UK-based scholars will be powerless to stop their research being used in racist or homophobic propaganda if proposed open access rules are adopted, a publishing expert has?warned.

Under the new policy??by UK Research and Innovation last month, any article accepted for publication from January 2022 should be made ¡°freely and immediately available online¡± in a journal, open access platform or institutional repository if its author acknowledges research council funding.

But the insistence that research should be made available under a Creative Commons attribution (CC BY) licence has particularly alarmed scholars in the arts and humanities. Under this?, anyone is allowed to ¡°distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation¡±.

Surrendering copyright is particularly problematic for humanities scholars,?said Rick Anderson,?associate dean at the University of Utah¡¯s Marriott Library and former president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing.

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¡°CC BY gives everyone in the world the right to remix, twist [or] distort your work as they see fit, but it also requires them to connect your name with the new version as its original author,¡± explained Mr Anderson, adding that this also meant allowing others to ¡°create derivatives of your work, including translations into other languages".

¡°Humanists are more likely to hesitate at that than scientists¡± because ¡°the manner in which their work is presented is often as important as the work¡¯s factual content¡±, said Mr Anderson.

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He highlighted the??of journalist Denver David Robinson, whose photographic portraits of Uganda¡¯s gay community published in 2013 were subsequently used in a Ugandan tabloid article titled "Top Ugandan Gays Speak Out: How We Became Homos¡±. If the photos had been published with a CC BY licence, Mr Robinson would have been unable to demand their withdrawal, Mr Anderson said.

¡°What copyright gives you is the exclusive right to¡­say ¡®no¡¯,¡± he continued, adding that this included saying ¡°¡®no, you may not incorporate a twisted version of my work into your homophobic pamphlet¡¯ and ¡®no, I don¡¯t want my work to be exploited commercially¡¯¡±.

¡°I realise that ¡®the right to say no¡¯ sounds very negative, but it¡¯s an extremely important right for authors [and] has been fundamental to the whole concept of copyright since its origins in the Statute of Anne,¡±?said Mr Anderson, highlighting the British copyright legislation of 1710.

Susan Bruce, head of Keele University¡¯s School of Humanities, who co-chairs the UK¡¯s Arts and Humanities Alliance, said that it was ¡°not piracy, so much as misrepresentation, that humanities academics are most worried about¡±.

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¡°Crucial differences in meaning can flow from tiny changes in expression, [which is why] many humanities academics prefer a ¡®no-derivatives¡¯ (ND) licence, which offers protection from misuse, misquotation or mistranslation,¡± said Professor Bruce.

UKRI said the ¡°core principle of our open access policy is that publicly funded research should be accessible and reusable¡± but it was ¡°conscious of differences across disciplines and these are being taken into account in the open access review¡±.

¡°For example we are considering whether a case-by-case exception for ND to be added to an open licence should be permitted in the new open access policy and welcome contributions to the consultation on this subject,¡± a spokesman said.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com