Text for copyright statement associated with PLoS feeds in the publishing applicaiton.

All works published by the Public Library of Science are under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. For more information, browse to http://www.plos.org/journals/license.html.

Rich those are the licensing terms. What is the Copyright (as per Susanne's email)?

Sorry, to clarify more. Per Susanne, in case of articles authors own the copyright and allow PLoS to publish it under the creative commons attribution license. The feed is generated by PLoS. Is the Copyright owned by PLoS for the feed and licensed under CC Attribution?

I would assume that for the feed itself, PLoS owns the copyright and it's licensed under CCAL. But let me send to MarkP for confirmation.

I'm not really sure how this is going to be presented to the user. On the bottom of our TOC pages online we just say

"All journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License."

CCAL is a link to the license page. Do we need to do any more than that on the RSS feed?

I don't know who signed on as plos_guest to update this ticket (I am presuming it is someone from PLoS). I am afraid the comment is again confusing License & Copyright. As per Susanne:

Basically, a Copyright holder uses a License to describe what
permissions they want to give for use of their work.

Why are both values stored with each article?  Because the copyright
holder is different for each article and because the license or license
versions can be different.  (Currently we don't tag a specific license
version, but we will start doing so as soon as we can work out a way to
export this information from the manuscript information system into the
article XML.)

We are right now working on implementing a change to how copyright and
license information is stored in our XML.  I've attached a text file
showing what the new code will look like.

Some background:

PLoS allows an author to retain Copyright of their article. Many
publishers require the author to assign copyright to them.

PLoS requires the author to agree to License their article under the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which enables the most liberal
usage and sharing of the article.  Many publishers who allow an author
to retain Copyright require that the author give the publisher a
permanent and exclusive license for the article.  Publishers who hold
Copyright of an article still use a License to describe restrictions of
use.

It is also possible that a publisher might require the author to assign
copyright to them, but then use a CCAL license.  I can't think of any
cases like this, though.

The above email was mentioned in context of License & Copyright for an article, but the basic definition of the two remain the same in this case. Unfortunately, the RSS feed does not provide a place for a License and only has an element for a Copyright. So the question again is, "Who owns the Copyright for the RSS feed and what text do you want us to put in there?". Please note CCAL tells others how they can use the material, but does not talk about who owns the Copyright (if any).

From Mark:

I received some interesting thoughts via the lawyers – the link to the blog post at the end in particular might be helpful, and suggests that some bloggers are adding license info to their RSS feeds. Could that offer a solution? Here are the comments:

RSS is, of course, just a web feed format.  The RSS feed of particular content is just code.  If it's 3d
party content that's being redistributed, the 3d party likely would claim rights in the RSS feed as a
"derivative work" of the underlying content.

That said, I think PLoS has a rightful claim to protect the RSS feeds (I'm sure it has permission from the
3d party content owners.).  The analogy would be a book compilation.  PLoS presumably is sending multiple
pieces of content in the RSS feeds (determining what content is distributed), in the same way a book publisher
chooses which articles appear in a compilation.  (The book publisher would have rights in the compilation,
even though he doesn't own rights in the individual
articles.)

All in all, it makes sense that PLoS claim rights in the feed.  I don't see a practical downside to doing so,
so long as they recognize their rights relative to the content owners.

Here's an interesting article that discusses the issues.  The CC copyright attribution (embedded in the RSS 
content) used by the author seems akin to what Mark is contemplating.
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2005/09/13/rss-copyright-protection/

From Mark:

Thanks Amit - the exchange illustrates the potential to confuse users, so I think we need to keep the message simple and consistent.

It seems that we can indicate in the feed the rights associated with the articles themselves, as well as the rights associated with the feed.

In my view, it's definitely simplest if we keep the rights information the same in each case. Ie the Copyright lies with the author (for the articles) and PLoS (for the feed). The license is CCAL in both cases.

So, in both cases, can the words be formed along these lines?

"Copyright 2005 PLoS. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License."

Moving it out of 0.8 as it is way too late to do anything about this. Probably will not go in 0.81 either.