This is a guest blog post by Josefine Hellroth Larsson. To read the blog post in Swedish, click here.
Wikimedia Sverige is currently working on several projects related to copyright in academic research. This is part of the association’s policy statement on ”free knowledge for research and education.” One of the projects focuses on so-called rights retention, which means that a researcher retains the copyright for their work without transferring it to a publisher upon publication. Currently, it is a problem that a lot of money is spent buying back researchers’ own works from publishers so that they can publish their research under an open license.
It is primarily I, Josefine Hellroth Larsson, who is working on the project. In order to familiarize myself with the issue of open academic publishing and its status in Europe and Sweden right now, I attended a conference.
The Lund Online Conference
Lund Online is a conference held every other year. It is funded by publishers involved in academic publishing, and the target audience is primarily librarians from colleges and universities. The theme for this year was *”Turning policy into practice – opportunities and consequences for stakeholders in scholarly communication.”* The participants were predominantly from the Nordic countries. Publishers were present in a fair-like setup and also participated, though to a lesser extent, in the program.
Over three days, two keynote speeches were delivered, and the rest of the sessions consisted of presentations followed by panel discussions. During all sessions, the audience had the opportunity to ask questions. Many of the discussions had a critical stance towards the current research publishing system, often with direct criticism of publishers.
The conversations covered both the breadth and depth of academic publishing, making it a very valuable experience. One recurring topic was the varying degrees of open access, as there is a whole spectrum of what counts as openness.
As a representative of Wikimedia Sverige, I was somewhat of an outsider, though many of the library participants I spoke with were familiar with us and our work. They were curious about why Wikimedia Sverige had chosen to engage with the issue and wanted to learn more about it.
Rights Retention
In a panel discussion titled ”Author rights & open licensing strategies”, the issue of rights retention was directly addressed. Per Pippin Aspaas, Head of Research and Publishing Support at the University Library of UiT (The Arctic University of Norway), participated in the discussion. He has been a driving force behind UiT’s adoption of a rights retention policy, and later, Norway as a whole adopted similar policies. He is therefore a leading figure in the movement that ”everyone” knows. Thus, Norway serves as an interesting example to consider as Wikimedia Sverige continues to work on this issue.
The Work Continues
The work now continues to map and support rights retention efforts within academic publishing in Sweden. In the coming months, Wikimedia Sverige will meet with experts and interested parties to try to promote even more openly published research. This will also benefit the work on Wikimedia platforms, as all contributors will have access to even more openly published source material.