Why do some academic publishers think they should charge extra for more liberal licenses (CC BY)?

"In recent days, there has been a surge of opposition from some members of the scientific community over the new journal being launched by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Aside from the high base-level charge from this publisher, which seems outside of the norm, one of the most controversial elements (also seen with some other publishers) is that the AAAS wants to charge more for a more liberal license. Why is this the case? To understand this, a little background on copyright and open licensing is necessary. Open licensing is a structure that sits on top of copyright under which authors use their rights to confer additional benefits to others, such as re-use, modification, translation and other derivative uses. The traditionally theorised model of academic labour is one wherein academics are paid a salary to write research articles and do not need to sell their work. They are, therefore, extremely well placed, the argument goes, to give away their work. (There are some problematic assumptions here that are linked to the increasing precarity of many academics on short-term contracts.) Copyright provides both economic and moral rights to authors. Under this theorised model, academic authors clearly do not need or want the economic protections; they do not need to sell their research. Instead, what they usually want is acknowledgement: a moral right. Academic publishers, on the other hand, are very different. Under a subscription/sale model, they explicitly utilise the economic protections of copyright to ensure that they can compensate for the labour that they invest into a publication (and profits in some cases etc. — I won’t re-hash that argument). They take the time-limited monopoly and ensure that only they can sell the unique commodity item in that period. Publisher revenue comes from a variety of sources, predominantly subscriptions, but also reprint requests and so on. Gold open access, however, implies a series of economic inversions in which publisher labour is to be remunerated from the supply side. In many instances, although by no means all, this takes the form of an article or book processing charge, in which the author, their institution or funder, remunerates the publisher for the labour, in exchange for making the work available freely to all. This again rests upon a set of assumptions about the motivations and economic situations of academic authors ... The argument then goes, in such cases, that if alternative revenue streams are denied (because publishers don’t have a copyright monopoly under the more liberal CC BY licenses), then the APC/BPC must be higher. This argument, therefore, only applies to publishers who expect to make money elsewhere; if a publisher doesn’t undertake such other revenue-generating activities and it charges different APC/BPC rates for more open licenses, then it is just cashing in ..."