开放存取运动中的数字权利管理.docx

1、开放存取运动中的数字权利管理开放存取运动中的数字权利管理来源：open AccessAbstract: Growing conviction that scientific progress will significantly benefit if scholarly articles and research papers are made freely available on the Web has given rise to the Open Access (OA) movement. While there is some awareness that OA articles ma

2、y require digital rights management (DRM), there is currently only low-level interest in the topic, with many OA advocates maintaining that it has no relevance to OA. The issue is complicated by the fact that there are currently two ways in which research papers are made OA, each of which has differ

3、ent implications from a rights point of view.Keywords: policy analysis copyright law, Creative Commons, DRMS design, Open Access, scholarly publishing, stakeholders IntroductionOA has gained a lot of traction over the last year, but it has also attracted considerable resistance from commercial and s

4、ociety publishers. Since they currently generate substantial incomes from selling subscriptions to their journals scholarly publishers fear that if research is made freely available on the Internet these revenues will be significantly threatened.Given the consequent struggle simply to make Open Acce

5、ss happen many OA advocates argue that worrying about DRM today could prove a distraction from the more important task of freeing the refereed literature.Since many also view DRM as synonymous with the use of technical measures designed to restrict access, rather than as a broad set of tools for man

6、aging rights in a digital environment, there is a tendency to see DRM as an issue for proprietary interests alone. The danger is, however, that if the OA movement fails to engage with the topic those proprietary interests may set the DRM agenda, to the possible detriment of OA.Nevertheless, some pre

7、liminary work on DRM is being done by the OA movement, and the growing success of the Creative Commons (cf. sources) may encourage OA advocates to take a greater interest in the topic.What is DRM?Any discussion of DRM in the context of OA has first to seek to define the term. The continuing controve

8、rsy surrounding P2P and illegal file swapping, for instance, has led many to conclude that DRM amounts to little more than locking up content with electronic padlocks. Indeed, since this perceived emphasis on restricting access is viewed as the very antithesis of OA, DRM has become the bte noir of m

9、any OA advocates.What this overly narrow view of DRM overlooks, however, is that digital rights management implies something broader than access control alone. It can also be used, for instance, to ensure correct author attribution, to certify document integrity and provenance, to prevent plagiarism

10、, and indeed to enable creators assert their rights in ways that encourage rather than restrict access.It may be helpful in this regard to view DRM as a two-layered cake. In this model the first layer consists of metadata that define the usage rules (rights) associated with the content. Then on top

11、of this can be placed an (optional) second layer of software-imposed limitations on copying, printing, viewing etc. (i.e. technical measures) in order to enforce the usage rules.Some OA advocates argue that neither layer is relevant in an OA environment. After all, they say, the aim of OA is to make

12、 research papers available to everyone, without restriction. It may be that the use of technical measures even for apparently harmless purposes such as ensuring document integrity will prove politically unpalatable for the OA movement (although Frederick Friends INDICARE article (Friend 2004) appear

13、s to demur on this). There are, however, strong reasons for arguing that the use of rights metadata does have an important role to play, and will for this reason be the main focus of this article.What authors requireIt is clear, for instance, that in making their research freely available on the Web

14、 researchers have no intention of giving away their IPR. Their only aim is to allow others to read and build on their work without facing the obstacle of the toll-barriers represented by increasingly expensive journal subscriptions.In fact we know researchers want to maintain control over their work

15、 on the Web because they have told us so. In 2002, for instance, when the JISC-funded Rights Metadata for Open archiving (RoMEO) Project (cf. sources) asked researchers for their views 55 percent of those surveyed (both OA and non-OA authors) said they wanted to limit usage of their works to certain

16、 purposes e.g. educational or non-commercial.And while over 60 % were happy for third parties to display, print, save, excerpt from and give away their papers, they wanted this to be on condition that they were attributed as the authors and that all copies distributed were done so verbatim.What RoME

17、O made clear, says Steve Probets, a lecturer in information science at UK-based Loughborough University who was involved in the RoMEO Project, is that authors are interested in maintaining some form of control over who can do what with their articles.As Brian Simboli, a science librarian at Lehigh U

18、niversity in Bethlehem, PA puts it: The shift from toll-access to open access may (illogically) encourage people to assume that the whole concept intellectual property has or should undergo some sort of sea change. Intellectual property is still intellectual property, regardless of how it is accesse

19、d (Simboli 2005).Some rights reservedWhat the RoMEO survey also revealed, however, is that the all rights reserved model of classical copyright is more than most researchers want. The protection offered to research papers by copyright law, the report concluded is way in excess of that required by mo

20、st academics.In other words, when releasing their work on to the open seas of the Web OA authors are interested in asserting only some of the rights of traditional copyright (e.g. the right to be named as author), while waiving other rights (e.g. the right to copy or make derivative works). That is,

21、 their wish is to make their papers available on a some rights reserved basis.But if researchers dont make clear to their readers on what basis a paper has been released, how will their readers know? They may mistakenly assume, for instance, that a paper has been made available without any restricti

22、on on its use and reuse, as if it had simply been placed in the public domain. Alternatively, they may feel constrained about using a paper in the more liberal way the author intends, for fear of legal reprisal.Consequently, if they dismiss DRM OA authors risk depriving themselves of a useful mechan

23、ism for specifying on what basis they are making their work freely available.Expression of rightsFor this reason, in 2002 Project RoMEO began developing an XML-based system designed to express rights and permissions in an OA environment. These issues are not unique to OA authors however. Motivated b

24、y the same desire to provide greater licensing flexibility for web-based content, for instance, in 2002 a number of intellectual property lawyers, including Lawrence Lessig (cf. sources) and James Boyle (cf. sources), founded Creative Commons (CC).By separating out the basket of rights provided by c

25、lassical copyright Creative Commons aims to give creators greater flexibility to mix and match those rights they wish to assert, and those they want to waive.The applicability of Creative Commons to OA was immediately apparent to the Project RoMEO team, who incorporated CC licences into the work the

26、y were doing. Explains Probets: The feelings of the RoMEO Project were that the Creative Commons licences would be sufficient to specify the majority of restrictions/conditions required by authors (e.g. that authors are attributed, or that derivative works or commercial uses are allowed).Probets, ho

27、wever, questions whether inserting rights metadata into OA papers can be classified as DRM. Im not sure that I would regard these licences as a DRM solution, he says. They indicate the ways the work can be used; they do not technically enforce that these conditions/restrictions are applied.This, how

28、ever, is surely too narrow a view of DRM. How better to describe the process of inserting machine-readable rights information into digital content in order to control how it is used than digital rights management?Others argue that utilising rights metadata without any means of enforcing their prohib

29、itions is pointless. By the same reasoning, however, we might conclude that it is a waste of time creating any rule, or law, unless it can be physically enforced at the point of potential infringement. We also know that anyone happy to infringe copyright law can circumvent most if not all the electr

30、onic padlocks devised to date.Two roads to OA: The case of the Gold RoadFor researchers wanting to better manage the rights in their papers, however, there is a more immediate problem than enforcement namely how they establish and define their rights in the first place. And since there are two ways

31、in which researchers can make their papers OA a one-size-fits-all approach is not currently possible.For researchers using the Gold Road to OA matters are relatively straightforward: they can simply publish in one of the new-style scholarly journals produced by OA publishers like BioMed Central (BMC

32、) (cf. sources) and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) (cf. sources). By reversing the traditional subscription model and charging authors (or more likely their funders) a fee to publish, rather than charging readers to read, golden publishers are able to make research papers freely available on the Web without any access costs.More importantly, by treating publishing as a service provided to the author, rather than as a property transaction in which the publisher acquires copyright in return for publishing a paper, both BMC and the PLoS are happy to us