KEN Online #2: Open Research and Intellectual Property: What are the boundaries of practicality?
Channel: Knowledge Equity Network
Date: 2023-10-12

This session will consider the implications of Intellectual Property (IP) to knowledge equity and how it is addressed on a global scale by the Wikimedia community and in specific Higher Education and research contexts. 

While Copyright and Intellectual Property (IP) laws are essential to protect creative and intellectual work, they can also present a barrier to knowledge equity, making it difficult to legally share academic and other forms of IP. 

Intellectual Property laws are complicated and vary across international jurisdictions. Inevitably they also disproportionately affect less wealthy nations who may not be able to access research material from the Global North.

Most people are familiar with Wikipedia “the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit”, one of the most popular websites in the world and which relies on citations to verifiable sources. However, Wikipedia is just one of 16 interconnected projects including Wikimedia Commons - a repository of openly licensed media files, Wikisource - a free library of out-of-copyright texts, and Wikidata, a store of structured data that can be read and edited by humans or machines. 

Content across all Wikimedia projects is openly licensed under a Creative Commons licence (usually the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International, or CC BY-SA 4.0) which means it can be freely accessed and reused by anyone with appropriate attribution. Any derived material must be licensed under the same licence.

Chaired by Nick Sheppard (Senior Lead, Knowledge Equity Network), the session will feature contributions from Lucy Crompton-Reid (Chief Executive, Wikimedia UK), Jodie Double (Digital Content and Copyright Manager, University of Leeds), Anubha Sinha (Senior Researcher, Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) India) and Puthiya Purayil Sneha (Senior Researcher, Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) India).