In the last post, I told you one of my photo on Flickr was published in an article from Nature Reports Stem Cells. After some discussions with three friends, I decided to write an e-mail to the journal editors basically stating that, although I enjoyed my photo being shown in their journal, they did not comply with one of the two conditions of the CC-by-sa license (the “Share-Alike” part, more details in the copy of my e-mail). I chose this licence for this photo because it is there to give freedom to other people on some material while this freedom stays with the media even if the latter is modified.
The answer quickly came from Matthew Day, database publisher:
From: Matthew Day
To: Jean-Etienne Poirrier
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2007 20:55:39 +0200
Subject: RE: Photo license issueDear Jean-Etienne,
I’m sorry that we have published a derivative of your image without putting the new work under a Creative Commons license. As you adroitly guessed, we cannot publish the derivative work under CC as it contains components from other sources.
I would be willing to discuss with you a way of keeping the image, and your credit, on the NRSC article. However, an additional complexity is that I see that you are posting a PDF of the article on your blog. The cleanest solution for us may be to simply remove the image and PDF from our websites.
If you’d like to discuss this, I could call you tomorrow or Friday if you are free and can email me your contact number.
With best wishes,
Matthew Day,
Database Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Matthew also removed the image from the website (before my answer). So I removed the PDF of the article (a personal copy but I don’t think I could consider it as a self-archived article) from this blog.
From an initial error, I think the Nature Publishing Group reacted correctly.
Jean-Etienne's blog 