Arguing over Copyright: An eScience tool for understanding and reasoning over copyright in digital scholarship

Abstract

This research addresses the problem of copyright on the reuse and sharing of scholarly data. The current trajectory of technological advancement is fuelling the mass digitization of scientific knowledge, promising exciting new opportunities across all fields of inquiry. However, to reach the potential of what these advances tantalizingly offer we have to challenge, and subsequently improve upon, our collective ability to manage and share such digital resources. A central topic of this challenge is copyright. Copyright, and the associated licensing practices, has become entangled with the reuse and sharing of digitized knowledge between colleagues. Troublingly, our understanding of the long term consequences of this trend are less considered than the existing copyright issues surrounding manuscript publication. Here we focus specifically on the problem of researchers getting access to accurate and appropriate copyright advice to make clear decisions, while they conduct their research. Our approach is to develop a model of automated copyright reasoning packaged into an app, usable on a mobile device. We develop a conceptual model to reason over copyright problems, which is derived from a review of copyright as it impacts research. We then translate this conceptual model into a computational model that is convenient for researchers to use. This computational model is also informed from a review of approaches and techniques from the field of computational knowledge representation and reasoning. The app, named Camden, provides advice across a range of copyright questions surrounding the reuse and sharing of research data. Such an approach to offering copyright advice is novel, and provides a unique proposition to address the larger challenge of copyright on digital scholarship. We demonstrate Camden’s utility on a set of practical research problems. Enabled by these developments, we conclude by proposing a path forward to expand its capabilities into other areas of research advice.