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ALA Attendance Off Pace from 2007, With One Especially Noticeable Absence
Perhaps it was to be expected given skyrocketing fuel costs and travel uncertainty, but attendance for the 2008 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA, as of yesterday, was 21,063, including 15,436 registrants and 5627 exhibitors, reported ALA executive director Keith Fiels, That’s off from 26,846 at the same juncture during last year’s 2007 conference in Washington, DC. Nevertheless, despite lower attendance the conference proved to be a vibrant one for librarians.
Perhaps more noteworthy than the 5000 fewer attendees, however, is one conspicuous absence from the show floor: Google. “For the first time in a while, Google is not exhibiting,” commented OCLC’s Roy Tennant. “What does this mean? Well, for one thing, no more great parties. But beyond that I don't know, but it can’t possibly be good.”
For our complete ALA coverage, including staff videos, visit the Library Journal ALA page.
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SPARC Forum: Harvard’s Shieber Discusses OA Policy; UC Officials Recall Near Miss
Earlier this year Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences (FAS) became the first in the nation to pass a pioneering Open Access (OA) mandate. The University of California (UC), however, almost got there first. “I’m thrilled and envious about Harvard,” moderator John Ober of the California Digital Library told the packed audience at the SPARC Forum at the American Library Association’s annual conference in Anaheim. Ober noted that a UC draft policy fell short, after getting bogged down in details. “We hit a long fly ball to the warning track,” he said, “but Harvard hit a home run.”
Harvard computer science professor Stuart Shieber, now director of Harvard’s new Office for Scholarly Communication told the conference-goers that while “the unsustainability of journal price increases,” spurred the policy, he said that at its heart, the issue for Harvard is not cost but “the underlying systemic problems [that] have led to a reduction in access.” Shieber, nevertheless, took aim at the commercial journals market, saying that commercial journals cost six times the price per page compared to OA journals, although there’s no proof commercial journals are six times better; in fact, he said, the cost per citation is 16 times higher for commercial journals. “There must be some underlying market dysfunction,” Shieber concluded.
UC’s Catherine Candee, executive director, Strategic Publishing and Broadcast Initiatives said UC’s OA push began with several spurs, including, some difficult negotiations in 2004 with leading STM publisher Elsevier, She said that open access was “one of the best tools” available to build “a sustainable publishing and communication system,” but admitted that getting there isn’t easy. In 2006, she noted, the UC Academic Senate endorsed a proposal for a Scholarly Work Copyright Policy, which was essentially an OA policy. In January 2007, Candee said, the provost requested Senate and administrative review of policy, involving all ten campuses. By July 2007, concerns over implementation overwhelmed support for the policy’s goals and intent, she said, and the policy was sent back to the provost. Now, UC faculty members, librarians, and administrators are consulting over a new version, she said.
“There was a lot of inspiration from Harvard’s action,” Candee said. “If only we’d done something so elegantly simple.” She said the there continues to be discussion on the local level, with local committees trying to get their Senates to take up the issue but system-wide, “the discussion is really postponed ‘til the fall.”
The broad, “opt-out” provision in Harvard’s policy, which Harvard FAS members can secure by request in writing, emerged as a key point. Columbia University librarian Jim Neal asked Shieber what faculty work product is included in Harvard’s policy, noting that the “debate at Columbia has provoked interesting challenges on what would be covered.” Shieber said the Harvard policy refers to scholarly articles, and explanatory materials refer to journal articles and articles in conference proceedings. “We wanted to make sure that core cases, the journal articles, are covered,” he said. “You can’t handle every case in a policy of this sort, so we kept it relatively simple and said it’s important that it be interpreted in best interest of faculty.” Shieber, said it was still too early to tell how many faculty members are opting out of the policy.
Ober said UC considered three different opt-out scenarios in its proposal. “We were trying in some senses to encourage compliance by making it very difficult to opt out,” he conceded, “which was probably the wrong way to go.” Candee added that planners must “be aware of unique needs of disciplines,” explaining that some faculty members thought that the National Institutes of Health mandate might cover the entire faculty, even though it only covers the hard sciences. Candee suggested that, along with OA, several other avenues should be considered, including negotiations with publishers for universal permissions, alternative publishing services, open textbooks/courses, and a review of the tenure and promotion system that enables the status quo. A recent UC report lays out some possibilities.
The Harvard OA policy continues to gain momentum, meanwhile. Recently the Harvard Law School followed in the footsteps of the FAS, and this week a representative of Harvard Medical School suggested they would “be the next school to go for OA.”
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Hardball: At ALA, Columbia’s Neal Recalls Section 108 Study Group Experience
It came later than expected, and seemed to reflect more contention than consensus, but this spring, the Section 108 Study Group, chartered in 2005 to inform legislative changes to update the Copyright Act’s exception for libraries and archives, delivered its long-awaited report. On Saturday, at the ALA annual conference in Anaheim, study group member Jim Neal, VP for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University, told an audience at the American Library Association’s (ALA) Annual Conference in Anaheim, that the overall 108 experience portends some major challenges ahead.
“I think that this is hardball we are facing,” he said. “I am giving a talk in Quebec City at IFLA [the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions conference this August], and the title is ‘Fair Use is Not Civil Disobedience.’ Are we ready for the hardball offensive that I think will be required to protect our rights?”
In a frank assessment, Neal said that the 108 study group found consensus on some issues, such as broad support for the inclusion of museums in new legislation and made “two very important omnibus recommendations:” libraries should have an automatic exception to preserve materials, without permission, and exceptions should be extended to web-based content. But the year-long delay in the report—due initially in early 2007—“evidenced the broad complexities of the issue,” he added, “and the broad political disagreements that were brought out in the process.”
Overall, as reflected in the final report, the study group found a “high level of disagreement, where we think there can be no significant legislative solutions,” including over vital issues such as the use of digital technologies for interlibrary loan. “We all know how we behave in our resource-sharing environment,” Neal said. “To get that reflected in 108 seems to make a lot of sense. But there was not agreement from the content community.”
The group discussed a range of issues, Neal noted, on which it was able to offer no recommendations, including virtual libraries and archives. “There was a cloud over us through the whole process, called the Internet Archive, he said, referring to the popular deep archive of web sites. “We felt it should be reflected, but couldn’t get there.” Nor could the group address whether 108 could trump licenses or contracts. Rights holders, he said, were concerned about losing their business. They wanted to make sure libraries don’t get digitization rights greater than they as publishers enjoy. Those representing the content community also frequently brought up piracy. Librarians, Neal said, urged against setting up laws “to deal with exceptional users.”
In fact, Neal said, study group members differed on perhaps the most basic issue of all: who represents the public interest. “We kept saying we represent the public interest,” he said, referring to the library community. Content providers, however, countered that they supply jobs and support the economy. “That was an interesting debate.”
Now that the report has been filed with the Librarian of Congress, Congress may hold hearings in response to expected legislative proposals, although nothing is expected in the near term. “We had a lot of stumbling blocks,” reflected Neal on the process. “I think we lacked consensus on guiding principles: What is copyright? What is an exception and limitation to copyright? It’s pretty hard to reach change… when you don’t have an agreement on guiding principles.”
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Georgia State University Strongly Answers Publishers’ E-Reserve Lawsuit
Just as librarians gathered in Anaheim for the ALA annual conference, state attorneys in Georgia have at last answered a landmark lawsuit filed by publishers, including two university presses and supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), filed against Georgia State University personnel over the university’s use of electronic course content. Two words can sum up Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker’s defense: fair use.
Baker and Georgia state attorneys nevertheless covered all their legal bases in their answer to publishers, and asked a district judge in Atlanta to dismiss the case. In the filing, Baker listed 18 defenses, ranging from a claim of state sovereign immunity to “acquiescence,” and asked that judgment be entered in [GSU’s] favor, and that it be allowed to recover all costs, reasonable attorney fees’ and expenses allowable by law.
The university’s point-by-point response to the publishers’ complaint now sets the stage for what could be a protracted legal battle over the contentious, years-long argument over e-reserves.
The response sheds little new light on how GSU will fight its case—and a settlement not unlike those reflected in guidelines reached under AAP pressure at other universities is still possible. GSU, however, has clearly not blinked, and its filing suggests it is willing to fight in court on its fair use claim. Georgia attorneys readily admit that the university “offers digitized course excerpts through its library electronic course reserves service,” as well as through course management services and faculty web site. “In so doing, GSU relies on the statutory doctrine of fair use.”
Notably, attorneys specifically denied that GSU made the suit necessary, as publishers have contended, by refusing to engage publishers about their practices. “GSU denies that Plaintiffs have made repeated attempts to reach an amicable and mutually acceptable solution without the need for litigation and that all such efforts have been flatly rebuffed by the state,” the filing reads. Attorneys also conceded that some reserves were not password protected, but attributed that to a vendor’s software glitch that is has since been repaired. The university also denied “massive,” or “ongoing systematic infringement,” and said that its placement of materials on e-reserve is not analogous to creation of a digital coursepack.
Should the action not be dismissed due to procedural or legal issues (such as GSU sovereign immunity claim) GSU’s case, and, by extension, possibly the cases of other university libraries, will come down to a judge’s reading of the murky guidelines of fair use—a verdict that could have major ramifications for both publishers and libraries. For publishers, the ramifications of suing their best customers could lead to more systematic changes, such a more aggressive shift to open access. For libraries, fair use could hit the wall.
“We might actually get a decision about the meat of the claim, that electronic reserves are almost always infringing if the universities do not pay for permission,” observed Duke University’s Kevin Smith on the Duke scholarly communication blog. “In effect, this is an attempt to enforce judicially a ‘pay-per-use’ model of content distribution.”
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Happy Independence Day! No Newswire on Thursday, July 3rd.
Due to the July 4th holiday, there will be no LJ Academic Newswire on Thursday, July 3rd. We’ll be back to our regular schedule next Tuesday. Have a safe and happy holiday weekend.
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