Legal Aspects of Open Access to Publicly Funded Research - Données de la Recherche

[From the Executive Summary] This chapter gives an overview of the main legal issues and policy considerations involved in accessing, disseminating or using both publicly funded scientific publications and research data under open access (OA) conditions. The term open access is used to denote public availability of scientific output (publications and data) without payment and re-use restriction. This paper focuses on the legal aspects of OA to publicly funded research results and, in particular, it examines whether copyright law and database protection rights support, impede, enable or are neutral towards the implementation of open access principles for the dissemination of publicly funded scientific results. After a general overview of intellectual property protection at the international level, Section 2 examines the laws of different jurisdictions (including countries from the European Union, the United States of America, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan and South Korea) as they relate to the protection of scientific publications and research data. The brief overview of the copyright and, where applicable, the database legislation in force in the different jurisdictions shows that the scope of protection granted to research output varies significantly from one country to another. Although the implementation of OA principles is based on contractual arrangements between authors, publishers, universities, and funding organisations, the framework set by copyright and database protection regimes, where relevant, is an important factor in how those arrangements are formed."