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LIBER Speaks Up For Open Science, Against Neighbouring Rights for Publishers
LIBER Executive Director Susan Reilly, speaking at a working lunch to discuss neighbouring rights for publishers. (Image by Giancarlo Rocconi, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
The European Commission recently held an open consultation seeking views on the role of publishers in the copyright value chain, including potentially expanding neighbouring rights to publishers.
LIBER was surprised by this consultation given that neighbouring rights for publishers were not mentioned in the September Communication on copyright reform under the Digital Single Market in December 2015, and was therefore pleased to be invited to a high-level working lunch with MEP Lidia Joanna Geringer de Oedenberg on 22 June 2016, where the issue was discussed.
It’s unclear what the aim and the scope of reform in this area might be. LIBER asserts that the burden therefore should be on those eager to introduce such a right to prove it is a necessity. Speakers at the event argued that no such proof exists.
Executive Director Susan Reilly presented the view from the research library community on the discussions, including LIBER’s belief that such a measure would increase the burden of the transactions of licences in a sector that already spends a huge amount on content.
Also speaking at the event was Łukasz Mężyk, co-founder and editor in chief of 300Polityka Newsmagazine and Michal Feix, Deputy General manager at Seznam.cz, a Czech web portal and search engine.
Together with LIBER, Mężyk and Feix shared the view that there was no solid case for in the introduction of this additional layer of rights and that such an expansion of rights would place an unbearable toll on their activities.
Feix was clear that it would penalise his company for choosing to stay operating in the EU. Mężyk believed that it would undermine his company’s healthy and functioning business model.
A condensed version of the speech delivered by LIBER Executive Director Susan Reilly follows below.
LIBER, is the association of European research libraries and represents over 400 university, national and research institute libraries across 40 countries. Our mission is to enable research from our institutions to be world class. World class research is by its nature collaborative, international, interdisciplinary, and increasingly data intensive. We believe that these four factors can be intensified, and the quality and impact of European research therefore increased, through the practice of Open Science.
Open Science, as defined by physicist and science writer Michael Nielsen, is based on “the idea that scientific knowledge of all kinds should be openly shared as early as is practical in the discovery process”.
It entails more open an innovative working methods and tools, data sharing and open access to publications, and new approaches to engagement and dissemination.
This is also clearly something that the European Commission and European member states support. The Horizon2020 programme couples research and innovation, making research more collaborative, and is developing the infrastructure to support international, interdisciplinary and data intensive research. The European Open Science Cloud is being developed with the intention of increasing the impact of the €77 billion investment in H2020 by making it easier for European researchers and innovators to access and reuse data.
In May, European Member States stated their commitment to transitioning towards Open Science, including aiming for to make immediate open access to scientific publications the default by 2020.
Why am I speaking about Open Science?
The proposed expansion of neighbouring rights completely flies in the face of the transition towards Open Science. At the moment the aim of full open access by 2020 is ambitious but achievable.
Neighbouring rights for publishers could completely undermine this aim.
Today researchers are able to make their articles open access by retaining copyright of those articles and by then making their articles available under an open licence such as cc-by (which allows reuse and TDM etc.).
In order to publish in a subscription journal they may sign an agreement allowing them to make a preprint of their article available in a repository (possibly after an embargo period). This is called green open access. Introduce neighbouring rights, and regardless of the author’s intentions or wishes, the publisher as a platform may still be able to claim copyright. In Europe there are at least 14 million articles available in our institutional repositories and discoverable via the EU open access infrastructure OpenAire.
OpenAire, if you’re not familiar with it, can be described as the European observatory of Open Science, because it tracks and provides access to the results of European publically funded research. Repositories in our institutions link up to OpenAire, therefore increasing the impact and visibility of the research outputs produced by researcher in our institutions.
Do we now want to create a situation where publishers can retrospectively claim remuneration for those articles, which are the result of European publically funded research?
It has already been stressed by the Commission and the Council that the transition towards Open Science must go hand in hand with a transition towards a more modern copyright framework; one that enhances our scientific leadership, for example in the area of text and data mining. We know that, whilst in other regions of the world TDM based research is growing- rate of growth is high in Asia and the Middle East. China is now only second to the US as the global leader in TDM based research. In contrast Europe’s share of TDM based research output has dropped by 10% in the last two years.
In Europe the lack of legal clarity forces researchers to seek permission through licences in order to do what their US or Asian colleagues can do within the law. We’ve demonstrated that to implement TDM licences at scale would cost an average research institution €680,000 in researcher time and necessitate 10 support staff. We know that a TDM exception would add a minimum of 2% to the European research budget just in terms of time saved by researchers in searching for content.
Two hundred and thirty six organisations worldwide have signed the Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age because they believe that TDM can save lives. We must prevent IP law from becoming a barrier to knowledge discovery.
On the other hand, the introduction of neighbouring rights for publishers would further limit the pace and scale of research. It would add an extra layer of rights. Would researchers now also need to also seek permission to use links, or display snippets of images or text in their TDM output?
We have repeatedly presented proof that the current copyright framework is unfit for the digital age, that it is hampering research and innovation and will take a toll on library and research budgets without appropriate reforms. Where is the proof that the expansion of neighbouring rights addresses any IP related problems? There isn’t any. I’ve spoken about the potential negative impact but the burden of proof of should not be on libraries or researchers to show that this would be anti-research and innovation.
Does this mean that we don’t value the role of publishers in the value chain?
European libraries spend at least €5.6 billion annually on access to content. And if we look towards the newspapers sector, which reform proposal are purportedly intended to save, there is hardly another stakeholder that values them more. Newspapers are the embodiment of social and cultural discourse and it is incumbent on libraries as keepers of cultural heritage to ensure sustained access to this content. We do this by spending 11% of our annual content budgets on news content and by investing in digitising and preserving newspaper content so that they are accessible for generations to come.
What we (libraries) prize most highly is sustainable access to knowledge. What is on the table here is the antithesis to this and is in fact a further step towards the privatisation of knowledge.
