Business, Innovation and Skills CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by the British Library

Executive Summary

The British Library was pleased to take part in the Finch Review and welcomed the Finch Group recommendations on open access and the Government’s subsequent commitments.

The wider accessibility of publicly-funded research, combined with flexible reuse conditions, will raise the social, economic, scientific and cultural impact of UK research.

Any shift towards open access should be accompanied by a move to minimise restrictions and limitations on the rights of use and reuse.

A flexible and gradual transition to open access is necessary to allow for new business models to emerge.

While no single licence for use of open access content is perfect in all aspects, the attractions of more liberal and standardised Creative Commons licences are evident.

The British Library supports journal content being made free to view through the public library network, but would be concerned if the repertoire of available content was wider in public libraries than at the national library.

The British Library

1. The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the world’s greatest research libraries. Our mission is to advance the world’s knowledge. We provide world class information services to academic, research and business communities as well as the creative industries, schools, further education and the general public.

2. The British Library collects, preserves and gives access to over 150 million items, including books, journals, manuscripts, music, patents, photographs, newspapers and audio-visual content, in both physical formats and the latest digital media. The Library is also home to iconic national treasures including the Lindisfarne Gospels, Magna Carta and Shakespeare’s Quartos.

Access to British Library Collections and Services

3. One of the key statutory duties of the British Library Board under the British Library Act 1972 is to make our services “available in particular to institutions of education and learning, other libraries and industry”. Today, we continue to provide research services to a broad constituency including academics, business people, writers, teachers and individual researchers (“citizen scholars”). We support these varied user groups through reading room services, online services and document supply services.

4. At the heart of our 2020 Vision (http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/2020vision/) is a passionate belief that everyone who wants to do research should have access to the rich resource of content held by the British Library. The digital environment provides an immense opportunity to democratise access to content by removing physical barriers. However, in enabling digital access, there are many competing factors at play, including striking the appropriate balance between the needs of users and the rights of creators, determining the role of public services, and bridging the digital divide by ensuring the public are able to make the most of digital opportunities.

5. The British Library needs to stay abreast of the changes in access to scholarly publications and such developments are very important to the Library: the Library subscribes to around 45,000 journals, we collect around 36,000 journals through the UK legal deposit privilege and we are a key channel for UK and overseas researchers to access scholarly articles. The access that we provide has many synergies with higher education institutions, especially at this time when the financial power of many university libraries to subscribe to scholarly journals is diminishing.

The UK Government’s Commitments on Access

6. The British Library was pleased to participate in the Finch Review and supported the involvement of all stakeholders, including publishers, academics, libraries and funding bodies. We support the commitments on access to research set out in the Government’s response to the Finch Group Report published in July 2012. The British Library welcomed the statement made in May 2012 by the Minister of State for Universities and Science, the Rt Hon David Willetts MP, that “the Coalition is committed to the principle of public access to publicly-funded research results”.1

7. The British Library supports the central recommendation that content arising from research, notably when supported from public funds, should be accessible to the greatest number of people and should, where possible, be subject to liberal terms and conditions for reuse. The recommendations by Dame Janet Finch will ensure that more peer-reviewed outputs of UK research are accessible globally free of charge; if combined with flexible conditions for reuse, this will raise the social, economic, scientific and cultural impact of UK research. We accept and support the principle that access to publicly funded research should be available beyond the academic research community, to benefit SMEs, life-long learners, journalists and others.

8. The British Library acknowledges the vital role played by learned societies in the scholarly communication ecosystem. These journals are often of great value. The circumstances and business models of learned society publishers should be considered in the transition to open access.

Rights of Use and Reuse in Relation to Open Access Research Publications

9. The British Library supports the recommendation that any shift towards open access to publicly-funded UK research should be accompanied by a move to minimise restrictions and limitations on the rights of use and reuse, in order to take full advantage of the “open” nature of the content. This recommendation will allow researchers the freedom to repurpose material and make full use of the latest research tools, such as text and data mining.

10. The British Library believes that a suitable licence wrapper needs to be applied to open access content. No single licence is perfect in all aspects, but the attractions of more liberal and standardised Creative Commons licences are evident as they allow for greater and more flexible reuse and greater legal certainty for the user.

Gold vs. Green Open Access Models

11. The British Library supports the recommendation that the implementation and transition process for open access needs to be flexible and gradual, as we need to allow for new business models to emerge, both in the publishing industry and within the research ecosystem.

Repositories and Hubs

12. The infrastructure of subject and institutional repositories should be developed so they can play a complimentary role to formal publishing models. The successes of discipline repositories such as Europe PubMed Central (http://europepmc.org), of which the British Library is a leading partner, should be built on. We believe that the Government should encourage a national approach to enabling the discovery of open access resources, across both open access publications and subject-based or institutional repositories, including persistent identifiers, linking to institutional and publishers’ knowledge bases and other developments which are critical to improving discovery.

13. For its part, the British Library is prepared to play an important role in the collection, connection to and preservation/conservation of open access content. For example, the British Library and the legal deposit libraries in the UK will collect, preserve and give access to UK research outputs through the Draft Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013, anticipated to come into force on 6 April 2013. Under the Regulations, access to content collected through UK legal deposit will be restricted to the premises of the legal deposit libraries.

Monographs

14. The British Library supports the efforts of UK higher education institutions, research funders and publishers to work together to promote further development in open access publishing for scholarly monographs. For example, the Library is a partner of Knowledge Unlatched (http://www.knowledgeunlatched.org), a global consortium piloting a new model to enable open access to scholarly monographs. 

15. The British Library is engaged in many other aspects of opening up information and data for researchers. We are committed to digitising our unique collections and enabling greater access for all to these resources, which is another critical aspect of opening up information, content and data in support of research.

The Finch Recommendation on Access to Research Outputs through Public Libraries

16. The British Library supports the recommendation that journal content (both archive and current) be made free to view through the public library network at no extra cost to the public purse. Whilst the British Library welcomes greater access to content, we wish to register our concern at the possibility that the repertoire of available journal content could be wider at public libraries than at the national libraries and higher education institutions, as we would have to continue to pay for licenses. We will continue to express this concern through the implementation group and in our discussions with individual publishers.

Conclusion

17. The British Library strongly supports the lead that the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills is taking in the move towards a more open, accessible and re-usable model of scholarly communication. We look forward to working closely with other stakeholders in the implementation of the policy.

Tom Johnson
Advocacy Officer

14 February 2013