Great idea, Stuart. This is definitely a great, albeit partial, solution!

I'll take it a couple steps further: First, in information systems publications--I don't know about other fields--it is quite common to borrow and adapt tables, not just figures, from other sources. As far as I understand (someone should please correct me if I'm mistaken), this is done under fair use/fair dealing laws. As long as the figures or tables copied or modified are just one small part of the article from which they are taken, copyright infringement has never been an issue. I've certainly copied third-party figures in this way (with appropriate citation, of course), and the journal's editorial office never mentioned a word about it.

Your solution makes this case even stronger: if the journals have no issue with borrowing third-parties' articles or tables under fair use/fair dealing laws, I couldn't imagine they would have an issue with using our own relicensed work.

My second extension: Extending this principle to tables should fill in the gap for qualitative research, which you mentioned in your blog as a possible limitation. You are right that most qualitative research might not be so meaningfully captured in graphs (though there are numerous creative exceptions); however, qualitative articles can effectually summarize the entire substance of their arguments and findings in well-written textual tables. I'm hoping that the rejuvenated AcaWiki (according to the thread from a couple months past) could provide a CC publication outlet for such tables, in the same spirit as Wikimedia Commons serving for graphs.

~ Chitu
Regards,

-----------------------
Chitu Okoli
Associate Professor in Management Information Systems
John Molson School of Business
Concordia University, Montréal

Phone: +1 (514) 848-2424 x2985
http://chitu.okoli.org/pro

From: R.Stuart Geiger <sgeiger@gmail.com>
Date: 2011/6/13
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Closed-sourced papers on open source 
communities
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <
wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>


Greetings wikiresearchers,

As many of you know (and as we've discussed on this list before), 
the
copyright licensing of academic papers about communities like
Wikipedia is a huge issue.  I've just written up a blog post 
about
this, but the tl;dr is that I have a bit of a solution, be it a
partial one.  The gist is basically that asking academics to 
release
*papers* under a free license is the wrong strategy.  Instead, we
should encourage academics to release *research* under a free 
license,
and that this can be done in such a way that still makes it 
complies
with most of the contradictory obligations we have found 
ourselves in.

It is quite possible to document a research project, its 
motivations,
its methods, its background, its findings, and even all those 
charts
and graphs on Meta, using the new Research: namespace and
corresponding templates that were *just* launched -- which 
everyone
should check out anyway.  And while I'd love some legal 
non-advice on
this, I think we can do this in such a way that whenever it comes 
time
to assign copyright to the ACM, all of the CC-BY/CC-BY-SA 
licensed
graphs can be "used with permission" in a published research 
paper.
Anyways, the link is below, and I'd love to get some feedback on 
it:
http://www.stuartgeiger.com/wordpress/random-thoughts/2011/06/12/closed-source-papers-on-open-source-communities-a-problem-and-a-partial-solution/

Thanks!
Stuart Geiger