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 I’m not sure but maybe because it could preclude use by people who need to photocopy them (for example) for an edu purpose when students don’t have high bandwidth so can’t access online, and a bookstore or something might make a small profit by doing so? I seem to recall hearing something about a situation like this awhile ago.
so NC is a problem for institutions, not individuals then? those two what you described as common distribution channels are not common for academics or most higher ed institutions but could be common for organizations.
is the problem that NC is too ambiguous about what commercial use? would it be better to have a 'nonprofit' cc license over the NC one? e.g. can be used where $$ is as long as the org or use is not for profit?
@vickysteeves @clhendricksbc All I can say is I remember the discussions before 4.0 of the CC licenses came out and duckducking for some links I found this collection of pro and contra arguments. Sure, it’s old, and pre 4.0, but I think the general questions remain. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial
@kensanata @vickysteeves Interesting! There is one article there from 2011 about why not use NC for scholarly articles but it’s mostly talking about publishers doing that so they can retain profits. Not sure if those are the kinds of arguments you’re looking for, Vicky.
@clhendricksbc @kensanata definitely not 
@vickysteeves @kensanata I do think the problem is and has always been the ambiguity which leads things to be less shareable than one would have thought because one may not imagine all the possible uses. Someone mentioned that one couldn’t upload charts or graphs to Wikipedia from such articles b/c that could count as making money.
Maybe nonprofit would be better? Still could be ambiguous though.
@vickysteeves @kensanata And I think this may have been part of the discussion about possible changes to NC in the past. I need to go at some of that history from what @kensata sent!
@vickysteeves @kensanata Oh Wait—the Wikipedia thing was about something else...it was because Wikipedia uses an SA license. Don’t know if that means you can’t upload something with NC?
@clhendricksbc @kensanata thanks for all these toots Christina, they've been really insightful. I clearly need to do a deeper dive into the NC history!!
@vickysteeves @kensanata Me too! I never really looked carefully at it. I’ve signed up for the CC certificate course this summer though maybe will learn a lot more there! https://certificates.creativecommons.org/
@kensanata @vickysteeves I was also thinking that I couldn’t upload my open access articles on some social media network like academia.edu that is for-profit. I’m getting off that network anyway but that might be another thing one could think NC could hamper?
@clhendricksbc @vickysteeves The general case I’d make is that NC means it cannot be hosted where ads are displayed or printed where money is made – thus distribution via the usual channels is hampered. By itself, that seems to be nothing specific to academic articles but perhaps the expectation is that papers are usually distributed in ways that make money for somebody?