The CC-BUT-WAIT License

Some feel open access has limits — mainly, when people find ways to make money off of it

Leave it to open science advocates to find their own shoelaces tied together when the information race really gets going.

Licensing agreements look a little different in the new light of LLMs, and if there’s money being made in a secondary market or reuse that authors might not like, the spirit and generosity informing CC-BY and OA generally suddenly adopts a more pecuniary spirit with what I’ll call the CC-BUT-WAIT license.

This approach requires a whole new shelf of pretzel logic now that licenses are in place and the LLMs hungry.

New agreements with AI companies made by Wiley and now Taylor & Francis — with others sure to follow — are stirring up resistance to open sharing of scientific research reports, scholarly works, and so forth.

And there’s nobody better positioned for the kind of pretzel logic needed than our old friend and renowned paid OA lobbyist, SPARC’s Heather Joseph, who is quoted in Inside HigherEd in response to news about the recent deal between Taylor & Francis and Microsoft/OpenAI (bolding mine):

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