In a 2023 report published by EndPoints News, it is suggested that for 2022, an estimated 70% of US FDA approvals for new treatments originated in small companies when compared to 66% in 2021. In addition to this, 6,918 clinical programs were reported in 2022 with an astonishing 77% originating from small companies.
On a practical level, these emerging companies are running very lean, with little or no budget for expenses outside of discovering and patenting their compounds. Rather than commit scarce funds to people, processes, buildings, equipment, and other capital-intensive investment, many small to medium sized companies find it more effective to outsource these operations and collaborate with other organizations. One area that often gets overlooked in the outsourcing and collaboration process is how to manage copyright compliance and the associated risks of non-compliance.
Ignoring Copyright is Risky Business
Research in the life sciences depends in part on the ability to acquire and share scientific information, particularly journal articles, in a timely manner. However, many companies are unaware that much of the published scientific literature is protected by copyright law (with the rights typically held by the publisher or the author of the article), which governs how the information can be used and shared. According to recent Outsell data for Life Science organizations, 59% of knowledge workers in this industry don’t strongly agree that they think about copyright issues before forwarding information and 62% don’t strongly agree that copyright infringement has serious risks and implications.
This becomes increasingly concerning when also considering remote working. On average, 33% of respondents in Life Sciences reported a fully remote work environment and 28% reported a hybrid environment. Of these employees surveyed, 30% reported sharing content more often, and 54% reported sharing with more people. Collaboration at small to medium sized organizations is crucial for advancing knowledge and innovation and the right tools can make this collaboration less risky. When an article is purchased for download, it is typically only authorized for the use of the individual user who purchased it.
An organization must obtain additional copyright permissions from the copyright holder if it intends to share copies with additional users internally, such as colleagues, or externally with regulatory agencies, customers, external businesses, or partners. While smaller companies without a librarian or information specialist onboard may be unaware of their obligations under copyright law, their lack of knowledge won’t help them. The copyright holder can enforce its rights through an infringement claim if uses are made without obtaining the appropriate permissions.
Other noncompliance issues arise regarding how employees access materials. In some smaller companies, researchers may use their academic credentials to download scientific articles and share them with colleagues. This is likely to violate the terms of the academic library subscription licenses, which would typically exclude the use of licensed materials for any non-academic use. In companies where there is no centralized information hub, researchers may turn to downloading articles from sites such as Sci-Hub and ResearchGate, which are promoted as ‘free’ sources for scientific information. In fact, ResearchGate has been involved in lawsuits in both Europe and the US, with publishers alleging that the networking site is illegally obtaining and distributing research papers protected by copyright law. In the United States, Sci-Hub has been sued twice for copyright infringement and lost both cases.
Another copyright consideration for small to medium businesses is Open Access content. With tight budgets, Open Access sources can be an attractive alternative to paid subscriptions. It’s important to know, however, there are many types of open-access licenses. Users may be unaware, but they need to know what rights are granted by the specific OA license type before the content is reused or shared to ensure the licensing terms are not being violated. In particular, the ‘NC’ part of CC-BY-NC allows for only non-commercial use.
Other copyright infringements are less obvious, and often involve electronic media. For example, depending on the nature and purpose of your use, you can unknowingly infringe someone’s copyright rights by embedding a YouTube video into your PowerPoint presentation, posting a commercial podcast on your company’s Intranet, or copying and pasting a blog post from a LinkedIn listing to your own blog. In each of these cases, you should consider whether to acquire permission from the copyright holder.
Furthermore, the emergence of AI technologies in searching and retrieval of content has further implications on copyright and copyrighted material. For example, if a dataset used to train AI models contains copyrighted material, it could be challenging to attribute information to its original source accurately or know when there are limitations to certain uses of the original source material. In such instances, voluntary collective licensing becomes an important factor in addressing potential risks related to the use of copyrighted materials used in AI systems.
Why does it matter, and what can you do?
Sharing content unlawfully undermines the culture of integrity that is valued by research organizations and can negatively impact an organization’s business reputation and value. It’s an unethical way to do business, and efforts to curtail copyright infringement should be included in overall compliance activities and subject to similar types of safeguards to those that govern manufacturing, financial data, or research archives.
While internal resources are usually limited in smaller companies, there are several ways to outsource copyright compliance efforts. You can sign individual subscription license agreements with individual publishers that will provide certain usage rights on a journal- or collection-specific basis. Other companies seek a broader solution by taking a repertory copyright license from a reproduction rights organization, such as Copyright Clearance Center (US), the Copyright Licensing Association (UK), or Access Copyright (Canada), which manage the licensing of secondary uses (such as storing and sharing copies for occasional use by colleagues, submitting copies to regulatory authorities, etc.) of books, journals, newspapers, and magazines on behalf of publishers, both within the relevant country or territory, and in some cases on a global basis.
To help ensure that your teams access content in an efficient and compliant manner, you can subscribe to various online journals, or license an online library solution that will deliver articles and book chapters electronically and enable users to check the uses for which you already have copyright permissions.
Copyright issues are becoming more prominent as digital technologies have made it easier to distribute information to wide groups of people at once. That’s why it is more important than ever to be aware that anytime you share content—by email, or instant message, or blog post, or a slide deck—without checking that you have the necessary rights to do so, you are placing your company at financial, legal, and reputational risk.
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As companies grow, their information needs grow, as well. CCC recognizes the difficulty in balancing current needs with future growth and is committed to providing smaller life science companies with a sustainable work flow solution to address information “underload” and copyright compliance challenges that grows with the company. Learn more about RightFind Enterprise and see real examples of how it’s used.
Editors Note: This blog post, originally published in 2019, was updated in January 2024.