Copyright Law

In October the Eighth Berlin Conference for Open Access took place for the first time outside Europe, in Beijing. Goethe.de spoke with Christoph Bruch, the Open Access expert of the Max Planck Society, about his vision of an optimum access for researchers to scientific information.

Mr Bruch, the 2010 Berlin Conference will take place for the first time outside Europe, in Beijing. What expectations will you bring with you to China?

So far the Berlin Conferences have been dominated by a public recruited from the European states. We hope that the Conference in Beijing will address representatives of scientific organisations from Asiatic states. Particularly in India and China science is developing very rapidly.

What subjects are on the agenda?

The agenda, as at all Berlin Conferences, is wide-ranging. It covers the typical questions in their current form: How is Open Access implemented in individual organisations? How do participants network with what has already been made available on Open Access? What legal hurdles remain to be overcome? What are the most interesting applications in different fields of science?

Science in service of the common good

The first Berlin Conference in 2003 ended with the adoption of the Berlin Declaration. What are its key statements?

Central to the Berlin Declaration is the commitment of science to act in the service of the common good. On the basis of Open Access, scientific publications should be made available to the broadest possible public. In the meantime, some 300 scientific organisations have signed the Declaration.

How can the call for Open Access be implemented in practice?

First of all, Open Access doesn’t mean that the process of publishing has suddenly become free of charge. It means that the costs aren’t borne by the user. There are two practical ways of doing this: the so-called “golden way” and the “green way”. When a publisher makes electronically available all the articles in a journal at the time of publication, free of charge to the whole world, we speak of the golden road.

With the green road, the copyright owner of a journal, which lives from subscriptions, allows his authors an electronic republication. This, however, is subject to certain conditions. Often, for instance, republication is allowed only after an embargo period of several months. What is then published is usually the final version approved by the author – but without the attractive layout of the publisher.

Scientists, publishers and librarians working together

Don’t publishers still lose subscribers?

We’re studying this question in the project PEER. PEER stands for “Publishing and the Ecology of European Research” and examines the impact of the green road in practice. The special feature of this project is that the publishers, scientific organisations and libraries are working together in it – groups that are normally fighting tooth and nail with one another.

A group of publishers has made available to the public through PEER authors’ manuscripts from some 300 scientific journals. PEER is measuring the effect of this: Are these articles accessed? Is there therefore less demand for the articles at the website of the original publisher? Does the availability of the articles change the behaviour of scientists? Do they address new target groups?

How you envision the ideal working environment for researchers and scientists?

In everyday life today we find a lot of knowledge very easily in the Internet through Google and have direct access to it. This situation doesn’t exist for scientists. Scientific publications in professional journals are becoming too expensive for many scientific organisations because of the price trend. Many small and medium-sized organisations as well as the board public can’t afford access to scientific journals.

Here I’d like to see a change, as would many scientists. Currently, the third basket of copyright law amendment is being discussed in Germany. It could be that we’ll get a so-called inalienable right of republication with this amendment, which would constitute a substantial basis for the green road and enable its simplified implementation. That would be a step towards making it possible for scientists to access scientific information as easily as we do the daily weather forecast.