[JoPP-Public] DOAJ: PDF and CC?

Fri Oct 28 17:37:23 CEST 2016

Mathieu ONeil <mathieu.oneil at anu.edu.au> writes:

> Hi all
>
>
> A French colleague inquired whether JoPP was archived in any databases
> including the "easier to get into" Directory of Open Access Journals
> (DOAJ). This seems like a pretty good fit for us. I checked it out and
> it does not seem too bad so I'm willing to give it a go.
>
> https://doaj.org/application/new
>
>
> However there are a few questions I'm not sure about. I've copied them
> all below but the most important issues IMO are PDFs and copyright.
>
>
> PDF
>
> We used to have a PDF generator for articles. This broke and was meant
> to be repaired...? This absence limits our ability to be picked up by
> search engines and archived in other databases.
>
> @Peter (and maxigas): is there a solution in sight?

This is absolutely my sin, I signed up for testing and recommending a
PDF renderer plugin for Wordpress and I never got around to put in the
necessary work. I would also like JoPP to be listed in databases so I
will try to do this soonish, but in order not to stress myself I would
say "this year".

> COPYRIGHT
>
> PDFs would feature this text:
>
> "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
>
> Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License"
>
>
> Now the only indication we have about copyright is "All the contents
> of this journal are in the public domain" (on the front page) which is
> a bit vague.

It is *somewhat* vague, but in some jurisdictions it is an existing and
precisely defined legal category:

   Before 1988 in the US, works could be easily given into the public
   domain by just releasing it without an explicit Copyright notice.
   With the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 (and the earlier
   Copyright Act of 1976, which went into effect in 1978), all works
   were by default copyright protected and needed to be actively given
   into public domain by a waiver statement/anti-copyright
   notice.^[44]^[45] Not all legal systems have processes for reliably
   donating works to the public domain, e.g. civil law of continental
   Europe.^[citation needed] This may even "effectively prohibit any
   attempt by copyright owners to surrender rights automatically
   conferred by law, particularly moral rights".^[46]

   ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain

I really like that JoPP is *not* subscribed to the typical Creative
Commons licencing regimes because I am against copyrights alltogether,
at least for scholarly works. For myself, it is a core value of JoPP
that distinguishes this journal from other projects in the "open
science" and "open access" field. Most other projects legitimise the
existing licencing regime by putting more specific licences on their
content. Public domain is a bit like WTFPL (Do What the Fuck You Want To
Public License). I think that is an important message to send. I suggest
that if we need a concrete licence than we go with the recommendation of
the Open Knowledge Foundation in this regard:

   In October 2014 the Open Knowledge Foundation recommends the Creative
   Commons CC0 license to dedicate content to the public
   domain,^[52]^[53] and the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication
   and License (PDDL) for data.^[54]

> So should we change this text to the CC licence? Any reason not to?

See above -- I am very much against licencing content under "CC
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License", but I would
be happy with CC0.

> Finally there are some questions at the end about author ownership - I
> assume we give all rights to authors? @Our legal experts (Angela,
> Steve...): any thoughts on this?

I would be interested about legal opinions on this too! As far as I
understand, in this sense "copyright" refers to some "moral rights" of
authors, one of the most important one of which is to choose the licence
for their works (for instance by submitting them to JoPP and accepting
our public domain or CC0 policy) and optionally issue the work under
other licence if they want to (known as "dual licencing"). The latter
can be interesting for authors if for instance they want to give a text
they wrote to a collected volume or magazine that wants to publish
everything under a traditional "All rights reserved" licence, but the
text in question have already been published in JoPP under CC0. Hope
what I try to express here is clear, I am a bit unsure, so feel free to
ask. :)

> cheers
>
>
> Mathieu
>
>
> SEE QUESTION AND POSSIBLE ANSWERS BELOW
>
>
> Publisher => Self-published?
>
>
> Platform, Host or Aggregator => Peter?
>
>
> What digital archiving policy does the journal use? => No policy in place?
>
> Does the journal allow software/spiders to automatically crawl the journal content (also known as text mining)? => No?
>
> Which article identifiers does the journal use? =>
> None?
> DOI
> Handles
> ARK
>
> Please indicate which formats of full text are available *
> PDF
> HTML
> ePUB
> XML
> Other
>
> What is the URL for the journal's Open Access statement?
>
> Does the journal embed or display simple machine-readable CC licensing information in its articles?
> Yes
> No
>
> Copyright and Permissions
> Copyright & Licensing help
>
> 52) Does the journal allow the author(s) to hold the copyright without restrictions? *
> Yes
> No
> Other
>
> 54) Will the journal allow the author(s) to retain publishing rights
> without restrictions?

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