Open Access Licensing
Open access licensing is about what a reader is permitted to do with a text rather than about what its author did. An open-access book is one the rights holder has released for reading and reuse under a standardised public licence rather than under all-rights-reserved copyright, and the differences between those licences are the whole point. It is the first entry in this vault's apparatus cluster that concerns permissions rather than evidence, and it changes the editorial options as much as any of the rest.
What it is
The instance that generated the note is James Williams's Stand Out of Our Light, whose copyright page states that an online version is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 licence permitting reuse, distribution and reproduction in any medium for non-commercial purposes provided appropriate credit is given and changes are indicated, with the press requesting that citations include the DOI. BY is attribution, meaning credit the author, name the licence and indicate changes. NC is non-commercial. The absent letters matter too, since there is no ND, so excerpting and adapting are permitted, and no SA, so a derivative need not carry the same licence.
In effect
The practical effect is on fidelity and on checking. Ordinary quotation at fair-dealing length means a sentence here and a phrase there, always with the risk that an argument is represented by a fragment of itself, and an open licence removes that constraint, so a passage can be reproduced entire and a definition given in the author's own words rather than in a summary that shifts it. The second effect is that a reader following a citation into an open text arrives at the passage rather than at a purchase page, which is the single variable that makes verification free.
What it does not say
It does not settle the non-commercial clause, which is the awkward part for a commercial publication and is not a technicality. Creative Commons' own position is that the condition turns on the intent of the use rather than on the identity of the user, and an advertisement-supported page carrying a long reproduced passage is not obviously a non-commercial use, so this is a question for a person rather than a note and nothing here is legal advice. It also does not make attribution easier, since the licence is stricter than a house byline and requires the author, the licence name, the DOI and a statement of whether the passage was altered. And it does not cover third-party material inside the book, so a reproduced passage that is itself a quotation from somebody else falls outside it.
Sources
- Williams, J. (2018). Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108453004. The copyright page carries the CC BY-NC 4.0 statement, and Cambridge Core serves the complete text of every chapter under it. The licence identifier rather than the prose is the authority: the same page loosely describes it as a "Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC 4.0", and attribution-only and attribution-non-commercial are different licences.
- The vault's record of other open titles, at Resources/Where to read the unheld books.md, including Bowlby's Maternal Care and Mental Health and Carothers's The African Mind in Health and Disease, both in the World Health Organization's repository. Public domain and open licence are different statuses and this page covers the second.