The University Council’s approval was announced this morning…

Boston University took a giant step towards greater access to academic scholarship and research on February 11, when the University Council voted to support an open access system that would make scholarly work of the faculty and staff available online to anyone, for free, as long as the authors are credited and the scholarship is not used for profit. Click here to download the full pdf.

“We believe this is the first time that a university as a whole has taken a stand on behalf of the university as opposed to a single school or college,” says Wendy Mariner, the chair of the Faculty Council and a professor at the School of Law, at the School of Public Health, and at the School of Medicine. “We are looking forward to new forms of publication in the 21st century that will transform the ways that knowledge and information are shared.”

“The resolution passed by our University Council is a very important statement on the importance of open access to the results of scholarship and research created within the University,” says BU President Robert A. Brown. “The digital archive called for in the resolution will become a great repository for the creativity of our faculty and students.”

You can read more at BU Today.

I’ve been experimenting a little with Google Documents (http://docs.google.com) in the past few weeks. This morning I created a presentation on Title 17 Section 108 for a lunch conversation about Copyright and Libraries, specifically focused on Boston University’s libraries beginning efforts to plan for a digitization project. I was generally pleased with the ease of creating the document. It isn’t as robust as MS PowerPoint, but it certainly met my needs.

It was possible to upload a PowerPoint presentation as a starting point. I was surprised, however, that I couldn’t download to a PowerPoint file, nor could I print it. With documents and spreadsheets, it is possible to export to a MS Office file. I didn’t try it, but a feature I really like is the ability to interact through chat with those who might be viewing the presentation online.

I was able to publish the document as well. This provides a URL (on Google) that is discoverable by the public. And this post is being written using Google Documents as the editor. In configuring options, I’m able to specify my blog for posting…

The Digital Commonwealth launched its new portal today at its Second Annual Meeting. It’s a really nice design that allows one to search all of the digital repositories in Massachusetts.

The Digital Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a portal to the rich cultural heritage held in museums, historical societies, colleges, libraries and other cultural repositories in Massachusetts. From this site you can search or browse the digital collections of member institutions throughout the state for manuscripts, images, historical documents, and sound recordings, providing you with enhanced access and retrieval of information.

Mary Minow’s presentation on copyright at the Second Annual Meeting of the Digital Commonwealth was as good as I’ve heard on copyright for libraries. I found particularly helpful her discussion of Section 108. I left much more encouraged about the possibility of digitizing materials that don’t clearly fall in the public domain. If you haven’t checked out http://www.librarylaw.com/, you will find it to be an expansive and very helpful resource for libraries sorting through legal issues.

ARS Technical has a news story about a complaint with the FTC filed by the Computer & Communications Industry Association claiming that

…professional sports leagues, Hollywood studios, and book publishers were all using copyright notices that misrepresented the law.

The group, including Google and Microsoft, has launched a new Web site called Defend Fair Use to support its complaint.

Adding University of California would be a significant addition….

University of California May Join Google’s Library Project – Los Angeles Times
In a move with major significance for the worlds of academic research and publishing, the University of California is in talks to join Google’s controversial project to digitize great libraries and offer books online.

Google is keen to have access to UC’s 34 million volumes from 100 libraries on 10 campuses, which is described as collectively the largest academic research library in the world. UC wants to delve more deeply into the Internet revolution with a deep-pockets partner like Google paying the costs of scanning books.

Even with the addition of the University of California collections, significant gaps will remain. Brian Lavoie, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, and Lorcan Dempsey did an analysis of the original “Google 5″ libraries published in D-Lib Magazine (September 2005). They compared the collective holdings of the Google 5 against the system-wide collection in OCLC:

The proportion of the system-wide collection actually covered by GDLP, once duplicate holdings across the five institutions are removed, is about one third (33 percent), or 10.5 million unique books out of the 32 million in the system-wide collection. About two-thirds (67 percent) of the system-wide collection, or 21.6 million books, are not held by any Google 5 library.

James Boyle’s latest comment on the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) proposal was to extend the length of an existing set of intellectual property rights for broadcasters (and webcasters.)

Copyright offices around the world admit that there is a huge problem with “orphan works” – copyrighted material for which the copyright holder cannot be found. Given the absurdly long copyright term, it is quite possible that the majority of the cultural production of the twentieth century consists of orphan works. Because of the difficulty of clearing copyright, those works remain locked up in the library. Even though the copyright holder has long disappeared, or would not mind, it is impossible to show the old movie, adapt the old book, play the old song, put the old poem in an anthology. Many libraries simply refuse to allow screening of movies until the copyright term has expired; probably no one would object, but the legal risk is too great.

Now imagine creating an entirely new layer of rights over everything that is broadcast or webcast, on top of whatever copyrights already cover the work. You find a copy of a movie in the library and manage, at great expense, to work out that it is in the public domain, or to get the copyright holder’s permission. Perhaps the work is covered by a Creative Commons license, granting you permission to reproduce. Not so fast! Even after trudging through all the orphan works problems in copyright, you would have to prove that this copy had not been made from a broadcast or webcast. More clearance problems! More middle-men! More empirically ungrounded state-granted monopolies! Just what we wanted. There are even some serious free speech problems.

Lorcan Dempsey suggests the difference between the rights of ownership of copyright protected materials and licensing are not as different as one might at first image:

What this means is that a large part of library collections is still in copyright. The library ‘owns’ the cost of storing it, shelving it, keeping it at the right temperature, and so on. It can be shared and borrowed in its current form. However, the library does not ‘own’ it to the extent that they can freely re-format it and allow it to be used by many parties.

In this sense, the gap between the materials that libraries ‘own’ and the materials that libraries license is smaller than we are used to thinking about.

His point is well-taken. I especially appreciate his inclusion of the ongoing cost of storing and preserving the item. What he’s describing may be more akin to a “lease-to-own” plan. If the library (or individual that purchases the book) keeps a book long enough, the rights of ownership do eventually include the right to copy, digitize, etc. The work eventually moves into the public domain. But the cost is quite high.

Scott Bennett’s article and cost analysis, Just-in-Time Scholarly Monographs builds in more detail case models to compare what he calls “Just-in-Time” versus “Just-in Case” models for libraries. “Just-in-case” strategies would acquire books in case someone might need them. “Just-in -time” strategies acquire a book only when it is needed. Nearly 10 years old, Bennett’s cost models continue to provide a helpful model for modeling the cost of various strategies for providing ready access to materials.
I’ve been thinking about how to control the cost of housing a book for the long-term, and retrieval of that book for use by library users. The cost of digitizing books has decrease in recent months. One of my primary costs is retrieval of books shelved off-site. I recently calculated it cost us over $50 to retrieve and return an item from off-site shelving.
Shifting to digital access to these materials may be more a more cost effective means of providing access to lesser used materials.

Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification a new open access journal has posted Jonathan Band’s “The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story.”

From the journal’s Web site:

International in scope, Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification is a new scholarly journal devoted specifically to the study of plagiarism and related fabrications/falsifications within the professional literature (i.e. scholarly journals and books) and popular discourse domains (i.e. journalism, politics, audio-visual texts). Providing a forum for scholarly discussion and research on trends and phenomena (both recent and historical) related to plagiarism, Plagiary features refereed research articles, “Perspectives” articles, book reviews, and responses as a point of focus on issues of vital importance to professional and popular discourse communities.

The U.S. Copyright Office just released its final report on “Orphan Works.” A quick scan of the report revealed what to me seemed a very reasonable approach to handling the issue. It think this is good news…

U.S. Copyright Office – Orphan Works
The Copyright Office has completed its study of problems related to “orphan works”—copyrighted works whose owners may be impossible to identify and locate. As requested by Senator Orrin Hatch and Senator Patrick Leahy, the Office submitted its Report on Orphan Works to the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 31, 2006. The Report is also available for download on this page in two versions, the Full Report with Appendices, and the Main Text (no appendices).

The EFF points to a judgement by a Nevada court in favor of Google that among other things declares that the Google Cache is a “fair use.”

EFF: DeepLinks
The court granted summary judgment in favor of Google on four independent bases:

* Serving a webpage from the Google Cache does not constitute direct infringement, because it results from automated, non-volitional activity by Google servers (Field did not allege infringement on the basis of the making of the initial copy by the Googlebot);

* Field’s conduct (failure to set a “no archive” metatag; posting “allow all” robot.txt header) indicated that he impliedly licensed search engines to archive his web page;

* The Google Cache is a fair use; and

* The Google Cache qualifies for the DMCA’s 512(b) caching “safe harbor” for online service providers.