Written evidence submitted by Research Libraries UK

Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee: Digital Opportunities: A review of intellectual property and growth - by Professor Ian Hargreaves

1. Research Libraries UK ( www.RLUK.ac.uk ) is a consortium of 30 of the largest research organizations in the UK and Ireland, including the three UK national libraries. Founded more than 25 years ago, RLUK is dedicated to ensuring the highest standards of research library support.

2. RLUK is a member of the Copyright for Knowledge alliance and we strongly endorse and support the submission that Copyright for Knowledge has made to the Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee regarding Professor Hargreavesʼ review of intellectual property and growth.

3. RLUK members are particularly keen to see a positive response to the problem of orphan works. We also wish to see the adoption of the exceptions for text and data mining and for library archiving recommended by Professor Hargreaves in support of education and research in the UK. We also support the vitally important recommendation that contractual terms should not be used to trump legitimate exceptions.

4. RLUK members see great potential in text and data mining to advance scholarship and promote innovation. The ability to make connections across and within distinct corpora of knowledge will become an increasingly vital part of the research landscape. We have a unique opportunity to ensure that copyright legislation does not become an inadvertent barrier to effective data and text mining.

5. Without a clear exception for text and data mining there is a danger that vendors will use the copyright regime to create new monopolies - only allowing researchers to mine content using tools supplied by that content provider. Copyright legislation should not be used to create new service-provision monopolies.

6. Such monopolies would be especially problematic as the great power of text and data mining comes from the very ability to interrogate a range of material from a range of content providers.

7. RLUK is hugely encouraged that the Government has accepted all of the Hargreaves recommendations and is planning on moving forward with a more open intellectual property system. The library community works hard to ensure that it respects copyright and the rights of creators. However, the current regime is far from optimized for the needs of 21st Century researchers and students. By accepting the recommendations of the Hargreaves Review the Government will help to create a modern IP environment that will bring great benefit to scholarship for many years to come.

5 September 2011