INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION

Project:
“Open Access Movement and WIPO”

Submitted By: -
Submitted to: -
Yash Tiwari

Bisma Noor
Mr. Amit Upadhyay
Bharat Chaddha
 INDEX

1. INTODUCTION

2. OPEN ACCESS MOVEMENT: HISTORY

3. WORLD INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ORGANIZATION

4. WIPO AND OPEN ACCESS POLICY

5. OPEN ACCESS POLICY IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

6. CONCLUSION

7. BIBLIOGRAPHY
 INTRODUCTION

Copyright can be given to any creative piece work which can be presented in any tangible
form; the creative work has to have an element of ingenuity or novelty for it to be considered
for copyright protection. Through copyright protection the author or creator gets a set of
exclusive rights, these rights are put in place so that creators get an incentive to work further,
are able to sustain themselves and also are able to bear the fruits of their hard work. The kind
of work that is generally considered are written forms of work, paintings, photographs, music
recordings, movies etc. A mere idea cannot be copyrightable, it has to be first made into a
tangible form; it’s not necessary for it to be in a physical form but has to be in a form which
can be perceived by the senses. Copyright, according to the U.S. Copyright Office, is a set of
exclusive rights that are granted to a creator of a work of an original work authorship. Those
rights include the right to make copies, publicly display a work, perform a work and create
derivative works based upon it. 1

Researches therefore cannot present the ideas and facts learned through academic research
papers of others as their own; they cannot replicate work of others verbatim. Only few
inconsequential parts can be copied along with citing the creator or author. Facts and ideas
learned from the academic work of others is not copyrightable but the expressions that are
created after these learning’s are. A copyright can be considered to be like property, the
creator has the right to allow others to get a license, he/she can sell it or give it away for free.
The problem arises when researchers are restricted heavily on the material they can or cannot
access. Often time’s non-open access journals who publish academic papers only make their
material available to their subscribers. The researchers who want to read these academic
journals can be people from impoverished communities, can be students; these people do not
generally have the means to pay hefty amounts just to access and read the research papers and
so just because they do not have the means to subscribe to a journal can it be said that they do
not have the right to learn. It is also not possible to make copies and display those copies
publically because that is illegal. Here the counter argument is that if all journals are made
open access, the writers will not be able to bear the fruits of their labor and injustice would be
done to them. But many do agree that there should be a limit to the intellectual property
protection, after a reasonable period these copyrighted material should come into public
domain.

11
United States Copyright Office, Copyright Basics (Circular 1)
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf
 OPEN ACCESS MOVEMENT: HISTORY

The foundation stone for open access (OA) was laid by Paul Ginsparg in 1991 when he
established the arXiv repository at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LAN-L) in order to
make preprints in physics freely accessible. Other leading protagonists and co-founders of the
OA Movement were, or are, Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly
Communication and a faculty fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and
Stevan Harnad, a cognitive scientist, who operates the blog Open Access Archivangelism,
among other things.

Since the beginning, OA has been seen as a way of improving the supply of scholarly
literature. Closed-access to scholarly literature, and the information it contains, is available
for use only to scholars and scientists whose institutions can afford to pay for it. However,
rising acquisition costs have led to a burden on the acquisition budgets of scholarly libraries
and, as a result, to a deterioration of the literature supply. Journal literature has been
particularly - although not exclusively - affected by these developments, which is why they
are known as the "serials crisis". Dewatripont estimate that between 1975 and 1995 the prices
of scholarly journals in the science, technology, and medicine (STM) sector grew by between
200 and 300 % beyond inflation. Bosch and Henderson (2013) report price increase rates of
6% for 2013, compared to an increase in the consumer price index (CPI) of just 1.5 %.
German scholarly libraries' expenditure on scholarly journals rose by approximately 19%
between 2007 and 2013, while their budget increased by less than 3%, and the cumulative
inflation rate was just over 8%2 (Herb, 2014). By contrast, analysts estimate that commercial
scholarly publishers normally achieve profit margins of between 20 and 30 % 3

There are a lot people who endorse the open access movement in many parts the world. In
USA, the case of Aaron Swartz is a very good example. Before him there was also people
like Michael Hart, father of Project Gutenberg, he spent many years transcribing thousands of
books for public use; and Carl Malamud, he made the US Securities and Exchange
Commission make available millions of corporate documents free of cost. Aaron Swartz was
of the belief that scholarly papers should be freely available to the public. To prove a point he
downloaded thousands of papers from non-open access site JSTOR through MIT’s servers.
He was later unjustly prosecuted for his unlawful act, which later on lead him to take his own
life. His life and death inspired many and also strengthened the open-access movement.

2
Herb, 2014
3
Van Noorden 2013
 In another such example an idealistic Kazakhstan student, Alexandra Elbakyan created the
Sci-Hub, a pirate website that takes copies of academic papers and provides them to those
who ask. Her belief is that although copyright is necessary the same is detrimental to the
advancement of educational research. The paywalls created to protect the writers are
siphoning students and other knowledge seekers of their right to information. Alexandra
bypassed this by getting through these paywalls to get hold of research papers and making
them available to the public. Her actions have brought in mixed reactions, some stress that
this is blatant infringement of copyright but others academics and students alike appreciate
this bold move and hope that Sci-Hub becomes the next Napster, an illegal music sharing site
which changed the music industry.

In both these instances it has to be remembered that there was no malice involved, these
were just students who wanted to bring in freedom to access information or quench their
thirst for knowledge. Generally this is the case worlwide, wherein the people striving for
open access are students and teachers who are bogged down by high subscription fees of
these for-profit journals and sites.

In the context of making copies or scans for personal studies and use, the Indian case The
Chancellor, Masters & Scholars of the University of Oxford & Ors. v. Rameshwari
Photocopy Services & Ors. (DU Photocopying Case) is a landmark case. Here the court held
that compilation of photocopies of relevant parts from different books, their preparation and
distribution to the students by educational institutions does not constitute infringement of
copyright under the Copyright Act, 1957. It held that such ‘course packs’ are authorised by
the educational institutions and are prepared by the faculty, so means it is reproduction of
work by teacher in course of instruction and thus won’t amount to copyright infringement by
using the Section 52(1)(i) of the Act4.

Conclusively we can say that open access is the way of the future, as technology is
advancing, the internet becoming a sea of knowledge and opportunity people will stand up
for their rights of free and open access, especially for educational uses. And it is increasingly
becoming more and more important to alter our copyright laws according to these changes.

4 Lawrence Liang, A blow for the right to knowledge, The Hindu (19 Sept. 2016)
 WORLD INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
ORGANIZATION

World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), international organization designed to

promote the worldwide protection of both industrial property (inventions, trademarks, and
designs) and copyrighted materials (literary, musical, photographic, and other artistic works).
The organization, established by a convention signed in Stockholm in 1967, began operations
in 1970 and became a specialized agency of the United Nations in December 1974. It is
headquartered in Geneva.

The origins of WIPO can be traced to 1883, when 14 countries signed the Paris Convention
for the Protection of Industrial Property, which created intellectual-property protections for
inventions, trademarks, and industrial designs. The convention helped inventors gain
protection for their works outside their native countries. In 1886 the Berne
Convention required member countries to provide automatic protection for works that were
produced in other member countries. The two organizations, which had established separate
secretariats to enforce their respective treaties, merged in 1893 to become the United
International Bureau for the Protection of Intellectual Property (BIRPI), which was based in
Bern, Switzerland.

In 1960 BIRPI moved its headquarters to Geneva. The aims of WIPO are twofold. First,
through international cooperation, WIPO promotes the protection of intellectual property.
The organization now administers more than 20 intellectual-property treaties. Second, WIPO
supervises administrative cooperation between the Paris, Berne, and other intellectual unions
regarding agreements on trademarks, patents, and the protection of artistic and literary works.
WIPO’s role in enforcing intellectual-property protections increased in the mid 1990s, when
it signed a cooperation agreement with the World Trade Organization. As electronic
commerce grew through the development of the Internet, WIPO was charged with helping to
resolve disputes over the use of Internet domain names.

WIPO’s membership consists of more than 180 countries. Its main policy-making body is the
General Assembly, which convenes every two years. WIPO also holds a biennial conference,
which determines the organization’s budget and programs. More than 170 nongovernmental
organizations maintain observer status.
 WIPO AND OPEN ACCESS POLICY

The World Intellectual Property Organization announced on 16th November 2016 its
new Open Access policy to promote the widest possible public access to its publications,
furthering the Organization’s commitment to the dissemination and sharing of knowledge.

As the world reference source for intellectual property-related information, WIPO houses
extensive collections of publications that include studies, reports, guides, and other learning
resources. The Open Access policy will facilitate access for policy-makers, researchers,
practitioners and anyone else seeking to use and build upon these resources.

“WIPO’s publications are unique collections of valuable information,” said WIPO Director
General Francis Gurry. “Our Open Access policy formalizes our efforts to ensure that this
wealth of knowledge is ever-more readily available for use by everyone.”5

To support the implementation of the Open Access Policy, WIPO will use the suite
of Creative Commons Intergovernmental Organizations (IGO) licenses, which it helped
develop with a group of international organizations in 2013. Creative Commons licenses are a
widely used and easily understood set of copyright tools and model agreements that facilitate
access to and use of creative content.

From now, new publications created and wholly owned by WIPO, as well as a selection of
existing publications, will be licensed under the CC-BY 3.0 IGO license or one of the
other licenses in the Creative Commons IGO suite. WIPO publications available under
Creative Commons licenses will be clearly identified and searchable within the publications
area of the WIPO website.

Through these widely used tools, WIPO is supporting open archive initiatives that promote
the dissemination of content through interoperability standards and efficient licensing
schemes.

Paolo Lanteri, legal officer in the copyright law division at WIPO, told the conference from the
audience that WIPO licences out material it owns, but does not licence the documents owned by the
member states unless it has received the permission of the member states to do so. International
agreements are in the public domain and are not being licensed, Lanteri said.

5
http://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2016/article_0016.html
 OPEN ACCESS POLICY IN INTERNATIONAL
ORGANIZATIONS

Open access is “part of the DNA” of international intergovernmental organisations, Charlotte

Beauchamp, head of editorial and design at the World Intellectual Property Organization, said
during a workshop last week. Representatives of different international organisations
described during the workshop the increasing use of an open access policy by their
organisations.

A workshop on International Organizations and Open Access was organised on 12 June

during the World Summit on the Information Society Forum 20176 which took place from
12-16 June.

The WSIS Forum, co-organised by the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU),

UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Conference on Trade and Development
(UNCTAD), is the largest annual gathering in the world of the “ICT for development
community” according to the ITU. The event was hosted by the ITU.

Open Access

Several speakers underlined the large amount of data and content that is produced by
international organisations.

The question of open access is “much broader and more complex” than just access to
research, Beauchamp said. The shared objective of open access is, according to Beauchamp,
encouraging users to take the content and share it without any technical or licence barrier.

The “big game changer” in the area of open access are the technical opportunities, Andrea
Stojanov, head of Digital Communications at the Asian Development Bank, said.

Stephen Wyber, manager, policy and advocacy, International Federation of Library

Associations and Institutions (IFLA), said libraries have always pushed for more open access,
in order to give different communities and public as much access as possible.

Wyber said that access to information is “the driver of development.” Better access to
information is “a key factor” in empowering individuals in creating more innovative

6
WSIS Forum 2017
societies, he added. Libraries have increasingly been focussing on making information
“relevant and useful,” Wyber said.

Open Access and International Organisations

Ian Coltart, manager, copyright, licensing and external publication at the World Health
Organization, said that the traditional approach of WHO was to reserve all rights regarding a
publication. Permission was required from WHO for the re-use of content, he added.

The milestones of open access are the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in
the Sciences and Humanities of 2003 and the Paris Open Educational Resources (OER)
Declaration of 2012, according to Ian Denison, chief of UNESCO Publishing and Branding.

The lack of an internal quality control framework was one of the reasons for the late
movement by international organisations toward an open access policy, Denison said.
Another reason was the lack of an open access licence which could be commonly used by all
international organisations, he added. In 2013 a new licence, the Creative Commons 3.0
Intergovernmental Organisation Licence, the result of a collaboration between WIPO and the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), was approved by a lot
of international organisations, Denison said.

An “extremely powerful and a strong political message” is given when an international

organisation such as WIPO and UNESCO stands up and says that it goes for open access,
according to Wyber.

Impact of Open Access

Coltart told the conference that the WHO aims at building a picture of the impact of
publication under an open access licence. The objective is not to control the re-use of the
content, but to verify whether the information is really open to everyone and map how people
are using open data, Coltart said.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, recently compared the average
number of downloads of papers made available by open access with the average number of
downloads of papers not made available by open access, Salvatore Mele, head of open access
at CERN, said. The results clearly show that scientific papers were used by a factor of two to
three times more after they were made open, he said.

But experiments at CERN need a massive amount of money, which is provided by funds built
over several years, Mele said. Making the data from the experiments openly available would
reduce incentives for the investors, according to Mele. CERN found a middle way by making
half of the data available several years after the experiment, he said.

Marco Trovatello, cross-media coordination & strategy advisor at the European Space
Agency (ESA), said that he “perfectly agreed’ with the way CERN controls the incentive of
its funders.
Stojanov of the Asian Development Bank said that people often underestimate the amount of
work that is required to publish data in a consistent way with the correct metadata. She also
said the Bank is looking at tracking use of its data, but did not say whether users would be
made aware of the tracking.

The Open Data for Development Network conducted a survey among the different types of
users of open data. The qualitative research provides a good indication of the proof that
people are actually using open data, Stojanov said.

John Cummings, Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO, said Wikipedia is a platform to

make images from different sources, such as international organisations, available to a large
audience. Newspapers often give Wikipedia credit for pictures they use, but Wikipedia does
not obtain any copyright in pictures on its website, Cummings said, urging them to properly
cite photos. The lack of attribution is one of the main reasons why it is difficult to verify how
people use the content, according to Coltart.
 CONCLUSION

The open-access movement has been around for more than a dozen years. It started with
three ambitious proclamations made in the early 2000s following meetings in Berlin,
Bethesda, and Budapest. Now, it’s more of an institution than a social movement, and the
statements have come to serve as a substitute for thought.

The open-access movement is a coalition that aims to bring down the traditional scholarly
publishing industry and replace it with voluntarism and server space subsidized by academic
libraries and other non-profits. It is concerned more with the destruction of existing
institutions than with the construction of new and better ones.

The arguments in favour of open-access publishing seem initially compelling and hard to
dispute. The movement, with its emphasis on sharing information freely and electronically,
has the spirit of a researchers’ collective

While a multilateral treaty on open access to basic science and technology has been proposed
by the scholars, WIPO’s approach has been much more modest. WIPO, while not a
champion of the open access movement, has taken on certain initiatives related to access to
scientific information and open access, partly at prompting of the Developing Agenda7.

Under the Developing Agenda, WIPO has initiated a number a studies, workshops and
website initiatives to explore, create taxonomies of, evaluate , and highlight open access
collaborative projects.8

Such initiatives may provide windows of access into a edifice of increasing copyright
protection that has developed over the past century, but they also represent a highly tentative,
limited, and incremental approach that may assist a limited number institutions in the least
developed countries and developing countries, but their contribution is minor in the face of
the of the scale of “information famine” and the potentials of widespread access to
knowledge that new technologies might offer9.

7
Gavin Baker, Open Access and New WIPO Director, accessed march 27, 2016)
8
WIPO, Progress Report CDIP/8/2 (Geneva, WIPO, 2011)
9
WIPO, Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights ( Geneva: WIPO, 2013)
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Books

International Copyright and Access to Knowledge by Sara Bannerman

 Articles

The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009, Author
Mikael Laakso, Published on 11th June, 2011

Open Access: The Changing Face of Scientific Publishing, Author Pranab Mukherjee
and Vishal Mishra, Published on April 2013

WIPO Adopts Open Access Policy for its Publications, Geneva , Published on
November 16th, 2016.

 Websites

http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle, The Access Principle: The Case for

Open Access to Research and Scholarship, UA Campus Repository.

https://www.ip-watch.org/2017/06/19/open-access-policy-international-
organisations/, Open Access Policy in International Organisations.

https://open-access.net/DE-EN/information-on-open-access/history-of-the-open-
access-movement/, History of the Open Access Movement.