An investigation into stakeholders' approaches to copyright ownership in university-produced scholarly works and the effect on access to UK scholarship

This thesis considers the various perspectives of universities, academic staff and publishers to the copyright ownership of teaching and research outputs produced by UK universities, with a particular focus on how this affects the provision of online and/or open access to those outputs by university libraries. It presents ten papers written over a twenty year time frame that consider these issues within the context of a number of practitioner research projects and demonstrate how practices are changing over time. The papers employ a range of methodologies including questionnaire surveys, comparative design studies, interviews and content analyses. The key findings relating to research outputs (the scholarly royalty-free literature) are that rights are still mainly relinquished to academic staff by UK HEIs, although some HEIs are beginning to assert the right to re-use those works in various ways. Whilst academics are relied upon to either retain copyright or communicate their HEI s copyright policy terms to publishers, in most cases they (reluctantly) assign copyright to publishers. Publishers are increasingly allowing green open access to their scholarly works in some form, but under a growing array of restrictions and conditions principally embargo periods. Publishers terms of re-use for such works (when made explicit) are often restrictive, however most academics would be happy for their works to be re-used non-commercially as long as their moral rights remain protected. This situation creates challenges for both Institutional Repository Managers and copyright clearance staff in Libraries to manage access to, and re-use of, these outputs. The key findings relating to teaching outputs are that copyright mainly lies with HEIs although there are signs that HEIs are moving towards a shared ownership position through licensing. Academics seem to expect some degree of shared ownership, but as with research outputs, are principally concerned that their moral rights are protected. UK HEI copyright policies in this area are fledgling and do not comprehensively address either moral rights issues or other key copyright issues pertaining to OERs. Failure of universities to address these issues is impacting on the motivation of academics to share OERs

Clearing the way: copyright clearance in UK libraries

Libraries today face a problem. Their raison d’etre: to provide access to information for their users is on the one hand being enabled by new technologies and developments, and on the other is being hindered by copyright restrictions. New developments in libraries, learning and teaching, such as electronic short loan collections, computer aided learning packages, distance learning packages and so on, all seek to provide better educational support for students. However to include readypublished material in all these services requires copyright clearance. Quotes such as “Copyright was seen as a major barrier to the scaling up of electronic short loan”1, and “one of the most taxing concerns for courseware developers…is to...obtain the legitimate use of existing copyright works to include in new products”2 abound in the library and related literature. In fact, the current legal and legislative framework makes copyright clearance an essential library activity

Project ACORN final report

Project ACORN was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee for eighteen months under the “Electronic Short Loan Collection” strand of the eLib (Electronic Libraries) programme. During the course of the project period it met all of its initial aims and objectives, listed below, as well as setting for itself, and meeting, many more. The Project has taken dissemination very seriously and has published over 35 reports and documents on its web site, in addition to writing a large number of journal articles and giving many papers and presentations. As the written report output of the Project has been so full, this Final Report can only serve to summarise the key findings of those reports, and direct the reader to the full reports for more detailed information

Ways of evaluating the chosen rights solution

Our motivational survey highlighted that easily available support would be a motivator for depositors to contribute their teaching materials into a repository. Support with rights issues is particularly important because of the confusion over rights that exists within UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). We have identified possible support that depositors and end users could receive. Some potential evaluation criteria have been identified to assess the licences that we have put in place. We aim to evaluate the experience of the depositor and the end user and assess each licence in terms of suitability and accuracy

Copyright ownership of teaching materials

In 1998, JISC commissioned a Senior Management Briefing Paper on Copyright (JISC, 1998, p.4), which recommended that “all members of HEIs [Higher Education Institutions], whether staff or students should be educated about the basics of copyright and what is acceptable practice”. A later study, also in relation to copyright in HEIs, stated that “there would seem to be a considerable gap between the legal position and what academic staff believe are their rights” (Weedon, 2000, p.16). Although this is not a recent study, the difference between the actual situation and the perceived situation amongst academics in terms of the ownership of their teaching materials is still unclear. Project RoMEO (2003), which focused on author attitudes associated with research outputs, surveyed participants and investigated who owned the copyright of journal papers that these authors had produced. Under one third (32%) of participants did not know this, which is concerning. It is no surprise then that Cornish (2004, p.12) believes the “ownership of copyright is complex”

ROMEO Project: final report

The JISC FAIR programme aimed to “evaluate and explore different mechanisms for the disclosure and sharing of content (and the related challenges) to fulfil the vision of a web of resources built by groups with a long term stake in the future of those resources, but made available to the whole community of learning.” Many of the projects funded under the programme are exploring the establishment of Institutional Repositories (IR) of academic research output, using the Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to disclose and harvest metadata about those resources (often referred to as eprints). However, some of the main barriers to the success of such repositories are not technical, but legal and cultural. In particular, the IR model raises a wide range of IPR issues. For example, if academics sign away their right to self-archive through journal publisher Copyright Transfer Agreements (CTAs), the whole process may collapse at the first hurdle. Once a paper has been self-archived, how can academics ensure that the rights they want asserting (say the right to be named as author, and to stop the text being altered) are asserted? Conversely, how can they ensure that other rights given them by copyright law that they may not care for (e.g. to prohibit copying) are waived? There are also rights issues for Data Providers (DPs) and Service Providers (SPs). DPs may be pleased that their metadata is being harvested, but what if someone then starts selling access to it? SPs may add value to the metadata they harvest, but who owns the rights in that enhanced metadata and how can it be protected? The RoMEO Project was funded for one year (1 August 2002 – 31 July 2003) to investigate the IPR issues relating to the self-archiving of eprints by academic authors via Institutional Repositories. It aimed to develop some simple rights metadata by which such papers may be protected in an open-access environment. It also aimed to investigate the issues relating to the IPR protection of metadata disclosed by Data Providers and harvested by Service Providers, with a view to developing a means by which the rights of such freely-available metadata might be protected under the OAI-PMH