Information Technology Reference
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seems to have remained dormant, with hardly any new articles
becoming available on it. The impact of these studies and the resulting
policy recommendations are difficult to assess, but it is worth
investigating whether detailed rules made by institutions of higher
education have provided a stimulus for improving the accessibility of
scholarly output, or whether, instead, a practice without detailed
institutional regulations leads to more positive results.
This chapter addresses digital scholarly output. In the scholarly
environment three declarations on Open Access are considered to be
guiding. The best known, the Berlin Declaration (Max Planck
Gesellschaft, 2003), lists the types of scholarly work protected by
copyright and covered by the Declaration: 'Open access contributions
include original scientific research results, raw data and metadata,
source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical
materials and scholarly multimedia material.'
To answer the question 'Who owns digital content?' we will
concentrate on research output, and specifically on journal articles.
These are by far the main focus both of policy documents from
institutions of higher education and of interest from the scientific
community. Although they are, by and large, subject to the same
regime of intellectual property and rules of first ownership, the
interpretation of the law by institutions of higher education differs
greatly between different scholarly outputs. For example, scholarly
multimedia materials in general are often considered to be educational
rather than research output, and they are hardly ever included and
discussed in institutional copyright policies; the policy of the SURF
Foundation, which also includes works other than journal articles, is an
exception. Raw data are mentioned more often, and it is to be expected
that, because of new developments regarding the reuse of data and
underlying sources, these copyright policies will be subject to change.
Although the legal provisions pertaining to the ownership of works
made in the course of employment are unambiguous, their
interpretation by universities, and the established practices of
universities, have confused the debate. When universities waive their
copyright (see below), the academic staff act as copyright owners in
their relationships with publishers, and publishers act as if academic
staff have the legal right to assign copyright (Law, Weedon and Sheen,
2000).
