CREATe presents the seventh entry in our series of working papers released in 2020: “Facebook ‘Regulation’: a process not a text” by Prof. Leighton Andrews (Cardiff University).

Leighton Andrews’ Working Paper addresses the unfinished process of regulating Facebook,  writes Philip Schlesinger. His analysis provides us with a compendious and up to date account of how, from a range of perspectives, UK regulators have been approaching this complex task.

Despite this specific focus, Andrews’ account has been shaped by his acute sense of how the question of platform regulation is playing out internationally as well as nationally. His study, which has the advantage of providing specific detail along with drawing out the general implications of the case in question, is deeply informed by current debate in regulation studies. It is also very sensitive to the power plays that often make the intended objects of regulation so refractory. Major players are also themselves inclined to engage in regulatory politics, both within and across jurisdictions.

In the course of offering the reader his detailed insights into the various perspectives presently shaping the debate over regulation, Leighton Andrews conceptualises today’s mood for intervention as working itself out through an incremental ‘sense-making’ process, a putting-out of feelers and a flying of trial balloons about how best to handle economic, political, cultural and social questions of increasing urgency.

CREATe presents the fourth entry in our series of working papers released in 2020: “The production, circulation, consumption and ownership of scientific knowledge: historical perspectives”.

This working paper by Aileen Fyfe (Professor of Modern History, University of St Andrews), is a lightly edited transcript of a CREATe public lecture delivered at the University of Glasgow on 29 January 2020.

Abstract:

Who owns the content of scientific research papers, and who has the right to circulate them? These questions are at the heart of current debates about improving access to the results of research. This working paper will use the history of academic publishing to explore the origins of our modern concerns. The Philosophical Transactions was founded in 1665 and is now the longest-running scientific journal in the world. This paper will follow the Transactions from its early days as a private venture of its editor to becoming the property of the Royal Society. It will explore the basis of the Society’s claim to ownership (which had very little to do with copyright) and reveals the ways in which the Society encouraged the circulation, reprinting and reuse of material in the Transactions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It will end by considering how things changed in the twentieth century, as commercial interests became increasingly influential in academic publishing and as new technologies brought new opportunities for circulating knowledge.

The full paper can be downloaded here.

CREATe is publishing today a new working paper Streaming Culture, offering a fascinating analysis of changing online consumption behaviour in the five years between 2013 and 2018. This is joint work with Nesta, within the AHRC Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre (PEC) where the paper is also available as a Research Report.

This research is the result of a data development project conducted in collaboration with the UK Intellectual Property Office.  The project, OMeBa (short for Online Media Behaviour Analytics), is an attempt to unlock the value of an important annual consumer survey. The Online Copyright Infringement (OCI) tracker survey was originally conceived in 2012 as a standard instrument to capture trends in online copyright infringement. It was designed by Ofcom with Kantar Media in response to a (now defunct) obligation under the 2010 Digital Economy Act.

By harmonizing question IDs, and documenting carefully method and changes across five waves of the survey, the OMeBa project made it possible to identify wider changes in online consumption over time, enabling new research questions to be asked.

As part of this data development initiative, Nesta and CREATe held a workshop in June 2019 (documented on the OMeBa resource page). The discussion highlighted a shared interest across government, industry and academia to increase understanding of digital consumption behaviours by different demographic groups.  The research presented today is a response to this challenge.