An appeal to biblical scholars: free your work

The texts we study are humanity’s common inheritance. The surviving manuscripts are in the public domain by virtue of age. The languages are public domain. The methods of textual criticism are public domain. The lexical traditions you draw on (BDB, LSJ, the patristic citations, the Masoretic apparatus) are public domain.

What is not public domain, in most cases, is your work on top of them.

We write to ask you to change that. Not to give up authorship. Not to renounce attribution. Not to forgo academic credit. Only to release your editorial labor under a license that respects what the four freedoms require: the freedom to use the work for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies, and to distribute modified versions. CC BY 4.0 and CC BY-SA 4.0 both qualify. Public-domain dedication (CC0) is even simpler. None of these prevent you from being cited, credited, or thanked. All of them ensure that the next generation of scholars can build on your labor without first asking permission, paying a license, or rebuilding what you have already done.

What we're asking for is what scholarship has always claimed to be#

Academic publication exists to advance shared understanding. The peer-review system, the citation chain, the conference circuit, the very idea of a field: all of it presupposes that knowledge accumulates because each scholar can read, criticize, and extend the work of every other. When the underlying data of that work (the text of a critical edition, the morphological tagging of a verse, the entries of a lexicon, the apparatus of variants) sits behind a custom EULA that forbids redistribution and modification, that presupposition stops being true. The chain breaks. The next graduate student cannot fork your work; they must reinvent it. The next free Bible reader cannot include your edition; they must use a worse one. The next country whose seminary cannot afford a Logos subscription cannot teach from your text; they must teach from one whose editor lived two centuries ago.

This is not how knowledge is supposed to work, and the people who built the discipline knew it. Tischendorf released his edition into the public domain. Westcott and Hort released theirs. Nestle’s 1904 edition is freely usable by anyone, and is the basis for several openly-licensed Greek New Testaments today, including the Greek New Testament you can read on this site. Brenton’s Septuagint, Yonge’s Philo, Whiston’s Josephus, the Ante-Nicene Fathers: all freely usable, more than a century after their editors put down their pens, because copyright on a 19th-century work eventually expires. Should we really require that a scholar wait until eighty years after their death before their work becomes part of the shared inheritance of the field?

The objections, and what we say to them#

“My work took years. I deserve to be paid for it.” You do, and you should be. Free licensing is not free labor. Universities, foundations, churches, presses, and grant-making bodies all fund scholarly work, and many already require open access on what they fund. An open license is compatible with every one of these funding streams. What it is not compatible with is a business model that treats your editorial work as an asset to be rented from a publisher in perpetuity. That model serves the publisher, not you.

“My publisher won’t allow it.” Many will, if asked, especially for digital releases of a work whose print edition has earned out. Many won’t, and the answer there is to publish in a different venue next time. Open Scriptorium and projects like it would gladly host author-archived versions of any apparatus, edition, or lexicon released under an FSF-approved license, including pre-print, post-print, and author-corrected versions where the publisher’s restrictions allow.

“Someone will misuse my work.” This is the strongest version of the objection and it deserves a serious answer. Yes: once your work is freely licensed, someone may quote it out of context, repackage it badly, or use it to defend a reading you disagree with. But this is already true of every published work; the four freedoms do not change it. What the four freedoms do change is that scholars who want to correct the bad use can do so, openly, on the same data, without having to ask anyone for permission. Free licenses arm critics, not just popularizers.

“My work isn’t finished enough to release.” Then release what you have, mark it provisional, and license the provisional state. The history of scientific software is full of projects that started as “rough drafts” and became foundational because someone made them available. The history of biblical scholarship is full of projects that started as definitive and became inaccessible because their editors died before licensing them.

What we are offering#

The Open Scriptorium project commits to host, mirror, attribute, and maintain in perpetuity any biblical-studies resource released under a license that meets the four freedoms. Hebrew and Greek editions, lexicons, morphological tagging, alignment data, discourse analysis, critical apparatus, translations, commentaries, manuscript transcriptions, paleographic notes: anything in the field, in any language, from any tradition, on any text. We will preserve your authorship, display your attribution prominently, and link to your institutional page or personal website. We will not claim ownership of your work. We will simply make sure that anyone, anywhere, can read it, cite it, build on it, and pass it on.

The ask#

If you are a scholar with authority over a work in this field, and especially if you are an editor, a lexicographer, a translator, or the maintainer of a database, we ask you to do one of three things:

1. Re-license an existing work under CC BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0, or CC0. We will help you find the right venue to announce it.
2. License your next work under one of the above when you publish it. Negotiate this with your publisher up front; many will agree if it is part of the contract from the start.
3. Encourage the institutions you sit on (editorial boards, learned societies, granting bodies) to require open licensing as a condition of support.

The texts we study were given freely. The traditions we serve were transmitted freely, copy by copy, scribe by scribe, for two millennia. Our scholarship can be freely transmitted too. It is mostly a matter of choosing to make it so.

We are choosing. We hope you will too.

— The maintainers of Open Scriptorium

If you have a work you would like to release, or you would like to talk about how, please open an issue on the issue tracker or get in touch directly. This appeal lives at a stable URL so it can be shared: openscriptorium.org/appeal-to-scholars.

We have also written a separate appeal to Bible publishers, asking them to release their texts and apparatus under free licenses.