Asking for Access

by Kathlin Smith

REALIZING THE DREAM of creating a rich, openly accessible digital library requires navigating copyright. A new study, Acquiring Copyright Permission to Digitize and Provide Open Access to Books, examines the practical aspects of seeking open access to monographs whose rights are privately held—that is, most work published after 1923. The author, Denise Troll Covey, principal librarian for special projects at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), describes three efforts at CMU to make books freely available on the Internet for public use. Her descriptions of this process and its results reveal an array of challenges—from locating copyright holders to defining the meaning of out of print—but also suggest strategies for success. The studies show that obtaining legal clearances requires an enormous investment of time, money, and patience. [...]

The three studies show that however painstaking the effort, it is possible to secure permission to digitize and provide open access to books. The following findings from the CMU projects may be instructive to others who plan to seek copyright permission for digitization.

* Locating copyright holders is difficult, expensive, and often unsuccessful. The three studies demonstrated the time-consuming and often-fruitless effort required to identify and locate copyright holders, especially those for older works. Publishers move, merge, or go out of business, or copyright reverts to the author. Authors and estates may be extremely difficult to find.
* For very large projects, the cost of obtaining permission on a title-by-title basis may be prohibitive.
* Obtaining permission to digitize targeted collections of material is more successful than is obtaining permission for entire bodies of published work. The per-title cost of a targeted effort, however, is higher than that of a nontargeted approach. Standard library practice is to target designated collections; therefore, the transaction costs suggested in the MBP may be unsuitable for planning purposes.
* The likelihood of gaining permission varies among types of publishers. Special publishers, authors and estates, museums and galleries, and scholarly associations were most likely to grant permission. University presses and commercial presses were the least likely to grant permission. Scholarly associations and university presses were more likely to grant access to older works than commercial publishers were.
* Some types of publishers are easier to locate than others. Museums and galleries, scholarly associations, and university presses were the easiest publishers to locate; commercial publishers were the most difficult to locate and least likely to respond.
* Publishers who deny permission may fear lost revenue, may no longer hold rights, or may be uncertain of their rights. Publishers who chose not to grant permission to digitize often did so because they feared lost revenue, even for older or out-of-print titles that were not generating revenue. Many publishers, particularly university presses, said that they wanted to participate but could not because copyright reverts to the author when their books go out of print. Many publishers noted that older contracts did not grant them electronic rights to the books or that they were uncertain of their rights in this regard. The most common reason publishers gave for not participating in the MBP was they did not have the time and staff needed to check their paper files title-by-title to determine copyright status and ownership.
* Publishers define “out of print” differently than librarians do. Even though a book may be listed as “out of print” in a catalog, publishers who still control rights to a book may view it otherwise because print on demand can give a book new life.

The study findings are preceded by a brief history of copyright law and practice. The full text of the report, copublished by CLIR and the Digital Library Federation, is available at http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub134abst.html

http://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/issues48.html#access

http://ppf.mtak.hu/index.htm

One of the gems of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is the Album Amicorum of Ferenc Pápai Páriz, Jr., that he carried with himself on his one and half decade long European peregrination (1711-1726). This album amicorum, the use of which followed a widespread European practice of the age, is now made available for all those interested in this period and topic. This album, which offers a very special glance into the intellectual life of 18th-century Europe, is published at the Internet on the occasion of Hungary's accession to the European Union on May 1, 2004.

The 122 pages of the Album preserve nice mementos written in Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Spanish or Syriac – and in many cases in more than one language – by English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Polish and Swiss personalities: bishops, professors, physicians as well as many students that became celebrities of the next generation. The notes are regularly composed of a quotation, a motto and a recommendation, followed by a signature. You can browse in them by persons, places, dates or the original pages. We have managed to identify almost all the persons who made their notes in the Album: we also include their biographies. Our publication is further enriched with maps, with frontispieces of some important works, as well as portraits of the persons. We cordially recommend it to the attention of every visitor of us.

See also here:
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/206189/

I do not agree with the praise of Google Print e.g. in the weblog entries of Peter Suber's "Open Access News". Google is - unlike Yahoo's http://www.opencontentalliance.org - definitively no advocate of the Public Domain. Google is blocking users outside of the US from viewing books which are Public Domain world wide (resp. in the US, the European Union, Canada, Australia etc.). From the items of the Google Library program one can see outside the US only items published before ca. 1865 freely.

A small list of such free works and more information can be found at:
http://wiki.netbib.de/coma/GooglePrint

According to the NYT "[e]ventually, the European sites will give users access to data about foreign-language books in the collections of the New York Public Library and the university libraries of Stanford, Harvard, Michigan and Oxford."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_10_16_fosblogarchive.html#a112964690233093989

Google should give free access to all books published before 1923 (PD in the US) AND of which the author is 70 years dead (European copyright term).

Google is claiming copyright for simple facsimile reprints of PD works made e.g. by the publisher Kessinger. This is clearly COPYFRAUD in the US!
http://ssrn.com/abstract=787244

The cooperating libraries (including Oxford outside the US) should not support a project which is only serving US interests not serving the enrichment of world wide knowledge and Public Domain.

I would like to read from Open Access advocates like Suber clear words against Google's discriminating practice.

http://www.adelphicharter.org/

The Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property responds to one of the most profound challenges of the 21st century:
How to ensure that everyone has access to ideas and knowledge, and that intellectual property laws do not become too restrictive.

The Charter sets out new principles for copyrights and patents, and calls on governments to apply a new public interest test.

It promotes a new, fair, user-friendly and efficient way of handing out intellectual property rights in the 21st century.

The Charter has been written by an international group of artists, scientists, lawyers, politicians, economists, academics and business experts.

b>"Mark your Calendars!"

The Third International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (I-CHORA 3) will be held in Boston, Massachusetts on 27-29 September 2007.
The Massachusetts Historical Society will host this third international conference.
The theme will be: "Personal Records and Recordkeeping Practices".

A formal call for papers will be issued in early 2006.

________________________________


International Conference ... Amsterdam 2005

We invite you to visit the website. Read about the conference program and the abstracts of the papers presented.
http://i-chora2.archiefschool.nl

The Universiteit van Amsterdam and the Archiefschool, the Netherlands Institute for Archival Education and Research, welcome you to Amsterdam for the Second International Conference on the History of Archives and Records, “Archival Affinities. Adapting and Adopting Archival Cultures”,
August 31st + September 1st + 2nd , 2005.


The 2005 conference focuses on intercultural and cross-national influences on record-keeping and archival theory, the dissemination and reception of theories and ideas on archives and record-keeping etc. Topics within this framework include:
• recordkeeping by colonizers and colonized, occupants and occupiers, etc.;
• post-colonial and post-communist recordkeeping in relation to former recordkeeping regimes;
• merging of indigenous and foreign theories, methodologies and practices;
• national influences on recordkeeping of international and multinational governmental and non-governmental organisations;
• records professionals and recordkeeping systems immigrating into other countries and cultures;
• cross-national networks of records professionals and archivistics scholars and their impact on globalisation of archival systems, theories and cultures.

The first I-CHORA conference took place in Toronto, October 2-4, 2003 (see http://www.fis.utoronto.ca/research/i-chora/home.html).

Go and see the 2005 conference website:
http://i-chora2.archiefschool.nl

I have posted the entry of Ms. Jonkers again because it was shown only at the right in the list of the new entries but not on the main page or in the English Corner. Thanks for contributing this! KG

http://www.iwaw.net/05/index.html

All papers are licensed with CC-NC-ND.

http://rollyo.com/search.html?sid=5405&f=share

Enjoy!

Electronic Reserve and Open Access

By Klaus Graf

Can administrators of Electronic Reserves (ERs) and staff using them in order to support Open Access (OA)? Copyright law requires that an ER must be restricted to students and staff. Even if the ER is in the same repository as the OA eprints (this is the case e.g. in Essen-Duisburg, see http://miless.uni-duisburg-essen.de) web users without a specific account cannot view the course materials.

It is clear that staff members' own works (syllabus, link lists, bibliographies etc.) can be made freely available on websites or in repositories. You can learn why it is important to make course materials open to the general public on the excellent MIT OpenCourseWare? website: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

ERs contain both copyrighted modern works and Public Domain (PD) materials which were scanned for classroom use.

It is not known which portion of ERs is PD (which could be displayed freely on a website). Maybe it's a very small portion (depending from the academic discipline). In a unified system (one server for eprints, multimedia and course materials) one can give access rights for these documents to the general public, but in a non-unified system one has to move to the OA repository.

PD materials don't have to be deleted at the end of the course.

Administrators and staff of ERs should give the general public access to PD documents

Administrators should encourage staff members to do so, and inform them about the legal framework and copyright issues (e.g. in Germany a work is PD if the author is 70 years dead).

Concerning the copyrighted material (modern articles and book chapters) there is also a way to support OA. When preparing a course ER scholars can ask the authors for permission to make the materials available freely. In the US it is likely that the rights holder is the publisher. If publishers agree with OA (a lot of them do so) there is no legal problem to put OA versions in the web. Administrators of OA repositories should allow moving stuff from ERs (i.e. from mostly non-affiliated authors) into the archive. In the case of an unified system one has only to set access rights for the public.

What is the advantage for the authors if their works are put into the OA part of an ER? They don't have to scan the documents and upload them to the repository.

A permission request to an author can educate that author about OA, who may then be interested to know more about OA.

Sending some permission mails is not really a lot of work.

Conclusion: Administrators and staff of ERs should support OA by asking for permission to make OA versions of ER materials available.

This text is dedicated to the Public Domain

You can edit the text at
http://wiki.netbib.de/coma/ElectronicReserve

Update:
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4931438/

Erik Möller, Are Creative Commons-NC Licenses Harmful? Podcasting News, October 4, 2005. Excerpt:

http://www.podcastingnews.com/archives/2005/10/are_creative_co.html

When the Creative Commons project published its first licenses in December 2002, it finally brought a sense of unity behind the free content movement....One particular licensing option, however, is a growing problem for the free content community. It is the allow non-commercial use only (-NC) option. The "non-commercial use only" variants of the Creative Commons licenses are non-free, and in some ways worse than traditional copyright law -- because it can be harder to move away from them once people have made the choice. There may be circumstances where -NC is the only (and therefore best) available option, but that number of circumstances should decrease as the business models around free content evolve. The key problems with -NC licenses are as follows: [1] They make your work incompatible with a growing body of free content, even if you do want to allow derivative works or combinations. [2] They may rule out other basic uses which you want to allow. [3] They support current, near-infinite copyright terms. [4] They are unlikely to increase the potential profit from your work, and a share-alike license serves the goal to protect your work from exploitation equally well.....As we will see, there are many desirable commercial uses....[I]f you choose an -NC license, your work will not be compatible with Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikibooks, and similar free content projects. One reason for this is that licenses like Wikipedia's, the GNU Free Documentation License, work according to the copyleft (or..."share-alike") principle: You can make derivative works, but they have to be licensed under the same terms. You cannot make a derivative work through addition of -NC content, as you can no longer apply the (more liberal) "share-alike" license to the entire work. Even where the license allows it, marking up regions of content as non-commercial and consistently following these boundaries is almost impossible in a collaborative environment....The use of an -NC license is very rarely justifiable on economic or ideological grounds....Finally, if you must use such a license for one reason or another, please do add an additional notice specifying the term of copyright protection you desire for your work. Otherwise, traditional copyright law will apply, and commercial use will be forbidden long beyond your death.

Source: Open Acess News