This document discusses open science and challenges for research libraries. It summarizes views from the European Commission and White House supporting open access to publicly funded research to benefit the economy and innovation. It also outlines recent legal developments regarding orphan works, open licensing like CC 4.0, and cases establishing that open licensing and self-archiving can preempt copyright disputes. Data mining and ensuring open repository policies and APIs were discussed as ongoing issues.
6. European Commission on Open
Access
• “The Commission objective is to optimise the impact of publicly-
funded scientific research, both at European level (FP7, Horizon 2020)
and at Member State level. This is essential for Europe's ability to
enhance its economic performance and improve the capacity to
compete through knowledge. One way to get there is open access.
Results of publicly-funded research can therefore be disseminated
more broadly and faster, to the benefit of researchers, innovative
industry and citizens. Open access can also boost the visibility of
European research, and in particular offer small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs) access to the latest research for utilisation.”
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7. White House on Open Data
• “Access to digital data sets resulting from federally funded research
allows companies to focus resources and efforts on understanding
and exploiting discoveries. For example, open weather data
underpins the forecasting industry, and making genome sequences
publicly available has spawned many biotechnology innovations. In
addition, wider availability of peer-reviewed publications and scientific
data in digital formats will create innovative economic markets for
services related to curation, preservation, analysis, and visualization.”
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8. And…
• “As a work of the United
States Government, this
document is in the public
domain within the United
States. Additionally, the
United States Government
waives copyright and related
rights in this work worldwide
through the CC0 1.0
Universal Public Domain
Dedication.”
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10. Orphan Works
• Directive 2012/28/EU on certain permitted
uses of orphan works.
• Applies to works held in memory
institutions.
• Orphan works are defined as those where
an author cannot be identified after a
diligent search.
• Diligent search is identified as done in
good faith by using “appropriate sources”
identified by consultation.
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11. Must-read
• Comparative study by
CREATe on the regulation of
orphan works in 7
jurisdictions.
• Countries currently
implementing directive,
different approaches,
expect a lot of
experimenting until we get it
right.
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13. Enforcement
• We are beyond the point of
court recognising open
licences
• German GPL cases
• Jacobsen v Katzer (USA)
• CC Cases in Belgium,
Spain, Germany and Israel.
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15. CC0
Relatively new licence that works both
as a dedication to the public domain,
and as a full licence where it’s not
permitted to relinquish copyright.
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16. Data mining
• If database is original, then it is (probably) protected by
copyright.
• Question is whether operation of data mining is allowed under
current copyright. My take is that it is probably not.
• Therefore, researchers will need licences for data mining.
• Move to have exceptions and limitations to allow certain non-
commercial research data mining.
• UK has just modified its copyright law to allow for data mining
for non-commercial purposes.
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18. Repository
policies
The more open the policies, the
more data mining can occur.
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Recorded metadata re-use policies UK Recorded full-text data re-use policies UK
Guadamuz and Cabell, “Data mining in UK higher education institutions: law and policy”
19. API law
•Most API protection is contractual (ToS, EULAs).
•Oracle v Google (US): Google created its own API interface
to avoid paying licence fees to Oracle. The ruling found that
the structure for which Oracle was claiming ownership was
not subject to copyright protection.
•SAS v World Programming Ltd (UK and ECJ): While not
related to APIs, it is a case which demonstrates that it is
very difficult to claim copyright over API-like functional
elements.
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20. Svensson and Others v Retriever
Sverige AB Case C‑466/12
• A group of journalists writing for the the Göteborgs-Posten
newspaper’s website sued Retriever Sverige, a commercial indexing
service which provides its clients with links to articles published by
other websites.
• The claimants argued that this practice amounts to infringement as it
is not clear to the clients that they are being directed to a site hosting
content in another website, while the defendants claimed that their
clients knew that the content was hosted elsewhere.
• “…the provision on a website of clickable links to works freely
available on another website does not constitute an act of
communication to the public…” 20
21. Public Relations Consultants
Association Ltd v NLA (C‑360/13)
•“…the on-screen copies and the cached copies made
by an end-user in the course of viewing a website
satisfy the conditions that those copies must be
temporary, that they must be transient or incidental in
nature and that they must constitute an integral and
essential part of a technological process.”
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