Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
institutions (EPrints, 2009). Authors are being either encouraged or
obliged to publish their scholarly output in OA journals, or to deposit
post-prints of their articles in their institution's digital repository.
The position of institutions
It is not just the authors who show little interest in the management of
their rights; for institutions, also, copyright has been an unpopular issue
until recently. In 2006 the SURF Foundation and JISC published a
survey of established practices regarding copyright in institutions of
higher education in the Netherlands and the UK. The study showed
that only a few universities had formal policies relating to intellectual
property ownership in the journal articles produced by their academic
and research staff (Weedon and Mossink, 2006). If they had a copyright
policy at all, it tended to focus mainly on the use of material produced
by the institution itself, specifying principles of fair use, the use of works
in course packs and interlibrary loan.
Since the rise of digital libraries and the establishment of institutional
repositories, the focus in copyright policies has shifted to the question
of ownership - and incidentally, this did not immediately cause more
institutions to establish policies. However, it is noticeable that
institutions are now both demanding and claiming a more important
position within the copyright arrangement, mainly as a result of the
spread of OA ideals and the concomitant growth of institutional
repositories.
The Berlin Declaration
In addition to OA journals, institutions of higher education increasingly
consider repositories to be the right method for disseminating scholarly
output. Inspired by the Berlin Declaration, many institutions have
joined a worldwide network of repositories. The Berlin Declaration, in
its succinctness, points towards the essence of the internet and its
importance for digital information: a medium that guarantees
worldwide access and global and interactive use of scholarly information
and cultural heritage. The 264 signatories to the Declaration
acknowledge this and state that they 'feel obliged to address the
challenges of the Internet as an emerging functional medium for
