Beyond Access: Enabling Reuse of Research
Andrew Johnson
UCCS Copyright Conference
June 4, 2013
Who am I?
• Not a lawyer
• Not a copyright wonk
• Someone interested in:
• Improving research processes
• Innovation
• Openness
• Justice
Open Access Definition
“By ‘open access’ to this [scholarly] literature, we mean its
free availability on the public internet, permitting any users
to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or
link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for
indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them
for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or
technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining
access to the internet itself.”
Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002)
Source: http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read
Degrees of Open Access
• Gratis (“free as in beer”)
–No cost for readers to access the scholarly literature
–BOAI: “free availability on the public internet”
• Libre (“free as in speech”)
–Not only free of costs but also free of many use
restrictions
–BOAI: “permitting any users to read, download, copy,
distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these
articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to
software, or use them for any other lawful purpose”
Roads to Open Access
• Green OA
–Self-archiving versions of published articles in
institutional repositories and/or central repositories
–No cost to authors
–Publisher agreements may limit/restrict this practice
• Gold OA
–Publishing articles in Open Access journals
–Various publishing models, many require authors (or
their institutions) to pay submission/publication fees
Open Access and Copyright
• Gratis (“free as in beer”)
–Primarily a business model issue for Gold OA
–Copyright central to Green OA (author/university v.
publisher as rightsholder)
• Libre (“free as in speech”)
–Copyright (licensing) is the mechanism for enabling
this type of reuse
–Creative Commons licenses are widely used for this
purpose
Creative Commons Licenses
"...give everyone from individual creators to large
companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to
grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The
combination of our tools and our users is a vast and
growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be
copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all
within the boundaries of copyright law."
Source: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Types of Creative Commons Licenses
Attribution (CC BY)
Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)
Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND)
Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC)
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA)
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND)
Source: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Creative Commons Public Domain Tools
• CC0 - Tool for waiving copyright or database rights to
your own works
• Public Domain Mark - Tool for labeling copyright-free
works (not necessarily your own)
Source: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/
Recent OA Legislation & Funder Mandates
• White House Memo on Public Access to Research
-Silent on reuse licenses/terms for publications or data
• Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act
-Publications should be made available “in formats and
under terms that enable productive reuse, including
computational analysis by state-of-the-art technologies”
• Research Councils UK Policy on Open Access
-Specifies CC-BY for publications
OA Debate Shifts to Implementation
"...publishers understand that OA mandates are here to stay. They
might quibble about embargoes, might insist on their right to demand
copyright, might insist that links to their own Web sites, rather than
deposit into a central federal repository (such as PMC), is the way to
go, but at the end of the day, to a person, they stood up and said they
supported making research available—after some time, under some
restraints. That was absolutely not the conversation any of us were
having five years ago, when the NIH policy was put into place."
Rebecca Kennison, Director, Center for Digital Research and
Scholarship at Columbia University
Source:http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Dialogue-over-Public-Access-to-ScholarlyPublications-Continues-in-the-US-89803.asp
Key Copyright Questions for OA Implementation
• Who should hold copyright over research publications and
data?
• Which licenses should be used for research publications
and data?
• How can copyright/licensing be used to enhance
research, promote innovation, and accelerate scientific
breakthrough?
SPARC Recommendations for Article Rights
Authors
● Retain the rights you want
● Use and develop your own work without restriction
● Increase access for education and research
● Receive proper attribution when your work is used
● If you choose, deposit your work in an open online archive where it will be permanently and
openly accessible
Publishers
● Obtain a non-exclusive right to publish and distribute a work and receive a financial return
● Receive proper attribution and citation as journal of first publication
● Migrate the work to future formats and include it in collections
"If you give away control in the copyright agreement, you may limit [an article's] use"
Source: http://www.sparc.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.shtml
Support for CC BY
BOAI: “...permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or
link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to
software, or use them for any other lawful purpose.”
SPARC: "We need both barrier-free access to and full digital re-use of the full text of
digital articles." Source: http://www.sparc.arl.org/bm~doc/sparc-nas-comments.pdf
Klaus Graf: "No researcher needs an incentive (such as that provided in copyright law)
to do research or to publish his results. Copyright, with its restrictions, simply isn’t an
appropriate instrument in this sector. ...All research results should be made CC BY
(and all data CC 0)." Source: http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss1/5/
OASPA: "Given the ways in which additional restrictions can limit the reach and impact of
research outputs, OASPA therefore strongly encourages the use of the CC-BY
license, rather than one of the more restrictive licenses or indeed a license that is
‘functionally equivalent’ to CC-BY." Source: http://oaspa.org/why-cc-by/
What about data?
• Unlike publications, facts and data are not copyrightable in the US
(see http://www.lib.umich.edu/copyright/facts-and-data)
• Even so, many data sets are made available under a variety of terms
and conditions
• Integration of data from diverse disciplines and sources is key to
many areas of research
• Making sure terms for various data sets align is time-consuming and
difficult to automate
• Even minimal terms like attribution (e.g., CC BY) can create
difficulties when data is compiled from a large number of sources
• Science Commons and others (e.g., Dryad) recommend CC0 for
data
Text/Data/Content Mining
• Definition: Using machines to analyze electronic texts for a variety of
purposes (e.g., lexical analysis to determine word frequencies in a
corpus)
• These techniques are increasingly necessary to utilize the vast and
growing amount of literature in many disciplines (and sub-disciplines)
• Even when access to full-text articles is provided, licenses or other
terms of use may prevent text mining
• At least some (and probably most) publisher agreements don't allow
text mining of content (see Heather Piwowar's negotiations with
Elsevier: http://researchremix.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/elsevier-agrees/)
Support for "mining rights"
"Policies must ensure that appropriate rights are assigned to enable full
reuse -including text/data mining and computational analysis. We don't
want to end up in a siloed, 'read-only' world."
Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC
Source: http://www.sparc.arl.org/bm~doc/sparc-nas-comments.pdf
"The right to read must be the right to mine."
Peter Murray-Rust, Chemist, University of Cambridge
Source:http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2013/05/29/licences4europe-has-notaccepted-the-right-to-read-is-the-right-to-mine/
What is to be done?
●
●
●
●
Advocate for less restrictive licenses/terms for freely available (and
even not freely available) publications and data
Educate about the need for machine-readable licenses and how to
apply these to works
Promote publishing in journals that do not require transfer of
copyright and make articles available under CC BY or similar terms
Encourage deposit of data in repositories that use CC0 or
equivalent terms (unless there are legal or ethical concerns
preventing this)
Why?
Librarians' expertise helps
researchers understand
copyright issues enabling
greater access to and reuse
of research publications
and data
New forms of scholarly
communication and
research present
opportunities for
academic librarians
Greater access to and reuse
of publications and data
allows new forms of
scholarly communication
and research to be
developed
Thank you!
Copyright 2013 by Andrew Johnson
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License