4 ms·

IIUC, it's complicated. For new OA publications at conferences/journals, authors get a choice of CC licenses [1,2]. The respective licenses can be found in an

IIUC, it's complicated. For new OA publications at conferences/journals, authors get a choice of CC licenses [1,2]. The respective licenses can be found in an article's [3] "Information" sidebar (hidden by default) or the HTML/PDF version [4]. Unfortunately, the licenses are apparently not shown more prominently in the ACM Digital Library. The search function does not allow filtering by license either. For CACM articles, the traditional ACM copyright notice seems to apply [5] (maybe there are CC-licensed articles, but I did not see any so far): "Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author." For pre-OA publications (< ~2020 ?), authors could either transfer copyright or give ACM a publishing license [3]. I'd assume that ACM may assign an arbitrary CC license to publications to which they own the copyright but not to ones for which they only have publishing rights. Given that authors only licensed publishing rights for the final article to ACM, I'd guess the only acceptable CC license in this case would be CC-BY-ND. However, I guess that ACM won't want to go through the trouble of assigning CC licenses to older publications. EDIT: My tentative guesses/answers to your questions would be: > - how effectively libraries' rights to archive, copy, and redistribute works published in cacm is protected; IIRC, libraries subscribing to ACM's DL already have the right to archive the content. Given that many authors have only given ACM the right to distribute their works, I'm not sure whether scraping OA articles is allowed. (ACM has been banning IP ranges for mass-downloading papers in the past, so be careful.) > - whether the license is compatible with incorporation of text into wikipedia and stack overflow; and IMHO, only if a non-ND CC license was applied to the article. Also, correct attribution is still needed [7]. > - to what extent volunteer translations into languages such as chinese and spanish can be legally archived, copied, and redistributed Again, probably only for explicitly CC-licensed content (excluding -ND). [1] https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/publication-rights-and-licensing-policy https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/publication-rights... [2] https://cfiesler.medium.com/acm-copyright-licenses-which-should-you-choose-and-how-do-you-handle-third-party-material-dbe87be8b57c https://cfiesler.medium.com/acm-copyright-licenses-which-sho... [3] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3623509.3633366 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3623509.3633366 [4] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3623509.3633366 https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3623509.3633366 [5] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3624717 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3624717 (sidebar) [6] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14734/which-acm-copyright-license-to-use https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14734/which-acm... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Creative_Commons_text_attribution_notice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Creative_Commons_text...

kragen 3y ago
thanks, this is great information! it's good to see that in the "information" sidebar (visible by clicking the circled i icon at the top of the right toolbar) they've removed the language about redistributing to lists or posting on servers. but "commercial advantage", especially now that they've removed "direct", seems like it could pose a lot of risks in the united states today, universities can no longer take advantage of the research exemption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption to patents because madey v. duke held that, by using madey's patented invention for research purposes, duke was 'increas[ing] the status of the institution and lur[ing] lucrative research grants', so a sneaky lawyer hired by a hypothetical future cacm administration could argue that things like archiving the cacm articles in a university library could produce 'commercial advantage' for the university, so it would be nice to have the acm using language that protects users' rights more solidly also, i feel like having the notice hidden by default makes it unnecessarily difficult to comply with, since the notice requires that copies 'bear this notice (...) on the first page'. unlike older cacm publications, the pdf of that article produced by the acm also doesn't bear the notice on the first page, or in fact anywhere, so you have to modify the pdf to be able to copy it in compliance with the conditions of the notice cc-by-nd or similar licenses are clearly not compliant with the definition of 'open access' in the berlin declaration. you may be correct that acm doesn't have the legal ability to license the creation of derivative works of older articles unless the author or other copyright holder had transferred copyright to the acm. that would make those older articles not open access, and obtaining the necessary licenses might be logistically infeasible at this point by any measure short of drastically reducing the term of copyright through legislation so it seems like the acm is improving the situation considerably, but there's still a long way to go
- raphman 3y ago
  Thanks for the information! AFAIK, licensing agreements between libraries and digital publishers typically include a right to perpetual access to articles in a journal or digital library they subscribe to. Any papers published while the licensing agreement is in place are to be made available even if the library cancels their subscription. This also includes the right to make backup copies of the digital library. (Here's such an agreement between ACM and the Norwegian universities: https://www.openscience.no/media/3449/download?inline https://www.openscience.no/media/3449/download?inline ) What the library is allowed to do with this backup probably depends on country-specific laws. However, if I understand the current situation correctly, ACM allows everyone to download CACM articles but not to redistribute them, right? In theory, they could also explicitly allow anyone to redistribute all of their publications (they reserve the right to do this in the licensing agreement with authors). However, I'd argue that it is not in ACMs interest to do so - and probably not in mine, either. Having a central, trustworthy source has benefits - e.g. when retracting papers. I'm fine with the ACM DL being free to use and having library backups as safety nets if ACM ever goes under.

kragen 3y ago

thanks, this is great information! it's good to see that in the "information" sidebar (visible by clicking the circled i icon at the top of the right toolbar) they've removed the language about redistributing to lists or posting on servers. but "commercial advantage", especially now that they've removed "direct", seems like it could pose a lot of risks in the united states today, universities can no longer take advantage of the research exemption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption to patents because madey v. duke held that, by using madey's patented invention for research purposes, duke was 'increas[ing] the status of the institution and lur[ing] lucrative research grants', so a sneaky lawyer hired by a hypothetical future cacm administration could argue that things like archiving the cacm articles in a university library could produce 'commercial advantage' for the university, so it would be nice to have the acm using language that protects users' rights more solidly also, i feel like having the notice hidden by default makes it unnecessarily difficult to comply with, since the notice requires that copies 'bear this notice (...) on the first page'. unlike older cacm publications, the pdf of that article produced by the acm also doesn't bear the notice on the first page, or in fact anywhere, so you have to modify the pdf to be able to copy it in compliance with the conditions of the notice cc-by-nd or similar licenses are clearly not compliant with the definition of 'open access' in the berlin declaration. you may be correct that acm doesn't have the legal ability to license the creation of derivative works of older articles unless the author or other copyright holder had transferred copyright to the acm. that would make those older articles not open access, and obtaining the necessary licenses might be logistically infeasible at this point by any measure short of drastically reducing the term of copyright through legislation so it seems like the acm is improving the situation considerably, but there's still a long way to go

raphman 3y ago
Thanks for the information! AFAIK, licensing agreements between libraries and digital publishers typically include a right to perpetual access to articles in a journal or digital library they subscribe to. Any papers published while the licensing agreement is in place are to be made available even if the library cancels their subscription. This also includes the right to make backup copies of the digital library. (Here's such an agreement between ACM and the Norwegian universities: https://www.openscience.no/media/3449/download?inline https://www.openscience.no/media/3449/download?inline ) What the library is allowed to do with this backup probably depends on country-specific laws. However, if I understand the current situation correctly, ACM allows everyone to download CACM articles but not to redistribute them, right? In theory, they could also explicitly allow anyone to redistribute all of their publications (they reserve the right to do this in the licensing agreement with authors). However, I'd argue that it is not in ACMs interest to do so - and probably not in mine, either. Having a central, trustworthy source has benefits - e.g. when retracting papers. I'm fine with the ACM DL being free to use and having library backups as safety nets if ACM ever goes under.