LIBER has signed a public statement alongside the university association CESAER and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), calling on the European Union to proactively recognise the importance of education and research digital infrastructures when devising digital-focussed legislation. LIBER has expressed deep concern about an emerging trend where education and research in Europe are treated as collateral damage caused by Directives and Regulations which are aimed at online businesses, but which in reality have much broader effects.
Digital platform-related legislation is devised around making commercial platforms responsible for users uploading illegal content, for example, music or films being uploaded to YouTube or Facebook. However, uploading content by end-users is a common feature of education and research also. Students, academics, researchers, and teachers upload articles, books, sound recordings, research data, and films to a whole raft of education and research platforms ranging from a university’s institutional repository, through to widely used repositories such as Dryad, ArXiv.org, national repositories, and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
LIBER worked successfully with other library and cultural associations to create an exemption for educational and scientific repositories from Article 17 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive. However, LIBER is now very concerned that no such carve-out has been created in the draft Digital Services Act, which has been described as the “mother of all platform laws.” An amendment that would have exempted educational, library, and research platforms was not voted on in the plenary vote in the European Parliament last week due to complex voting list structures. This leaves discussions between the European Commission, Parliament, and Council of Ministers as the final chance to rectify this oversight in the drafting.
LIBER is currently working with other library associations as well as the European University Association and Science Europe on the lack of carve-out for educational and scientific infrastructures in the Digital Services Act.
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