RUBRIC Toolkit: Access Management
Overview
Institutional Repository (IR) Managers need to gain a basic understanding of the legal obligations associated with key IR access management issues, including:
content deposit
content management
content exposure
accessibility
authentication
authorisation
version control
protection of rights
The Open Access to Knowledge Project (OAK Law) funded under the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative provides more in depth research on legal matters, with further links to the publications and research specifically relating to IR rights management issues. Section 3 and Section 4 are especially useful.
A guide to developing open access through your digital repository was released by the OAK Law project in April 2007. This is a very practical Australian guide to copyright principles and practice for repository managers and policy makers, covering:
copyright issues involved in depositing and accessing material in digital repositories
effective management and promotion of digital repositories
the relationships between the parties involved in the deposit and access process
licensing requirements
technical considerations, such as software and metadata
Content Deposit, Management and Access
The OAK Law project reports provide general guidelines on the legal arrangements you will need to implement, however, they do not provide specific legal advice. IR Managers must consult their organisation's legal department to obtain solid legal advice on access management for their repository.
Copyright enforcement has now gained great prominence and so the IR Manager must be able to prove satisfactorily that they have taken the necessary and appropriate steps to ensure that copyright laws were not infringed in relation to their IR.
Institutions should aim to educate students and academics to self manage the copyright issues in their work.
Whilst user rights are generally well understood and well regulated in existing library systems, deposit licensing is an emerging area. The OAK Law Project is looking at how to structure an IR deposit license to assist Australian universities to develop these licenses with consideration of the author's rights and IR responsibilities. The resulting outcome will be dependent on what rights to their work an author has kept.
You will need to check:
does the author still own copyright for the work?
does someone else own the copyright for the work? If so, who?
is there uncertainty about who owns the copyright? The author may not know
permission is not required when only metadata is being submitted
Other issues you will need to consider:
do you need any processes in place when multiple authors are involved?
should these be incorporated into Deposit Policies?
will you seek author permission for deposit from all authors or just the submitting author?
will you require authors to sign over any of their rights?
do you want to seek permission to manage software obsolescence in relation to their submission?
how will you ensure that duplicates are not entered? (especially if multiple authors are involved and more than one is likely to submit a copy)
if an embargo exists, ensure you don't end up with multiple access points with different access conditions
Creative Commons
Creative Commons, the development of open content licensing, is a strong international movement to reinforce the idea of Open Access at a legal level. This new generation of licencing gives people permission to reuse work. These new forms of licencing are going to be a key part of the future of scholarly publishing.
The notion that publicly funded material should be available to the public is supported worldwide. Some significant events, treaties and supporting bodies have been included in the readings section.
While many of these trends are significant for the individual researcher these things are being considered at a high policy level. They will not need to be driven by the individual at a granular level. Each organisation will need to use its own legal resources to work on draft and production licences and associated documentation.
Copyright Overview
The OAK Law Project Report No.1 summarises the basis of copyright as: a balance: on one side is the need to provide incentive and reward for creativity and innovation while, on the other, is the need to ensure the continuing flow of raw materials for further innovation and creativity.
The Scholarly Communication Crisis raised concern that the traditional publishing models were causing the system to be unbalanced, in terms of increasing barriers to the flow of raw material, largely due to escalating subscription rates.
The Open Access movement has attempted to redress the balance using internet technology to expose the research literature of the world with minimal restriction.
The Open Access Overview declares that Open Access (OA) is compatible with copyright, as well as other features and supportive services associated with conventional scholarly literature such as peer review, revenue (even profit), preservation, prestige and career-advancement and indexing.
The Research Quality Framework (RQF) press release by the Hon. Julie Bishop, Minister for Education, Science and Training in Australia escalated discussion on the matter of copyright management in IRs. This announcement had a significant impact because copyright issues will need close scrutiny in relation to evidence portfolios required to support the RQF exercise.
RQF Assessment Panels need to access the published version of articles, rather than a pre-print version or author's copy.
Copyright arrangements with publishers often restrict the published version from being placed in an Open Access IR, depending on the publisher's policies.
The Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) are working with the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) to obtain publisher agreement for making the publisher version available in institutional repositories for the purposes of the RQF.
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has had a similar debate in the UK in relation to the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).
Copyright Workflow
A Repository Manager must know how to check or obtain permission for items submitted for deposit. The Oak Law Project provides general legal guidelines, however, all IR managers should seek legal advice from their insitutions' legal department when setting out their copyright workflows.
Here are some suggested steps to check copyright on a deposited item:
receive an item for deposit
check Sherpa for publisher support for self-archiving (explained below)
record publisher permissions into the metadata where available, otherwise
contact the publisher directly. If a publisher cannot be identified, then
contact the closest authorizing body (such as a conference chairperson, journal contact or sponsoring organisation). If permission cannot be obtained, then
contact the author directly to provide an alternative copy (such as a pre-print rather than a published version of the paper)
note all associated permissions in the metadata associated with the item
restrict any items carrying embargo periods from public view
Copyright Arrangements with Publishers
The Sherpa website was established with support from JISC and the Wellcome Trust to enable authors and repository managers to easily locate publisher policies on copyright and self-archiving. It has collected and analysed policy statements of nearly 300 major publishers and has a rating system to indicate the level of self-archiving supported.
Sherpa policies can be viewed:
by Publisher
The ROMEO colours web page explains the rating system:
green can archive pre-print and post-print
blue can archive post-print (ie final draft post-refereeing)
yellow can archive pre-print (ie pre-refereeing)
white archiving not formally supported
The ePrints Summary Statistics on Journal Policies says that as of April 2007, 62% of the publishers registered are “green” publishers.
One limitation of Sherpa is that representation of publishers and journal titles produced in more regional locations, such as Australasia, is quite limited.
An Australian supplement to Sherpa will be produced by the OAK Law Project to address this limitation. It will be known as the OAK List. OAK Law will “undertake an analysis of publication agreements from large and small publishers, both Australian and international” and be “interoperable with the UK-based SHERPA List”. This will be a resource of great significance for Australian IR managers.
Lund's JournalInfo is a guide to journals intended as an aid for the researcher in the selection of journal for publication but gives a lot of information about each title including scope, quality, reader availability and library cost. Some information may be useful to the IR Manager in conjunction with the Sherpa site and is worth checking out.
Eureka Science Journal Watch is a wiki which makes it a freely-editable source of information on scientific journals, starting with mathematics and physics. This means that users can start a page on a science journal and record any information they have uncovered from its editorial pages and recount their experiences when relying on that information. It is another useful resource for IR Managers in finding information on a particular journal title.
Embargoes
An embargo period restricts an author from exposing their work in an IR until a specific time has elapsed (usually 6 or 12 months) following publication. Embargo conditions are usually clearly stated in the publisher's policy statement.
Embargoes can be managed through a spreadsheet with calendar reminders set up to review and make items publicly available at the end of the embargo period.
Many IR managers will still amend metadata in the IR with a statement regarding restrictions on accessing the article level content. In this way the embargo is attached to the access rather than the exposure of the work.
The Immediate Deposit / Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate is a useful reference which recommends that “the author's final, peer-reviewed draft of all journal articles is required immediately upon acceptance for publication, with no delays or exceptions; but whether access to that deposit is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access (with only the metadata, but not the full-text, accessible webwide) is left up to the author, with only a strong recommendation to set access as Open Access as soon as possible”.
Optimising OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How? provides the broader context for this discussion.
Restricted Content
Some items may carry other restrictions such as “Commercial in Confidence” or contain culturally sensitive material such as ethnographic material.
People of the Rivermouth, a D-Space testbed program conducted by the APSR Project in 2005 is a recent project which touched on the issues of cultural sensitivity in Australia.
The Paradisec website manages digital conservation and access for endangered materials from the Pacific region, including Oceania and East and Southeast Asia.
An overview of these projects is available in a presentation by Tom Ruthven on the APSR website.
The OAK Law Report No.1 provides further information about these issues.
The USQ ePrints Collection Development Policy also mentions these issues.
Practical Copyright Management Suggestions
IR Managers need to be informed about the complexity of Copyright issues and know which resources to access and monitor in order to keep abreast of developments. Many Copyright management decisions will be made outside of the Library or the IR space at either the organisational or sectoral level. The role of the IR Manager is to manage the issues as best they can using guidelines available from sources such as:
the local Copyright Officer
disseminated information from specialist projects such as OAK Law
The IR Manager or nominated representative who receives deposit items should always assure authors that copyright conditions of every deposit will be checked and permission obtained or applied for. The IR Manager is responsible for developing an appropriate checking process. This can be conducted by the person in the organisation with responsibility for quality control of metadata (this may be the IR manager, repository staff or other areas such as the Research Office).
A Copyright Matrix documents key decisions to be made on copyright including:
End user agreements
Take down notice
Copyright notices on the article
Deposit notice
Copyright information for end users
The University of Southern Queensland has offered the following practical advice on how to manage copyright for an IR:
A sample letter for seeking publisher permission from the University of the Sunshine Coast provides another template example.
Documenting the Copyright Paper Trail
Tips for developing a system for retaining and retrieving details of permissions:
Storage
If possible use a linked data stream or a note in the IR to store copyright information with the metadata for each item. Include information about the date and source of the permission plus any conditions or restrictions required.
Publisher permissions
If a publisher gives blanket permission for all authors at your institution, keep this information online for repository administrators to access (a database or spreadsheet format may be useful). Embargo periods should also be noted if these are not readily locatable on publisher web sites or in SHERPA.
Templates
The following templates may be useful for the process of obtaining publisher permissions or requesting a different version of a paper from an author, depending on the publisher's response:
Copyright Policies
Some Australian universities disclose their copyright policies. These may be useful references for new IR Managers:
Third-Party Copyright
Out of the Shadows (Joyce 2004) explains why third-party copyright is a major concern in thesis material and how this issue should be handled.
There is wide divergence of current practice. Some institutions examine each page of a thesis submitted for publication to identify third-party copyright material. These institutions also ask students submitting theses to include a signed form letter containing an assurance that there is no third-party copyright material included.
It is debatatable whether such form letters are sufficient as workarounds. It was noted at an ADT Technical Committee meeting in 2006 that some university courses in Australia now require inclusion of published papers in their dissertation.
A Copyright Guide for Research Students: What you need to know about copyright before depositing your electronic thesis in an online repository was released by the OAK Law project in 2007 to assist universities to educate students currently undertaking dissertations. The guide:
provides a broad overview of copyright law
will assist research students in managing all copyright issues encountered
addresses critical issues relating to the inclusion of third party copyright material in a students thesis.
The guide includes two model third-party copyright permission requests which students can use to obtain permission from the copyright owner before including third party material in their work..
There are emerging issues being raised at ADT Central meetings, particularly in relation to non-pdf formats included in dissertations. Examples of concern are MP3 sound files, video formats and requirements for a medical degree where apparently three chapters of a PhD in some institutions must be exact replicas of papers published in high quality medical journals. Including these in an IR poses many policy problems with issues such as copyright and technical issues such as software not being able to handle a variety of media. There appears to be little “best practice” available at this stage to inform IR Managers on how to confidently handle these issues.
The International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations held bi-annually addressed these types of issues. The latest conference was held in Sweden in June 2007.
Authentication and authorization
The MAMS (Meta Access Management System Project) was funded in the first round of SII projects to work on authentication, authorization and identity management issues relating to IRs. The following animated videos explain what an access federation means and the technology used:
Access Control Use Cases
There are many use cases requiring access control:
publisher embargoes
"commercial in confidence" material
culturally sensitive material
other restricted material
An authentication matrix is an ideal long term solution and provides a sophisticated way to enable authorised users to access appropriate content upon request.
The Accessibility Framework is a key DEST agenda looking at the issues surrounding authorisation and authentication. Projects funded under the SII are seen as key infrastructure in the development of the Accessibility Framework because "much of the value of research accrues through effective dissemination of research outcomes, leading to greater societal understanding or take up of the results. One of the best ways to make research outcomes as accessible as possible is to expose the research output through an open access institutional repositories".
The Research Quality Framework is seen as just one instance where the Accessibility Framework can be applied.
Becoming part of the Australian MAMS Federation will be an institutional decision, but the IR Manager may have a role to play in informing that process.
The MAMS project looks at:
managing authentication, authorisation and identities through the integration of multiple solutions
common services for digital rights, search services and metadata management
middleware components to increase efficiency in research infrastructure
architecture capable of supporting multiple, independent models
potential for inter-institutional communication
MAMS Project documentation is available from their website, and includes papers, presentations, reports and access to demonstration systems.
The MAMS Federation is a prototype infrastructure for the Australian Higher Education sector:
identity providers and service providers agree to trust each other
the Federation is used to exchange content and information about users
trust relationships between all parties are managed by the Federation
The EuroCAMP 2007 conference website provides links to updates on the state of deployment in Europe, where there are roughly 14 national federations (April 2007), indicating that Identity Federation deployments are increasing internationally.
An identity federation terminology is available from JISC.
The Australian Access Federation (AAF) Project has been formed to develop an Australian Higher Education and Trust Federation. This project will build on the existing work funded by DEST, in the first phase of the e-Security Framework project (based at the University of Queensland) and the MAMS project.
References and Further Reading
Refer to the Further Reading section at the end of the Toolkit for bibliographic details of works referenced in this section.
“RUBRIC Toolkit: Access Management” produced May 2007
