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 when seeking to include copyrighted works in their research. Scholars are sometimes forced to seek copyright holders’ permission to discuss or criticize copyrighted works. Such permission seeking puts copyright holders in a position to exercise veto power over the publication of research, especially research that deals with contemporary or popular media.

These results demonstrate that scholars in communication frequently encounter confusion, fear, and frustration around the unlicensed use of copyrighted material. These problems, driven largely by misinformation and gatekeeper conservatism, inhibit researchers’ ability both to conduct rigorous analyses and to develop creative methodologies for the digital age.16

As a simple preliminary ﬁnding, this gives just one example of a set of difﬁculties to which open licensing could pose an easier solution than changes to international copyright law.

Within different spheres of endeavour, open licensing is claimed to have varying degrees of potential. It seems fair to say, however, that there is not a single researcher who would not beneﬁt in at least one fundamental way from even the more restrictive forms of open licensing (such as CC BY-ND). That is, without open licensing, even if one were to have monetarily free access to an article or book, this does not entail permission to redistribute that material beyond the basic provisions of fair use. Every year, universities pay to redistribute photocopies of critical material, produced by academics, to their students. This is because, for instance, despite the fact that this is use for the purposes of teaching in an educational establishment, in the UK ‘Making copies by using a photocopier, fax, and so on, on behalf of an educational establishment for the purpose of noncommercial instruction generally requires a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency.’17 Organisations such as the UK’s Copyright Licensing Agency and the US’s Copyright Clearance Center act as mass collection agencies, requiring licensing agreements from universities in order to use, in many cases, material written by their own scholars and imposing limits on the amount that can be used for teaching in such cases. Furthermore, these agencies often require universities to re-purchase material that they already own, simply so that it can be reprographically distributed to students. The CLA’s HE license states that, ‘[u]nless there are valid pedagogical reasons for using a superseded edition, all copies should be made from the current published edition’ and economic hardship of one’s library