Case Studies/80Beats Blog
“80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles on the day's most compelling topics” — 80Beats website
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
80Beats has added an additional copyright term to their use of a Creative Commons licence. They provide that Discover owns the exclusive copyright to all 80beats posts for 30 days from the date of publication. After this period has expired, the text is licensed under a Creative Commons licence.
80Beats has adopted a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. This means that people have a right to use the material on the blog as long is they attribute the author and do so for a ‘non-commercial’ purpose. Any adaptation of the material may only be distributed under the same or a similar licence to the licence which 80beats has used (ie a CC-BY-NC-SA). Any images on the blog are not owned by Discover and so are not included under the Creative Commons licence.
This licence is applied through the use of a licence button on every page of the site, along with a brief summary of why they chose to use a Creative Commons licence. The licence button links to a summary of the licence, which in turn links to the full licence.
Motivations
80Beats was encouraged to release its material under a Creative Commons licence because they make use of the work of many other excellent publications in putting together the blog and so believe it is only proper to offer up their content in turn for use by others. A Creative Commons Share Alike licence will also help to fulfil Discover Magazine’s aim of encouraging an interest in science by allowing people to use material on the blog and share it with friends. The use of a CC licence demonstrates the importance of people having access to, as well as an interest in, the rapidly developing world of science.
