Invited Speaker
Prof. Dr. emeritus Rainer Kuhlen
Department of Computer and Information Science
University of Konstanz, Germany
We are pleased to announce that Professor Rainer Kuhlen has agreed to deliver an invited speech at IMCW2014.
Professor Kuhlen studied philosophy, literature and sociology in Münster University. He received his PhD degree from the University of Regensburg and became professor of computational linguistics at the Department of Computer Science of Koblenz University. In 1980, he moved to the then newly founded Department of Computer and Information Science of University of Konstanz where he carried out research on and taught information retrieval, information ethics and politics, collaborative knowledge management for e-learning, and information markets until his retirement in 2010. Professor Kuhlen chaired several committees including the Committee of Communication and Information of the German Commission for UNESCO, UNESCO Chair for Communications (ORBICOM), Nethics e.V. (Ethics im the Net), and German Coalition “Copyright for education and Science”. He also acts as consultant and expert among others for DFG , the Volkswagen Foundation , the Goethe Institute , the Leibniz Association , the Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Culture, especially in the area the copyright adaptation.
Title: “Will there still be a need for copyright regulation when open access becomes the default for publishing in science?”
Abstract. In the last twenty years, copyright regulation for science and education has been more of a disabling factor than an enabling one. With the increasing commercial importance of information goods and services, national and international copyright regulation has turned copyright into a trade law rather than an author’s or user’s law. This can be clearly seen in the fact that the exceptions and limitations for free, respectively fair use have been weakened and exploiters´ rights have been strengthened, in particular by giving priority to licensing and contractual agreements rather than to legally binding copyright exceptions. This copyright shift towards exploiters´ rights is also true with respect to science and education. All attempts on the part of science organizations lobbying to improve the situation have failed so far, in particular proposals to replace the system of complicated and insufficient copyright exceptions by a comprehensive statutory regulation such as a general science and education clause. Interestingly enough, this failure has contributed to encouraging more and more authors in science to choose open access journals with free licenses as the primary means of publication. This worldwide tendency is clearly supported by national and supra-national information programs, in particular within the European Commission. The development is a real challenge to copyright and market regulation and raises many questions; among these this paper will concentrate on the following: Will there still be a need for copyright regulation (beyond the protection/guarantee of strong moral rights for authors) when open access becomes the default for publication in science? Will open access become the default commercial publication model, or will the information industry continue to rely on contractual and licensing agreements? And if open access becomes the default, what are the business and particularly the financing models for publishing? Will the public be willing to support and finance commercial open access models (as it has done and continues to do for libraries), and/or will the publishing industry be able to develop new, economically efficient publishing models independent of public subsidy, mainly based on new value-added services?