[Advocacy Advisors] non-free academic publishing licenses

[Luis Villa]

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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