The need for common terms for licensing scientific literature and databases: presentation at IFLA 2002

1. The licence
trap
The need for common terms
for scientific literature and
databases
Chris Rusbridge, University of
Glasgow
09/25/12 1

2. Contents
• ‘Nightmare’ paper
• Updating
• Licence issues
• Over-riding law?
• ePrints issues
• Service issues
09/25/12 2

3. Scenario (LIP-LINC,
1996)
– 20-40 years on?
– Major shift to electronic publishing
– Print journals decimated
– Scholarly self-publishing wide-spread
– Library is a teaching/learning resource
– Historians use paper for research
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4. Information objects?
– Hyper-text consequences
• writing de-linearised
• information in chunks or gobbets
• electronic book not a self-contained
package
• package boundaries un-clear
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5. Copyright
– licences required for everything?
– variety of terms & conditions
– variety of pricing models
– impossibility of adherence: millions of
objects, thousands of licences!
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6. Preservation problems
– Legal
– Technical
– Organisational (who?)
– Financial
– How to get a continuous commitment
measured in hundreds of years?
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7. Updating the scenario
• Hypertext?
– Formal writing remains linear (mostly)
• 62 journals with embedded multimedia (McKiernan)
– Encyclopaedias non-linear but controlled
– Web resources limited hypertext… but free
• Eg Perseus
– Citation linking growing
• Hypertext at the article level
• Still mostly within single resources
• DOI and OpenURL based
• Do hit barriers occasionally; mainly no citation link!
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8. Updating the scenario 2
• Licences not so varied
– Consortia impact
• Yale Liblicense site
(http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/index.shtml)
• ICOLC (http://www.library.yale.edu/consortia/)
• CHEST, NESLI, PA-JISC Model licence in UK
(http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/modellic.pdf)
– Industry consolidation
• Fewer agreement variations
– BUT many independent publishers
– Also many subtle differences
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9. Updating the scenario 3
• Digital preservation
– Remote access model
• So who preserves?
– Legal deposit of non-print?
• Or specific preservation agreements needed
– Preserving meaning
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10. How big is the
problem?
• University of Glasgow
– 4500 e-journals from >1300
publishers (only 30 publishers
supply > 10 journals, and around
1000 supply only 1 journal)
– 350 datasets
– 150 e-books(?)
– Hundreds of licence agreements,
mostly on paper
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11. Licence issues 1
• Authorised users
– Staff?
• Employees
• Visiting
• Honorary
– Students?
• All?
• Restricted faculty?
• Restricted location?
• Part time?
• Work placements?
• Continuing education?
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12. Licence issues 2
• Walk-ins
• None?
• Occasional
• Registered?
• All?
• All, but require ATHENS authentication? (Not
available except for staff & students!)
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13. Licence issues 3
• Locations?
• Library?
• All or part of (one or more) campuses?
• Residence?
• Workplace?
• Anywhere in the UK?
• Anywhere in the world?
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14. Licence issues 4
• Special conditions (probably
many more)
– Ordnance survey complex conditions
– A major publisher!
• Permission needed for local storage of any part
of article
• ‘Except as above [photocopies, ToCs, lists of
articles], no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a computer system or
transmitted … by any means, electronic … or
otherwise, without the prior written permission
09/25/12 of the publisher’ 14

15. Over-riding laws?
• Eg new Export Control Act
– Controls on the transfer of
technology by intangible means
– Related to weapons of mass
destruction and delivery systems
– Academic freedom clause…
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16. Technical issues 1
• Technical implementation
– Lowest common set; often prohibit
walk-in access even where allowed
• Semantic web and web services?
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17. Technical issues 2
• Digital rights management systems
– Seem more concerned with tracking
ownership and splitting payments (eg
OASIS http://www.oasis-
open.org/committees/xacml/,
indecs http://www.indecs.org/)
– Would need to track user types; interact
with authentication & authorisation
systems (eg FDRM
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july02/martin/07ma
rtin.html)
– Would need to express licence terms (eg
XrML2 http://www.xrml.org/)
– Copyright expiry & other fair use17
09/25/12 issues

18. ePrints
• Subversive proposal
– Author self-archiving
• Copyright issues
– Between author and publisher, not reader
or library and publisher
– Pre-prints
• Prior publication?
– Post-prints
• Need rights to mount
09/25/12 18

19. Summary
• Licences becoming more uniform
• Technical implementation makes
more uniform still
• Rich technical environments
some way off
• We are not getting what we pay
for!
09/25/12 19