With respect to individual users, the major providers of collaborative biodiversity platforms could immediately start to make the choice of NC licenses less deceptive. A choice of licensing options should be given and the NC license should be present in ways that avoid raising false assumptions. “All Commercial Rights Reserved, most use by for-profit as well as non-profit organizations prohibited” is a better representation of the effect of the license.
Open content licenses such as CC BY (used by many Open Access publishers) or CC BY-SA (used, e.g., by Wikipedia) will enable a much wider re-use of a contribution and increase the efficiency of non-profit organizations in informing and educating others about biodiversity and nature conservation. We therefore recommend copyright owners to balance the negative impact of the non-commercial restriction on open knowledge dissemination, collaboration and ease of re-use against income which may be lost. In many cases, the potential profits from commercial use are comparatively low or irrelevant.
However, a publisher may indeed, with appropriate citation of the authorship, use an openly-licensed work in a book that generates a profit. The resulting dissemination of knowledge on biodiversity, regardless of profits, may well be in the interest of biodiversity education and society in general. Open licenses like CC0, CC BY, or CC BY-SA allow the commercial and private sector to collaborate and to develop businesses based on and contributing to the digital commons (Keller and Mossink 2008, Fletcher 2011). Furthermore, open licenses will help small companies or local non-profit initiatives more than big companies. Large companies can afford to buy works and can bear high management overhead, the cost of legal advice, or the risk of litigation much better than small organizations and initiatives.
Each creator of a work considering licensing options is therefore encouraged to balance the potentially lost income against the increased benefit to society. Within our own field of biodiversity, we hope that more organizations and publishers encourage their contributors to avoid NC licenses. The “commons” of CC NC licenses is available to a few, but not to the many.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank S. Baskauf, W. Egloff, I. Kuchma, M. Linksvayer, R. Page, G. Riccardi, D. Roberts, V. Smith, as well as one anonymous reviewer for review and helpful criticism.
References
- Agosti D, Egloff W (2009) Taxonomic information exchange and copyright: the Plazi approach. BMC Research Notes 2: 53. doi: 10.1186/1756-0500-2-53
- Aoki K, Boyle J, Jenkins J (2006) Bound by Law. Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Duke Law School, ISBN 0974155314, http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/digital.php
