On 23 Apr 2005, at 20:48, Stevan Harnad wrote:
Richard Poynder has written an -- as always -- thoughtful and informative article:Richard Poynder, The role of digital rights management in Open Access, Indicare, April 22, 2005. http://www.indicare.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=93 http://poynder.blogspot.com/2005/04/role-of-digital-rights-management- in.html
I find it significant that Richard defines DRM as a two-part phenomenon: metadata and services (ie a layer of 'rights' metadata and a layer of software that enables appropriate activities given the correct interpretation of the metadata). Note that this conforms to the Open Archives Initiative model of data and service providers communicating through sharing metadata about digital items. DRM is just one example of many publication-related issues that can be dealt with in such a way - preservation, data archiving, version control, classification, certification (all taken from a brief scan of the Self-Archiving FAQ http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/). Open Access, a simple phenomenon whose implications are well understood by researchers, librarians, administrators, managers, funders and politicians, provides the technical infrastructure, the community of users and the service environment which will underpin new solutions for all these issues. Increasingly large amounts of OA material will generate large numbers of OA services, supporting new ways of using the literature which in turn will bring new requirements for the DRM community to support. Now that funders can see the output from their projects appearing online as OA material, they can start to specify what they want to do with it (as services providers) and what extra information needs to be collected by the data providers. Now that research administrators see output from their institutions appearing online in the OA institutional repositories, they can start to work out how they want it analysed, and what metadata needs to be associated with it. My conclusion is patterned on Richards, except that where Richard's puts the OA community in hock to the DRM community, mine reverses this as follows: Until there is a lot more Open Access content available for researchers (and other stakeholders) to use to their benefit, the DRM movement (and many other movements) may struggle to make significant progress in understanding the nature of rights, responsibilities and opportunities involved in digitally-mediated scientific and scholarly research. Increasingly it appears that only by engaging with this simple issue can the [DRM] movement hope to achieve its objectives. --- Les Carr
