[Donat Agosti]

Dear colleagues
Following our last discussions regarding legal interoperability, I wonder whether we might have lost the direction and goal of our groups goal. We increasingly get entangled in our current situation of complex copyright law, different interpretations thereof, understanding by lawyers, administrators and scientists of copyright law, and trying to make something out of our past rather than looking into the future where we do want to interoperate.
From a legacy point of view, the current situation is complex, and in fact a large number of players out there do not want to see this happen for various reasons. The big STM publishers, the big (fund receiving) institutions, nor the scientists. A very relevant exceptions are the big funders, in our case the US government and the EU, our governments that seem to care about our future, and see also http://ec.europa.eu/research/conferences/2015/era-of-innovation/index.cf…
I always thought that RDA is some sort of an advisory board or think tank in regards of the future of science, especially concerning data and how we could build an IT infrastructure that allows this new research our main public funders envision.
The way we approach this now is not to contribute our contribution to this vision by looking back into the (very immediate) past and drawing the conclusions from it and to define a way we have to operate in this future to make. We now rather come up with a solution that accepts all the complexities and idiosyncrasies of a system that has grown at an age before the Internet and is now mainly anachronistic and an obstacle. An example on how a vision might look like and has been implemented has been the Creative Commons which defined a rule how the creative community could interact, in this case with specific licences.
If we do not come up with a system that allows Big Data to happen, and we rather cement the current, untenable situation, I believe we do not to our job in the sense of the RDA.
Our case studies should not be used to model a system that covers all the legal system we have found and believed we have to move within, but rather line out what have been the obstacles and what legal system is needed to achieve out “big data” science goals.
I see the work of the RDA legal interoperability group, if at all, rather a group that voices its concern in a constructive way to resolve the impediments on the way to Big Science and to fulfill the legal framework of open data, outlined by the EU and the US OSTP.
With my best regards and looking forwards to your comments
Donat

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