Full Article, Immediate, Permanent, Discoverable, and Accessible to Anyone Free of charge

Springer's copyright form: http://www.ida.liu.se/research/semanticweb/CopyrightFormESWC2017.pdf

Looks fine to me. Whether Springer would agree to it is quite another matter!

I am not sure why you need to impose conditions on top of the CC-BY license... that makes it a non-standard license, which makes it much harder to deal with.

In fact, you can’t impose conditions on top of a CC license. More precisely, you can’t use the CC trademark (name, logo) if you make any modification to one of the predefined licenses. The only thing you can personalize is the way the work must be attributed.

What you’re trying to do here is mixing two types of licenses: an end-user license (CC BY) and a private publishing license (between the publisher and you) describing what the publisher may or may not do. This entails a basic contradiction: you provide a manuscript with a CC BY license; this allows Springer (and anyone who gets a copy of it) to publish it, under the sole condition of attribution. According to the license, Springer can modify it, sell it, distribute it under a different license, with any access restriction, as long as it is attributed. But at the same time, you tell Springer that they must allow free, immediate, permanent access, machine readability, and so on.

In my opinion, the way to obtain what you want would be to state that you authorize Springer to publish you work under the following conditions (1) that they agree to meet your access requirements (FAIPDAAF + machine readability); (2) that, upon publication (meaning your requirements will be met), a CC BY license will be applied to the work, with the following attribution information ... [the main issue here is the URL of the "source” of the original work (see https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution); this could well be the URL of the version published by Springer, as it’s supposed to be freely available forever; the URL with the DOI would be the safest].

This way, the (private) publishing license, between you and Springer, and the end-user CC license (applied only upon publication, with no supplementary conditions/restrictions) are not mixed-up.

Note that I’m not a lawyer, so that doesn’t constitute legal advice. Also, I agree with Charles that it’s far from certain that Springer would accept such a proposal. But I used a similar reasoning when I recently revised the publishing contract for a small OA journal using CC BY.

I hadn't had a look at the article, so I wasn’t aware that a CC BY license had already been applied to it.

This situation raises a very complex issue regarding CC licenses, namely the possibility of equivalent versions (in terms of copyrighted content, thus with only different formats and/or other non-substantial modifications) of the same work being disseminated under different licenses. For instance, you could send a copy (what you call the Latex version) without a CC license (you can do that as the copyright owner), so that the strategy I propose could still make sense. I assume the eswc2017 branch is not available online with a CC license; if it’s not the case, Springer could claim that they can publish it the way they want, because they just have to use the same exact version available under CC BY.

The terms of Springer copyright agreement illustrate well the complexity of the situation, and the difficulty in reconciling two opposite dissemination modelsThe agreement asks for an exclusive license that amounts in practice to a full copyright transfer. But a non-exclusive, non-revocable license (the CC license) has already been granted, and this license allows anyone to do all what Springer wants to get the exclusive right to do through the copyright agreement.

A mention of the existence of the CC license could be added to the agreement, meaning that the author could not enter into any further agreement except in the situations and under the conditions mentioned in the “Rights Retained by Author” section. But that would mean the author (who is bound by the copyright agreement) would have less reuse rights than what CC BY license grants to every ‘end user’.

But the bottom line, from a practical point of view, will be the decision of Springer to agree or not with your access requirements. I went to their site though, and the 2016 proceedings papers of the same conference are all paywalled (USD 30 per paper). [By the way, I don’t understand why people publish in paywalled conference proceedings or, more to the point, why conference organizers choose to help publishers make money by restricting access to the papers. (To be honest, I know perfectly well why they do it, but that’s a discussion for another day.]

Finally, I’d like to point out that this discussion is not purely hypothetical. The same issues can be raised with Elsevier copyright policy. According to this policy, authors, who grant an exclusive license to Elsevier, can “share” their manuscript in a limited way. At the same, they must apply a CC (BY-NC-ND) license to the manuscript; this allows others to do things that are forbidden to them, for instance freely disseminating it on their institutional repository (see https://www.elsevier.com/about/company-information/policies/sharing). It’s no surprise that authors are at loss to understand what they are allowed or not to do (and that they often quite purposefully ignore to try and untangle this mess).

A follow up: Springer proposed their CC BY Consent to Publish form [FTP URL, with PDF at the end] for OpenChoice articles. We are also invited to have a look at their OpenAccess information.

Based on internal discussion, it doesn't appear to be that our proposed agreement actually made it out to Springer. We responded with:

Proposed changes:

"Publisher is entitled to have the Contribution peer‐reviewed by external reviewers of its choice."

->

"Publisher is entitled to have the Contribution peer‐reviewed by external reviewers of its choice, and if the review leads to any changes in the Contribution, Publisher agrees to release all of the reviews in full content with CC BY 4.0 license, with reviewers attributed, to the Authors."

or alternatively, that the text on external reviews can be removed.

We would like to request clarification on the following:

Will the Authors remain to be the original copyright holders, and then waving some rights so that through CC BY, Springer is allowed to publish the Contribution within their services?

It is not clear from this agreement if Springer could not sell access to the original "agreed to publish OA content" to readers, i.e., a "no paywalls" clause. If it is in there somewhere, can you please point at the sentence(s)? If not, we would like the agreement to have the following statement:

"Springer agrees to publish the Contribution in full, immediately and permanently accessible for anyone to read and/or download a copy of for free of charge, without requiring any intermediary steps (e.g., creating an account at Springer's website)."