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.

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.