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 | New Guidelines, Same Old Issues: With AAP Involvement, Universities Release E-Content Policies
Rattled by what it sees as a growing practice that could potentially damage publishers' business, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) last week announced that is reached "agreements" with three universities to issue guidelines on the use of electronic content. AAP praised Syracuse, Marquette, and Hofstra Universities over their adoption of new guidelines for "the use of copyrighted materials in digital formats," which, of course, is code for e-reserves. The new guidelines, however, are really nothing new, observers note, and are part of an ongoing AAP effort to engage universities much like the guidelines AAP and Cornell University agreed to in late 2006.
Although reports suggested the new guidelines arose from "cordial" conversations with the universities, one administrator anonymously told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the agreement was made under a looming threat of litigation. Cornell University confirmed in 2006 that its guidelines were also undertaken under similar duress, though AAP VP and general counsel Allan Adler has told Library Journal that the AAP wasn't threatening lawsuits. "We have to get the attention of these institutions in a serious way," he conceded, but noted that publishers have not been "active in litigating copyright issues like the music, movie, or software industries."
As for the content of the guidelines, even critics say it is not unreasonable. Simply put, the guidelines merely state what AAP has maintained should be obvious: that practices and uses that require permission in print under the fair use provisions of the copyright act require permission in the electronic realm as well, a stance Adler said last year he saw as "black letter law in the United States."
The issues at stake in the guidelines, however, do represent an all too common challenge for university administrators—more specifically, university counsels. Currently, such charged discussions over the use of electronic content have placed universities in a tenuous position: go too far and get sued, don't push and you limit the academic mission. "I worry that publishers are forcing universities to err on the side of non-use when interpreting the vague and flexible guidelines for fair use," commented Peter Suber on his Open Access blog. "Universities, more than most institutions, should be pushing the envelope instead. I worry that publishers are extorting agreements with threats of litigation."
Although "multiple copies for classroom use" is, in fact, in the law, Georgia Harper, scholarly communications advisor for the University of Texas (UT) at Austin's University Libraries, has told the LJ Academic Newswire that subsequent case law has all but written that principle out, leaving administrators in a tight spot. "As a principle, as something we should fight for, I wholeheartedly agree," Harper said. "But as a general counsel of a university, the mission is to advise your client of the reality of the risks, and it's not looking good for that principle." Meanwhile, AAP's conversations and the resulting guidelines, she said, do little to ease the issues involved with the ever-growing use electronic content.
"Slapping a policy on your web site is the tip of the iceberg," Harper insists. "Implementation is the real challenge. We don't need a one-size-fits-all solution. We do need a more realistic sense of where to draw the line, because, right now, it can be justified to draw it just about anywhere."
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NIH Sets Deposit Date for Public Access Policy, but Copyright Battle Still Brews
In a landmark post, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published on its web site the first ever public access policy for a major government agency and a lengthy FAQ
explaining the policy and how to comply. According to the site, the policy will take effect on April 7, when "all articles arising from NIH funds must be submitted to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication." In addition, the policy includes a citation component as well, as of May 25, 2008, that will require all NIH applications, proposals, and progress reports to include "the PubMed Central reference number when citing an article that falls under the policy and is authored or co-authored by the investigator, or arose from the investigator's NIH award." The policy was signed into law on December 26 after years of support by the library community.
The April 7 date for the policy, however, is not quite set in stone—publishers opposed to the policy have vowed to continue their fight, and have laid the groundwork to a legal challenge. This week, the American Chemical Society (ACS) reiterated AAP claims that suggest a possible legal showdown. According to a report in Chemistry World Madeleine Jacobs, ACS executive director and CEO, told NIH director Elias Zerhouni in a letter that the policy could "result in conflicts with copyright law and intellectual property rights," and further could "interfere with scientific peer review of journal articles and adversely impact the sustainability of scientific journals." ACS spokesperson Glenn Ruskin also told Chemistry World that he does not think the NIH has "abided by the law," and that ACS are "trying to work out the copyright and intellectual property questions."
Supporters of the policy, meanwhile, say any claims of copyright conflict or complaints about the way the policy was enacted are groundless. "The NIH Public Access Policy has been actively considered by Congress since 2004 and was enacted through all the normal and proper channels," SPARC executive director Heather Joseph told the LJ Academic Newswire. "Besides holding public meetings with stakeholder groups, including the publishing community, the NIH published the proposed policy in the Federal Register in 2004, and requested public comment. It received—and made public via its website—more than 6000 comments on the policy."
As for copyright issues, the library community issued a legal brief shooting down that argument in July, 2007. "The NIH Public Access Policy does not conflict with copyright, and no amount of repeating this 'concern' will make it so," Joseph said. "It would be a shame if more time and money had to be wasted on groundless challenges instead of focusing on getting the implementation right and working towards the good of the community"
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| Library Leaders Named to Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access
Several library leaders, scholars, and technologists have been named to the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access announced last September and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The task force will sponsor quarterly discussion panels involving international experts from the academic, public, and private sectors. Two reports are expected, including a final report in late 2009 that will offer recommendations for digital preservation.
The task force is co-chaired by Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at University of California, San Diego, and Brian Lavoie, a research scientist with OCLC. Also partnering on the project are the Library of Congress, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the United Kingdom, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the National Archives and Records Administration. The first meeting of the task force will be held in Washington, DC, January 29-30. A web site will be set up to solicit comments and encourage dialog.
Task Force members include:
- Paul Ayris, Director of Library Services, the University College of London, England
- G. Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean of Libraries, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
- Elizabeth Cohen, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA
- Paul Courant, University Librarian, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
- Lee Dirks, Director of Scholarly Communications, Microsoft Corp.
- Amy Friedlander, Director of Programs, Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), Washington, DC
- Vijay Gurbaxani, Senior Associate Dean, Paul Merage School of Business, University of California at Irvine
- Anita Jones, Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
- Ann Kerr, Independent Consultant, AK Consulting, La Jolla, CA
- Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), Washington, DC
- Dan Rubinfeld, Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, University of California at Berkeley
- Chris Rusbridge, Director, Digital Curation Centre, University of Edinburgh
- Roger Schonfeld, Manager of Research, Ithaka, Inc.
- Abby Smith, Historian and Consulting Analyst to the Library of Congress, (based in San Francisco)
- Anne Van Camp, Director, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC
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| Emory University Lands Alice Walker Archive
Emory University (Atlanta, GA) announced that it has landed the personal archive of Georgia-born Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Alice Walker. "I can imagine in years to come that my papers, my journals and letters will find themselves always in the company of people who care about many of the things I do," Walker said in a statement, announcing Emory as her choice. The archive includes everything from drafts of early works of fiction to correspondence and editorial notes—more than 120 boxes of journals, photos, and other materials, now being processed by librarians.
Walker's papers will join those from an array of literary luminaries in Emory's formidable special collections, which includes the recently acquired archive of Salman Rushdie, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney's papers, British poet laureate Ted Hughes' papers, and the 75,000-volume Danowski Poetry Library. In 1983 Walker became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for her novel The Color Purple.
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