Partnering on Copyright

Open Access: An Overview

Research is undertaken in order for it to be widely read, used and built upon. However, this research is often not reaching its potential as in many cases there is a barrier to its access in the form of journal subscriptions. The scholarly communications community is bucking this trend with its development of Open Access (OA), a potentially revolutionary access model which allows maximum dissemination of research output, making scholarly papers freely available to all through an Internet connection, with little or no restriction on use of materials for any reasonable purpose. This empowers research institutions and their researchers alike, placing authors in control of how their work can be accessed, used and re-used.

But while it offers a wealth of benefits, like considerable increases in the citation rates of research articles and in the visibility and prestige of participating institutions, the move to OA has significant implications for the intellectual property rights (IPR) of contributing authors. As those of the Adelphi Charter have acknowledged and responded to, one of the great challenges facing the 21st century is 'how to ensure that everyone has access to ideas and knowledge, and that intellectual property laws do not become too restrictive.'

The copyright of authors' work has long been considered something they simply sign away to publishers, but OA is moving the goalposts on this issue, allowing an opportunity to negotiate with publishers to retain certain dissemination rights, and every stakeholder in the academic communication process must become familiar with the implications.

Current Open Access developments
Open Access as an access model is not going away; indeed, the trend is gathering pace as increasing numbers of universities set up institutional repositories (IRs) to archive and provide access to all their research output. The SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) project has helped establish IRs in 20 institutions, for example, including the universities of Oxford, Nottingham and Edinburgh. Sixteen of the 19 top UK research-led universities of the Russell Group have also set up IRs. And, at a governmental level, the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee has produced a report entitled 'Scientific Publications: Free for all?', which encourages HEIs to set up repositories. In itself, the report is an excellent resource for issues surrounding OA. In the Netherlands too OA is gathering pace, as the SURF Digital Academic REpositories (DARE) programme is coordinating the establishment of a network of repositories at all Dutch universities and several academic and research organisations. Also, some countries have drawn up OA policies. These include Australia, Finland and Scotland.

Routes to Open Access
There are two ways in which work can be made available in an OA environment, both of which bring significant benefits. The first method is to ‘self-archive’: authors continue to publish as normal in a subscription-based journal (allowing them to continue to submit work to the established journal which most suits the research), but supplement this by placing a copy of the article online, whether on their institution’s website, or in an institutional or subject-based repository. Different journals have different policies on this: 93 per cent allow self-archiving in one form or another; some place restrictions on whether the pre-print or post-print can be archived. Other conditions may also apply, such as a requirement to acknowledge the journal in which the article was published. The second way is to publish in an open access journal. These offer a level of peer-review and copy-editing comparable with a traditional fee-based journal and are listed in a dedicated directory.

Although it may seem a revolutionary development, an IR is relatively cheap and easy to set up, with the necessary software available for download free. But while it may seem to bring many benefits for little cost, the model has radical implications for copyright arrangements between author and publisher. These need to be negotiated and reviewed in order to maximise opportunities for OA and thereby the benefits such an environment for research can bring. The accompanying overview of related copyright issues provides an introduction.

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The Berlin Declaration
The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities is one of the three major Open Access initiatives which have arisen from conferences, the other two being the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Budapest Open Access Initiative. These have defined what Open Access is, which is that the information is freely accessible online with permission to use this information given for any reasonable purpose, and have played an important part in promoting and supporting OA worldwide.

Many OA initiatives use the definition of an Open Access contribution given by the Berlin Declaration. This declaration was drafted ‘to promote the Internet as a functional instrument for a ‘global’ scientific knowledge base and human reflection and to specify measures which research policy makers, research institutions, funding agencies, libraries, archives and museums need to consider.’

To qualify as Open Access, the declaration states, a contribution must satisfy two conditions:

1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual (for the lifetime of the applicable copyright) right of access to, and a licence to copy, use, distribute, perform and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any reasonable purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organisation that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving.

A number of institutions and organisations have signed the Berlin Declaration, as well as those of Bethesda and Budapest, and, in so doing, are actively supporting and showing commitment to the OA movement both in their own institutions and beyond.

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