A clearer perspective on CC-BY reuse

Over the weekend I posted and discussed the results of my survey on the editing and re-publication of open access articles in what pretend to be multi-author edited books containing new material.  The articles are published under the original authors' names, but the titles and text have been lightly edited, and the original publications are either not cited or cited in an obscure appendix.  When I composed the survey I thought that this reuse was permitted by the CC-BY license, but now (after a lot of Twitter discussion) I think that this particular form of reuse contravenes the license in at least two ways.  Because the reuse is illegal, the best remedy is legal action by the journals that originally published the papers.

Here's the relevant legalese from the CC-BY license:

1. If you distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work or any Derivative Works or Collective Works, You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and give the Original Author credit reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing by conveying the name (or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original Author if supplied; the title of the Work if supplied; to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource Identifier, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and in the case of a Derivative Work, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Derivative Work (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author"). Such credit may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Derivative Work or Collective Work, at a minimum such credit will appear where any other comparable authorship credit appears and in a manner at least as prominent as such other comparable authorship credit.

Contravention #1:  In the specific case of articles from scientific journals, it's not clear (to me) whether this requires citation of the original publication or just listing the names of the authors.  However, PLOS's description of their CC-BY license explicitly says that any reuse must cite the original article. (I can't find anywhere on the BioMed Central site that explicitly says this; they just quote the standard CC-BY license.)


So, at least for papers from PLOS journals and probably for papers from other OA journals, the book publisher is contravening the license by not conspicuously including a citation to the original publication.

Contravention #2: The CC-BY license prohibits 'implied endorsement'.  Here's what the Creative Commons wiki says:

"All CC licenses prohibit using the attribution requirement to suggest that the original author or licensor endorses or supports a particular use of a work. This "No Endorsement" provision protects reputation, and its violation constitutes a violation of the license and results in automatic termination."

This means that the book publisher cannot simply list the original authors of the article as authors of the book chapter.  Instead they must say something like "This is an edited version of the paper by the original authors" or otherwise make it clear that these authors are not responsible for this new publication.  Similarly, the book must not list the authors as "Contributors", since this also implies that the authors endorse the new work.

The appropriate response is legal action by the journal agains the book publisher:  My survey of authors found that authors are most concerned about how this reuse could affect their reputations; they want to be sure that their work will be correctly cited and that they are not held responsible for the reuse.  Preventing the two contraventions described above would go a long way to eliminate the authors' concerns.

In principle the individual authors could sue the book publisher, or maybe organize a class action suit.  But in this situation I think legal action should be the responsibility of the journal publishers. The authors have paid substantial fees to the publishers, and legal action to protect their rights should be considered part of the cost of running an open access journal.

I still think that open access journals should give potential authors more information about the risks of the CC-BY license as well as its benefits.  But taking responsibility for defending authors' rights would let journals provide this information in a much more positive way.  For example, they could say:

"The CC-BY license protects the rights of authors to have their publication correctly cited when it is reused, and to not be seen as responsible for any alterations.  This journal will take legal action to defend these rights if they are infringed."

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