On Monday 12th November 2018, IJPDS is changing the publishing licence from the current Creative Commons
CC-BY-ND to CC-BY
The International Journal of Population Data Science (IJPDS) is an electronic, open-access, peer-reviewed journal focussing on the science pertaining to population data. It publishes articles on all aspects of research, development and evaluation connected with data about people and populations.
It is published by Swansea University.
Why is IJPDS changing to CC-BY?
At IJPDS, sharing research freely is at the heart of everything we do and, as an Open Access journal, it is important that we uphold the Open Access ethos of making research freely accessible to all without restriction.
We currently publish articles under the CC-BY-ND licence, but this restricts the freedom to make changes and to distribute derivatives, thereby blocking or restricting the creation of derivative works. Our decision to migrate to the CC-BY licence will allow others more freedom to engage with IJPDS author’s research whilst still protecting the author’s moral rights.
- the freedom to use published research and associated benefits of using it
- the freedom to study manuscripts and to apply knowledge acquired from them
- the freedom to make and redistribute copies of the information
- the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works
Funder Requirements
Increasing numbers of research funders stipulate the use of CC-BY when publishing via Open Access. Subsequently, IJPDS already offers the CC-BY licence to authors funded by RCUK / Wellcome Trust. We also use the CC0 “No rights reserved” licence for publishing source data that permits its re-use. IJPDS is now simply extending the right to freely access and use published research by rolling CC-BY out to cover all published works.
Benefits of CC-BY
By removing the restriction on derivative works, CC-BY opens up more options for using the research e.g. new ways of representing scholarly articles through text-mining and visualization techniques or allowing articles to be translated into other languages, and encouraging engagement with manuscripts through wider use has clear benefits to the authors.
Protecting Authors
Publishing under a free license does not mean that authors lose all their rights and any use of manuscripts published in IJPDS still require full attribution (i.e. giving credit and recognition to the author of a manuscript). Creative Commons licences require that no modifications to manuscripts should ‘be prejudicial to the Original Author’s honor or reputation’ (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions).
Please note that manuscripts already published IJPDS prior to Monday 12th November 2019 will remain as CC-BY-ND, unless we receive a request from the authors to change to CC-BY.
Guest post by Sharon Hindley, IJPDS Marketing Manager.
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