Does research constitute "derivative works"?
The GNU Free Documentation Licence states that "derivative works" must also be distributed under the terms of the FDL. This is the "cancer" by association that Mr Ballmer (Microsoft) famously criticised the related GNU General Public Licence for software (i.e. preventing the usual monopolistic behaviour of the monster from Redmond). It has become noticeable that academic research published via various permutations of the Creative Commons licences are then cited in subsequent subscription access journal articles. Doesn't this maintain unfairly the subscription journal system? If citation of previous research (published open access) makes a new article a "derivative work", shouldn't that article be distributed also via open access? How would researchers respond to this "licence consequence"? Would researchers prefer to reject citation of open access articles, in order to continue submission of work to subscription access articles? Or, would researchers be more willing to publish their work open access if they know any cited works would also be compelled to be published also open access? It is annoying that researchers cite my open access work in new research articles, that are then published in subscription access journals (the motivation for this post!).