[sc-announce] "Copyright and the European Commission - Science Commons' Response" - Science Commons blog
Kaitlin Thaney
kaitlin at creativecommons.org
Mon Nov 24 12:34:24 EST 2008
Copyright Policy at the European Commission - Science Commons' Response
November 24th, 2008<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/11/24/response-question-19-ec/>by
Kaitlin Thaney
This past July, the European Commission released a green paper on issues
pertinent to work in increasing access to scholarly content. The
paper, "Copyright
in the Knowledge
Economy"<http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/docs/copyright-infso/greenpaper_en.pdf>,
raises a number of questions regarding licensing schemes for scholarly
content. The following is Science Commons' submitted response to the
Commission on Question 19.
The question reads:
"Should the scientific and research community enter into licensing schemes
with publishers in order to increase access to works for teaching or
research purposes? Are there examples of successful licensing schemes
enabling online use of works for teaching or research purposes?"
——————————————————————————
*Science Commons - Response to Question 19*
*Submitted on November 21, 2008 –*
Within the scope of the Green Paper (section 1.2) is the dissemination of
research, science, and educational materials to the public, and question 19
asks whether the scientific and research community should enter into
licensing schemes with publishers to increase access to work for teaching
and research purposes.
With respect to governmentally-funded research, the fruits of research
should be openly available to the scientific community and the public, in
accordance with the principles laid out in the Budapest Open Access
Initiative <http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml>, the Berlin
Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Science and
Humanities<http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html>,
and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access
Publishing<http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/bethesda.htm>.
We believe that these declarations already articulate principles that are
appropriate for ensuring broad, digital access to the scientific and
scholarly corpus. Such access is particularly important with respect to
results arising from research projects supported with government funding,
because broad-based, digital dissemination serves important social and
governmental purposes that motivate such funding.
We recognize that publishers have a variety of business models, and while
open access models used by publishers such as Public Library of Science and
BioMed Central offer the fastest and most direct means of making scholarly
works available to the public, other, so-called "traditional" publishers,
pay for peer-review and publication-related costs through subscription and
access fees. They have argued that an exclusivity or "embargo" period is
needed in order to fund investments in quality control and to support
publication costs. We believe that fee-for-access publishing models are not
necessarily inconsistent with the broad goals of open access, as long as the
embargo period(s), if any, are reasonable, and that subsequent to the
embargo period, scholarly papers published in journals are deposited in an
online repository and made available for download free of charge and free of
technical or legal restrictions. An example of such a policy would be the NIH
Public Access Policy<http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-08-033.html>(April
7, 2008).
Furthermore, such works should be licensed to the public under terms that
permit redistribution and appropriate reuse, including in certain
circumstances, the creation of compilations, annotations, and other
derivative works. Examples of licenses that support the ability to
disseminate and to reuse works include the Creative Commons licenses,
published by Creative Commons Corporation. The Creative Commons Attribution
3.0 license is an example of a license that is widely adopted by open access
journals and recognized as consistent with the open access declarations
discussed above. However, such open licenses need not be limited only to
open access journals, but they can also be used a model for licensing works
made available after any relevant embargo periods. Such licenses ensure that
open access is not only available at a technical level through download
(read-only access) but also at a legal level through appropriate licensing
of copyright in order to permit the preparation of derivative works and
other transformative uses (read-write access), which are central to
scientific and cultural enterprises. Creative Commons has also worked with
many international collaborators to make these licenses available in many
languages, as well as to adapt them to the laws of many jurisdictions. [...]
--
To read this post in its entirety, visit
http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/11/24/response-question-19-ec/
--------------------------------------
Kaitlin Thaney
Project Manager
Science Commons, a project of Creative Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
http://creativecommons.org
kaitlin at creativecommons.org
--------------------------------------
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