Science Commons Announcements

["Kaitlin Thaney" <kaitlin AT creativecommons.org>]

Copyright Policy at the European Commission - Science Commons' Response

November 24th, 2008 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", 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?"

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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, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Science and Humanities, and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing. 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 (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. [...]

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To read this post in its entirety, visit http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/11/24/response-question-19-ec/ 

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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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