This report compares the legal status of research data in the four KE partner countries. The report also addresses where European copyright and database law poses flaws and obstacles to the access to research data and singles out pre-conditions for openly available data.
Archives des mots-clés : copyright
Asking for Permission: A Survey of Copyright Workflows for Institutional Repositories
An online survey of institutional repository (IR) managers identified copyright clearance trends in staffing and workflows. The majority of respondents followed a mediated deposit model, and reported that library personnel, instead of authors, engaged in copyright clearance activities for IRs.
The most common “information gaps” pertained to the breadth of information in copyright directories like SHERPA/RoMEO. To fill these gaps, most respondents directly contacted publishers for permissions.
Respondents typically did not share publisher responses with other IRs, citing barriers such as time, expertise, staffing, and the need for improved methods for sharing data with copyright directories.
Paper Tigers Rethinking the Relationship between Copyright and…
Paper Tigers: Rethinking the Relationship between Copyright and Scholarly Publishing :
“Discontent is growing in academia over the practices of the proprietary scholarly publishing industry. Scholars and universities criticize the expensive subscription fees, restrictive access policies, and copyright assignment requirements of many journals. These practices seem fundamentally unfair given that the industries’ two main inputs – articles and peer-review – are provided to it free of charge. Furthermore, while many publishers continue to enjoy substantial profit margins, many elite university libraries have been forced to triage their collections, choosing between purchasing monographs or subscribing to journals, or in some cases, doing away with “non-essential” materials altogether. The situation is even more dire for non-elite schools, individual scholars, and members of the general public. There is a growing sense within the scholarly community that change is needed, but change, thus far, has come slowly.
In this Article, I attempt to neutralize the part of the problem that deals with copyright issues by showing that, at least with respect to copyright, scholarly publishers are “paper tigers”: the legal basis of their copyright claims is less secure than is commonly assumed. In so doing, I hope to offer universities an alternative approach to promoting change within scholarly publishing.
In Part I, I explain how, despite customary practice and common (mis)understanding, universities in fact own the copyrights in faculty-created works under the work-for-hire doctrine.13 While a common law “teacher exception” existed at one time to exempt teachers from the operation of the work-for-hire doctrine, Congress’ failure to codify the exception in the 1976 revisions to the Copyright Act extinguished the old common law rule. In Part II, I describe how, in response, universities developed various policy “solutions” in an attempt to circumvent the application of the work-for-hire doctrine. However, these solutions fail to satisfy the requirements set forth in the Copyright Act. I argue that while these policy failures have damaging implications for the proprietary scholarly publishing industry, the potential effect on the public’s interest in open access to scholarly works is quite promising. In Part III, I explore some of the implications of this revised understanding of the law and address concerns expressed by some scholars and commentators that faculty-creators will be harmed by university ownership of copyright. Finally, I conclude with a series of recommendations that universities could undertake to reduce reliance on the proprietary scholarly publishing industry and empower faculty while promoting open access.”
URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1893590
Copyright and Open Access for Academic Works …
Copyright and Open Access for Academic Works :
“In a recent paper, Prof. Steven Shavell (see Shavell, 2009) has argued strongly in favor of eliminating copyright from academic works. Based upon solid economic arguments, Shavell analyses the pros and cons of removal of copyright and in its place to have a pure open access system, in which authors (or more likely their employers) would provide the funds that keep journals in business. In this paper we explore some of the arguments in Shavell’s paper, above all the way in which the distribution of the sources of journal revenue would be altered, and the feasible effects upon the quality of journal content. We propose a slight modification to a pure open access system which may provide for the best of both the copyright and open access worlds.”
URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1647586
Le copyleft appliqué à la création hors logiciel…
Le copyleft appliqué à la création hors logiciel. Une reformulation des données culturelles ? :
“Le copyleft est une notion juridique issue des logiciels libres qui autorise, dans le respect des droits de l’auteur, la copie, la diffusion et la transformation des œuvres avec l’interdiction d’en avoir une jouissance exclusive. C’est le projet GNU de la Free Software Foundation initié par Richard Stallman avec la première licence libre copyleft pour logiciels : la General Public License.
Notre recherche concerne le copyleft appliqué à la création hors logiciel telle que nous l’avons initiée en 2000 avec la Licence Art Libre. À travers la pratique que nous en avons et par l’observation de ses effets, nous nous interrogeons sur la place de l’auteur à l’ère du numérique et de l’internet. Nous découvrons une histoire, une histoire de l’art, qui n’est plus déterminée par une fin mais qui débouche sur des créations infinies réalisées par une infinité d’artistes mineurs et conséquents. Nous observons que le copyleft n’est pas un processus de création ordinaire, mais de décréation. Il s’agit d’affirmer, par la négative et la faille, non la négation ou la faillite, mais la beauté d’un geste qui s’offre gracieusement. Ce geste conjugue éthique et esthétique, il est « es-éthique ». Nous comprenons qu’avec le copyleft, la technique est au service d’une politique d’ouverture « hyper-démocratique », à l’image de l’hypertexte du web qui troue les pages et ouvre sur l’altérité. Il s’agit d’articuler le singulier au pluriel en un écosystème qui préserve le bien commun de la passion du pouvoir. Une économie élargie excède, sans le nier, le seul marché. Des œuvres copyleft affirment cette réalité politique et culturelle où l’art forme la liberté commune à tous et à chacun.”
URL : http://antoinemoreau.org/index.php?cat=these
Owning the Right to Open Up Access to…
Owning the Right to Open Up Access to Scientific Publications :
“Whether the researchers themselves, rather than the institution they work for, are at all in a position to implement OA principles actually depends on the initial allocation of rights on their works. Whereas most European Union Member States have legislation that provides that the copyright owner is the natural person who created the work, the copyright laws of a number European countries, including those of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, establish a presumption, according to which the copyright of works made in the course of employment belongs initially to the employer, which in this case would be the university. In France, a similar presumption applies to works created by employees of the State. Even if researchers are in a position to exercise the rights on their works, they may, nevertheless, be required to transfer these to a publisher in order to get their article or book published. This paper, therefore, analyses the legal position of researchers, research institutions and publishers respectively, and considers what the consequences are for the promotion of OA publishing in light of the principles laid down in the Berlin Declaration and the use of Creative Commons licenses.”
URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1829889
Back to the future: authors, publishers and ideas in a copy-friendly environment
How could scholars survive in a copy-friendly environment jeopardizing the established system of scholarly publishing in which scientific publishers seemed to be authors’ best friends? A backward itinerary across three German Enlightenment thinkers who took part to the debate on (unauthorized) reprinting shows us ways – usual and unusual – in which culture can flourish in a copy-friendly environment.
While Fichte endorsed an intellectual property theory, took the function of publishers for granted and neglected the interests of the public, Kant saw authors as speakers and justified publishers’ rights only as long as they work as spokespersons helping writers to reach the public. Eventually Lessing’s project was designed to foster authors’ autonomy by means of a subscription system that could have worked only on the basis of a free information flow and of direct relationships with and within the public itself.
Such a condition can be compared with the situation of ancient auctores, with one difference: while the ancient communities of knowledge were educated minorities, because of the limitations of orality and manuscript media system, we have now the opportunity to take Enlightenment seriously.