first large-scale CC licensing of scientific papers

University of California and Springer have signed an agreement to publish as Open Access (Creative Commons by-nc).

This is huge news, I personally wonder how UC managed to achieve that. But nevertheless this is undeniably a precedent, which other research institution should use to reach similar agreements.

The currently publishing situation for scientific papers is on the average terrible, with (at least in Italy) research institutions being strangled by the yearly subscriptions fees to digital libraries. The subscriptions are so bad that the year you stop paying them you loose access entirely, basically admitting that you have wasted all the past year payments.

At least CC by-nc will create material that in the future can be collected independently and made available by each institution.