Conflicting academic attitudes to copyright are slowing the move to open access

Where previously authors would typically assign rights in a scholarly work to an academic publisher, the open access movement has prompted a shift towards retention of rights and the use of creative commons licenses to control how works are used by publishers. This shift has the support of research funders, whose policies seek to ensure the widest possible readership. Francis Dodds suggests that whilst publishers have adapted with some success to a new OA environment and its contractual framework, researchers have proved more ambivalent to the changes. The fact that researchers are divided in their views about OA, and the merits of permitting varying degrees of reuse of their work, has contributed to limiting the spread of OA publication, which remains only a modest percentage of the overall market.