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 then undertake these activities. This may ﬁnancially disadvantage a publisher whose contracts are not sufﬁciently ‘future proof’ or it may simply mean that an author is free to publish the work in other formats elsewhere, depending upon the contract. It also allows publishers who know that they do not wish to operate in a certain sphere to give the author the opportunity to exploit this aspect elsewhere.

With a non-exclusive license to publish, the author keeps his or her copyright but gives the publisher the right to publish the material. However, the author retains the right to license others to do the same (or to make the piece public on his or her own initiative). This is seen by advocates as a good step for open access as the author will retain the right to deposit his or her work and to republish it wheresoever he or she chooses without requiring publisher dispensation. Of course, it also gives less favourable terms to publishers who need to ensure their economic return on the labour invested (see the remarks in Chapter 2 on the co-existence of green open access with sales/subscriptions, though, for reasons why this may still be possible). This mode does not, however, permit reuse of material beyond fair dealing, as detailed below.

Open licenses

Open licenses, which fulﬁl the lowering of permission barriers enshrined in the BBB deﬁnitions of OA, come in a variety of forms, but the most common for scholarly articles and books so far have been those designed by the Creative Commons Foundation, which have proved enforceable in courts of law worldwide.8 The second most commonly used open text license is the GFDL (the GNU Free Documentation License), which was Wikipedia’s choice until May 2009 (when it was then superseded by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License).

Those who would like to know much more about Creative Commons licensing for humanities researchers (particularly on a practical basis) may wish to consult the Jisc Collections Guide to Creative Commons Licensing for Humanities and Social Science Researchers from which much of the information in this section is derived, which is itself made available under a Creative Commons Attribution license.9 The other source for the information provided