I’m delighted to be asked by the HHuLOA team to write a little about open access, research data management and licensing from my institution’s perspective, the British Library. The project was formed in recognition that through collaboration we can meet funder requirements in a more efficient and coordinated way. The British Library is in many respects an outlier, we do not publish OA articles or receive research council funding however we do license the use of journal content and metadata for use in our products and services. Recently we’ve had to give careful consideration to how we manage funded articles so that publicly funded material can be fully exploited and to ensure that we do not contravene the terms of use for Gold OA content. We’re working with publishers to standardise Open Access metadata and, internally, we’ve had to develop flags to identify OA content to ensure it is used in accordance with Open Access principles, for example not applying a fee or DRM to an OA funded article. Finally we need to inform our users of what they can and cannot do with articles – and that depends on which licence the article comes under. We are conscious that we could/should be doing a lot more to get EThOS to reflect existing rights information where its available. Institutions are generally leading the way in terms of managing rights and permissions for theses, so we are keen to reflect this into the EThOS e-theses service and work with institutions to share licensing experience around OA content, including metadata to maximise the discovery and reuse of publicly funded content.
In support of this we carried out a horizon scan of current practice and HEIs’ theses policies in autumn – and thank you to those of you who responded, your feedback was extremely useful. We were particularly interested in institutional policies around e-theses where they deal with rights or author permissions as where there is clarity on rights issues, that is to say where publication policies or author agreements permit, we would like to include rights information alongside the thesis. This rights information would include links to licences, e.g. Creative Commons licences where applicable accompanied by a “machine readable” version of each licence, ideally in the CC Rights Expression Language (CC REL).
We’re looking forward to working with HHuLOA partners to investigate how the ingest and display of rights information for open access materials can be improved. For those institutions that follow a risk based approach toward making theses available in lieu of formal author permissions, the project would like to support institutions in their move to having greater clarity on licence terms and we’d like to propose the following package of work to support this:
- Model permissions letters and take down policies
- FAQs on the permissions letters including guidance around what constitutes publication, e.g. whether adding DOIs to a thesis makes it a publication.
- Guidance on rights clearance and due diligence search for rightsholders.
- Template online form for retrospective rights clearance for IR content.
- Briefing on the management and communication of rights for senior managers
- A model publication policy around the submission of theses in an institutional repository
- BL/ HHuLLOA to work with repository software suppliers such as DSpace and EPrints to investigate ways of automating and streamlining the accurate communication of usage rights for research content.
Finally the project will host a series of forums for institutions to discuss and test recommendations from the HHuLOA project, including an event focussing on doctoral theses held at the British Library.
Posted on behalf of Anna Vernon, Licensing Manager at the British Library