Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/106

 and last, but not least for the context at hand, comes a request for a non-exclusive license to publish under a Creative Commons (or other open) license.

In a copyright assignment or transfer model, the author agrees to transfer (irrevocably give) his or her economic rights to the publisher. The publisher then may, at its discretion, permit the author to perform certain activities that go beyond fair use with the material (such as deposit in an institutional repository – green OA). This is implemented so that the publisher may protect the author against copyright violations, libel or plagiarism and to facilitate requests for reprints.7 Of course, a publisher could offer either ﬁnancial or inkind legal advice to their authors without such a provision. There is, therefore, a case for balancing the rhetoric of author protection against the economic advantages for a publisher of a copyright transfer. It seems more probable that publishers prefer copyright transfer both because it gives them full and exclusive ownership of the material for the entire term, including distribution in new geographical areas or in new forms not covered explicitly under licenses to publish, and also because it centralises their ability to protect intellectual property. The argument in favour of this is that publishers often invest substantial quantities of labour time (at a price) into taking on work and that, within the current sales/ subscription model, it may be easier to recover costs and/or make a proﬁt with this form of ownership. Conversely, the author permanently signs away his or her economic rights to the work and has no comeback if he or she later wish to make such work open access and this was not initially agreed.

Under an exclusive license to publish, the author retains his or her economic rights, but signs away most of the practical beneﬁts of so doing, usually for the entire term of the copyright. In this form of license, the publisher has the right to publish and make money from the work (and to act to legally protect those rights) and the author agrees never to give the speciﬁcally negotiated rights to anybody else. The reason that this mode has emerged is that it is marginally more beneﬁcial to authors. If a speciﬁc type of publishing is not covered under an exclusive license to publish (for example, distribution in certain regions or formats), the author can renegotiate for new, better terms at a later date if the publisher (or another publisher) wished to