Today, COMMUNIA made a submission to the EU Start-up and Scale-up Strategy call for evidence (available as a PDF file). Due to COMMUNIA’s focus on access to knowledge, we focused on this issue, outlining specific barriers to access to knowledge that apply to start-ups and scale-ups as well as the research sector, which is the backbone of Europe’s innovation system.
We highlighted two copyright-related issues in particular, access issues to research results, even for publicly funded research, and issues created by non-commercial requirements for research across multiple parts of the European copyright acquis. We also raised awareness of the problem that a number of Member States have laws in place that limit access to or reuse of important materials, such as public sector documents, public speeches, public data and databases, or cultural heritage, further hampering research and innovation.
Finally, we proposed a number of concrete solutions to these issues, including an EU-wide secondary publishing right and a fully harmonised, mandatory and general copyright exception for research. We also suggested that the EU lawmaker should consider relaxing the “non-commercial” requirements in the EU copyright acquis.
