Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/127

 communities out of the beneﬁts of open licensing in a baby-with-the-bathwater situation. Furthermore, if derivatives are prohibited, so too are the beneﬁts of extensive quotation, academic image inclusion, rewriting for popular consumption, community translation and longer excerpts for course pack distribution, as well as text mining for the digital humanities in jurisdictions where there are no legal exemptions.

Given these controversies, it is unsurprising that it has been suggested that Creative Commons licenses are unsuitable for academic research and that a new set of licenses is needed instead.48 However, writing licenses from scratch is a difﬁcult business as they require court precedents to be trustworthy and also have jurisdictional speciﬁcity that needs expert legal counsel worldwide. Furthermore, new licenses may be incompatible with existing CC licenses used elsewhere, which could, for just one example, make the inclusion of material within Wikipedia impossible. It is also clear that a proliferation of licenses comes with problems. For example, when the International Association of Scientiﬁc, Technical & Medical Publishers recently drafted its own set of licenses, Andrés Guadamuz noted that, aside from being non-compliant with BBB deﬁnitions of open access, these new licenses served to ‘taint the open access licensing environment by generating more licence complexity and more confusion [for] the academic authors’.49 A potentially better solution for those who would like the humanities to be less utilitarian, but who also recognise both that open licensing comes with some beneﬁts and that potential industry collaborations need not always be resisted, could be to impose a ShareAlike (SA) clause on material. This would mean that industry would be under the same obligation to give back to the community as the original academic. Indeed, any new derivatives that were made by industry as a result of using academic research licensed under CC BY-SA would also have to carry that license, meaning that the academy could beneﬁt in turn from any transformation of the work, if valuable.

This brings me, ﬁnally, to consider the role that CC licensing could play in the broader structural changes pertaining to the marketisation of higher education, a concern that has been mentioned several times already. Some ﬁgures, most notably John Holmwood, have argued that Creative Commons licensing of academic research