A local organization advocating greater reuse and sharing of scientific information releases its first tools for researchers.
Corie Lok
An MIT-based nonprofit group created last year to promote broader access to scientific publications, data, and materials yesterday released a set of short legal documents that it hopes researchers will sign and submit to publishers to secure their right to make the published version of their papers freely available online after publication.
The group, Science Commons, is a spinoff of Creative Commons, a San Francisco–based nonprofit whose copyright licenses are widely used to allow sharing and reuse of digital photos, music, and other online content. Science Commons seeks to apply some of the same principles to the world of scientific research.
Lead by former bioinformatics entrepreneur and assistant director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, John Wilbanks, Science Commons is housed in donated office space at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Each of the three documents released yesterday is a one-page PDF that researchers can print off, sign, and attach to publication agreements they must sign before journals publish their papers.
The documents offer authors a range of rights levels to choose from. The most liberal version states that the author is entitled to post the published version of a paper immediately after publication and grants others the right to copy, display, and distribute it for noncommercial purposes, as long as they credit the author and journal.
Universities such as MIT and other organizations have created similar documents for authors, but Wilbanks says he wants to make Science Commons the “go-to” source for them. “The aim is to provide a standardized set of documents to make it easier for authors to retain their rights and freedoms in publishing their articles,” says Wilbanks.
It’s not clear yet how many authors will submit these documents to publishers. “The most important factor is getting individual faculty members to make their papers openly available,” says Stuart Shieber, a Harvard computer science professor and the chair of the provost’s committee on scholarly publishing at Harvard University.
Even if an author decides to sign such a document, publishers may not. For example, none of the rights outlined in the Science Commons documents are compatible with _Nature_’s policy, which allows authors to post only their version of the article, rather than the published version, six months after publication.
“Dare I suggest we need to review the outcomes of ongoing publisher experimentation and gain more experience with different business models in the digital age, rather than have more author addenda and the associated bureaucracy?” says David Hoole, Nature Publishing Group’s head of brand marketing and content licensing.
Wilbanks says these documents will likely evolve over time, just as Creative Commons’ licenses have developed since they were first released.