EU Copyright Law in Support of European Research & Education

In this brief an explanation is given why Exceptions in copyright legislation are of great importance to the free flow of knowledge, essential to education and research in the European Union. At present the Freedom of access to knowledge for EU citizens is trapped in a complex web of national laws and local licensing arrangements. The current EU copyright law does not enable the vision of either a "Europe of knowledge" in the Bologna Process or of a "unified" European Research Area to be realised. To address this Exceptions and limitations harmonised to fit best practice are required to allow content to move digitally across Member States in support of education, research and libraries. Support for open content licensing by the European Parliament will strengthen authors’ rights, meet the needs of researchers, teachers and learners, and enable the free flow of knowledge in support of the "fifth freedom".

Meeting on Provisions in Licensing Incorporating new developments in daily licensing practice: Setting conditions for open access, patron driven access, and data & text mining

Following the workshop on new developments in daily licensing practice in November 2011, we brought together fourteen representatives from national consortia (from Denmark, Germany, Netherlands and the UK) and publishers (Elsevier, SAGE and Springer) met in Copenhagen on 9 March 2012 to discuss provisions in licences to accommodate new developments. The one day workshop aimed to: present background and ideas regarding the provisions KE Licensing Expert Group developed; introduce and explain the provisions the invited publishers currently use;ascertain agreement on the wording for long term preservation, continuous access and course packs; give insight and more clarity about the use of open access provisions in licences; discuss a roadmap for inclusion of the provisions in the publishers’ licences; result in report to disseminate the outcome of the meeting. Participants of the workshop were: United Kingdom: Lorraine Estelle (Jisc Collections) Denmark: Lotte Eivor Jørgensen (DEFF), Lone Madsen (Southern University of Denmark), Anne Sandfær (DEFF/Knowledge Exchange) Germany: Hildegard Schaeffler (Bavarian State Library), Markus Brammer (TIB) The Netherlands: Wilma Mossink (SURF), Nol Verhagen (University of Amsterdam), Marc Dupuis (SURF/Knowledge Exchange) Publishers: Alicia Wise (Elsevier), Yvonne Campfens (Springer), Bettina Goerner (Springer), Leo Walford (Sage) Knowledge Exchange: Keith Russell The main outcome of the workshop was that it would be valuable to have a standard set of clauses which could used in negotiations, this would make concluding licences a lot easier and more efficient. The comments on the model provisions the Licensing Expert group had drafted will be taken into account and the provisions will be reformulated. Data and text mining is a new development and demand for access to allow for this is growing. It would be easier if there was a simpler way to access materials so they could be more easily mined. However there are still outstanding questions on how authors of articles that have been mined can be properly attributed.

Knowledge Exchange Discussion paper on Open Knowledge

The development of an openly available layer of scholarly and scientific content requires access to all types of output from the scholarly and scientific process. Interoperable and sustainable infrastructure components are invaluable elements and the content should be clearly licensed for re-use. Open Knowledge will improve the discoverability and re-usability of content across the sectors, to the benefit of higher education and research and will help the (European) knowledge economy to move forward. In Autumn 2013, scoping sessions took place with experts to discuss their views around the value of making knowledge open and the steps which need to be taken to achieve this. These discussions are collected in the Knowledge Exchange discussion paper on Open Knowledge.

Study into licences used by Open Access journals

The Knowledge Exchange Licensing Expert Group has commissioned a study which examined which licences or licence provisions are being used by open access and hybrid publishers when making their publications available in open access. The study intended to identify a ‘best practice’ licence model framework and to formulate recommendations with respect to an OA licence structure, taking into account the commercial and non-commercial needs of authors as well as the publishers. The study was undertaken by Maverick Outsource Services Ltd. This led to the following recommendations for an optimum licence in an open access journal: The author retains copyright; The author or rightholder grants to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to the work, and besides a licence to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any reasonable purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship; A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository. This includes the permission as stated under 2, in a suitable standard electronic format; The copyright holder can retain the right to restrict commercial use if they wish; The copyright holder provides the publisher with permission to publish, subject to open accessibility of the work in online published form.

New developments in daily licencing practice workshop

New developments in higher education and research are having their repercussions in dailylicencing practice. Examples are; demands for perpetual access usage of licensed content incourse packs or virtual research environments text mining open access to publications. Atthe Knowledge Exchange workshop on LicencingPractice, twenty Experts discussed how these newdevelopments could be incorporated in licencing. The workshop consisted of four presentations oncurrent developments in licencing followed by threeparallel breakout sessions on the topics open access,new developments and data and text mining. This led toa lively exchange of ideas. Especially the aspect of dataand text mining provided valuable insights in how thiscould be incorporated in licencing. The Knowledge Exchange Licensing expert group willwork on how to implement the model provisions discussed. Input from the workshop was collected for a workshop with publishers to take place in March 2012 and will include these provisions in their licences. The various suggestions will be also shared with other international organisations working inthis field.

The impact of Open Access outside of European Universities

The Open Access movement has encouraged the availability of publicly-funded research papers, data and learning content for barrier-free use of that content without payment by the user. The impact of increasing availability of content to researchers in European universities is understood in terms of easier access to previous research and greater exposure for new research results, bringing benefits to the research community itself. A new culture of informal sharing is evident within the teaching and learning communities and to some extent also within the research community, but as yet the growth in informal sharing has not had a major effect upon the use of formal publication choices. This briefing paper explores the impact of open access upon potential users of research outputs outside the walls of research-led European universities, where the economic value of open access may be even greater than the academic value within universities. The potential impact of open access is understood in many communities but requires a greater volume of open access content to be available for the full potential to be realised. More open access content will become available as the opportunities in open, internet-based digital scholarship are understood. This briefing paper was written in cooperation with SPARC Europe. All links provided in footnotes in this Briefing Paper are to studies available in open access.

Submission Fees - A Tool in the Transition to Open Access?

Knowledge Exchange examined different routes in achieving the vision of 'having a layer of scholarly and scientific content openly available in the internet'. One of these routes involves exploring new developments in the future of publishing. Work is being undertaken investigating interesting alternative business models which could contribute to the transition to open access. In this light KE has commissioned a study investigating whether submission fees could play a role in a business model for Open Access journals. The general conclusion of the report bearing the title ‘Submission Fees a tool in the transition to open access?', written by Mark Ware, is that there are benefits to publishers in certain cases to switch to a model in which an author pays a fee when submitting an article. Especially journals with a high rejection rate might be interested in combining submission fees with article processing charges in order to make the transition to open access easier. In certain disciplines, notably economic and finance journals and in some areas of the experimental life sciences, submission fees are already common. Overall there seems to be an interest in the model but the risks, particularly those involved in any transition, are seen by the publishers to outweigh the perceived benefits. There is also a problem in that the advantages offered by submission fees are often general benefits that might improve the system but do not provide publishers and authors with direct incentives to change to open access. To support transition funders, institutions and publication funds could make it clear that submission fees would be an allowable cost. At present this is often unclear in their policies. Author acceptance of submission fees is critical to its success. It is an observable fact that authors will accept them in some circumstances. Author acceptance would require further study though. Based on the interviews and the modelling in the study one model in particular is regarded as the most suitable way to meet the current requirements (i.e. to strengthen open access to research publications). In this model authors pay a submission fee plus an Article Processing Fee and the article is subsequently made available in open access. Both fees are set at levels that balance acceptability with the author community with securing a meaningful mix of revenues for the Publisher.