The Need for More Openness

Presentation at the AHRC/British Academy Conference on Copyright and Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Rufus Pollock

[Open Knowledge Foundation]

Who Am I?

Researcher in Economics at Cambridge University

Executive Director of the
Open Knowledge Foundation

Promote open access to information
NB: do not think all information has to be free)

Emphasize: talking about Copyright Issues in Research

Not about copyright in general culture

  • So only talking about novels/plays/recordings to the extent they come into academic realm and impact on research
  • NOT debating what kind of copyright (scope/length etc) we should have in general

This Need Not be an Antagonistic Issue

Most researchers are users and producers

  • As the report pointed out at some length, most of those engaged in research are both producers *and* consumers of knowledge and hence producers and consumers of works covered by intellectual property rights
  • Furthermore in a general sense researchers, perhaps even more than an average member of the population, benefits from the production of new works
  • I myself am both a user and a producer of knowledge which is copyrightable

Copyright is A Valuable Tool

Current Regime has many Problems

Report deals admirably with many of these

Lots of this Discussion on Traditional Access Issues

Problems of getting access to copyrighted material for reuse

Not My Focus Here

  • I want to look at something I think is particularly important and which is covered rather more tangentially in the report

Copyright as Obstacle to the Development of the Academic Commons

Dynamic costs are the real ones: the biggest problem with the current copyright regime is not its direct effect on access to individual works but on the development of larger corpora that the tools to transform, analyze and recombine those corpora.

Much of the Problem Arise from 'Transaction Costs'

Need to Seek Permission

Transaction Costs are Substantial

"The indirect costs in higher education (through delays and difficulties in clearing rights) are very hard to estimate. [SCONUL has] attempted an estimate of the static costs in higher education and have arrived at a minimum figure of the order of 30 M/year." [emphasis added]
(SCONUL submission to Gowers quoted at para 51)

Obstacle to:

Creation of Repositories and Databases

Obstacle to:

Creation of associated tools to transform, analyze and recombine such corpora

A Simple Example: Consider an Academic Text

  • Text itself (in plain old printed form): valuable
  • In digital form: more valuable
    • Easier to store, redistribute etc
    • example of St Clair book – no digital copy
  • Made searchable: even more valuable
    • This means open formats and open source (no pdfs)
    • People have to be able to experiment, index etc etc
    • I'm not sure I could count the number of occassions on which I have spent serious time trying to refind a quote or a fact that I knew was in a book somewhere but for which the existing index was not sufficient
  • As part of a large searchable repository: more valuable still
    • Think of Google Scholar but fully open
  • As part of a large interlinked, annotated, rated corpora: ...
  • A single universal distributed library ...

Difficult of Impossible with Current Copyright Regime

The Digital Revolution makes so much Possible

The digital revolution has made so much possible especially in the ways that we can combine, recombine and add to existing works.

Large Scale Knowledge Recombintation Requires Openness

Need move to: Open access / Open data

But it is simply not possible to run these kind of systems in which many people can simply access **and** contribute when they are not open. Need FREEDOM: No need to seek permission -- makes it possible to recombine many sources.

A World in which each of us Preserve our own Islands of Copyright

Is Not A Sustainable Future

The Pay-Per-Use/Exclusive Rights
Model of Copyright

Is Incompatible With this Digital Revolution

Copyright Has a Role to Play in the Academy

But Not it Current One

Much More Limited: Sustaining the Commons

  • Use it where secrecy/access control might be an issue (e.g. databases) to enforce share-alike provisions
  • For attribution – though these kind of 'moral rights' are probably better achieved through the use of social mechanisms than legal ones
  • For limited integrity-type ends (Perl-like provisions of the form: 'if you make a derivative of this you must relabel/rebrand it')

In most areas of academia we only ever needed the copyright because we need to have a monopoly for the distributor. This function is not needed anymore now we are in the digital age – open access publication in journals, digital repositories for general material (e.g. dspace@cambridge) etc.

Extras

(Some) Things We Should Do

  • Authors must retain copyright and should simply license to the publisher in as limited way as possible.
    • Collective bargaining with publishers and all other intermediaries to achieve maximum retainment.
    • Standard license agreements should be promulgated by research councils/academic institutions and all academics should be strongly encouraged to use such a license as a minimum bargaining point.
  • Wherever possible let's build our own, open knowledge, resources:
    1. Our own digital data stores.
    2. Does not just have to be for journal text or databases but for all sorts of digital artifacts (e.g. artstor).
    3. Make sure these resources are truly open.
      • E.g. jstor and artstor while fantastic are not open
      • This does not not mean the service must be free (service costs money in terms of bandwidth, hosting etc) just that I should be able to reuse, redistribute etc etc.
  • Compulsory licensing for databases where there is a monopoly provider (Report recommendation 10).