SEPT 6 Policy Roundup

[Timothy Vollmer]

Here's a few policy-related news items and projects we've been following over the last fortnight. 

Leaked European Commission Copyright Plans Ignore the Public Interest

We've now seen leaks of the Commission's impact assessment as well as a draft directive on copyright in the digital single market. It's not looking good for users. What will be introduced? Ancillary rights for news publishers, limited exceptions for education and text and data mining, obligating internet platforms to police for copyright infringements, no unified freedom of panorama. COMMUNIA is breaking down the draft directive, and already has analyses on the education exception and text and data mining exception. Definitely more to come on this...

Defending Noncommercial Uses: Great Minds v Fedex Office

Creative Commons is asking permission to file an amicus brief in a case in the U.S. having to do with the interpretation of one of CC's noncommercial licenses. To recap, education publisher Great Minds created educational materials and shared them under a Creative Commons noncommercial license (specifically, CC BY-NC-SA). Public school districts then paid FedEx Office stores to make copies of some of the materials. These copies were to be used by the school districts noncommercially. Great Minds claims that because FedEx charged its typical fee for these copies to be made, it violated the CC license. 

We know that millions of people, companies, and institutions use the CC noncommercial copyright licenses to make their work available to the public for noncommercial use. There are uses that CC licensors clearly intend to allow—and that licensees clearly expect to be granted—through the noncommercial licenses. We believe that one of those uses is the ability to contract a company like FedEx Office to make copies of content for noncommercial use.

"An Unfortunately Typical French Initiative"

This summer the French Parliament adopted a provision that would attempt to collect fees for images indexed on the Internet in France. 

How would this work? When an image is published online, the reproduction right and the right of communication to the public of this image shall be transferred to one or more collecting societies appointed by the French government. Online communication services “reproducing and communicating to the public images for search and indexing purposes” shall have to obtain a license from those collecting societies to index images legally. The license fee will either be based on the revenue accruing from the exploitation of the service or be a lump sum fee.

Earlier this year Creative Commons and several other organizations sent a letter opposing the policy. Similar to the ancillary copyright that will be introduced at the EU level, this type of restriction likely won't do anything substantial in remuneration for creators, and will negatively affect access to information and media online. 

eLife reveals publication costs to spark debate on journal prices

Open Access publisher eLife has disclosed that this year it expects to spend £3,147 per published paper. It is estimated that high impact closed journals like Science spend upwards of £30,000 per paper. The article processing fees at the traditional journals is similar to eLife's total publishing cost per article.

Wellcome Trust: Why we have set publisher requirements

Wellcome Trust has had a CC BY licensing policy in place for years. Now they're stepping up with a few more requirements for publishers in order to ensure research is freely and openly available as soon as possible.

A Quick Tour Around the World of Scholarly Journal Publishing

Here's an interesting writeup on some trends in scholarly publishing. A few observations: 

• publishers becoming further consolidated, and continuation of journals sold as bundles to libraries or library consortia
• library budgets are flat
• publishers investing in services around publications, not the publications themselves
• preprints continue to expand in popularity and usefulness
• there is growth in the open access sector, but still only at 4% overall 
• more and more funding agencies are requiring research to be made open (aligned with the movement that publicly funded research should be open licensed research)
  
• big stumbling point for open access policies is compliance/enforcement
• policies around data sharing are more complex and challenging than those around papers
• publishers need to improve their products with regard to access and functionality (for example, the Sci-Hub research shows that many people are accessing papers via that site because it's easier and more convenient than the research portals in which they have legal access to through their university)

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