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 A ﬁnal use case can be seen in the broader dissemination and ampliﬁcation of research work that could be possible through resources such as Wikipedia, if open licensing provisions were in place. Regardless of whether one favours the anarchic construction of this online encyclopaedia (and irrespective of the quality controls in some areas), it is a remarkable resource and the ﬁrst port of call for many lay readers who wish to learn about a topic. While it is already possible to quote portions of research works within Wikipedia under fair use provisions, to extend this reuse to include larger portions of work, or even whole articles, would give a far more visible presence to humanities research in a popular, public space. While some will remain wary of Wikipedia, the potential to incorporate research work within similar ecosystems will be far easier if compatible open licensing provisions are adopted.

Translation

At present, English dominates scholarly discourse.20 In a networked world, this is a huge challenge as, in the quest for practical solutions to overcome language barriers, the risk of erasing cultural speciﬁcity is omnipresent. To date, the mutually exclusive options to militate against this have been authorised translations or neglect. The question then becomes one of canonisation: which forces allow authorised translation, what are their motivations and who is allowed to translate? The answer, in most cases, will contain at least some degree of commercial interest for works that are within their copyright term.

This is where advocates claim that open licensing could help. To return to my previous argument from Weber, humanities communities should be at least partially concerned with plurality and the communication of difference. By giving permission, in advance, to anybody to translate a work, through open licensing, a greater degree of plurality could emerge, it is argued.

Such arguments have emerged implicitly and explicitly from the work of John Willinsky and Kathleen Fitzpatrick. In the former of these arguments, John Willinsky proposed that, in the online environment, acts of reading should be supplemented by technological ‘helpers’ that provide side-by-side context: contextual reading.21 These helpers could, in Willinsky’s view, give information on