"no derivatives" clause for CC licensing
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.