Open access monograph dash could lead us off a cliff | THE Opinion

"Many scholars are broadly supportive of the benefits of open access, but they often display a degree of disquiet when all the implications are pointed out to them. One problem is the liberality of some of the Creative Commons licences that open-access authors are required to sign. At their most permissive, these allow almost any reuse of a work, including adaptation and abridgement, as long as the original author is credited. This is particularly hard to swallow when it comes to monographs. In the arts and humanities, scholars do not regard the research embodied in their books as data to be mined, but, rather, as carefully crafted arguments: creative works in their own right. And they view with dismay the prospect of those works’ atomisation and appropriation by others."