UK university policy approaches towards the copyright ownership of scholarly works and the future of open access

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider how the open access policy environment has developed since the Rights Metadata for Open Archiving Project’s call in 2003 for universities and academics to assert joint copyright ownership of scholarly works and investigate whether UK universities are moving towards a joint copyright ownership. Design/methodology/approach The paper analyses 81 UK university copyright policies to understand what proportion make a claim over: IP ownership of all outputs; the copyright in scholarly works; re-using scholarly works in specific ways; and approaches to moral rights. Results are cross-tabulated by policy age and mission group. Findings Universities have not asserted their interest in scholarly works through joint ownership, leaving research funders and publishers to set open access policy. The paper finds an increased proportion of universities assert a generic claim to all IP (87 per cent) relative to earlier studies. In total, 74 per cent of policies relinquished rights in scholarly works in favour of academic staff; 20 per cent of policies share ownership of scholarly works through licensing; 28 per cent of policies assert the right to re-use scholarly works in some way; and 32 per cent of policies seek to protect moral rights. Policies that “share” ownership of scholarly works are more recent. The UK Scholarly Communication Licence (UK-SCL) should have an impact on this area. The reliance on individual academics to enforce a copyright policy or not to opt-out of the UK-SCL could be problematic. The paper concludes that open access may still be best served by joint ownership of scholarly works. Originality/value This the first large-scale analysis of UK university policy positions towards scholarly works. The paper discovers for the first time a move towards “shared” ownership of scholarly works in copyright policies.

The UK Scholarly Communication Licence: Attempting to Cut through the Gordian Knot of the Complexities of Funder Mandates, Publisher Embargoes and Researcher Caution in Achieving Open Access

“…In 2000, Weedon carried out a comprehensive study of UK HEI Intellectual Property (IP) policies, showing 69% had some general claim to the IP of its scholars [37]; however, this is significantly before widespread OA practices were adopted. More recently, Gadd [36] has reported another investigation similar to [37] Weedon's, showing that now 86% of HEIs have made a general claim to own IP, possibly highlighting the greater prominence given to this issue by institutions and moves towards policies framed around treating copyright as "shared" between the author and institution.…”

“…On the positive side, Gadd has described UK-SCL as an encouraging initiative which will be a useful starting point for discussions over ownership [36]. Fyfe et al also recommend such an approach to HEI leaders, arguing that this model for copyright retention is an "appropriate rebalancing" [39] (p. 19) of rights, giving academics more responsibility over their own publishing decisions.…”

“…However, as the OA agenda developed, there was a shift to a focus on marketing to researchers, implementing new workflows, and getting services up and running in practice, and this seems to have meant that copyright issues per se received less interest, at least in the literature. However, the rise of OA and OA mandates has pushed copyright once more to the foreground, highlighting issues of licensing agreements, academics' understandings of copyright, and institutional policies on intellectual property [2,21,26,36]. In particular, the relationship between authors and their institutions in the area of copyright has become an area of focus.…”

Toward a Potential Solution of the Crisis in Scholarly Publishing: An Academic Research Community Alliance Model

“…A 2017 author survey conducted by Kudos, in partnership with 10 publishers, found that 83% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that publisher / journal copyright and sharing policies should be respected, but 60% agreed or strongly agreed that they should be allowed to upload articles regardless of publisher / journal policies. 94 Gadd (2017) attributes this 'cognitive dissonance' in authors' behaviour to a tension between 'copyright culture' (adhering to copyright policies) and 'scholarly culture' (sharing papers with their peers). Authors perceive greater overlap between the two than is necessarily the case, and are liable to side with the latter where the two are in conflict.…”

Academics’ experience of copyright

“…Given the importance of copyright, it is of little surprise that there is an extensive literature relating to its use in HEIs. Some of the literature relates to the copyrighting of research (e.g., Gadd, 2017), but the focus here is on its relationship to teaching, where the majority of this literature examines copyright attitudes and instruction from two viewpoints, namely, students and academic librarians (ALs). The group comprises students that, in theory at least, are most likely to need copyright instruction (Czerniewicz, 2016; Intellectual Property Office and National Union of Students, 2013;Muriel-Torrado and Fernández-Molina, 2015;Ovalle and Doty, 2011); ALs, conversely, are the group most likely to provide such instruction (Charbonneau and Priehs, 2014;Morrison and Secker, 2015;Rodriguez et al, 2014).…”