Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/50

 book processing charges (for the removal of price barriers) and the various aspects of reuse permitted by the Creative Commons Attribution (‘CC BY’) license (the removal of permission barriers). I will try to give a ﬂavour of these here.

One of the clearest statements with regard to the former stance was voiced by the editors of the Review of African Political Economy, who believe that ‘The potential gains of OA are fundamentally undermined by the “pay to publish” principle.’67 Likewise, the Editors of History Journals’ written submission to the UK’s Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) Select Committee Inquiry in 2013 noted that they were ‘concerned that the international reputation of UK journals is likely to suffer if scholars abroad begin to believe that they will have to pay to publish in UK journals’.68 For now, I will let these statements stand on their own as concerns but will also note that in Chapter 2 below I address alternative business models for gold OA that may mitigate these problems. I will also note that there are no barriers of this sort to green OA which comes with no cost to authors. In other words, these objections were speciﬁcally addressed to the article/book processing charge implementation of gold open access. In turn, there is also concern that the pay-to-publish principle compromises academic freedom by tying ﬁnance to publication.69 These economic worries are compounded by concerns that the destabilisation engendered by a switch to new models may hinder the ability of publishers to continue to operate as venues for the promulgation of research.

Academic objections to the lowering of permission barriers to humanities research have taken two different forms, which are explored much more thoroughly in Chapter 3. The ﬁrst of these is an authorial worry over the potential corruption of scholarly integrity. In late 2013 this was aired by the Cambridge historian Peter Mandler in an article for the Journal of Victorian Culture. Mandler noted that, in the humanities, ‘Our form of words is unique to us and it cannot be dismembered and mixed with the words of others – which CC BY [the Creative Commons Attribution license] facilitates – without yielding what we tell our students is plagiarism: the mixing of their words and our words without specifying (through quotation) which is which.’70

The second set of objections over permissive licensing of humanities work is made most forcefully by John Holmwood, whose