ROMEO Project: final report

The JISC FAIR programme aimed to “evaluate and explore different mechanisms for the disclosure and sharing of content (and the related challenges) to fulfil the vision of a web of resources built by groups with a long term stake in the future of those resources, but made available to the whole community of learning.” Many of the projects funded under the programme are exploring the establishment of Institutional Repositories (IR) of academic research output, using the Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to disclose and harvest metadata about those resources (often referred to as eprints). However, some of the main barriers to the success of such repositories are not technical, but legal and cultural. In particular, the IR model raises a wide range of IPR issues. For example, if academics sign away their right to self-archive through journal publisher Copyright Transfer Agreements (CTAs), the whole process may collapse at the first hurdle. Once a paper has been self-archived, how can academics ensure that the rights they want asserting (say the right to be named as author, and to stop the text being altered) are asserted? Conversely, how can they ensure that other rights given them by copyright law that they may not care for (e.g. to prohibit copying) are waived? There are also rights issues for Data Providers (DPs) and Service Providers (SPs). DPs may be pleased that their metadata is being harvested, but what if someone then starts selling access to it? SPs may add value to the metadata they harvest, but who owns the rights in that enhanced metadata and how can it be protected? The RoMEO Project was funded for one year (1 August 2002 – 31 July 2003) to investigate the IPR issues relating to the self-archiving of eprints by academic authors via Institutional Repositories. It aimed to develop some simple rights metadata by which such papers may be protected in an open-access environment. It also aimed to investigate the issues relating to the IPR protection of metadata disclosed by Data Providers and harvested by Service Providers, with a view to developing a means by which the rights of such freely-available metadata might be protected under the OAI-PMH.