In our most recent LAPIS lecture we discussed the development of the book trade, intellectual property and piracy. Instead the history of the book trade, which is covered in one of classmates blogs, I thought I would limit my focus to some of the potential difficulties caused by intellectual property rights, especially in the context of teaching and research and discuss potential solutions which have been proposed.

Current difficulties

Intellectual property emerged as an attempt to protect the economic interests of producers of a variety of different intellectual outputs. Intellectual property rights don’t just protect a particular material object i.e. a particular copy of Harry Potter but instead, this protection extends to the content contained within Harry Potter. It would therefore not be possible for me to copy the material in the book and create my own edition of Harry Potter. Some form of Copyright exists in essentially every country in the world. Most of these copyright laws share some temporal limitations and have exceptions for fair use. These are intended to balance the protection of material for the creator (whether an individual or corporation) with the desire to make these innovations accessible more broadly. However, there are potential problems with the current forms of copyright law.

Interpreting fair use

Most common forms of copyright include some form of exception for ‘fair use’. Common exemptions tend to include all, or some of the following (or something similar):

• Non-commercial research and private study
• Text and data mining for non-commercial research
• Criticism, review and reporting current events
• Teaching
• Helping disabled people
• Personal copying for private use
• Parody, caricature and pastiche
• Certain permitted uses of orphan works
• Sufficient acknowledgment
• Fair dealing¹

Although the above provide some exemptions, there can be difficulty interpreting how exactly these apply in specific cases. As an example, the use of text and data mining has often been hindered not by technical limitations but rather by uncertainty about copyright. In other cases someone might no reuse an image, or piece of text because they are worried about copyright infringement. It is with these sorts of difficulties in mind that Creative Commons licences were introduced.

Creative Commons

Creative commons licences attempt to remove uncertainty about what can be done with work falling under copyright. Whilst it does not remove copyright it does remove some of the usual restrictions associated with copyright:

Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable you to modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs. ²

By providing a variety of licences, creative commons can spell out more clearly what can be done with a work. Often these licences will just be visually attached to websites or content but it is also possible to include this information in metadata making it easier to retrieve material with a licence appropriate to your needs.

Gratis or Libre (free beer or free speech)

Whilst the open access movement has partially been about ensuring free access to published materials, some have argued it should go beyond that. Although an article maybe open access in the sense that it is free to access it, beyond this it can have the usual copyright restrictions associated with ‘traditionally’ published articles. Other articles published in an open access form might have a licence that allows for a variety of different types of use or reuse. This has led to the characterisation of two flavours of open access Gratis and Libre. The primary difference between the two is in terms of what can be done with content of that work. Gratis OA is free as in free beer, Libre is free as in free speech. One can be freely accessed the other freely (to different degrees) shared, modified and reused. The question then asked is whether this distinction is important or not?

Is this distinction important?

Some argue that making distinctions between different types of open access is unhelpful, and the focus should be aimed towards making content free in terms of price, rather than adding an extra layer of compliance to be ‘really’ open access. This issue can be looked at from a number of different ways.

One is simply to do with requirements associated with funding for research. The Wellcome Trust for example

encourages - and where it pays an open access fee, requires - authors and publishers to licence research papers using the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY)** so they may be freely copied and re-used (for example, for text- and data-mining purposes or creating a translation), provided that such uses are fully attributed. ³

Research Council UK has a similar policy for research it funds. Some of the reasons given are outlined in the above quote. A particularly important one being the ability to translate an article. One of the aims of open access is to increase access to research outputs for the developing world and limiting translation clearly limits this aim.

The ability to text mine an individual journal article might seem trivial but in the long run copyright restrictions could hinder the use of research created today. Copyright lasts a long time and research with an open licence, clearly indicated through metadata, removes legal worries and allows researchers to focus on the research itself. The potentials for data mining huge sways of medical literature are yet to be fully realised. Systematic reviews take a long time, and a great deal of expertise. Creating the opportunity for researchers to review huge bodies of literature, often outside their immediate fields, and potentially find news links and avenues for exploration could provide exciting new opportunities for research.

Another potential benefit of libre open access is that it encourages sharing and hosting of research in new places. Although this may not be so relevant in the short run, in the long run it can help ensure sustainable access to research by storing files in multiple locations and in multiple formats.

Is all of this essential for an article to be truly open access? I would suggest it isn’t. Providing materials that currently sit behind paywalls for free (as in beer) already provides significant advantages. With that said I think more open licences (not necessarily the most open) provide many additional benefits. Being able to reuse someones datasets for very different purposes that they hadn’t considered, combining existing teaching materials for new courses, making use of research in new contexts, these are just some of the benefits that can arise. Although there might be examples when it isn’t to use these more open licences (I can’t think of many) a gradual shift towards open licences might also coincide with new opportunities for more collaborative scholarship and research benefiting the ‘original’ author as much as the ‘audience’.

This work by Daniel van Strien is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.