Healthy Metadata and the EU Copyright Directive

Publishers must maintain clean, reliable metadata for their content, including about authors, institution, license types, and citations.

Throughout March, CCC is delivering a series of virtual programming planned for London Book Fair presentations. For a complete schedule, please visit copyright.com/lbf2020

This is a podcast edition for “Get Fit for Licensing: Healthy Metadata and the EU Copyright Directive,” originally scheduled for the second day of London Book Fair 2020.

Over the next two years, EU member states are required to adopt The Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which passed in 2019. Importantly for scholarly publishers – whether based in the EU or not – this directive provides a clear and explicit formulation of the legal status of copying materials for text and data mining (TDM) and other types of information extraction.

While a narrow, non-commercial exception for scientific research does exist, the Directive leaves in place critical protections around licensing. To capitalize on any opportunities, publishers must maintain clean, reliable metadata for their content, including about authors, institution, license types, and citations.

“I’m a real believer in having infrastructure and standards that kind of enable better and quicker, more effective uses and reuses of content,” says Duncan Campbell, Senior Director, Global Sales Partnerships, John Wiley & Sons.

“I think that metadata is a crucial component of that,” he explains. :One of the crucial aspects of this is how to identify articles, how to identify versions of articles and the sharing rules that apply to those articles.

“And so it’s really important for us, as an industry, to be tagging articles with things like which article version of it, is it an author manuscript, it is accepted, is it the version of record,” Campbell tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “Also, what license applies to that piece of content, so it can be understood whether it can be used and reused.”

Duncan Campbell is Senior Director, Global Sales Partnerships at John Wiley & Sons, where he is responsible for licensing, agent relations and copyright & permissions for Wiley’s academic journal and database content. In addition, he is also engaged in developing Wiley’s strategies and policies in areas such as government affairs, content sharing/syndication and text & data mining.

Roy Kaufman, Managing Director of both Business Development and Government Relations for Copyright Clearance Center, also joins the virtual panel discussion.