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Paper short abstract

Social & Cultural Anthropology faces distinct ethical challenges in open access. Researchers often use restrictive licensing to address research and publication ethics. I argue, however, that licensing is not the right moment to handle and ‘fix’ such ethical considerations.

Paper long abstract

Regarding open access, researchers from Social & Cultural Anthropology face different ethical challenges than colleagues from other disciplines. Sensible research contexts, knowledge production that is considered shared and communal and the discussion of private, secret or even sacred knowledges and objects urge them to reconsider the impact of academic publishing.

Open access publishing goes hand in hand with open licensing, usually through Creative Commons licenses, that offer standardized options to give permission while protecting copyright. Open licensing thus reserves certain rights while inviting everyone to share and, depending on the license, adapt and update, translate and rework even for commercial purposes.

More than two years working on open access in SCA showed me that ethical concerns within the discipline—alongside concerns about recent developments in text and data mining and GenAI—often lead researchers to adopt protective stances through restrictive licensing, sometimes even considering closed-access publication. “Even [the license] CC BY-NC may not offer sufficient protection from exploitative use…” expresses the disappointed hope to safeguard through restrictive licensing.

Against this impulse, I argue that licensing might be the wrong moment to handle and ‘fix’ those pressing ethical questions. While it is important to know different license options and to choose a license that suits the work and respects the rights and interests of all of its creators, the underlying considerations and decisions need to be addressed at different—usually earlier—stages of research. Restrictive licensing—while occasionally justified—cannot substitute for conversations we have failed to have.