can someone explain to me why non-commercial creative commons licenses are not open when applied to scholarly articles?
I've heard this statment a lot but I'm not 100% on the underlying logic.
@vickysteeves
Openness means more than "can be read for free". Open content can be culturally remixed, curated, archived, annotated, read aloud at parties, etc... Now, define "commerce". Can you do paper-readings occur at parties if there's an entry fee? If the archives accept donations? If the remixer shares their work on patron?
90% of the time "NC" users just want to avoid exploitation of their work. In such cases I suggest "SA" instead! Make them pay with more culture!
@cathal also, corcaigh abu !!
@vickysteeves
Also, yay! Are you in Cork? In the early days of Twitter I recall "tweet ups" of local users. We should totes arrange a "toot up" of Corkonians, too. Granted, I only know 3 so far.. :P
@cathal I'm not but I lived in Cork for a bit and absolutely fell in loooove with the city.
I'm not sure we can equivocate FOSS and open access scholarly articles in this case.
I know many more academics who would make their articles OA if they could ensure that someone didn't make money off it OR turn a profit over it (which is hilarious bc publishing with a major publisher means making $$ for them...). that's their concern. I agree SA is a good potential solution for this.
@vickysteeves
I have had the same concern, and settled on SA. But I also think this is one of the stages of dissonance between a closed and open mindset: one starts to see the benefits, but still imagines outcomes as if set in the other system. E.g., if someone posts excerpts of my paper in a monetised blog, should that actually bother me? It disseminates and popularises my work, and perhaps helps someone pay the bills, but I haven't lost out. If I want a slice, I could blog too?
@vickysteeves
Honestly, no: commerce isn't per-se a wrongful use of open content, in my opinion, so I don't think it's appropriate to call something open when it tries to make judgements on the merits of re-use. The Free-Libre / Open Source Software communities made the same determination, and software cannot be called "Free as in Freedom" if it forbids commercial use. It's not only about ambiguity, it's about the values of creating a robust commons and embracing what that means.
@cathal So you're issue is the definition of 'commerce' under this license is ambiguous? because unde NC, I would say the majority of people can remix, curate, etc. it's a problem at an *institutional* level?
if it was 'nonprofit' instead of 'non commercial' would that be better for you?