ARL, AAU Examine Licenses for Copyrighted Materials

In several recent venues, directors of ARL libraries and members of ARL
and AAU committees discussed the pros and cons of wide area or
comprehensive licenses for copyrighted materials.  In late spring, two
different sets of visitors joined ARL to contribute to the ongoing
discourse. 

During a visit to AAU, ARL, and other organizations in the Washington,
DC area, representatives of the Higher Education Funding Council for
England (HEFCE), including Sir Brian Follett, Vice-Chancellor, Warwick
University, described a recent Call For Proposals to publishers to
participate in a U.K.  site license prototype project that would include
all of the approximately 100 universities in the United Kingdom. 

The HEFCE is considering at least two responses to the Call in order to
gain more experience in the journal/license arena.  The potential
benefits of such licenses are that all UK universities would receive
paper and e-subscriptions (if available), and students and faculty in
their institutions would be defined as eligible for unlimited copying
for educational and research purposes.  The visiting delegation also
identified risks in pursuing national site licenses.  For example, would
the publishers selected for such a pilot project attain an unfair
competitive edge over other publishers who are not selected? In future
years, would universities have bargaining power in the face of publisher
price increases? Could individual universities opt out of a national
license if they chose to? How would the national license fee be
apportioned?

If it proceeds, a UK experiment with site licensing for copyrighted
journals will be one that North American research universities will
monitor closely. 

At the ARL meeting in Boston, Isabella Hinds of the Copyright Clearance
Center (CCC) joined the ARL Scholarly Communications Committee for a
dialogue about a proposed CCC comprehensive collective licensing
program.  She and Joe Alen, President of the CCC, also joined the
AAU/ARL Intellectual Property Task Force's May 25th meeting in the ARL
offices.  The CCC described its intentions to introduce a comprehensive
collective photocopy license for the academic market.  The license would
aggregate photocopy reproduction rights for a number of campus uses
including classroom use, coursepacks, administration, and other paid-for
uses. 

The CCC's proposed licensing system was described as: comprehensive,
inclusive, flexible in pricing and payment structure, and accommodating
of fair use in a way that preserves academia's rights under the
Copyright Act.  The initial offering will not extend to digital uses of
material in digital form but will include substantial amounts of
material that can be stored in digital form for the purpose of creating
a paper copy. 

Both the Scholarly Communication Committee and the Intellectual Property
Task Force engaged the CCC representatives in questions that probed
where the program might have value for universities.  Some of the
concerns included: How would the CCC licenses adjust for fair use, a
very high percentage of library copying? What are the incentives for the
university signing a license that includes coursepacks when currently
coursepacks are purchased directly by students? Will "hit" articles be
priced higher than little-requested articles? Electronic reserves may be
an area where universities could use a license; when would the CCC
license include uses of material in electronic form? Aggregation reduces
feedback to the publisher, so how would a publisher learn which specific
articles or chapters are heavily used?

The IP-TF agreed to develop a list of issues and questions that could be
pursued in further discussions with the CCC as their program unfolds. 


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ARL 181
A Bimonthly Newsletter of Research Library Issues and Actions
Association of Research Libraries
August 1995