How does intellectual property
impact the creativity and research outputs of doctoral researchers? CREATe team member, Amy Thomas (RTA, Copyright Evidence Wiki Sub-Editor), explored this question in a webinar supported by Vitae and IPO, and in collaboration with the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities (SGSAH) on 23 March 2020. The webinar considered two main facets of intellectual property: first, how the law recognises and protects creativity, and; secondly, how researchers can exploit that creativity effectively.
The webinar began with a presentation by Mario Moustras (Leadership & Talent Development Coach), who provided an overview of the main types of intellectual property, whilst delving deeper into particular concerns about copyright protection of creative products and research outputs. Mario’s presentation was followed by applied case studies by Claire Squires (Director, SGSAH), Amy Thomas (CREATe) and Colin Kirkpatrick (Senior Knowledge Exchange Manager, Glasgow School of Art) to demonstrate how copyright can be used in context. Claire provided valuable knowledge on publishing concerns for researchers, whilst Amy and Colin illustrated more specific case examples of Arts & Humanities students exploiting their creative outputs ‘in real life’.
The session concluded with a forum for researchers to raise their IP-related concerns and experiences, offering the team an opportunity to ‘mythbust’ common misconceptions. Popular concerns amongst researchers included IP in the context of social media (e.g. can you copyright a tweet? And who owns your work once it’s posted on a platform?), how to use Creative Commons licences, and questions of ownership of research and research data (doctoral researchers with similar concerns may find the CREATe resource on Open Science useful!).
CREATe have previously worked with SGSAH at a Summer School in 2018, a full report of which is available here. This year’s Virtual Summer School is scheduled for 22-26 June; interested Arts & Humanities PhD researchers should follow the SGSAH website for more details in due course.