Going spare: Brexit could cut off access to feminist journal

A bad Brexit could cut off access to a crucial feminist scholarly resource.

In 2015, the British Library digitised and made available to international researchers, students and activists through the Jisc Journals platform a complete run of the pioneering British feminist magazine Spare Rib. This vital resource may now have to be closed down.

A blog by Polly Russell, the library’s lead curator for contemporary politics and public life, explains the reasoning behind this. Because Spare Rib was published between 1972 and 1993, its content remains in copyright. As part of the digitisation process, the library successfully obtained permission from more than 1,000 contributors. Where it proved impossible to identify rights holders, the material was still made available under a European Union directive that allows cultural heritage institutions to provide access to such “orphan works”. About 57 per cent of the Spare Rib archive – some 11,000 articles and images from 2,700 contributors – benefits from this protection.

Yet should the UK leave the European Union without a deal, writes Ms Russell, the library has been “advised by the Intellectual Property Office that this legal exception will no longer apply. In those circumstances, the library would have to suspend access to the archive or be in breach of copyright. The remainder of the archive, for which permissions have been obtained, would not form a sufficiently coherent resource to be useful to researchers, so we would have to close the resource entirely.”

“Of all the perils looming with a possible ‘no-deal’ Brexit,” commented Lynne Segal, anniversary professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck, University of London, “the unexpected effects on copyright laws may seem small fry.” Yet Spare Rib was “the most popular voice of women’s liberation for over 20 years in the heyday of feminism”, and “we surely know the invaluable significance of keeping archival evidence of our recent history, especially for a record as fiercely contested as second-wave feminism”.

Given that “women’s radical voices have always been so easily erased”, Professor Segal continued, it was crucial to retain “the evidence of their diverse, collective practices and shifting aspirations for transforming personal lives, cultural understandings and institutional structures seeking to build genuinely egalitarian, caring worlds fast forgotten in historical records”.

In the event of a successful withdrawal agreement, Ms Russell’s blog goes on, the issue would be deferred but perhaps not resolved because “we understand that the orphan works exception – as with other EU laws – would remain in place at least until at least the end of the transition period, at the end of next year”.

While acknowledging that it was no substitute for the complete archive, the blog stresses that “the curated British Library Spare Rib site, with its contextual essays and selected magazine content, will still be accessible”.

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com