EIFL supports call to withdraw new STM sample licences
EIFL hopes that the sample licence will be improved to facilitate dissemination of research outputs.

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Image of the petition letter.
EIFL has joined an open letter from a global coalition calling on the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers to withdraw their recently released set of model licences for research articles.
Posted: August 11, 2014

EIFL has joined an  open letter  from a global coalition of access to research, science and education organizations, libraries, funders and publishers calling on the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers to withdraw their recently released set of model licences for research articles.

As currently formulated, the sample licences would make it difficult or impossible to combine these research outputs with other public resources. They would make the research literature legally incompatible with hundreds of millions of Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr, videos on YouTube, articles on Wikipedia and across the open web.

EIFL, together with over 60 signatories of the letter, believe that confusion and inconsistency are not in the long term interests of science or any stakeholder. For this reason, we call on the STM Association to withdraw the licences and to commit to working within the Creative Commons framework.

Read the open letter.

PLOS Opens blog: a license to please.

STM response to the open letter (pdf).

Let us work together towards a world where the whole sum of human knowledge, both that from within academia and that from without, is accessible, usable, reusable and interoperable. And let us work within the legal frameworks that have already been globally adopted as a base for building the rest of the tools we need to make this a reality.
Excerpt from the open letter
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