"no derivatives" clause for CC licensing I’m wondering about whether it might hurt to use the "no derivatives" clause when licensing a scientific article under a Creative Commons license. My impression is that nobody ever creates "derivative works" in academia, that would simply be considered as plagiarism.

A related question is the usefulness of the "share alike" clause. Note for instance that the arXiv proposes both CC BY and CC BY-SA. What is the difference? Are there any derivative works of an article that would not be plagiarism?

I’m only talking about an article, for instance a theorem and a proof in mathematics, not about any kind of computer code which one may want to reuse.
It is correct that it is very unlikely anyone is going to hack out chunks of a scientific paper and reuse them in another scientific paper - that would be plagarism, and very unsubtle plagarism at that. However, that's really not the main goal of allowing derivative works. (Plagarism tends to ignore copyright anyway, so worrying you've 'given permission' for it is a bit of a red herring...)

These are things that are (probably or potentially) considered derivatives in the meaning of that clause:


Edited or annotated extracts for teaching purposes
Translations of the whole or part of the paper into another language
Modifications of images and diagrams for reuse in other work (or in writing about your work)


Any of these, if done with appropriate permission and attribution, would not constitute plagarism - and all are fairly useful things to allow.

Some of these may be more useful in certain circumstances than others, of course.

There are also some complexities around databse licensing; depending on the jurisdiction, reusing material from a dataset could always be considered an adaptation. CC explicitly recommend against using ND clauses for datasets for this purpose. If your paper contains data tables, this aspect may be worth considering.