Case Studies/80Beats Blog
"As 80beats makes fair use of the work of many excellent publications, we think it's only proper to offer up our content for use by others" — 80beats
Overview
Discover is a highly regarded popular science magazine that has been publishing since 1980. Along side republished content from the print editions, the Discover website publishes an images and video gallery, a podcast series and a blog portal that includes 10 science-focused blogs.
80beats is one of Discover’s blogs. Written by Andrew Moseman and Smriti Rao and edited by Eliza Strickland, the blog posts ‘journalistic mashups’, synthesising science news from a range of sources into short, punchy entries. The authors indicate a direct quote from other sources with blue text and linking to the source in square brackets after the quote.
80beats is available on the Discover website, is syndicated via RSS and is circulated as a daily email newsletter.
License Usage
Entries on 80beats are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence. The content does not become available on the CC licence terms until 30 days after it was published have passed. During this period Discover asserts full copyright over the entries. Notice of this licensing arrangement is made in the left column of the blog. The notice also specifies that the images on 80beats are not the property of Discover and are therefore not under the licence.
Motivations
Because 80beats draws so heavily on other literature in the science field, the authors wanted to explicitly add their new content back into the body of commentary of a given topic. As the licence notice states, “As 80beats makes fair use of the work of many excellent publications, we think it's only proper to offer up our content for use by others.”