|
 |
Will the Average University Press Benefit from GSU E-Reserve Suit?
The blogs were buzzing this week with more discussion of a lawsuit filed by publishers against Georgia State University (GSU) alleging massive copyright infringement through the school's use of electronic course content. Not lost on observers: the two lead defendants in the case are university presses-partners that share a common goal with libraries-to serve higher education. "It feels like suing a member of the family," conceded Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), in an official statement supporting the lawsuit. "Unfortunately, the alleged infringement is like stealing from a member of the family."
An increasingly dysfunctional family, the suit would suggest. The question at the center of the case has been framed by lawyers as a dispute over the boundaries of fair use in education, but, observers wonder, what in practice do university presses stand to gain from supporting a lawsuit against an academic library over fair use? In the AAUP statement, Givler noted that vast amounts of electronic course content were being used without permission-and, more importantly, without permission fees. He posited that university presses depend on the kind of income at stake in the suit "to continue to publish the specialized scholarly books required to educate students and to advance university research."
University presses, (or their recent woes), however, do not seem to be so dependent on e-reserve activity. Statistics in the recent Ithaka report, University Publishing in the Digital Age, found that just five percent of the average university press's income was derived from "other publishing income/subsidiary rights." The health of university presses is more closely tied to serials inflation driven by commercial science publishers, the decline of print monograph purchases-still the bread and butter of most university presses-and a lack of institutional support. Although the average university press receives an operating subsidy from its parent institution, those subsidies rarely cover expenses. Of those presses responding to Ithaka, an astonishing 70 percent reported running a deficit, and 22 percent reported breaking even.
Of course, Oxford and Cambridge are not your average university presses, as University of Michigan librarian Paul Courant pointed out to the LJ Academic Newswire. They operate without subsidies and on a scale closer to commercial publishers. "The big university presses have a hefty chunk of the monograph market, and at [Cambridge's] stated $.17 per page fee per student for, say, a hundred students for 50 pages each of two books in a course, Cambridge is looking to make $1700 on one course in one semester," Courant explained. Multiply that by lots of courses and lots of semesters and you can see a hefty pecuniary interest."
The downside of that strategy is that library budgets-and student budgets as well-are not equipped to handle a spike in permission fees, and the more money that goes to permissions-and much of that to commercial presses-could mean even less money to purchase monographs published by university presses. "Library budgets, or university budgets, generally, will be taxed further," Courant agreed, should publishers follow through and win a verdict the suit. "But from the perspective of an individual publisher that has a lot of coursepack/e-reserve business, [the suit] is probably a smart business play, even if the library turns around and buys only one or two copies of a book that they would have bought four or five of before."
As Courant alluded to in his blog post about the case, however, there nevertheless seems to be a "robbing Peter to pay Paul" aspect in a university press suing a university library over fair use. "Things have come to a pretty pass when academic institutions sue each other over academic matters," he writes. "For all of the flowery language that we often hear from university presses about the importance of a robust nonprofit publishing sector in service to the academy, the issue here is plainly about the profits of the 'nonprofit' publishing sector. Perhaps I am wrong, and the Vice-Chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge have been in touch with the President of Georgia State to discuss the missions of learning and teaching, but I'd bet not."
|
|
GSU E-Reserves Suit Moves E-Reserves Discussion into the Light
For the last few years, as Association of American Publishers' (AAP) lawyers began examining e-reserve practices, university administrators and general counsels have sought to stay out of the line of fire when it came to discussing electronic course content. Many believed that a lawsuit was inevitable as it became clear that negotiating "guidelines" on a case-by-case basis simply was not going to yield the kind of national consensus publishers desired. Now that a federal suit has been filed against Georgia State University (GSU), however, the discussion over e-reserves has inched into the light-and that light is revealing some deep divisions in the scholarly communication system.
Sandy Thatcher, director of the Penn State University Press, commented on the Inside Higher Education web site that the issue for university presses "is fairness," not just fair use. "Because [GSU is] not paying anything for the privilege of using the materials that presses produce, they are not doing anything to support the whole system of scholarly communication on which those very students and faculty depend," he wrote. "I should think the universities that pay the costs for the system would object to having Georgia State take advantage of it without helping support it."
Others shot down the notion of libraries not supporting the system. "[Coursepacks] are incredibly expensive, have no resale value, are terribly uncomfortable to carry around, and half of its contents the student already owns (has paid for before)," responded "Mary M." on Inside Higher Ed. "If publishers want to be fair, then be fair. But if they just want to extend their lousy business model (apply the same cost structure from print to digital), then let them become the eventual victims of their own stupidity." She also bristled at those that sought to turn the issue to one of morals. "The idea of calling classroom use of an article 'theft' is so grotesque a misapprehension of what's going on here and so antithetical to how scholars see things that my…question is: do these publishers any longer know their constituency?"
Librarian Dorothea Salo at Caveat Lector posted an interesting reaction to the suit. "If I were the Georgia State library," she wrote, "I'd play hardball. No e-reserves for anybody, and let faculty go whine at the AAP." In an earlier post from 2005, Salo explained that libraries would do well to expose the costs of their services to scholars. "Call out the AAP from behind the curtain," she wrote. "Look faculty in the eye and say, calmly, 'no, we can't put this on e-reserve, because fair-use is endangered everywhere and the AAP is making lawsuit noises-but why don't you and I contact the article authors and ask if they'll post a preprint we can link to? And by the way, are you posting your own preprints for others?" Salo said libraries must "draw a thick black line connecting what faculty do and what they have access to, because right now they don't see it."
Northwestern University Libraries' Claire Stewart wrote a detailed post on the library's copyright blog, hitting at a central frustration of the case. "Publishers are not at all specific about their thresholds for acceptable use," she writes, "leaving us to wonder whether they would consider any reserve use fair."
Perhaps the most remarkable reaction came from University of Texas' Georgia Harper. On her blog, Harper said reading Stewart's blog "pushed the last little piece into place." That piece-open access (OA). "The same struggles the industry is going through to figure out how to make the economics of OA work for journals are going to come to monographs next and then why not educational publishing?" she wrote. "Books can be freely accessible without authorship, editing, peer review and distribution falling into the gutter. Do we know how right this minute? Maybe not. Is it impossible? Absolutely not. Do we need to figure it out? Absolutely. Will we? Absolutely."
|
|
SPARC-ACRL Forum Will Addresses Harvard Open Access Policy
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) announced this week that the SPARC-ACRL Forum during the 2008 American Library Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA, will examine Harvard University's recent faculty open access mandate. The program, entitled "Campus Open Access Policies: The Harvard Experience and How To Get There," is co-sponsored by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services-Continuing Resources (ALCTS-CRS). It will "explore the motivations behind the Harvard policy, the groundwork invested in its creation, reactions and outcomes to date, and the broader implications of this historic step."
Headlining the timely event will be Stuart M. Shieber, professor of computer science at Harvard, director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society, faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the key architect of the policy. Shieber will be joined by Catherine Candee, executive director, Strategic Publishing and Broadcast Initiatives, from the office of the president of the University of California, who will relate similar activity in her school's system, and by Kevin L. Smith, JD, scholarly communications officer at Duke University, who will suggest legal considerations for institutions following the open access policy path.
The forum will be held from 4-5:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 28, in room 210 A-C of the Anaheim Convention Center. The ACRL Scholarly Communications Discussion Group will additionally host an open conversation about issues that surface at the forum from 4-5:30 p.m. on Sunday, June 29, in room 203 B. Please consult the final program to verify room assignments. The forum will also be available via a SPARC podcast at a later date.
|
|
Chronopolis Launches “Framework” To Preserve At-Risk Digital Information
The Chronopolis Digital Preservation Demonstration Project, one of the Library of Congress' latest efforts to collect and preserve at-risk digital information, officially launched this week. Billed as a digital preservation "data grid framework," it was developed by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at University of California San Diego (UCSD), the UCSD Libraries (UCSDL), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado, and the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.
The key goal: to provide "cross-domain collection sharing for long-term preservation." UCSD university librarian Brian Schottlaender, a principal investigator on the project, said the project is "part of a new breed of distributed digital preservation programs…to provide data longevity, durability and access well into the next century." Specifically, the partnership calls for each Chronopolis member to operate a "grid node"of at least 50 terabytes of storage capacity for digital collections. Just one terabyte of information would use up all the paper made from about 50,000 trees. Chronopolis calls for a minimum of "three geographically distributed copies of the data collections, while enabling curatorial audit reporting and access for preservation clients." The partnership will also seek to develop a "best practices" guide for digital archive systems.
|
Library Journal Academic Newswire
Contributing Editor: Andrew R. Albanese
Phone: 646-746-6852 E-mail: aalbanese@reedbusiness.com
Editor: Francine Fialkoff
Phone: 646-746-6807 E-mail: fialkoff@reedbusiness.com
Executive Editor: Rebecca Miller
Phone: 646-746-6725 E-mail: miller@reedbusiness.com
News Editor: Norman Oder
Phone: 646-746-6829 E-mail: noder@reedbusiness.com
TO UNSUBSCRIBE
To unsubscribe send an e-mail to Unsub_Academic_Newswire@email.libraryjournal.com
TO SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe to Academic Newswire or our other newsletters
Subscribe to Library Journal magazine
ARCHIVE
Read past issues
PRINT
You must change your print settings from portrait to landscape to print this page.
VIEW OUR PRIVACY POLICY
Click here
QUESTIONS?
If you need further assistance with your newsletter subscription, please contact our Online Support Staff.
Send editorial questions about this newsletter to: aalbanese@reedbusiness.com.
RBInteractive: onlineads@reedbusiness.com, (888) 7RBI-WEB.
PRIVACY MANAGER: privacymanager@reedbusiness.com
Reed Business Information 2000 Clearwater Drive Oak Brook, IL 60523 | Fax: 630-288-8394
© 2007 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2008 Library Journal. All rights reserved.
"Library Journal" is a registered trademark. "Library Journal Academic Newswire" is a trademark.
|
