Teresa Nobre, Maria Drabczyk, Eric Luth, Deborah De Angelis, and Maja Bogataj
Report by Communia Association, Link (CC-0)
Access to Knowledge is key to the fundamental Right to Research. Resources used in the context of scientific research are often protected by copyright and related rights, and right holders can prohibit their use for research purposes. Researchers rely on copyright exceptions and limitations to access, use and reuse protected data sources in scientific projects. A fair and modern copyright framework is therefore essential to create an enabling environment for scientific research.
In some countries, researchers benefit from broad and flexible copyright exceptions and limitations that allow them to use protected materials in their projects, while in others they face overly restrictive laws that force them to either refrain from using such materials or to work in legal grey zones.
In the European Union (EU), a recent reform attempted to address some of the obstacles copyright law poses to scientific research. Text and data mining – a modern technology where researchers use computational methods to analyse mass amounts of text, images and other data sources – is now allowed across all the EU Member States. While the EU-wide copyright exception for text and data mining represents a significant improvement to the legal framework for research in the region, it does not respond to all the pressing needs of researchers and their audiences. The mandatory exception only covers the rights of reproduction. It does not cover the right of communication to the public, which is essential to enable researchers to access research resources remotely and to share the research results and underlying resources for purposes of verification, validation and dissemination of results. This poses problems from the perspective of research transparency, prevents researchers from complying with open access requirements for scientific research and hinders joint and cross-border initiatives.
This publication intends to demonstrate some of the problems that EU researchers face due to these constraints. It assembles an initial selection of views of individual researchers from Sweden, Poland, Italy and Slovenia that were gathered through a series of interviews conducted in January and February 2023 as part of the Right to Research in International Copyright Law project. The aim of the initiative is to better understand the needs and challenges faced by European researchers, particularly those interested in joint research activities and cross-border research collaborations. The interviews discuss issues of access, use and reuse of knowledge in unilateral and multilateral projects and the interviewees’ perception of the current limitations related to copyright having an impact on their work.
So far, twenty interviews were conducted, with more data gathering planned for the near future, including more perspectives from female researchers. The final overview will be openly shared in the course of 2023. The presented views do not constitute a representative research sample. Nevertheless, they serve as strong evidence supporting the need for a global copyright reform in the field of research addressing the essentials outlined by the researchers.
