Who owns Research?
Resources and links for postdoctoral researchers
This page includes links to information and resources related to the ownership and authorship of research, and changes in scholarly communications in the digital era. These themes were debated at an event organised by the CRASSH Postdoctoral Researcher Forum on 3 June 2010. Links to the event programme and speaker biographies can be found here. There is also an account of the speakers' contributions to the first session on the Open Reflections blog.
The resources on this page are grouped under the following headings:
- Debating the future of academic publishing
- Digital self-archiving - what does it mean for researchers?
- Intellectual property, copyright and authors' rights
- Authorship and collaborative research projects
Debating the future of academic publishing
At the Who owns Research? workshop we heard from representatives of three publishers: Cambridge University Press, Open Book Publishers and the Open Humanities Press. There are numerous websites covering the principles and practice of Open Access publishing. This guide produced by the Cambridge University Library is a good place to start. If you want to go into it further, Peter Suber’sOpen Access Overview is very useful. A perspective from a publishers’ organisations on recent developments in the drive for open access, can be found in this press release from the UK Publishers’ Association.
Digital self-archiving – what does it mean for researchers?
While the trend towards the open access publishing of academic research has partly been driven by a movement – with supporters and opponents, and its own networks and organisations – researchers in all disciplines, regardless of their personal views about open access, will increasingly find that their own universities and funding bodies encouraging (or requiring) them to make copies of their research outputs and data freely available in a digital archive. The Directory of Open Access Repositories allows you to search for repositories by country and subject area and listed 176 repositories in the UK as of June 2010. Cambridge University’s DSpace repository is part of the SHERPA network of repositories, where you can find lists of publishers' policies on open access publishing.
In June 2009 University College London announced that it had adopted a formal policy requiring staff to deposit their work in an open access online repository. So far most other UK universities have a voluntary policy, as is the case at Cambridge. The UK Research Councils support increased open access, and issued a policy statement on the subject which you can read here. Both the ESRC and AHRC require grant holders to deposit their research outputs and where possible their data in repositories.
Intellectual property, copyright and authors' rights
As Adam Steenkamp from the Cambridge Research Office emphasized in his presentation at the 'Who owns Research? workshop, questions relating to intellectual property are at the heart of the research funding process. You can read the University of Cambridge’s intellectual property policy here, and Cambridge researchers needing advice on intellectual property issues related to research contracts can contact the Research Office. Useful external resources on this question include the Copyright Toolbox website, which includes model agreements you can use in negotiating terms with publishers. The Society of Authors and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society also highlight authors' rights in their work. Creative Commons is a project which allows creators to license their work for sharing, re-use and adaptation. It gives creators the opportunity to reserve some rights in their work, such as insisting on attribution to the original creator, or restrictions on commercial re-use of the work.
Authorship and collaborative research projects
It has long been recognised that assigning authorship among a group of researchers can be a controversial process (discussed in this 1979 article). Mechanisms for fairly distributing authorship within a team differ from discipline to discipline. In the sciences, as this article explores, major journals have adopted policies encouraging the publication of notes explicitly listing the contribution of each named author. The American Psychological Association website provides a useful example of discipline-specific guidance: the author’s insistence that researchers should “discuss intellectual property frankly” applies much more broadly.
The Research Ethics Guidebook has a very helpful page on the question of authorship for Social Scientists which includes both practical suggestions for how to tackle disputes on this issue and links to further resources.
