Rights and repositories
The powerpoint slides from these talks can be found at:
The afternoon was given over to the discussion of 4 topics covering some of the legal issues that repository managers face:
- risk management,
- negotiating with rights holders,
- choosing the right licence
- and changing cultural perceptions of copyright.
Each speaker prepared 10 top tips on these topics and these tips can be found at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres/rightsrepositories.aspx. They will also be added to the Repository Support Project website in due course.
For me the most interesting things to come out of the day were the issue of establishing the correct IPR regime or regimes in an institution and the problem of communicating complex legal issues to people not terribly interested in them.
The IPR regime subject arose in response to a question from someone who is running a repository service that is being subjected to some restrictive practices imposed by the University legal team. John Casey suggested that this was not uncommon and was indicative of the fact that a lot of University IPR regimes were designed for the enterprise part of the institution’s business. Naturally this IPR regime did not necessarily fit with other parts of the institution’s business such as education and non-commercial research so it would probably be appropriate to establish a parallel IPR regime for these parts of the business. John recommended that repository managers could help in this process by preparing business cases and risk assessments to support a different IPR regime for senior managers to discuss.
Communication cropped up again and again throughout the day. Lots of delegates reported problems communicating legal issues to senior managers and academics. A couple of ideas to help with this problem were suggested. One was inserting help prompts for legal issues into the repository deposit interface. The other was adopting the model used in the CAMEL project. The Camel model was designed to get senior managers to a neutral venue to discuss the issues with elearning and to share good practice. It was suggested that this model could be used for IPR issues as well.
I also think that there are lessons to be learned from the creative commons website which makes good use of symbols, cartoons and web design to effectively communicate about Intellectual Property issues. Perhaps a similarly visual communication method could form a page of repository websites or a central website such as RSP?
All in all it was a very useful day and it is a credit to the speakers that I came away full of ideas and enthusiasm rather than the fear and paralysis that exposure to legal issues has caused me in the past.
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