Vox Scientia is a group of organisations (including Communia) and individual educators, researchers, librarians, cultural heritage professionals, and students who are standing up and aiming to be the ‘Voice of Knowledge’ – ‘Vox scientia’ – in this debate. The parties engaged believe in a world where all people are able to freely exchange ideas, create, learn, and contribute to the global knowledge commons. The aim of the initiative is to mobilize people to stand up against dangerous and restrictive copyright  solutions backed by the European Commision.

How will copyright reform influence the sharing of knowledge? The reasons are countless,, but let us just name a few. Imagine a world where platforms have to monitor all user generated content to look for content protected by copyright. Such a solution is not only  a clear breach of existing EU laws (including the Charter of Fundamental Rights) but also will result in limiting the knowledge we have access to online. Or let’s assume that you conduct research on some complicated issue, but copyright requires that the content that is mined using TDM to extract facts and data is then immediately destroyed. This is counter-intuitive from a research or investigative perspective. Being able to show which sources were used is what builds up the trustworthiness of the acquired knowledge from mining, provides evidence for one’s findings in case of dispute, and allows colleagues to mine the same data in order to see if similar results emerge.

Do you want to voice your concerns and take part in the campaign?  We are inviting individuals and organisations to support the campaign in a number of ways.

• Show your endorsement by adding your logo to the website: add your voice to the conversation around the campaign. Our message will be stronger if our voices are united.
• Speak out against an unbalanced copyright that benefits the few to the detriment of the future of knowledge: send us a quote or a story and a photo to be posted online in our #KnowledgeNetwork.
• Share our content in your social channels: we will make videos, infographics, gifs and memes communicating the implications of restrictive filters. You can help us amplify our message.
• Become a spokesperson of the campaign: be an advocate of knowledge by participating in interviews and events, and actively spreading our campaign message.

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Communia Association is one of the signatories of this letter. We are urging other organisations, especially those active in the fields of Open Access and Open Science, to express their support by signing this letter. Additional signatures will be collected until 1st October – you can sign the letter using this form.

Ancillary copyright extended

Ancillary copyright for publishers, a new right to collect payments and to control the use of headlines and snippets of news articles, has been one of the most controversial parts of the Proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Both the rapporteur in the JURI Committee and the Estonian EU Presidency currently support this flawed proposal . They do so despite heavy criticism – not just from civil society, academia and libraries, or digital economy companies, but even from some of the Member States.

Press and academic publishers have completely different business models, based on different value creation chains. While press openly publishes content on the Web, academic publishers sell the works of academics at a hefty price, and with a heavy markup. Angelika Niebler, Herbert Reul and Christian Ehler, ITRE members who proposed the amendment that extended the right to academic publishers, have provided no rationale for granting this new right also to academic publishers. They also failed to explain why they are supporting a regulation that will create burdensome and harmful restrictions on access to scientific research and data, as well as on the fundamental rights of freedom of information.

A threat to Open Access

A new right to control and monetise use of snippets of academic articles would significantly limit the sharing of open access publications and data which currently are freely available for use and reuse in further scientific advances. For example, researchers, students and other users of scientific and scholarly journal articles could be forced to ask permission or pay fees to the publisher for including short quotations from a research paper in other scientific publications. The proposed ancillary right further conflicts with the Berne Convention’s Article 10(1), which provides a mandatory exception for quotation, as well as posing risks to freedom of speech.

Support our joint open letter for Open Access and Open Science

Signatories of the letter urge the Legal Affairs Committee to remove Articles 11 and 13 from the draft Directive. Furthermore, the Committee should ensure that Articles 3 to 9 support new forms of research and education and not work against them. Furthermore, we hope that the European Commission, the European Parliament and Member States will chose to uphold Europe’s commitment to Open Science and Open Access.

Please sign the open letter.

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Open access to publication and research data as either in the public domain or under an open license aligned with the Open Definition would help work towards the goals of Science 2.0. Such a policy would be especially important when public funds are expended for scientific research and publications. COMMUNIA policy recommendation #12 states, “all publicly funded research output and educational resources must be made available as open access materials.” Interest in text and data mining is increasing, and traditional gatekeepers of science scholarship (namely commercial publishers) are attempting to restrict this activity through the adoption of custom licenses and/or contractual terms. We think that text and data mining should be considered as outside of the scope of copyright protection, and instead should be considered as an extension of the right to read (see “Right to Read is the Right to Mine”). Text and data mining should not be treated with a contractual approach which would try to license for a fee this usage in addition to the right of access. Terms of use prohibiting the lawful right to perform data mining on a content accessed legitimately should be considered an abuse of exclusive rights.

Here’s our responses to the questionnaire. The Commission’s background paper on the Science 2.0 consultation is here.

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The work of Communia is based on a set of 14 policy recommendations which aim to support policies that enable a rich and accessible Public Domain. In light of these recommendations, Communia welcomes the development of a strong Open Access (OA) policy at the European level around the following main ideas:

• All publicly funded research outputs and educational resources must be made available as open access materials (aligned with the Budapest Open Access Initiative).

• Notwithstanding the need to support OA policies, access to copyright protected material for education and research purposes must be improved by strengthening existing exceptions and limitations to copyright, and broadening these exceptions to cover uses outside of formal educational and research institutions.

Social and Economic Meanings of Open Access

Open Access is defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) as the free availability and unrestricted access of research results, without financial, legal or technical barriers. According to the revised BOAI recommendations, research results should be made available:

• Without payment by the reader,

• Without contractual, legal, or licensing restrictions on use or reuse other than integrity and attribution of the author,

• Without technical restrictions which might prevent indexing, mining, searching, filtering and any other automatic processing making research more useful and likely to be connected with related results for the advancement of research,

• When possible, as “libre OA” (which combines free access as well as liberal open licensing) – preferably under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license or equivalent.

OA is beneficial for the research community, for the economy and for society as a whole. Researchers need to be able to access research results without having to pay expensive subscription fees. They should be able to read and use what they need to be able to perform their work effectively and efficiently. Universities and funding agencies are not able to sustain the rising prices of an oligopolistic journal publishing industry. Even the most well-funded libraries (such as Harvard University and the University of Munich) have had to cancel journal subscriptions because they cannot afford to continue paying the subscription fees.

Academic research is mostly financed through public funding. The current system oftentimes results in the government essentially paying for the research several times: first, when the governmental entity awards research grants; second, when the government subsidizes the salaries of the academics who serve as peer-reviewers; third, when the government pays for libraries in research universities that subscribe to the journals. The public should receive a better return on the investments being made for the research, development, and publication of publicly funded scholarship. OA provides an economic and social return on investment through higher dissemination to citizens, taxpayers, and researchers from other countries and other disciplines, OA fosters interdisciplinary cross-fertilization and international impact.

Open Access quick facts

1. OA is always free (“gratis”) for the reader

At the very minimum, every Open Access model assumes that content is available for free of charge (gratis) to the reader.

2. Two publications models

The two OA publication models, just like the traditional conventional (non-OA) model (with financial, legal or technical barriers), are sustainable ways of not only making knowledge available, but also of conducting business activity. OA requirements can be fulfilled through various publishing models combined with various business models:

• Green OA designates the self-archival by researchers of their publications in institutional or disciplinary repositories, free of charge to the reader. Most non-OA publishers already authorize an author to deposit in a repository, sometimes after an embargo period. For more than 20 years the discipline of physics has seen high levels of green OA deposit and has not lead to subscription cancellation of non-OA journals.

• Gold OA designates publishers or journals which distribute their publications free of charge for the reader under a liberal open license (such as the Creative Commons Attribution license).

Various business models can be employed to cover the costs of Open Access publications:

• Public funding, institutional subsidies, advertising, donations: 100% of scientific publications, both OA and non-OA, already rely on external funding and volunteers authors, referees and editors.

• Paid additional services, such as user statistics or other formats.

• Publication or a submission fee by the author, like in many non-OA journals. However those fees can be waived, depending on the origin of the authors, and cannot be understood as the only model for OA.

Gold OA is compatible with market and cost recovery. Some OA publishers are commercial and profitable. Online OA may increase the sales for printed journals.

3. OA respects research policy and Intellectual Property

A well-written OA policy:

• Is consistent with the rules of copyright, and allows the rightsholder to leverage open licensing to communicate a set of rights to downstream users.

• Does not interfere with the academic freedom of the author to publish in the venue chosen by them.

• Does not preclude rightsholders from pursuing the exploitation (such as through a patent) of the findings within the research paper before publishing the results.

• Is aligned with the current peer-review process. Peer review takes place before any publication, while OA focuses on distribution. Scholarship destined to be released as OA undergo the same peer review as Non-OA articles.

• Is impartial with respect to quality. Both OA and Non-OA publications can be of varied quality, and there is nothing about OA that suggests it is of lower quality; all articles should be judged on their merits.

• Operates in tandem with accepted academic integrity and ethics: OA articles are not more likely to contain plagiarism than Non-OA scholarship.

• Can increase the impact of a researcher’s work. The researcher may be able to receive more citations because articles in OA are more likely to be cited than non-OA papers. OA is beneficial for the career of all researchers as readers and as authors.

4. OA to data is indispensable

• In addition to OA to articles, OA to the data associated with the articles is important so that other researchers can confirm and reproduce the results.

• OA to data is compatible with both green and gold OA models: repositories and journals can host data in content management systems linked with publications. OA and non-OA journals are requiring the deposit of underlying data and code in order to assess submissions’ validity and quality.

COMMUNIA Recommendations

Communia Association calls the Members of the European Parliament to establish a clear OA policy:

1. OA mandate for all publicly-funded research output

All publicly-funded research outputs (including published articles, preprints or drafts prior to peer-review, books, scientific data, databases, archival records, software source code, conference presentations, audiovisual and teaching material, etc.) must be made available without financial, legal, contractual or technical restriction to access, use and reuse, as aligned with the Budapest Open Access Initiative, as soon as possible.

An OA mandate should require:

• Publications to be released under conditions compatible with a Creative Commons Attribution license.

• Data to be released in the public domain or using a tool such as the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.

• When publications and related data could not be released under those conditions, they should be made available at the latest at the moment of publication or immediately afterwards. An embargo of 6 months counting from the date of publication is acceptable.

A mechanism of incentives, control and sanctions should be devised and enforced for entities who do not comply with the policy.

2. Eliminate sui generis rights on databases

The 1996 Database directive, which imposes additional restriction to the use of data contained in databases, has not demonstrated any benefit and should be annulled.

3. Prevent unfair publishing agreements

Publishing agreements precluding authors to archive their research output in OA repositories or banning authors who are bound by an institutional OA mandate should be prohibited.

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