Invitation to OASPA members to shape use cases for attribution and re-use

Providing appropriate and accurate attribution for works that inform and inspire scholarship is core to Open Access. And, as the prevalence of particularly Creative Commons licenses grows, have a valuable role to play in supporting our authors and readers in effectively navigating the complexities of whom to attribute, when, and how.

OASPA has therefore introduced “Getting the credit,” a new set of proposed principles and basic use cases for open-access to use, test, and expand on in order to support scholars as well as we can. OASPA members are now invited to help test and expand on this important new set of use cases and principles for the attribution of scholarly works, before it is promoted to the wider publishing community.
The principles suggest:
1. We acknowledge the tradition of both freely giving knowledge to our communities and also the expectation that contributions will be respected and that full credit is given according to scholarly norms.
2. The community expects that where a work is reprinted, collected, aggregated or otherwise re-used substantially as a whole that the original source, location and free availability of the original version will be both made explicit and emphasised.
3. The community expects that where modifications have been made to an article that this will be made explicit and every practicable effort will be made to make the nature and scope of modifications explicit. Where a derivative is digital all practicable efforts should be made to make comparison with the original version as easy as possible for the user.
4. The community assumes that unless noted otherwise authors have not endorsed any republication or modification of their original work. Where authors have explicitly endorsed the republication or modified version this should be made explicit in a way which is separate to the attribution.

The principles are intended simply to set the tone and scope of the use cases, which detail real examples of how to assign credit, explain modifications, and state terms for re-use. Today, the use cases encompass articles, books, and book chapters — but we want your feedback.

Please help us add to the use cases and share your comments on the principles before January 25, 2015 at https://docs.google.com/a/elifesciences.org/document/d/17Z88Ru3qlRDQmEBo3_kaB0fND3gS6nTDCeJaFrWLwGg/edit?usp=sharing.

While this is an open, public discussion, we seek contributions from OASPA members as a first priority. In the New Year, we will take stock of your feedback and consider the best way to take this ahead.

Thanks in advance for your input.

Sincerely,

Paul Peters

President, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association