Report

The Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and ARL have drafted a proposal in response to the OSTP memo: The SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE).

 share-proposal-07june13.pdf

The proposal begins:

Research universities are long-lived and are mission-driven to generate, make accessible, and preserve over time new knowledge and understanding. Research universities collectively have the assets needed for a national solution for enhanced public access to federally funded research output. As the principal producers of the resources that are to be made publicly available under the new White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)[1] memorandum, and that are critical to the continuing success of higher education in the United States, universities have invested in the infrastructure, tools, and services necessary to provide effective and efficient access to their research and scholarship. The new White House directive provides a compelling reason to integrate higher education’s investments to date into a system of cross-institutional digital repositories that will be known as SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE)...

Comments and questions about the draft SHARE proposal (PDF) are welcome—please send e-mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

While many research libraries have begun to digitize their collections and share best practices around the steps required to create digital content, much less is known about what happens post-launch. Building on previous research by Ithaka S+R that defined key aspects of sustainable digital content, Appraising our Digital Investment: Sustainability of Digitized Special Collections in ARL Libraries offers a first look at the practices, attitudes, costs, and revenues associated with caring for digitized special collections. The report shares results from a survey conducted on the sustainability of digitized special collections at ARL member institutions.

 digitizing-special-collections-report-21feb13.pdf

Research libraries have a responsibility to make library collections and services universally accessible to their patrons. And as research libraries provide more content electronically to students, faculty members, researchers, and others, the role of libraries and other partners in their institutions and beyond is changing in the provision of information resources and services to patrons with disabilities.

print-disabilities-tfreport02nov12.pdf

Does the approach of creating a code of best practices, anchored in professional practice, actually work to expand the utility of fair use? What has happened to others who used codes of best practices to gain access to their rights? This document describes specific examples of success with using codes of best practice.

fair-use-codes-success.pdf

arl-committee-structure.pdf

fair-use-code-faq-libs.pdf

Memorandum discussing legal issues in website archiving.

 band-new-day-for-archiving-2.0-23feb12.pdf

The ability to make reasonable "fair use" of copyrighted material is both economically and culturally important to the enterprise of education. In asserting fair use, teachers, librarians, and others cannot rely on a claim of "educational exceptionalism," for which there is no clear basis in U.S. Copyright law. Instead, they should seek to take advantage of current trends in copyright caselaw, including the marked trend toward preferring uses that are "transformative," where the amount of content used is appropriate to the transformative purpose. Over twenty years, we have accumulated considerable information about what constitutes "transformativeness," and members of the education community are well-positioned to provide persuasive narratives explaining how educational uses significantly repurpose and add value to the copyrighted content they incorporate. Published in Law & Literature, Vol. 24 No. 3 (Fall 2012).

jaszi-education-and-fair-use.pdf

On January 13, 2012, the Supreme Court by a 6-2 vote affirmed the Tenth Circuit decision in Golan v. Holder. The case concerned the constitutionality of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), which restored copyright in foreign works that had entered into the public domain because the copyright owners had failed to comply with formalities such as notice; or because the U.S. did not have copyright treaties in place with the country at the time the work was created (e.g., the Soviet Union)

golan_summary_06feb12.pdf

Flyer discussing copyright education and academic integrity codes.

Code-brief-copyright-education-2012.pdf