[GOAL] Copyright: the immoveable barrier that open access advocates underestimated

[Heather Morrison]

Thanks Richard - this brings together many of the major problems, issues and cases on this topic. I encourage everyone to read it, comment on it and begin building from this understanding of the complexity of copyright.

As Fair Use / Fair Dealing week is wrapping up, I would like to take this opportunity to argue that open access scholarship requires strong fair use / fair dealing, not only for open access works but for all types of works. As a researcher, I make my own work open access but I also need to draw from works with a variety of copyright statuses including All Rights Reserved, and sometimes scholars and journalists need to work with material that the creators did not intend to publish at all. When we work with these kinds of materials, we need to be able to point to the originals, sometimes in whole and sometimes by copying portions. Even if ubiquitous open licensing were possible for scholarly works were possible, this would not address non-scholarly materials with which we conduct research. For this, we need fair use / fair dealing.

When I re-use portions of works that are clearly not intended for broad-based blanket downstream re-use rights, I cannot release these portions of my work under open licenses. If I am subject to overly strong open licensing requirements, this is a disincentive to conduct many types of research.

Fair use / fair dealing cannot be taken for granted. These rights are recognized by some countries (fair use in the US, fair dealing in the UK and Canada), but are not as widespread as copyright. These rights are often contested in courts and a subject of discussion in developing laws and treaties touching on copyright.

I argue that fair use / fair dealing is essential for open scholarship and that working cooperatively with advocacy efforts for fair use / fair dealing is in the best interests of open scholarship. In Canada we currently have a good copyright law with respect to user's rights. This is up for review later this year. It is wise to assume that those who wish to profit from IP are already lobbying to weaken or eliminate user rights, both through our national copyright law and in international treaty discussions. Advocacy in the interests of readers and creators who need content to build on will be necessary.

Individual readers are largely invisible when it comes to policy discussions on copyright. For this reason, librarians and library associations (such as IFLA) have been the major champion of user's rights, speaking out for all of the readers served by the profession.

The ARL fair use / fair dealing website is available here:
http://fairuseweek.org/

Some libraries may be planning events at a later date. For example, at the University of Ottawa it is currently study week, so our library is having workshops next week.

best,

--
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
Desmarais 111-02
613-562-5800 ext. 7634
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: Open Access Scholarship
http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca<mailto:Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>

On 2017-02-22, at 3:17 AM, Richard Poynder <richard.poynder at cantab.net<mailto:richard.poynder at cantab.net>> wrote:

In calling for research papers to be made freely available open access advocates promised that doing so would lead to a simpler, less costly, more democratic, and more effective scholarly communication system.

However, while the OA movement has succeeded in persuading research institutions and funders of the merits of open access, it has failed to win the hearts and minds of most researchers.

More importantly, it is not achieving its objectives. There are various reasons for this, but above all it is because OA advocates underestimated the extent to which copyright would subvert their cause.

That is the argument I make in a recently-posted text on my blog, which can be accessed from this page: http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/copyright-immoveable-barrier-that-open.html

Richard Poynder

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