Would really be worth calling them out on this. Perhaps they are just Innocent or perhaps trying to pull the wool?

On 26 July 2014 13:01, advocacy_advisors-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:

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Today's Topics:

1. non-free academic publishing licenses (Luis Villa)

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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...

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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