University institutions have always played a variety of roles regarding copyright in the process of publishing a scientific/scholarly work. The changes resulting from rapid digitisation are forcing institutions to review their position and role where copyright is concerned. This opens up new opportunities for the institutions, but it also raises a number of new questions.
- As employers, institutions need to make new arrangements with the scientific/scholarly authors who work for them. Those arrangements will specify such things as who will hold the copyright in a scientific/scholarly work.
- The development of research databases (i.e. repositories) forces institutions to make agreements with copyright holders regarding access to the material they contain and how it will be used.
- On the other hand, such repositories also make it possible to store and reuse an institution’s own material and thus to reduce costs.
- Institutions have always made arrangements with publishers for licences for the use of periodicals. This has led to the institutions being faced by increasing costs for purchasing the periodicals.
- Institutions also need to consider the public interest, which demands that access be possible to research results. Many university institutions have therefore rallied round the banner of Open Access, i.e. the principle that the results of publicly financed research should also be publicly accessible.
The parties with which an institution maintains a relationship are:
- The scientific/scholarly author – who is associated with the institution and who has published a work or wishes to store it in the institution’s repository.
- The publisher – when the institution makes agreements for purchasing scientific/scholarly works (licences).
- The user – who wants access to this research material.
What information does this website provide for institutions?