Through our discussion we have identified barriers to collaborative include institutional policy & lack of understand re: policies and ‘open’ in addition to the legal constraints.

This manifests itself through:

  • unclear policy and contradictory advice - grey areas, unclear definitions of research outputs and what is covered by a specific policy
  • getting into trouble for doing the ‘right thing’
  • fudging for compliance - tools available don’t always fit requirements to be legally compliant, tools have to used and combined in weird ways to get jobs done
  • ‘just put it out there’ - breaking the rules feels like the right thing to do - when draconian
  • data sharing agreements - data management plans, not always completed and not always realised needed

These are caused by a combination of lack of understanding of open licences and what ‘open’ means (especially by senior management and legal services), which leads to the questions including:

  • how do you educate about ‘open’ and sharing? Especially seeing as researchers already do not (want to) understand copyright for “classical” research outputs such as journal articles which is e.g. why they use ResearchGate
  • is code a research output or software produced for work? - grey & unclear in IPR documents, unclear definitions of research outputs and what is covered by a specific policy
  • can I contribute to open source projects? - lack of legal right to contribute code to open source projects due to not owing the IP of the work