Report: “Researchers Opt to Limit Uses of Open-Access Publications”

From Richard Van Noorden at Nature.com:

Academics are — slowly — adopting the view that publicly funded research should be made freely available. But data released yesterday suggest that, given the choice, even researchers who publish in open-access journals want to place restrictions on how their papers can be re-used — for example, sold by others for commercial profit.
That stance is directly opposed to the views of major funding agencies, such as the seven UK research councils and the Wellcome Trust in London, one of the world’s wealthiest biomedical charities. Advocates of open access say this shows that researchers don’t understand how publishing licences affect ‘open’ research papers, and that more work needs to be done to explain why licences matter. But some publishers argue that restrictions are needed.

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See Also: E-Mail Post With Statistics Used in Nature.com Article (Data From Nature Publishing Group)

Nature Publishing Group can offer some more data on author choice of licenses on Scientific Reports. Since we introduced CC-BY as an option in July 2012, authors have chosen CC-BY on 5% of papers.

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