We discussed with BioRender at length and they assured us that their license is compatible with publishing final figures CC-BY (if author has an account). The copyright of the I dividual icons I am less sure about
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Totally, I have been building https://bioicons.com since a few years. However, more funding for truly open science illustrations will not happen if stakeholders like journals continue to believe BioRender's ridiculous attempts to salvage their business model.
I asked BioRender about reusing illustrations from a CC BY article some time ago and they told me the license of the article is not correct and a correction will have to be issued. Do you want to track down all authors to correct all 153 articles in PloS Biology that make use of BioRender?
Good for you, the people who published these articles did as well. Nevertheless, the company says the people who paid them for a license violated their copyright and need to correct their article when I asked for reusing it under the stated license. Is that open science for you?
For CC BY it doesn't matter if I want to reuse the complete figure or just part of it. The license allows me to do both at no cost without a BioRender account for any purpose (republishing same figure in a journal, extracting individual icons etc.) as long as I state the license and modifications.
In the fictional universe of the BioRender lawyers they can claim they are compatible with CC BY but fact is the figures created in BioRender cannot be reused under CC BY because they say one needs a paid account which is against the CC BY terms (compare BioRender vs. @creativecommons.bsky.social).
Also BioRender's new "CC BY" license requires that users put a specific link where above conditions are displayed because they have to explain that they differ from standard CC BY. (CC BY doesn't allow modification of the conditions). This is not the case for this PLOS article.
Why does PLOS enforce CC BY for all 3rd party content if not to allow reuse in other journals without filling permission forms or hidden copyright complexities?
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