Why Europe needs a digital knowledge act

The next European Commission and Parliament should tackle the barriers that European knowledge institutions face in the digital world head-on, argue Felix Reda and Justus Dreyling.

Felix Reda is a former member of the European Parliament and a member of COMMUNIA, an international association incorporated under Belgian law that advocates for policies that expand the Public Domain and increase access to and reuse of culture and knowledge. Justus Dreyling is the policy director of COMMUNIA.

The European Union is spending massively on research and innovation. Horizon Europe has a budget of €95.5 billion, up from a cool €80 billion for its predecessor program, Horizon 2020.

This important strategic investment has and will continue to bring about scientific breakthroughs. And yet, the EU has failed to prioritise crucial reforms allowing universities to achieve Horizon Europe’s goal, “the creation and better diffusion of excellent knowledge and technologies.”

Schools and libraries face many of the same hurdles, preventing them from fulfilling their key public-interest mission – to promote access to knowledge and information. For too long, knowledge institutions have been an afterthought in legislation. If we want EU research funding to reach its full potential and maximise Europe’s innovative capacity, we must put their needs on the legislative agenda.

What is holding European knowledge institutions back?

As we are heading towards the midpoint of “Europe’s Digital Decade”, European libraries, archives, museums, universities, schools and other knowledge institutions still cannot offer the same services online as offline.

University researchers lack access to essential data, impeding their ability to conduct the same state-of-the-art research done in other parts of the world. At the same time, they are often legally prohibited from sharing digital research resources with colleagues, which impairs research transparency and collaborations across borders.

On top of that, a big chunk of published research funded with public money through Horizon Europe or other public sources ends up locked behind paywalls, putting a huge financial burden on research institutions that need to access it.

Even where knowledge institutions are permitted by law to access or share certain materials, they often shy away from doing so out of fear of being sued. In the US, public interest institutions are protected from paying damages when they act in good faith, believing that their actions are permitted by law. In Europe, the lack of such safeguards, combined with a highly complex and fragmented legal framework, has a chilling effect on practitioners’ exercise of user rights

Educational establishments and libraries are also facing significant barriers when trying to provide learning materials in digital form. Although more and more learning takes place online, knowledge institutions do not get to buy ebooks under the same conditions as physical books.

Many ebooks are never made available for lending by their publishers or only after a long retention period, and when they are available to libraries, they are much more expensive than physical books.

It is not only traditional publishers that engage in unfair licensing. Amazon, by now a big publisher of its own and the top dog for self-published books, refused to license its ebooks to libraries altogether for a long time and has only started to give some US libraries access to its catalogue.

This is made worse because many scientific publishers and other software providers for knowledge institutions have redesigned their business models as data analytics companies.

By offering all-purpose solutions for the entire research workflow, these corporations not only want to lock knowledge institutions into a single system, creating new dependencies. Tracking and later selling researchers’ data without their individual consent is also inherently problematic, as it curtails academic freedom.

We need a Digital Knowledge Act

These problems need to be fixed through EU-level legislation. The outgoing European Commission and Parliament have passed ambitious legislation in the digital area to promote competition, foster innovation, and strengthen users’ rights. Yet despite their clear impact on research, neither the Digital Services Act nor, the Data Act nor the AI Act have given sufficient consideration to the needs of knowledge institutions.

We need a targeted intervention to empower knowledge institutions to carry out their public service mission in the digital environment. This includes some surgical interventions in copyright law, such as a legal solution for e-lending by libraries, but mostly measures that go beyond previous discussions about copyright.

The idea of a Digital Knowledge Act has been floating around in Brussels policy circles for a long time, ripe to be implemented. We ask the new Commission and Parliament to use the upcoming legislative term to give European knowledge institutions the tools to unlock their full potential.