Informationsplattform Open Access: Licences

Open-content licences

Open Access is not just about cost-free access to scientific and scholarly information. It also means the removal of permission barriers (Peter Suber). Only contributions which are distributed under a free licence are genuinely Open Access. In order to give authors and users of Open Access contributions legal certainty, these contributions should be distributed only under a licence which clearly regulates the extent to which the work may be used by others. Examples of well-known open-content licences which are used widely in the science sector are:

The journals published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and by BioMed Central use Creative Commons licences. This is in line with the requirements of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access and the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

Another open-content licence is the licence to publish which was initiated by JISC and SURF and is recommended, for example, by the Wellcome Trust. This licence is available in English, Dutch, Spanish and French. Unfortunately a German-language version is not yet available.

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Granting open-content licences when self-archiving in repositories

When publishing in an Open Access journal, authors retain the exploitation rights in their work. As a rule, however, authors who deposit their work in a document server have already transferred the rights of use to a publisher. Whether or not authors are entitled to grant an open-content licence when self-archiving depends on the provisions of the publishing agreement concluded with respect to the primary publication. If the publisher was granted only a non-exclusive right of use in the work, authors may grant rights of use to an indefinite number of third parties. Hence they are indeed entitled to make their work available under an open-content licence.

The situation is different when the publisher was granted exclusive rights of use with respect to the primary publication. In this case the publisher holds all the rights, the author is thus not entitled to grant rights to third parties. In order to license the work under an open-content licence the prior consent of the publisher must be obtained in this case.

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What requirements should an open-content licence meet?

An open-content licence should meet certain requirements. To be legally binding in Germany (many of the available licences are not ), it must be adapted to German copyright law and be in German. Authors differ with regard to the rights which they wish to grant to the public. Therefore different versions of the licence should be available.

Requirements:

1. People without a legal background should have no difficulty understanding the rights and obligations arising out of the use of the licensed work.

2. The text of the licence must be legally sound thereby leaving no room for interpretation in the case of legal disputes. Although the purpose of licensing is to avoid legal disputes in the first place, they cannot always be prevented.

3. The content of the licence should be available in machine-readable form so that it can be linked to the work. In this way licence-relevant parameters can be digitally indexed thus enabling users to search specifically for open-access content which offers the level of freedom they desire.

4. The metadata of the work should be recorded in machine-readable form, be Dublin-Core compliant and be attached to the publication.

 

Source: Bruening, Jochen & Kuhlen, Rainer (2005). Creative Commons licences for open-access documents (PDF 67.9 mb) (available in German only).

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Links for further reading

The following collective volumes deal with licensing questions, among other things:

 

Detailed conference proceedings on the subject:

Further links

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