Legal framework. Know your rights

Transfer of copyright must be made in written form and signed by its owner. Copyright duration depends on when the work was created. Moreover, it differs between countries.

The system of copyright which acts in the creation and maintenance of an Open Scholarly Community on the Web is complex because entails different objects: primary sources (manuscripts, their digitization - i.e. images -) and secondary sources (editions, articles, books and essays as well as the project web sites contents).

Copyright law does not give any definition of primary sources [2], it only outlines:

● what is a protected work
● what is a work in the public domain
● what is a derivative work
● whether there are other copyright-related rights on a work.

Legally speaking, there is an important distinction between original works and derivative works.

Copyright on original works lasts in general 70 years after the death of the author. After that date, that work is in the public domain, which means that monetary rights on that work expired. Practically, this means that we can use it freely (without paying any fee nor asking authorization).

A derivative work is a work that is protected autonomously such as an adaptation, an arrangement, a transcription, a new version, a translation, etc, of a previous work. The fact that a work is in the Public Domain does not mean that also the version or translation that you are interested in is freely available.

This means that an Italian translation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is not necessarily in the Public Domain, so you need to clear the rights on the version/translation/ adaptation you are interested in. Critical and scientific publications are publications of Public Domain works with a critical or scientific reconstruction, or organization of the work, or description.

There may be national legislations which recognize protection of these versions even if they are not “creative”. Scholars agree on the nature of neighboring or related right of such a protection. A neighboring right is a right similar to copyright but -usually- offers a lighter protection (terms, intensity, reserved activities, etc).

Although each EU state member has its own copyright system, common guidelines are described in several EU Directives [3].

Manuscripts (owner)

Manuscripts are original works. If you intend to embark upon a digitization project, you need to be aware that you must investigate the copyright situation involved for each item that you intend to scan. Many archives, libraries and museums have in their custody collections which have been donated to them, so they hold the copyright on them (Note that if the copyright owners are unknown to the institution, it can be very difficult or at least
very costly and time consuming to obtain copyright permission).

We have several good experiences (see NietzscheSource and SchopenhauerSource) which prove that it is possible to obtain the right to digitize the manuscripts. For help, contact our existing communities.

Facsimile

Digitization means that collections and holdings can be given wider access (which may be in opposition to the protection of intellectual property rights). Therefore, the first issue to address in a digitization project is the legal conditions for making digital copies.

Moreover, we recommend that access to the digital collection is reliant upon acknowledgement of a copyright disclaimer. Thus, you should provide copyright information about your project on your web site.

Editions

Editions are derivative works. In Europe, copyright on editions is regulated by art. 5 of the Term Directive (Council Directive 93/98/EEC of 29 October 1993) harmonizing the term of protection of copyright and certain related rights [4].

Art. 5 Critical and scientific publications

But the Term directive:

● Is not mandatory
● Does not define the modalities of the right
● Does not define what is a critical or scientific publication
● Permits the introduction of other related rights to copyright.

Here there are some examples of national laws on Critical works:

1. Italy
“1. Senza pregiudizio dei diritti morali dell'autore, a colui il quale pubblica, in qualunque modo o con qualsiasi mezzo, edizioni critiche e scientifiche di opere di pubblico dominio spettano i diritti esclusivi di utilizzazione economica dell'opera, quale risulta dall'attività di revisione critica e scientifica
[...]
2. La durata dei diritti esclusivi di cui al comma 1 e di 20 anni a partire dalla prima lecita pubblicazione, in qualunque modo o con qualsiasi mezzo effettuata”. (art. 85 quater LDA )

2. Germany
“1. Editions which consist of non-copyrighted works or texts shall enjoy, mutatis mutandis, the protection afforded by the provisions of Part I if they represent the result of scientific analysis and differ in a significant manner from previously known editions of the works or texts.
(3) The right shall expire 25 years after publication of the edition; however, it shall expire 25 years after its production if the edition is not published within that time limit. The time limit shall be calculated in accordance with Article 69.(art. 70 UrhG)

3. Poland
“The person who after expiry of the term of protection of the copyright to the work prepares a critical or scientific publication thereof, which is not a work, shall have the exclusive right to dispose of and use such publication within the scope specified in Article 50, subparagraphs 1 and 2, for 30 years after the date of publication” (art. 99 PCL)

4. Spain
“1. Toda persona que divulgue licitamente una obra inedita que este en dominio publico tendra sobre ella los mismos derechos de explotacion que hubieran correspondido a su autor.
2. Del mismo modo, los editores de obras no protegidas por las disposiciones del Libro I de la presente Ley, gozaran del derecho exclusivo de autorizar la reproduccion, distribucion y comunicacion publica de dichas ediciones siempre que puedan ser individualizadas por su composicion tipografica, presentacion y demas caracteristicas editoriales” (art. 129 LPI)

5. UK
“Duration of copyright in typographical arrangement of published editions Copyright in the typographical arrangement of a published edition expires at the end of the period of 25 years from the end of the calendar year in which the edition was first published”. (art. 15 CDPA)

Please, add a reference to your national law articles on Critical Works/Editions to our website, in order to help other communities to join the Action.

Secondary sources

Secondary sources include books, essays, articles on primary sources and are protected by copyright law (generally, 70 years after the author's death. For a table see: http://www.eucopyright.org/2008/04/copyright_eu_list/)

Your community productions are secondary sources and will normally include:

• Web site contents
• Collaborators production

We strongly encourage our Action members to adopt an Open Access policy, self-archiving their results in OA institutional and disciplinary archives, publishing them in OA journals (see sect. 3.1.e - f) and adopting copyleft licenses (such us Creative Commons [5]), which help to increase the dissemination of scholarly works and their reuse.

Finances. Preliminary budget.

Build your team - Structure your expertise

The variety of tasks involved in the areas of activity in creating a *Source community on the Web, involves creating a team to draw upon different human resources in the institution and to contribute a range of skills [6].

The authoring and content management for the Website. Different sections of the website can be apportioned to nominated individuals to update regularly, under the coordination of a Webmaster.

The systems administration functions, which include site maintenance, access management and network connectivity are best delegated to a designated systems administrator.

The third area of activity of the Web team is that of Website management. This includes developing an institutional policy on the role of the website in marketing and promotion and the development of a consistent design style.

Graphic design skills are not easily found in SSH scholarly communities, libraries and archives, and it may be necessary to appoint a specialist consultant in this capacity.
General computer literacy, and a working knowledge of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) are required for Website development work. The importance of HTML for librarians and archivists, and increasingly of XML (Extensible Markup Language), is growing rapidly. The acquisition of these skills is one of the goals of the Summer School/Training school organized by Action A32.

Estimate your project Costs

The cost estimate can be divided into operational, organizational and staffing costs. Operational costs can include Materials (Stationery, archival quality boxes, boards and preservation storage materials, printer cartridges, computer software), Equipment (Computers, scanners, printers, disk storage), Travelling expenses and Services (such as: Maintenance contracts, conservation of originals, staff training, expert consultancy fees, couriers for source materials, accommodation and catering for meetings/workshops).

In setting up a *Source community, you must take into account two specific questions:

1) Do you need to digitize manuscripts and/or texts?
Building a digital collection is expensive and resource-intensive. Before embarking on digitization projects, some basic planning principles are offered here for projecting the costs underlying the design, implementation, and maintenance of a digital library.
Management issues related to the budgeting for a digitization project include the cost of training of staff and integration of new work processes, the acquisition of equipment and provision of a suitable workspace, and the establishment of new systems of digital storage to ensure the preservation of digital heritage. If you need to digitize manuscripts and texts, see Digitising your sources section.

2) Software. Do you have a person capable for installing?
Here it is a list of Technical Requirements for installing Talia Platform:
http://trac.talia.discovery-project.eu/wiki/TaliaInstallation

If you need help and assistance, please contact us.

Organizational costs

Cost for the organization of your *Source community project can include several entries. A list can include:

1) Management
Project manager salary, travel to meetings, workshops and conferences attending.

2) Administration
Partial compensation for institutional administrative staff and services of host institution.

3) Organizational development
Strategic planning meetings, team-building exercises, project reviews.

4) Overheads
Office space rental, refurbishment, office furniture, cleaning.

Costs for Staff

It is important to include in your project a prospect about the requested staff to be involved, which can include:

• Full-time staff
• Part-time staff
• Contract staff
• Consultants

Publishing costs: Adopting an Open Access model

Your publishing and dissemination costs can be contained by adopting an Open Access policy. To know more about this possibility, please contact us.

Social Framework. Dissemination

Build your own community

How is structured an Open Scholarly Community on the Web?

Firstly, besides traditional tools, it makes use of web-based tools to communicate, i.e. to archive, spread and certify data and results. So, in order to think practically to this different functions, a useful starting point is for staff to visit sites of similar projects to see what features work well and what tools are most useful for scholars.
Secondly, it needs specific technological and legal expertises. Open scholarly communities on the Web are by definition interdisciplinary. In addition to scientific competences, they require competences in:

• web sites management;
• rights management;
• project management;
• purely scholars.

Thus, people who have competences in more than one of these fields will be appreciated. Our Action promote the acquisition of these expertises through Training Schools/Summerschools.

Look for European research teams on your corpus

It is very important for your community to enabling networking effects between yours and other scholarly communities which work on your same corpus or field.
Firstly, because your project and site richness depends on its contents.
Secondly, because the linking degree of your sites determines your visibility on the Web. As in traditional communities, on the Web a high degree of scientific discussion and connections will improve the quality of your results.
The goal to create connections between scholars of EU countries is one of the main objectives of COST program. Our Action promotes this goal by organizing workshops and meetings and through STSMs.

Contact similar sites

The value of the Web is given by its linking degree. Moreover, the Web is a small world: to reach one node of the web, we need only a few links. Thus, it's very important to connect your sites to similar ones. Increasing our relevant connections will make you easy to be reached by people interested in your corpus or subject. To contact similar sites will also your improve your possibilities to create new projects and cooperations in Europe and abroad.
Don't spare time in the research of similar projects: use not only google, but ask informally to colleagues (by email or at conferences), look on usenet discussion groups, use local search engines (see here a list: http://www.searchlores.org/regional.htm)

Last but not least: do not neglet to update and enrich your web site. It's the best way to signal your presence on the Web, and to be contacted by similar projects as well. Let's start to link your web site.

Link your website from

a. your personal homepage/blog
The first place where to put a link to your *Source community web site, is you personal homepage, whether institutional or not. If you have a blog, you may use it to keep informed you reader about your new project. Remember that any new link to your web site will empower it.

b. your institution website
A second step will be to contact your institution web site administrators, in order to have a link from your university/institution site to yours. Institutional web-sites are important hubs and authorities in the scholarly network on the web. Thus, their link will make your project more visible.

c. your library website
A third step is to contact you library staff, in order to let them know about your project. Librarians are very often much more sensitive about storage, archiving, indexing projects than academics. Moreover, libraries web site are very much visited by researchers, thus this link will make your project nearer to its potential collaborators and users.

d. wikipedia
Wikipedia became an important source of information on the Web. It is highly used as a traditional encyclopedia, to people who want to have a basic knowledge on a topic they do not know. Wikipedia is also high-ranked web site by google thus being very visible on the web. So, it would be a good choice to decide to create a page on your project on wikipedia, and preferably to translate your page into the main european languages: en, fr, it, de, es, etc..

e. open access archives directories

Open access archives [7] let you self-archiving your scholarly production in institutional and disciplinary repositories. It is a good choice to store in one or more open repositories all the articles and presentations about your project produced by your *Source community.
In order to know what archives are available in your institution and/or discipline, you have at disposal 2 directories of Open Access Archives, which include a list of around 1300 repositories:

1. The Directory of Open Access Repositories – OpenDOAR: OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.
(University of Nottingham, UK, http://www.opendoar.org/)
2. Registry of Open Access Repositories – ROAR: (University of Southampton, UK, http://roar.eprints.org/)

f. DOAJ directory

If you create an Open Access Journal, link it at your Web site and ask for its inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ (http://www.doaj.org/). DOAJ service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. As of today [April 2009], it includes 4000 journals and 271.786 articles.

References

[1]. For a more detailed guide on this part, see N. Korn, Guide to Intellectual Property Rights and Other Legal Issues, Minerva project, 2005, http://www.minervaeurope.org/publications/guideipr1_0.pdf.

[2]. See Th. Margoni, How to access primary sources in Europe. The legal framework, presentation hold at the Workshop: Open Scholarly Communities on the Web: The Legal, Economic and Social Framework, Maison Française d'Oxford, Oxford April 2008.

[3]. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_European_Union

[4]. See again Th. Margoni, How to access primary sources in Europe. The legal framework, cit..

[5]. See http://www.creativecommons.org. CC website has different pages according to different legislations on copyright in Europe and abroad.

[6]. For a more detailed guide on this part, see: IFLA and ICA, GUIDELINES FOR DIGITIZATION PROJECTS for collections and holdings in the public domain, particularly those held by libraries and archives, march 2002, chap. 4, http://www.ifla.org.sg/VII/s19/pubs/digit-guide.pdf.

[7]. To know more about OA Archives and on how they function, see: P. Suber, Open Access Overview. Focusing on open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm.