An Open Letter to the British Library: charges for Open Access and restricted dissemination of Out-of-copyright material

An open letter to the British Library Board about lack of Open Access and restrictions on out-of-copyright works
Dear Andy Stephens BSc (Head of Corporate Planning and Secretariat, The British Library) andy.stephens@bl.uk
I am a chemist at the University of Cambridge with a major research interest in eScience – the UK term for the combination of scientific research and scholarship with the new opportunities and power of the Grid and cyberinfrastructure. The UK, through the DTI and others, has spent many hundreds of millions of pounds and I am funded in this area by EPSRC, DTI, comapnies such as Unilever and also by JISC (the Joint Infrastructure Systems Committee). Earlier this year, for example, I was invited to a joint international JISC/NSF meeting on “data-driven science” to discuss the future of cyberinfrastructure over the next 8 years. At that meeting a central theme was the universal availability of digital information without physical, semantic, financial or legal barriers.
In chemistry much of the primary scientific information first appears in peer-reviewed publications in a form unsatisfactory for eScholarship. The primary barriers are business/legal in that publishers assert ownership over the content and the piecewise requirement to negotiate licences and other permissions. In practice, therefore, the material is limited to non-copyrightable material (data or out-of-copyright) or to Open Access publications where the licence asserts the right of the user (human or robot) to use the material without permission.
I was therefore dismayed to find recently that the British Library not only fails to recognise and promote access to this uncopyrightable or Open material, but also adds additional financial and legal restrictions on access (see http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=571 and http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=543 and several other posts). In summary the BL (a) charges for Open Access articles and (b) puts draconian restrictions on access to and redissemination of material long out of copyright. I do not know how widespread this is, but I surmise that there is a blanket restriction on effective access that applies to all content. If true, this means that the British Library, which is involved in digital research (http://www.bl.uk/about/strategic/digiresenv.html) and understands the potential is, paradoxically, a major barrier to eScience.
eScience is at the stage where it needs large amounts of semantic high-quality electronic content with zero-access barriers. Traditional operation of copyright and permissions stands in the way and I would ask the BL to take a national and international lead in tackling this problem rather than amplifying it.
[NOTE: Peter Suber, the leading Open Access commentator and expert has said publicly that he was not able to understand the BL’s position on payment and access permissions for Open Access journals – and presumably for out-of-copyright material as well]