To this end, publishers currently require the protections of copyright for their subscription and/or sale business models. Scholars do
not usually require such economic protections (instead, they need
reputational protections), but they do need the labour of publishers.
For open access advocates who see twofold difficulties in access and
restrictive permission barriers, this adds up to a chiastic economic
mess. While there remains no economic disincentive to researchers in
allowing others to read their work for free, access is denied to
scholarly research through paywalls that are necessary to remunerate
publishers. On the other hand, while there is no financial disincentive to researchers in allowing others to redistribute and, in some
cases, to reuse their work with attribution, permissions remain
restricted in order to protect the paywall model through time-limited
copyright. Under mechanisms where publishers could claim their
remuneration elsewhere, which are the economic reconfigurations
implied by gold open access, advocates of this economic stance
believe that problems of both access and permissions would be
resolved by new business models. Sceptics, conversely, believe that
the new models for such a reconfiguration are unproven and could
result in irreparable damage both to the economics of scholarly
publishing houses and, consequently, to the circulation and discovery of high-quality research material in a useful form.
These difficulties notwithstanding and to return to the history, Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard-based lawyer, saw this logic unfurling in the wake of Stallman’s and others’ successes with the GPL and began working on a series of licenses that would allow creators of any type of content (i.e. not just software) to extend such reuse rights to others. It was in this light that the Creative Commons (CC) licenses were unveiled. Coming in a variety of types corresponding to different levels of permissiveness, these licenses – although contentious, as I will explore in Chapter 3 – are designed to allow content creators to use their copyright protections to allow others to redistribute, modify, translate and computationally analyse works, among other activities. It is Lessig’s Creative Commons licenses that are most frequently used to achieve the lowering of permission barriers to open-access material, predicated on the reasoning outlined above.
Creative Commons licensing for academic material, as with the GPL, is not a replacement of copyright, but a superstructure atop it
