Came across the following statement in the recent papers related to CWIS in Frontiers 

Copyright © 2020 Authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the  Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

The statement is ambiguous if I understand the contents of this thread correctly. The authors own copyright over the content but it also has CC BY licence. 

Elisabeth, curious if one could copy chunks of such articles into Wikipedia? 

Regards,
paresh

Hi Paresh,
Interesting question. I also find it a bit confusing. For example the copyright statement of this paper says at the bottom:

Copyright © 2020 McConville, Kvarnström, Nordin, Jönsson and Niwagaba. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the  Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . 

Which makes me wonder: is the copyright with the authors or is it open access (CC BY)? Or maybe that's not a contradiction. I would assume that the CC BY license statements overwrites the "author copyright" statement.

So yes, we could copy chunks of text from these papers as well as images to Wikipedia articles. However, in most cases we would have to paraphrase content because the intended audience is different: These papers are written for WASH experts and are likely to use jargon, abbreviations etc. For the text to be understandable for lay persons ( = the target audiences in Wikipedia) we usually have to paraphrase and simplify.

But in any case, thanks for alerting us, and wouldn't it be great if key findings from these papers now made their way into relevant Wikipedia articles? I'll raise this possibility with the 3 authors that are named for the editorial:  Christoph Lüthi  ,  Juliet Willetts  and  Sabine Hoffmann.

Regards,
Elisabeth

Hi Paresh,

Regarding your question regarding Copyright: Yes, the Creative Commons copyright rules do apply here - it is an open-source document that can be downloaded, used and cited. As with all publications, the original content should always be cited correctly (and not just copy-pasted without reference). I agree with Elizabeth, that a Wikipedia text has a different audience and you'll need to adapt the language and syntax.

Very best,
Christoph (Eawag)