There has been a great deal of comment from authors in the humanities about being ‘forced’ into adopting a licence that they disagree with, either as part of a funder mandate or as part of its policy on Open Access and Creative Commons. Often this is down to misunderstanding of some of the aspects of Creative Commons licensing. The Sciences have been using CC BY licences for journal articles for a number of years, in the case of publishers such as Biomed Central and PLoS this has been the basis of their business model.

Other objections have come from the Learned Societies. In this case this has largely been down to the business models of those particular society/publishers which rely on income from their journals to keep the society in surplus.

With respect to monographs, the only mandate for researchers to use a Creative Commons licence is from the Wellcome Trust, however, European Research Council funding also mandates that all research, including monographs is available via open access, so the need for CC licencing for monographs is sure to grow.

Despite objections, funding bodies are entitled to set such terms as a condition of funding, just as publishers do as a condition of publishing. Researchers can choose whether or not to accept these conditions when the funding is offered: they can in theory decline the funding if they disagree with the terms! In the UK, if major funders such as HEFCE, , in addition to RCUK, decided to move towards supporting Creative Commons licences, there would be very little choice for researchers who did not want to use these licences. But ultimately the funder is free to decide how it wants the outputs of its investment to be made available as a condition of contract.

5.1 Creative Commons licences
5.2 Institutional polices and copyright
5.3 Funder mandates
5.4 Third Party rights and author rights
5.5 Commercial Use Questions
5.6 Benefits of publishing with a Creative Commons licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.