Making Open Access Licensing Work

Whilst licensing terms should be easy to find, easy to read and easy to interpret, Open Access to scholarly materials now presents publishers and authors alike with a wide variety of user licence options to copyright-protected works, including bespoke licences that individual publishers have created and licences offered by third parties such as Creative Commons. Additionally, increasing globalisation of research and the development of mining tools have necessitated the need to consider a variety of translations and data and text mining options as additional elements to such licences.

STM believes that publishers should have the tools to offer a wide variety of appropriate licensing terms dependent on their economic model and business strategy. To that end, the Association has produced sample licences for a variety of uses within open access publishing. These will be updated in due course. The licences on this page have been designed to provide easy to use, ready-made terms and conditions which publishers can adopt and/or adapt to the needs of their users. The “full” licenses can be used as stand-alone options, while the “supplementary” license clauses can be used to supplement other existing standardised or bespoke licences.

For further information on the rationale behind STM’s model licences, please see here

STM Model Licences

• Designed to provide you with a comprehensive choice when selecting the most appropriate licensing options
•  Precise, short and easy-to-use terms and language which can be used to enhance existing offerings (including CC-BY)
• Specific language on commercial use to cover paid advertising being associated with Open Access content

Worked example of using a supplementary licence:

For the last 5 years, Publisher XYZ has applied the following generic public access licence to his OA content:

“GENERIC PUBLISHER PUBLIC ACCESS AND PRIVATE USE LICENCE

This Work is made available by Publisher XYZ to you, the Licensee, permitting various uses under the specified terms and conditions:

•Private use: download, copy, share with research colleagues (or family members & friends), post in work spaces, transfer copies to different personal devices or computers

Public posting: Post a copy on a public site or repository (with links to the “version of record”)

Provided that:

• the metadata and identifying information included in the Work (author, publication, citation information) is not deleted or modified;
• the meaning, interpretation, context and conclusions reached in the work is not misrepresented; and
• the Work is not sold, licensed for a fee, provided as part of a commercial product or service, or associated with commercial advertising, sponsoring or commercial promotion.

Due to globalisation (need for multi-language access) and the development of mining tools, Publisher XYZ now responds to user demand to supplement the above generic licence to enable non-profit translations and text and data-mining for non-commercial researchers. To make this easy, Publisher XYZ decides to add via a DOI link the supplementary licence (fourth on the list of STM sample licences below): “Researcher Rights Added Licence: non-commercial translation and text and data mining research rights added” [LINK]

To further aid publishers with their production of Open Access licensing terms and conditions STM have also produced a useful guidance document containing twelve key points which help make Open Access licensing work.

Resources:

Twelve points to Make Open Access Licensing Work 

STM Open Access Licensing Best Practice Statement