“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea…”[44]
The public mission of universities has evolved over time, ranging from character formation of elite citizens, to ‘critic and conscience’ of society, to supporting active citizenship in an emerging ‘knowledge society’.[45] A common thread throughout is an engagement with society that involves exchanges based on information, the currency of scholarship. Some claim that information is well suited to such public missions:
“Information is particularly suited to gift economics, as information can be copied and transmitted at practically no cost. It can be treated as a non-rival good: when you share information, you do not deprive yourself of the information (although you may deprive yourself of certain revenues that could be gained in the market economy from the intellectual property rights).”[46]
Although information may be non-rivalrous, a property of what economists most often call public goods,[47] it does not always come for free. The University of Melbourne spends in excess of $12 million per annum on purchasing scholarly publications and several million more dollars per year in licensing copyright materials. Significant additional costs are incurred and new skills required in stewardship of digital information and in data curation. In turn, our academics earn limited income from their intellectual property, they receive relatively small honorariums for their contributions to peer review and journal editing processes, and the University earns some income from licensing multimedia courseware to others.
While most in the academic community would aspire to further the public mission, research and teaching are the activities that a university and its scholars are most directly paid for and encouraged to engage in. Given limited time and resources, research and teaching are where most of an institution’s energies will be concentrated. As universities in Australia have moved inexorably away from their former reliance on government funding they have looked for other sources of income, including commercialisation of intellectual property. Such commercialisation, involving engagement with private corporations, is often seen to stand in contrast to public dissemination of scholarship.
Each of these three perspectives — the tradeoffs between the direct benefits of teaching and research and those of the public mission, resource conflicts, and commercial conflicts of principle — require some brief examination in terms of their applicability to scholarly information.
Although teaching and research are traditionally the core activities of universities, a range of direct and indirect benefits does accrue to a university and its scholars from wide dissemination of scholarly information.
First, universities and other cultural institutions are (amongst other things) stewards of resources provided at least partially through public funding. Scholars are beneficiaries of access to these resources. It is doubtful that a given level public funding would be maintained if universities were not to engage in the public mission of disseminating scholarship generated by them.
Second, public dissemination aids in increasing citations.[48] While citations are valued primarily within the scholarly community rather than in the community at large, public interest in a piece of research can increase the need for other scholars to cite it — if only to refute something that is very public. In addition, measures of research impact beyond citations (for example, metrics) are gaining currency and these are typically more susceptible to influence by public action.
Third, public engagement can provide the building blocks for continuing research. Some academics are using means such as YouTube videos to make their research more broadly accessible, to trigger engagement with the wider community, and to stimulate input into a new cycle of scholarship.[49]
Fourth, when universities engage with and contribute positively to society, they enhance their brand and, without the need for expensive marketing, encourage the best scholars and students to aspire to join them.
A university’s role in beneficence sometimes sits awkwardly with a desire to reap the significant benefits that can accrue from a public service mission. Indeed, some contend that universities fulfil their public interest mission by virtue of engaging in the core activities of research and teaching.[50]
The public mission may also conflict with students’ perspective. In recent years students have become more demanding customers of a university as their individual contribution to the cost of courses has risen. This can be contrasted with their role as co-learners and researchers and therefore as a part of the university community of scholars contributing to society. As with many other aspects of the Net Generation society it is likely that these seemingly conflicting goals will continue to co-exist.
Regarding resource conflicts in distributing and curating information, the assumption that “information can be copied and transmitted at practically no cost”[51] bears examination. It would be more accurate to say that the cost of copying and transmitting information has become very cheap in the Internet era, particularly in comparison to the past. The marginal cost of copying and disseminating information to any one recipient is close to zero, making it a non-rival good,[52] but this does not mean the cost of the curation and dissemination mechanisms are equally minimal. In fact, they have a substantial fixed cost[53] (which is perhaps why libraries and publishers continue to exist).
Who should bear these fixed costs: institutions, governments or society? In the past, the cost was nearly exclusively public — governments gave universities money to carry out activities such as buying books and making them available. Now, private companies digitise books and gain revenue from making them available, for example by charging third parties for the right to advertise beside the book’s content. This new funding model is rapidly increasing the size of the overall investment in scholarly resources, and resulting in the witting or unwitting privatisation of a former public good—the digital copy, the one that will be most-used in the future,[54] now belongs to a private entity. Perhaps the only sensible way for these costs to be met in future is through collective action by public institutions.[55]
Potential conflicts between wide dissemination and commercialisation of scholarly information are a complex and emotive issue to which we cannot do complete justice here. It may be tempting to suggest that academics and universities should jealously guard the results of their scholarship as potential differentiators. Mitigating against this idea, it is clear that no single university or university system owns bodies of knowledge: rather, “collectively the (international) academy does control such a critical mass.”[56]
What value does any individual piece of scholarship have for its creator or for a university? As mentioned earlier, there is the potential value of commercialisation, which is what intellectual property laws exist to guard.
The digital world has changed what we can do with information. Copyright and other intellectual property rights are about what we may do with information. Copyright is a form of property that exists only because the law says so. It exists to maximise good by balancing the incentive to create (owners’ or creators’ rights) with the public good of information being disseminated and used (users’ rights).
Ideas themselves are not subject to copyright. Expression of ideas in material form, for example in writing, is subject to copyright.
Copyright is a matter of balance in public policy, and part of that balance is a complex system of exceptions. Against the background of ‘all rights reserved’ there are significant movements intended to encourage and facilitate sharing of copyright material. Open Source licences for software allow programmers to build on the work of others, often on condition that they share their own work in a similar manner. Similarly, Creative Commons licences can be applied to literary and other works to make them available to others for free, subject to various restrictions at the discretion of the copyright owner.
Houghton, Steele and Sheehan (2006) suggest that adopting an Open Access approach to scholarly communication has potential economic benefits for Australian universities. These include: reducing the time and cost of the research and discovery process; reducing duplication of research; enabling better-informed research (and fewer chases down blind alleys); enhancing opportunities for multi-disciplinary collaborations; providing a ‘breadth’ dimension for researchers; and improving educational outcomes.[57]
In the international arena universities are increasingly viewed through the lens of their position in rankings such as the Shanghai Jiao Tong Index where research performance is a significant factor, especially the number of individual publications and citations appearing in high-impact journals.[58] To climb the rankings ladder universities encourage their researchers to publish in particular journals, and thus accrue prestige to the institution. By pursuing this course universities may inadvertently be creating an unwanted commercial dependency on the large transnational companies that produce those journals.[59]
Some view the move to Open Access as inevitable: “It seems like a clash between the irresistible force of the open knowledge movement against the immovable object of intellectual property ownership.”[60] Indeed, more and more significant institutions are moving towards open publishing.[61] Great universities help to shape societies and are in turn shaped by them: Net Generation society is permeable at the boundaries between what is private and what is public. It is likely that this society will expect the same from its public-spirited institutions.
There is increasing pressure from funding agencies to ensure that research outputs and research data are made as widely available as possible through initiatives like Open Access repositories. The underlying argument is that the taxpayers, the students and the benefactors have already paid and should not have to pay twice.[62]
What is the value of a university’s information and who has moral ownership of it? On what principles does it decide when to give information away and when to license its material to others? When to license other people’s output? When to give away the source data and scholarly outputs of research, teaching and learning activities?