Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/120



In terms of controversies pertaining to open access and the humanities, Creative Commons licensing has aroused fervent opposition. As outlined in Chapter 1, and beyond the economic arguments in Chapter 2, the main oppositions to CC licensing take two forms: concerns over scholarly integrity and broader worries about undesirable activities that could be enabled by such lowering of permission barriers.

In this section, I want to spend a little more time airing these claims and evaluating the dangers that could arise from the implementation of CC licenses. It is worth noting, upfront, however, that personal preference for a speciﬁc license may not, in the end, be a choice that rests with most authors. Many funding councils have mandated Creative Commons licenses for work that they fund. The EU’s Horizon 2020, the UK’s RCUK and the Wellcome Trust, as notable humanities funders, already have mandates for forms of open licensing.28 Given the Australian Research Council’s move towards open-access mandates, one could speculate that a licensing condition will only be a matter of time for this funder also. Authors who dissent from Creative Commons licenses are then faced with the (non-)choice of deciding whether they will accept funding from a particular source (under its rules) or spurn the funding in favour of principle. Given institutional pressure to attract funding, it seems unlikely that many will stick to their guns. That said, a recent survey by Taylor & Francis also indicated that authors remain extremely wary of CC BY, an aspect reiterated by Wiley, although advocates continue to criticise the methodology of these surveys.29

Concerns over scholarly integrity

The ﬁrst worry regarding Creative Commons licenses concerns the integrity of academic research material and the author’s moral rights. While some see the ability to rework material as a beneﬁt, others think this a problem. Without a No-Derivatives clause, each license is designed to allow maximum reuse, including modiﬁcations to the language used. While this might seem strange, understanding some