Hi, all-

An academic publishing group called STM (The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers) has published some "open" licenses that, well, aren't really open. In my reading, they fail both the OKFN's open definition and freedomdefined.org's definition, so would not be acceptable on Commons or other WMF projects.

Andrés Guadamuz has written about this more here:
http://www.technollama.co.uk/academic-publishers-draft-and-release-their-own-open-access-licences#

I'm considering drafting a WMF blog post on this issue, because of the potential for confusion and the limitations on reuse[1]. I've also been made aware of a potential letter on the subject from a variety of related organizations that we'll consider signing on to.

This is not advocacy per se, since it is a private group and not a government, but I wanted to give you all a heads up in case you were asked about it by publishers or other people in the open access movement.

Have a great weekend-
Luis

[1] We have piles of materials from legitimately open-licensed journals, like PLOS: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Media_from_PLOS_journals (seriously, I spent minutes clicking around in there and never got past the letter A, alphabetically)


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Luis Villa
Deputy General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
415.839.6885 ext. 6810

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