Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), along with numerous other organisations, is a signatory to a letter calling on the STM Association to withdraw their model licences for open access.
According to COAR, these licenses just serve to further confuse users about what they can do with articles by introducing a whole new set of access and re-use conditions for content. The organisation is calling on publishers to use Creative Commons licenses, which are already well-established and well-recognized by the community.
The letter states that 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, COAR is calling on the STM Association to withdraw them and commit to working within the Creative Commons framework.
