Update: Coalition copyright reform advocacy efforts
Since the start of September, SPARC Europe has been coordinating a coalition of 15 concerned organisations to advocate towards the EU on a draft copyright directive the Parliament, Council and Commission are working on.
Among the main issues in the draft are:
- potential requirement of a second payment by readers to publishers for access to “open access” works for which publishers have already been paid
- requirement of filtering sytems and bureaucracy on open access repositories
- very limited exceptions to copyright for education and text and data mining, risking a missed opportunity to support and enhance education, science and research in Europe
Our coalition has published an open letter to MEPs and EU Member States, which is still open for further signatures from individuals and institutions; see here: http://sparceurope.org/copyrightreform/
So far, in addition to the original signatory organisations, another 24 institutions have signed and 338 leaders and members of the European Library/Scholarly Community. Among signatories are national consortia of libraries such as the Association of Hungarian Librarians, Associazione Italiana Biblioteche, the Conference of Directors of Polish Academic Libraries, Council for Finnish University Libraries, Croatian Library Association Dutch Consortium of Libraries at Universities of Applied Sciences (SHB), Estonian Librarians Association, The Finnish Research Library Association, German Library Association, the Lithuanian Research Library Consortium, Slovenian Library Association, Swedish Library Association, the Portuguese Association of Librarians, Archivists and Documentalists, Society of College National and University Libraries (SCONUL), and VVBAD (Flemish Library and Archive Association).
The coalition has been seeking meetings with decision-makers to explain our concerns and to counter argue the heavy publishing lobby. It has encouraged its respective national members to meet MEPs and explain the issues in our open letter, and also to send the letter on to their respective governments.
There is a strong lobby in favour of some of the problematic proposals in the draft directive, so we have a significant job ahead of us until the legislative process ends, probably in the spring of 2018. We will update you on progress in due course.
Follow the dicussion on this matter onTwitter using one of these hashtags #CopyrightReform
#KeepOAOpen