Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Can law catch up with e-research?

Bernard Lane, Hi-tech research outpaces law, The Australian, August 22, 2007.

Researchers riding the wave of hi-tech collaboration may leave lawyers and policymakers in their wake, commentators have warned following what is believed to be the first survey of legal issues raised by e-research.  "One of the fears is that researchers out of their frustration will avoid the law," Queensland University of Technology [QUT] legal academic Brian Fitzgerald said....

In the QUT survey [report], released today, researchers complain that formal agreements for collaboration can take longer than [their research projects]; they prefer to work around university lawyers whenever they can; and they see the need for a plain English legal guide to the use of databases....

"The moment's now for e-research because data is coming up everywhere and the value of the data rises as the volume rises," Australian e-Research Infrastructure Council executive director Rhys Francis said....The council, which met for the first time last month, will oversee $75 million of public spending.

This includes the start of work on an Australian Access Federation, which would replace cumbersome bilateral agreements for sharing access to scholarly resources throughout the sector with an automated system ultimately to be hooked into an international network.

E-research ranges from simple web-based collaboration through to open-access publishing, high-speed computing, global sharing of massive data sets and control of scientific instruments. Some observers say the term e-research will become redundant as technology reaches into all fields of research and makes the solo researcher a rare species.

The QUT survey, Legal and Project Agreement Issues in Collaboration and e-Research, involved 176 mostly university researchers, research managers, lawyers and others working in commercialisation offices....

To show what was at stake, [Fitzgerald] drew a parallel with music downloads, where practice fast outstripped the law.  "We'd rather the whole e-research system works from the get-go on a legal foundation," he said....

Update. The report is by Maree Heffernan and Nikki David, Legal and project agreement issues in collaboration and e-Research: Survey Results, Queensland University of Technology, August 2007. Much of the survey covers researcher attitudes toward OA licenses for data.