Graphic from openaccessweek.org, photo by Greg Rakozy

To mark this year’s Open Access Week (20-26 October), the UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship hosted a webinar exploring this year’s theme: Who Owns Our Knowledge?

Facilitated by Bibliometrics Support Officer Andrew Gray, a panel of four speakers from different areas of UCL offered their time and expertise to consider this complex question.

• Lauren Cantos is the Research Integrity and Assurance Officer in the Compliance and Assurance team. Previously she worked in the Research Ethics team at UCL, and her background is as a Humanities and English researcher.
• Christine Daoutis is the UCL copyright support officer, based in the library. Her background is in open access, open science and copyright, particularly the ways copyright interacts with open practices.
• Catherine Sharp is Head of Open Access Services in Library Services [or LCCOS]. She manages the Open Access Team, which delivers Gold open access, including transformative agreements, and Green open access through UCL’s repository, UCL Discovery, for UCL staff and students.
• Muki Haklay is a Professor of Geographic Information Science at UCL department of Geography. He founded and co-direct the UCL Extreme Citizen Science group. He is an expert in citizen science and contributed to the US Association for Advancing Participatory Science (formerly the Citizen Science Association), and the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA).

The webinar began with a short reflection on the theme from each of the panellists, followed by a discussion structured around these questions:

1. What does “ownership” mean for research – for outputs and for data? And when we define what “ownership” means, how do we decide who the owners are – or who they should be?
2. We often think of ownership as linked to “authorship”. A wide range of people contribute to research – including many outside academia – but not all become named as authors. How do we recognise them?
3. What happens when copyright (or other IP rights) conflict with academic expectations around ownership and authorship?
4. How is the production and the dissemination of research influenced by commercial considerations around ownership and access?

It was a thought-provoking discussion in which the panellists touched on a wide range of subjects, including considerations of attribution beginning at the outset of a project, recognising contribution from individuals outside of academic structures, understanding copyright concerns when having work published and how UCL’s updated Publications Policy can help with this. As well as answering questions, the session raised other questions and, as is often the case, the complexity of these questions didn’t allow for straightforward answers. As Andrew aptly put it towards the end of the webinar – ‘sometimes saying the question is complicated is an answer in itself’. This particularly resonated with regard to the issue of AI tools failing to attribute authors, and also the matter of widening participation within the production of knowledge.

If this has piqued your interest, or you attended the webinar and would like a recap, you can watch the full recording now:

Access the full recording on MediaCentral

Useful Links

A selection of useful resources were shared in the webinar chat:

• The Authorship Integrity Toolkit from UK Research Integrity Office
• UCL’s updated Publications Policy
• ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge? Understanding how copyright can shape the discourse around open scholarship’ – blog post by Christine Daoutis
• Managing intellectual property rights in Citizen Science by Teresa Scassa and Haewon Chung
• Typology of Citizen Science projects from an intellectual property perspective by Teresa Scassa and Haewon Chung
• ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge? Retaining author’s rights through UCL’s updated Publications Policy’ – blog post by Catherine Sharp
• EIFL Rights Retention and Secondary Publication Rights
• Introducing CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI – Creative Commons
• Open Science at the generative AI turn: An exploratory analysis of challenges and opportunities | Quantitative Science Studies | MIT Press
• Copyright considerations in text and data mining: sharing and adopting best practice – UCL Library Skills training session
• “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
• Join UCL Copyright Literacy Community on MS Teams

We are very grateful to the speakers who contributed a lot of insight and provided much to reflect on from this webinar. We hope the conversation around these questions will continue and answers will develop as we navigate the complexities.

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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Graphic from openaccessweek.org, photo by Greg Rakozy

The theme for this year’s Open Access Week is ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’ – a fundamental question in the world of Open Access. Here at the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship, we will be joining the global conversation around this question with blog posts from the perspectives of Copyright, Rights Retention, and Citizen Science, as well as a webinar with a panel discussion between four experts.

The Open Access Week website unpacks the theme by first asking ‘how communities can reassert control over the knowledge they produce’. Increasingly, knowledge is being used without the permission or even awareness of those who produce it, through AI scraping, politicisation of research, and lack of attribution. What can be done to prevent this? The temptation may be to retreat from Open Access, as a means of protecting knowledge from inappropriate and indiscriminate use, however this is not the solution.

Knowledge is a human right.

Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, gave this statement in 2020, ‘Worldwide people need States, international bodies, science and medical institutions and practitioners to ensure the broadest possible sharing of scientific knowledge, and the broadest possible access to the benefits of scientific knowledge. This is key to any effective public health policy. It is essential to the combat against climate change. And it is a fundamental matter of human rights.’

Lucia Obst (WMDE), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

With this in mind, we should consider knowledge not owned solely by its producers, but by humanity collectively, to be accessed, used, and built upon.

At the same time, the considerable amount of effort that individuals and groups dedicate to producing knowledge needs to be appropriately recognised. A very pressing concern is that this is not something that AI tools are currently doing, with considerable discussion in the media covering concerns about materials being ingested into large language models and then regurgitated, often inaccurately, without attribution to the original authors.

In response to this, Creative Commons are working on ‘CC Signals’ – a project still very much in its early stages, which hopes to improve author attribution from AI. This topic, and Copyright in general, are complex areas within knowledge ownership. To explore further, we will have a dedicated blog post later this week from our Copyright Support Officer, Christine Daouti.

Photo by Mary Hinkley, © UCL Digital Media

Ultimately, most researchers want their knowledge to be used for the greatest benefit – to enhance people’s lives, improve how things are done, and find solutions to our biggest problems. Reasserting control to ensure this can happen, by making knowledge open and accessible, is crucial.

Therefore, whilst publishers might want to monopolise knowledge to maximise profits, authors are increasingly retaining control over their knowledge thanks to Rights Retention policies. At UCL, the Publications Policy has been updated this year to include a Rights Retention statement, and our Head of Open Access services, Catherine Sharp, will be explaining this in more detail in another blog post this week.

Bridger Teton NF, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also important to consider who has ownership over the production of knowledge. If knowledge should be for the widest possible audience, then the production of this knowledge should involve the widest possible community. This is where Citizen Science and Co-Production come in. These initiatives open the doors of knowledge production to include people with a broad range of backgrounds and experiences, who might otherwise have been excluded from the process. To unpack this topic in more depth, our Citizen Science Coordinator, Sheetal Saujani, will be contributing a blog post later this week.

We are looking forward to the conversations and insights which this Open Access Week will generate, and we hope you end the week with a desire to delve even deeper into the complex question of ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’

Read along with our upcoming blog posts and join the conversation on social media!

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.

Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

Share this post on Bluesky