Voynich Authorship

[Mark Knowles]

It is a real pity that archives are so restrictive about their material being shared with a wider audience.

This is a subject I feel quite strongly about. To me it is absolutely disgraceful that the sharing of knowledge amongst academic researchers is so restricted. I never realised this prior to engaging in this research.

I am not a lawyer, so I don't know on what legal basis they are entitled to do so. However it is clear that certainly all the archives that I have dealt with make it quite explicit on their websites and in writing that one needs permission from an archive to share a document in public and they may well charge a fee for doing this. Given the concensus on this amongst the archives and the opinion of other academics that I have had dealings with it most surely be the case that they legally have the write to do so.

One other Voynich researcher in the past suggested to me that there was no legal restriction on this due to the copyright having expired. However it must be another law, not copyright, that they are governed by.