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University Librarians Want Copyright Reform

Regular readers of this column (thank you) will recognize copyright reform is a common interest of mine, especially as such reform might lead to greater public access to research. Still, I only took up the copyright torch after a very loose consensus – among researchers, publishers, librarians and funders – around open access’ scientific value began to emerge. Such consensus has been called the iron law of copyright reform. Could such reform address, I dared to hope, reduce such impediments to open access as publishers dragging their heels, while holding on to subscription arrangements, even as they introduced rampant price increases for author charges and the so-called “transformative agreements” meant to bring about open access.

So inspired by the possibilities of reform, I came up with a statutory licensing proposal for research publications (shared here and here). I soon discovered, however, that I needed to learn more about allies in this reform, namely, university librarians. To remedy that I joined forces with Stephanie Savage, a Scholarly Communications and Copyright Services Librarian at the University of British Columbia, to conduct a survey of university librarians on copyright reform, whose views are definitely worth sharing here, even as the full study is about to be published in College & Research Libraries.

Of the 196 librarians who responded to our survey, little more than a third worked at Canadian institutions, with lesser proportions from the U.S., Australian, UK, and other countries. Just short of a majority of the librarians were satisfied with open access’ growth and progress. Among those feeling less so, six librarians referred to publishers taking undue advantage of open access: “We need to leverage our collective power and push back against publishers’ rent-seeking, exploitative practices.”

Where support was strongest was in fully 90% of the participants keen to see copyright reform in support of “sustainable open access.” Their comments reflected a general sense that “copyright legislation [in Australia] is fairly out-of-date.” By comparison, I would add, every other cultural enterprise, be it video, music, gaming, etc., has seen one or more reforms since the early 1990s onset of the internet. On the other hand, science has not seen copyright changes since permission to photocopy an article was granted in the 1970s. In addition to this interest in seeing reform, the majority of librarians (65%) were not deterred by the likelihood that publishers would, as one put it, “have much more lobbying power” nor the fear, as another noted, that this would “open up the chance for it to be worse.”

When asked about current copyright reform initiatives, the librarians expressed the strongest support (with 88% in favor) for Secondary Publishing Rights (or rights retention), which eight European countries to date have legislated. This enables authors can always post open access copies of their final drafts for government financed research, if after an embargo period in some cases: “A good step to bring the rights back to where they belong – the author, not the publisher.” Some librarians felt this was being achieved through publisher contracts – “we’re on this path now” – suggesting copyright reform might not be needed for such rights.

The second most popular initiative was to strengthen copyright exceptions for research (with 77% support): “The law certainly needs to be more favorable to fair use for research purposes.” Still, the question of AI was raised as an exception: “What about feeding data to large language models?” Not ones to miss out on financial opportunities, I might interject, Elsevier and other publishers are offering researchers’ publications for just such purposes. And while raising ChaptGPT’s research quotient may have its appeal, especially if credited as is now common, I’d like to ask that publishers redirect such windfall profits toward reducing subscription and article processing charges. It seems only fair.

The least favored reform among librarians was, alas, my statutory rights for research publications initiative. It was sobering to see it attract the barest of majority support (52%) and among the strongest of objections: “Oh boy no thank you; this is a recipe for disaster.” It did apply to all research publications and offered price controls (following the music industry example), leading at least one librarian saw it “as the most likely scenario.” Still, others did not desitater to object to requiring libraries and funders to fairly compensate publishers for universal open access. It was seen to “solidify the positions of the major publishers,” who were likely to “hijack” the process.

Librarians’ fundamental lack of trust in commercial publishing appeared across the survey. The distrust may well be earned, but it poses a serious challenge to what the survey affirmed, to wit, university librarians think it’s time for the law to support a wider circulation of research.

Now, if there’s one hopeful sign of librarians and publishers gathering around this common cause of open access, it’s with the relatively new “subscribe to open” publishing model (first discussed here). S2O, as it is known, represents a more cooperative and trusting relationship, with libraries supporting publishers’ conversion of journals to open access (without author fees). Some 28 publishers – soon to exceed 50 – are now using it to offer open access to hundreds of journals. Could this approach offer a path for turning an open access consensus into the cooperative effort needed to bring copyright for research publications into the twenty-first century?

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