Support and demand for researchers to publish in open access (OA) journals has been growing steadily among funding agencies, research organizations, and institutions of higher education. The Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils UK OA policies have begun imposing more finite restrictions, like publishing only under CC‐BY licenses, on researchers. CC‐BY, or Creative Commons Attribution, is one of several, and the most open, of all creative commons licensing. It most closely embodies the definition of OA, as established by the Berlin Declaration and Bethesda Statement on Open Access, by allowing for the most reuse, including the unrestricted creation of derivatives. Scholars have voiced concern that CC‐BY may not be the best license for all disciplines. Libraries, as OA publishers, custodians of institutional repositories, facilitators of scholarly research, and organizers of information, are well‐positioned to enhance a discussion on balancing the needs of scholars for minimum control over their work with the goal of OA publishing to most widely disseminate information and scholarship to the public without barriers of country, class, access, or financing.