Guest post by Christine Daoutis, Copyright Support Officer at UCL

Graphic from openaccessweek.org, photo by Greg Rakozy

The theme of this year’s International Open Access Week is a question – and a call for collaboration. By addressing ‘who owns our knowledge’, it invites diverse communities to recognise and challenge existing assumptions about how scholarship is created, disseminated and built upon; to recognise power dynamics that shape these assumptions; and to make decisions that best serve the interests of the public and the academic community.

Understanding how copyright frames these assumptions, power dynamics and decisions is essential. In the strictest sense, who ‘owns’ scholarship (perceived as the IP rights in the outcomes of research – publications, research data and any other outputs created in the life of a research project) is, after all, defined by legislation and by the terms of publishing agreements and other contracts. In a broader sense, ‘owning’ can determine the ‘what’, the ‘how’ and the ‘who’ of scholarship in the first place: what is selected to be funded and published? How will the outcomes be disseminated? And crucially, who is able (or not able) to access, understand, benefit from and possibly build on the outcomes of a work? While many of these questions depend on IP rights, other factors (including criteria of research quality and impact, academic freedom, linguistic and cultural barriers to access) also influence how we address them.

Image from www.freepik.com

Keeping close to this year’s theme, this post will focus on three key approaches related to copyright which should help adopt practices that support open scholarship.

1. Understanding authorship and copyright ownership
   To make a work as open as possible, it is first necessary to establish who the rights owner is, as it is the rights owner who has control over reproducing and disseminating the work. It is natural to assume that the author(s) of a work should be its owner(s). However, this is determined by copyright laws and by contract. In the UK, the first owner of a work is its author. However, if the work was created in the course of employment, the employer is the owner unless there is an agreement that says otherwise (CDPA 11). Understanding – and where necessary, negotiating – ownership empowers authors to make their research widely available and reusable. This involves reading and understanding institutional IP policies and the terms of grant agreements, publisher agreements and collaboration/co-production agreements. In terms of publishing, rights retention policies (covered in another post this week) ensure that authors and their institutions keep key rights enabling them to make their research articles immediately available under the terms of an open licence.
2. Addressing authorship and ownership in collaborations
   Moral rights – which include the right to be attributed as the author of a work – are just as important as economic rights when addressing copyright. Deciding who is co-author in a work and in what order they should be credited is essential. Further, contributions to a research project that may or may not also involve direct authorship of a publication should also be established and acknowledged. This includes acknowledging contributions by research participants, citizen science participants and anyone who has played an advisory or supporting role in the research by applying standards such as the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CrediT).
3. Understanding and using open licences
   Open licences, including Creative Commons licences and open source licences, support the dissemination and reuse of a wide range of works. While research funders have requirements around the use of licences (for example, the CC BY licence for research publications) researchers can also apply licences to a broader range materials (educational resources, images, preprints, datasets). Particularly in the age of AI, understanding how licences such as Creative Commons work is important, both for authors and users of scholarly works. Creative Commons are also introducing ‘preference signals’ to support transparency and reciprocity in how scholarly works are used by AI.

Further Support

The UCL copyright service helps you navigate these issues through training, discussion and opportunities to follow and participate in current debates. To engage with copyright at UCL:

• Join one of our sessions, which include addressing copyright in publishing agreements and discussing copyright and open access issues via our Copyright for Humans game.
• Join our UCL Copyright Community Teams channel for discussions, events and opportunities to share and develop your copyright knowledge.
• Contact copyright@ucl.ac.uk for support.

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.

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