Re: MPS and PLoS Sign Agreement

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Just curious, what exactly is the value of the copyright that the 
author retains under this CC license since users can do 
practically everything with it except remove the author's name? 
There is no residual commercial value here, is there? Under 
European copyright law, with its moral rights" provisions, 
"attribution" already is a moral right ensured by law, so there 
would be no need even for this kind of CC license, would there? 
One could simply grant to users free use of the article for any 
purpose with no need to protect attribution, since that right is 
inalienable in "moral rights" systems.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

> PLoS applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to 
> all published articles. Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership 
> of the copyright for their article, but allow anyone to 
> download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy 
> articles in PLoS journals, so long as the original authors and 
> source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or 
> the publishers. Thus, the contents of the seven Open Access 
> journals of PLoS are freely accessible for the reader worldwide 
> via internet.