0.11 Response to roger bagnall paper: integrating digital papyrology  (Page 4/10)

Accordingly, we have for the last ten years insisted that all contributors to our projects agree to the Creative Commons attribution share-alike license. The combination of this license with the established moral rights of authors affords the right mix of accreditation for the original authors with open access to all. To spell this out: there are three components of this legal framework. The first is the requirement for attribution: this mandates that every republication and reuse made of the materials must reproduce the declarations of responsibility and credit affixed to the materials. This guarantees the perpetuity of statements of credit, as required by our first rule for scholarly communities. The second component is that all publication and republication must be “share-alike”: this mandates that any republication of the materials must be on exactly the same terms as the original publication. A publisher could not, for instance, take these materials, adapt them, and then prevent anyone else republishing the adapted materials. (On the other hand, this does not forbid publishers from including the materials within a commercial site: I discuss this more below.) The third component is that of authorial moral rights. In the endless discussions among scholars about intellectual property over the last decades, moral rights has hardly figured. Yet, it is a powerful tool. In particular, moral rights permit the author to forbid inappropriate publication: we might, for instance, decide that our transcription of Codex Sinaiticus should not appear on the Wicked Pictures website.

It appears, to me, that this gives the originating scholars every right they ought to have. Indeed, there is only one right that this combination does not give the scholar who created the material. It does not give the scholar the right to say: I permit this scholar (scholar A, who is my friend) to work on and republish the materials I first created; but I do not permit this other scholar (scholar B, who is not my friend) to work on and republish the materials. This may be something we can debate: but I cannot imagine a single circumstance in which this is defensible in the academic digital world. It may be base human nature to want to use the work we have done, and think we own, to fight wars for us; as a token with which to reward our friends and punish our enemies. But the point of rules is to forbid us from doing things we might want to do, but which we all agree damage our communities.

I stress this point at length because scholars are human. And the human thing is to say: yes, all digital materials should be available free to everyone, but actually to mean: yes, everyone else’s digital material should be available free to me, but I am going to control who makes use of my material. There is no getting around this. Open means open, and all means all. Further, as Bill Clinton so memorably failed to say: “Is” means “Is.” In our context, “Open to all” must mean: actually, really, open to all. Hence, our second rule: digital scholarly communities must be built on open access by all, to all .