Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/112

 ellipses, changes of emphasis (‘emphasis mine’) or in the inclusion of images. The centrality of such inclusions also varies in scope/scale and spans a range of types of producer, from other academics to artists/performers and beyond. Nonetheless, these are derivatives in copyright terms that are allowed, at a small scale, within the bounds of fair use. Other cases that are desirable for the academy, such as inclusions of larger portions of material in course packs (which is then potentially a derivative work), as set out below, may not be considered fair use.

The case for open licensing in the humanities, then, is substantially different from its historical context in computer science. For the humanities, open licensing should be less about the rhetoric of liberation of data/code and the attachment of ‘the language of personal freedom. . . to information’, as Paul Duguid points out, and more concerned with potential use cases.15 In other words, this should not simply follow the business mantra that ‘information wants to be free’ but should instead be predicated on whether existing copyright provisions are adequate easily to allow activities desired by academic researchers. Advocates of open licensing claim that they are not.

Among the ﬁrst questions that must be considered are whether and why open licensing might be required or desired. As I will suggest, below, there are multiple areas in which advocates construe beneﬁts and this section presents arguments from that perspective. The foremost of these, however, are the assertions in recent years that the current system of copyright is actively preventing scholarly research from fulﬁlling its potential. For instance, a report by the Ad Hoc Committee on Fair Use and Academic Freedom in 2010 for the discipline of communication studies noted, of their survey research, that:

Nearly half the respondents express a lack of conﬁdence about their copyright knowledge in relation to their research. Nearly a third avoided research subjects or questions and a full ﬁfth abandoned research already under way because of copyright concerns. In addition, many ICA members have faced resistance from publishers, editors, and university administrators