KE report on the legal status of research data

The Knowledge Exchange programme (KE) has commissioned a report on the status of intellectual property (IP) rights and research data in the four KE countries; the Netherlands, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Specifically, what if any are the barriers to open access to primary research data - especially those resulting from public funding. Get the report here.

The report raises some interesting points. Basically, data are considered facts and facts cannot be protected. However, data always need to be put into a form before any action can be taken with them, and the form may enjoy some forms of protection.

Comparing the law in the four countries, It turns out that the three continental countries are more similar to each other than any of them to the UK. This is due to the low barrier to protection in the UK, where only 'skill, labour, and judgement' is needed to claim intellectual property rights, whereas the three continental countries all require some form of originality and individuality in order to have a claim to workhood. The latter is difficult to obtain for data gathering.

Secondly, the European database directive do extend some harmonisation to the four countries. The directive offers protection to databases to the extent that significant investments have been made to create them. However, only investments after the data gathering counts. With a crude example, an expensive telescope and a cheap database offer no protection to the database, whereas a cheap telescope and an expensive database does.

There may be practical monopolies to data though. IPs have to do with published data, but if data reside in a place that is not immediately available, then there is no way to force access to it.

The report makes a case for further harmonisation of European law. The differences between the laws of the member states in the EU make for some very complicated issues. For example, if a German researcher uses data that originated in Denmark, German law should be used to determine the legality of the use. Similarly, if data is available online, the relevant laws are the laws of all the countries where the data is available. In this sense research data can join cultural heritage as an area that cry out for harmonisation.

SMEs and access

John Houghton, professor of economics at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia has once again been asked to do a study in Denmark. The new study is entitled ”Access to Research and Technical Information in Denmark” and concerns itself with the access problems faced by primarily small- and medium-sized enterprises – the so-called SMEs.

With a total of 98 questionnaire responses and 23 in-depth interviews as the data source, the study went to the heart of access problems for the SMEs: costs of access itself, cost of delay and cost of loss of opportunity.

The SMEs report that they typically need articles from scholarly journals, technical reports, market reports, standards and patent information


The SMEs find the information landscape difficult to navigate and access costly. While the universities' licenses to the scientific literature do allow for in-house use, they rarely if ever allow for remote online access. The SMEs are therefore forced to subscribe to costly scholarly journals, and they are rarely able to cover their subject field that way, because the literature is scattered over many domains, document types and providers. This goes double for those firms in transdisciplinary fields.

Access to information – or rather lack thereof – weighs on innovation and invention, time to market and overall production costs. The firms report that on average:

27% of new products and 19% of new processes introduced within the last three years would have been abandoned without access to scientific literature. The products account for 46% of sales on average. Development time would have increased by on average 2.2 years without access to contributing research.

The primary recommendations to remedy the situation are:

• An information literacy lift: the firms often lack the required information competencies; i.e. monitoring, discovery, source selection, searching and evaluating. Workshops, training sessions or targeted reference librarian services are possible solutions.
• License opportunities: SMEs could either join the national license Consortium or existing licenses could be extended.
• Open Access: Denmark should support Open Access. The firms generally make good use of Open Access and the more information that become freely available the better. Especially publicly funded research should be available to everybody.

Growth in a knowledge economy depends to a large degree on innovation in the segment of SMEs. It's therefore critical to give them the tools they need, and once again we see the real cost of locking up behind toll barriers the knowledge we create ourselves.

See the press release and download the report at http://goo.gl/90wNb

SCOAP3 moves forward

The SCOAP3 logo

A watershed meeting was held at CERN on April 6th 2011 where the initiative group and supportive countries and institutions met with a group of publishers and discussed if and how to progress with the SCOAP3 initiative. The decision to move forward with a tender was unanimous.

SCOAP3 stands for Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, and at its core it's a redirection of subscription fees in order to provide increased access to high-energy physics papers. High-energy physics already make intense use of the arXiv.org pre-print server, but they still feel they need conventional peer-reviewed articles published in conventional journals.* To that end, the SCOAP3 partners have come up with an aggregate figure of how much it will cost to have four special high-energy physics journals running as well as two general physics journal in which high-energy physicists publish regularly. This amount - approx. €10 mn - is the yearly budget of the CERN-led SCOAP3 consortium. The individual countries and institutions pay a share of that based on their share of published papers. The journals will be Open Access.


Presently, 70% of the budget has been met in the form of pledges and countries representing 24% have responded favourably and are expected to join shortly. Then the consortium is ready to start the tendering process. Expected launch date is January 1st 2013.


The history and nuts and bolts of SCOAP3 can be seen here, and there's a great FAQ here.

* Of course, the really interesting point - as raised by Tom Sanville - is that we know that the pre-print versions from arXiv.org account for no less than 90% of the use of articles in the field as a whole and only 10% use can be attributed to the published article. So do the physicists actually need publishers or do they just need to arrange for peer review in some form?