Probably a little bit of both. 

On the more-or-less innocent side, some academic institutions are genuinely worried about some "new" aspects of information reuse that this partially addresses, like data mining/data extraction. I think this is just a phase and they'll grow out of it, but we (free/open community) have not yet done a great job addressing why freedom to do data mining is important.

On the "pull the wool" side, this is damaging to interoperability and republishing - both of which are important to us and very scary to the publishing industry. So the publishers (and this is definitely an initiative from publishers) have a lot of incentive to constantly try to redefine "open access" until they can break it with those terms.

The letter we've been asked to join focuses primarily on the interoperability argument, which I think is appropriate for them; the blog post I'm thinking about would be more focused on intellectual freedom.

Luis


On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 5:07 AM, Jon Davies <jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:
Would really be worth calling them out on this. Perhaps they are just Innocent or perhaps trying to pull the wool?


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 14:27:18 -0700
From: Luis Villa <lvilla@wikimedia.org>
To: Advocacy Advisory Group for WMF LCA
        <advocacy_advisors@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Advocacy Advisors] non-free academic publishing licenses
Message-ID:
        <CAM2wSz5503dZREk43hwMLer2udW7BE0C4AMyy8pOxiUDR_hBPw@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

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)


--
Luis Villa
Deputy General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
415.839.6885 ext. 6810

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received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the
mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical
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members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more
on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.*
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--
Luis Villa
Deputy General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
415.839.6885 ext. 6810

This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you have received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer.