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Cite as: Martin Paul Eve, “More on dual-licensing of digital OA books”, https://eve.gd, June 04, 2026, https://doi.org/10.59348/pyncb-wyx70.

Following up on yesterday’s post, I received an email this morning from Andrew Johnson, who is the Scholarly Communications Librarian (Copyright & Licensing) at Sheffield University in the UK and so seems to know his stuff on this turf. With his permission, for which I am extremely grateful, I reproduce that message, as it answers some of the questions I posed:

So what is licensed? Well, not what a lot of people expect, because technically what is licensed are the restricted acts of reproduction and distribution. The work is protected by copyright, and the BY-NC-ND licence applies – assuming the University publisher applies it to the original work you submitted and transferred to them, in exchange for a contractual agreement to publish. That licence applies to “the work”, but really it is reproduction and distribution rights that are licensed. Off topic, the application of CC licences to “works” rather than “copies” is to me arguably the biggest interpretational difference between CC and open software licences.

You rightly point out US law applies to your contract, but local law determines how the CC licence applies. So in the US, reproduction and distribution rights cover – in CC licence legal code terms – what is spread over three rights in the UK, as we have the right of communication here. So in UK use, three restricted acts are licensed. CC licences apply to copyright-relevant acts in the territory where the act occurs. In the UK those three restricted acts are licensed as they apply to the work you created. Any copying that doesn’t alter the original intellectual creation you supplied in making it is permitted by the licence, all formats and media. So format shifting from website to pdf to any other text document, or copying long-hand to paper, or photocopying from a print copy of the book – all licensed, as they are the same restricted acts with the same work.

Your chapter discusses how sharing e.g. medical articles could have direct health benefit to life and be used by pirates as justification for shadow library copying, and that rhymed for me with how copyright protects such works more “thinly” than some works in the humanities and arts, where more creative or expressive creation has stronger protection against substantially similar copying – even where it is appreciation or critique. From a rights justification view it is interesting that there is on one hand a value judgement around how essential such works are in the hierarchy of needs, but in legal terms they are the most protected due to being deemed the most essential to promote future creativity for the benefit of all (albeit less so in personality-rights cultural traditions maybe).

So, a huge thanks to Andrew for writing on this. It’s lovely to hear from people who are working in this space and even better when they are truly knowledgeable and willing to engage.

Image: An image of a typewriter printing the words Copyright Claim (Markus Winkler on Unsplash)

I have recently published a book chapter (on Shadow Libraries) in a very fine collection that was published in print in January and digitally just now, in June. The digital edition contractually promises to be open access with a CC BY-NC-ND license (yes, I know, the hardcore OA crowd are baying “that’s not open access” etc. but I really liked the book concept and wanted to write for it etc.).

However, the question arises in this dual licensing scheme of what actually remains under copyright and what is openly licensed. Is it the text that is now open or the full expression of the text in its full and individual context? For example, the book version has specific pagination, typesets, layout, and so forth, while the webpage has a different set of digital characteristics and framings. These features might remain distinct to each version and under different intellectual property regimens.

Perhaps of some significance, in English law, the relatively recent THJ v Sheridan case ruled (basically) that merely copying/photographing an existing work would not cross the barrier for originality and a new copyright/derivative work.

This is relevant because it might be that the NoDerivatives license does not allow me, for example, to print a PDF file from this work so that I can encapsulate it in a repository, because that might be considered a new derivative work. I think this is probably not the case, because it doesn’t contain sufficient originality to engender a fresh copyright, as per the above cited case. But then we are not working under English law here. The contract will be based and judged in America. But the question persists. If I copy the text of that chapter and put it into a Word document, is that a derivative work? Or because I haven’t modified the text at all, is it just “the work” itself? Have they licensed the text or have they licensed a web page in its totality?

I had assumed that the important thing, in terms of Presses pursuing these dual-licensing strategies, was that citation norms often require pagination for the most part, although we can see that this is, in many ways, potentially silly in the digital age. Nonetheless, the book version retains a distinct value for this purpose.

But regardless of whether they are happy about it, the Press has contractually agreed that all of those publications will be by BY-NC-ND. If they are considering the implications of that, probably the most important thing is the likelihood of abuse or even likely loss of revenue, rather than just the theoretical possibilities. And I would say it is relatively low risk. The physical book retains much value for its flexibility in terms of random access (flicking to a page), but also for sequential reading (much easier on the eyes). Having a relatively openly licensed digital version, as we have said for many years, probably doesn’t actually erode the value of the book.

But we will see. I noticed that the license wasn’t yet being applied to the work and so contacted my editors who have been superb in passing this up the chain and thinking through what this means with me.

Image: An image saying CC BY-NC-ND (Umberto on Unsplash)