COAR, along with numerous other organizations, is a signatory to a letter calling on the STM Association to withdraw their model licences for open access.
These licenses just serve further confuse users about what they can do with articles of articles by introducing a whole new set of access and re-use conditions for content. We are calling on publishers to use instead Creative Commons licenses, which are already the already well-established and well-recognized by the community.
The letter states, “The Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers has recently released a set of model licenses for research articles. In their current formulation, these licenses would limit the use, reuse and exploitation of research. They would make it difficult, confusing or impossible to combine these research outputs with other public resources and sources of knowledge to the benefit of both science and society. There are many issues with these licenses, but the most important is that they are not compatible with any of the globally used Creative Commons licenses. For this reason, we call on the STM Association to withdraw them and commit to working within the Creative Commons framework.”
The full letter is available on the PLOS website here.
