Acquiring Copyright Permission to Digitize and Provide Open Access to Books by Denise Troll Covey
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Acquiring Copyright Permission to Digitize and Provide Open Access to Books by Denise Troll Covey Digital Library Federation Council on Library and In for ma tion Re sourc es Washington, D.C. October 2005 ii Published by: Digital Library Federation Council on Library and Information Resources 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 500 Wash ing ton, DC 20036 Web sites at http://www.clir.org and http://www.diglib.org ISBN 1-932326-22-7 ISBN 978-1-932326-22-2 CLIR Publication No. 134 Copyright 2005 in compilation by the Digital Library Federation and the Council on Library and Information Resources. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transcribed in any form without permission of the publishers. Requests for reproduction or other uses or questions pertaining to permissions should be submitted in writing to the Director of Communications at the Council on Library and Information Resources. Additional copies are available for $25 per copy. Orders must be placed through DLF's or CLIR’s Web site. This publication is also available online at no charge at http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub134abst.html and at http://purl.oclc.org/dlf/trollcovey0509 The paper in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard 8 for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Li brary Ma te ri als ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Troll Covey, Denise. Acquiring copyright permission to digitize and provide open access to books / Denise Troll Covey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-1-932326-22-2 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-932326-22-7 (alk. paper) 1. Copyright and electronic data processing--United States. 2. Electronic books--United States. I. Title. KF3024.M32C68 2005 346.7304’82--dc22 2005024572 iii Contents About the Author .......................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................... v Foreword ........................................................................................................................ vi Introduction .....................................................................................................................1 A Brief History of Law and Practice .............................................................................2 The Implications ..............................................................................................................7 The Response ...................................................................................................................9 The Random Sample Feasibility Study ......................................................................11 Overall Results ................................................................................................13 Analysis of Restrictions .................................................................................15 Analysis of Foreign and Domestic Publications ........................................16 Analysis by Publisher Type ...........................................................................17 Analysis by Publication Type ........................................................................17 Analysis by Print Status and Publication Date ..........................................18 Analysis of Transaction Costs .......................................................................20 Conclusions and Lessons Learned ...............................................................21 The Fine and Rare Book Study ....................................................................................21 Overall Results ................................................................................................26 Analysis of Restrictions .................................................................................28 Analysis of Foreign and Domestic Publications ........................................29 Analysis by Publisher Type ...........................................................................30 Analysis by Publication Type ........................................................................31 Analysis by Print Status and Publication Date ..........................................31 Analysis of Transaction Costs .......................................................................34 Conclusions and Lessons Learned ...............................................................35 The Million Book Project Study ..................................................................................38 Tracking the Data ............................................................................................42 Overall Results ................................................................................................43 Analysis by Publisher Type ...........................................................................45 Requests that We Provide Lists of Titles ......................................................48 Request that We Check Copyright-Renewal Records ...............................51 Experiments to Contain Costs ......................................................................52 Analysis of Transaction Costs .......................................................................54 Conclusions and Lessons Learned ...............................................................54 Looking Ahead ..............................................................................................................58 References .......................................................................................................................60 iv About the Author Denise Troll Covey, principal librarian for special projects at Carnegie Mellon University, is responsible for conducting research to inform library administration and strategic planning. She manages Carnegie Mellon University Libraries’ performance measures and keeps abreast of technological developments and their social implications and the laws, policies, practices, and standards relevant to digital libraries. Her current projects are engaging Carnegie Mellon faculty members in developing an institutional repository for their scholarly work and conducting an analysis of the public comments and public hearing transcripts regarding the U.S. Copyright Offi ce's investigation of orphan works. Ms. Covey serves on the National Information Standards Organization Standards Development Committee, where she is leading an initiative to develop rights expression and management for scholarly information. She is also secretary of the Measurement, Assessment, and Evaluation Section of the Library Administration and Management Association. Ms. Covey was a Distinguished Fellow at the Digital Library Federation in 2000–2001. v Acknowledgments Many people were involved in the copyright-permission work reported here. I thank Lily Waters and Leigh Caskey Schenk of the U.S. Army for doing the groundwork for the feasibility study, Tracey Connelly for continuing the work, and Carole George for seeing the study through to completion and conducting the preliminary data analysis. George also created the database for tracking the data in the Posner project and contributed to the design of the publisher database for the Million Book Project. I thank Ruth Ann Schmidt for her help with the Posner permissions and Cynthia Brown for her work on the Thousand Book Project, her assistance in designing the publisher database, and her help fi nding publisher addresses for the Million Book Project. The time and effort of the librarians and students who helped fi nd publisher addresses are also much appreciated, as are the reading and editing suggestions for this report provided by Cindy Carroll. Special thanks go to Erin Rhodes, who did the bulk of the permissions work on the Posner and Million Book projects. Without her efforts, diligence, and persistence, this report would not exist. Though her task was sometimes tedious, she persevered. Though she often felt confused and frustrated, she persevered. Despite the inadequacy of our mechanisms for tracking the data, she persevered. And she never complained. I could have had no better assistant. Special thanks are also extended to Kathlin Smith of the Council on Library and Information Resources for her careful reading and editing suggestions and to the copyright attorney that she recruited to ensure the accuracy of my overview of copyright law. Those who funded this work must also be thanked: Henry Posner, Jr., and his wife Helen for funding the Posner copyright-permission work and Bruce Miller at the University of California Libraries at Merced for funding the Million Book Project copyright-permission work. Finally, I thank Gloriana St. Clair, dean of University Libraries at Carnegie Mellon and one of the directors of the Universal Library Project. Her vision and substantial allocation of my time were essential to what we have accomplished. vi Foreword The contemporary academic library and its users have an appetite for digital copies of books that far outstrips the willingness and ability of publishers to provide such access. In the science disciplines, contemporary and histori- cal journal literature is becoming widely available in digital format, albeit at considerable cost. Access to the scholarly record in digital form is already transforming the manner in which science disciplines communicate, publish, research, and review excellence.