Chief, Serials & Acquisitions Department
Stanford University Library
Stanford University is participating in a consortial, ARPA funded ($1.5 million), 3 year project (1992 to 1995) to mount Computer Science Technical Reports on electronic networks. The project is coordinated by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives; other consortium members are: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; University of California at Berkeley; and Cornell University. Within Stanford, this research project is a joint effort between the Libraries and Information Resources and the Computer Science Department.
The Consortium's goals can be summarized: build a networked electronic library of Computer Science literature; research technical issues; experiment with intellectual property systems; and document impact on scholarly community.
Stanford's research emphasis is to explore the problems of large distributed information systems; to experiment with issues of scale particularly as related to: selective dissemination of information; parallel text retrieval; distributed searching; and distributed indexes.
In addition, Stanford has spent the last year addressing some of the social and political aspects of intellectual property.
Stanford needs author permissions to mount technical reports dated after 3/89; the project devised a form which allows non-exclusive, revocable rights to distribute the technical reports.
Technical reports have multiple authors; Stanford's legal council advised that one author can give permission for multiple authors.
Technical reports sometimes subsequently appear as journal articles; the project devised a form that authors can attach to publisher copyright agreements.
Technical reports sometimes have previously appeared as doctoral thesis and UMI holds exclusive distribution rights; the project is not mounting these thesis. However beginning 1/1/94, UMI has a new agreement for Doctoral Thesis which gives UMI non-exclusive distribution rights for electronic editions.
The project needed a working definition of a derivative works; investigators chose a conservative approach. If the title is similar and the authors are the same the works are considered to be derivative.
Faculty have mixed understandings of copyright implications; a Computer Science faculty technical report committee was formed.
An attempt was made to study subsequent publication patterns. The data below are not scientifically valid, but just hints at some patterns. In 114 of the returned permission forms authors indicated subsequent publication of their technical reports. The publisher distribution was:
IEEE 21.0%
Springer 10.5%
Elsevier 18.4%
SIAM 5.3%
ACM 18.4%
Academic Press 4.4%
Wiley 4.4%
The investigators have permission to mount approximately 1,500 technical reports; expected growth is up to 200 technical reports/year.
Principal Investigator:
Hector Garcia-Molina
Computer Science Dept.
hector@cs.stanford.edu
Project Manager:
Rebecca Lasher
Libraries & Information Resources
cn.mcs@forsythe.stanford.edu