Copyright, Open Access, Creative
Commons:
Impacts
on Library Services and Budgets.
Stacy DeMatteo
San Jose State University
School of Library and Information
Services
Revised 11/30/2008
Introduction
There
are many issues impacting libraries today from a lack of resources due to
reduced budgets to the ultimate threat that libraries can face closure. Threats of closure predominately impact
public libraries but the threats have a ripple effect across the library
community in that these funding issues impact the basic tenets of the library
profession; providing and making information accessible to the population they
serve. This vital belief in making an
equitable playing field for all societies by providing all with access to
information is a noble one. However, in
recent years with the advent of digital technologies, the costs associated with
digital information, and copyright laws have caused libraries to struggle with
fulfilling their fundamental belief system.
This struggle manifests itself by librarys inability to provide
information and access to information due to the high cost of scholarly
materials and the impacts of these high costs on the librarys ability to
maintain quality collections.
This
paper will look at the problems impacting libraries from decreased revenue to
increase prices for journal subscriptions and online databases, copyright
issues and costs associated with the copyright laws. This paper will also look at the solutions
now available to the libraries and the academic community through the Open
Access movement. Additionally, this
paper will examine options available to authors of creative works by scientific
publishers, including allowing authors the ability to self-archive or deposit
works in institutional repositories.
Increase Subscription Costs
As
stated above, library budgets have been significantly impacted in part due to
the increased cost of journals and databases subscription prices. Publishers have consistently increased prices
for online journal and databases over the years; these increases in some cases
have doubled or tripled in the last 10 years. According to Lewis (2008) this
increase is over six times the rate of general inflation. For example, the
average cost for chemistry related journals subscriptions went from $2,582 in
2004 to $3,490 in 2008, physics related journals went from $2,380 in 2004 to
$3,103 in 2008 and biology related journals went from $1,292 in 2004 to $1,671
in 2008 (Van Orsdel & Born, 2008). The problem is not simply that
individual journal price have increased but rather the collective increases of
journal subscriptions have significantly impacted the librarys ability to
provide users with a diverse collection of in-print or digital materials.
An
interesting paradigm has occurred in the publishing world. With the advent and growth of digital
technologies and the ease in utilizing these technologies, publishers continue
to increase the cost of journal subscriptions, when in actuality digitizing
journal issues is more cost effective for publishers than actually printing the
journal issues (Lewis, 2008).
Traditional publishing models continue to push print copies to their
subscribers even though researchers today prefer to search or view scholarly
materials online either through subscription access or online databases
provided by libraries. This is also true
for library subscriptions; publishers still require libraries to purchase both
print and online versions, keeping the subscription costs high. Scientific publishers even take it one step
further by bundling subscriptions; these packages are very expensive, and in
most cases include cheaper less used journals, not initially selected by
library subject specialists or from requests by the user community.
Libraries
can no longer offer these bundled subscriptions and are beginning to revolt
from traditional publishers and publications.
Another factor in why libraries are starting to rebel from traditional
publishers and their high costs of journal subscriptions is the need to
reassess how libraries can best spend their collections budget and still meet
the needs of their community. Libraries
now have to deal with making tough choices on how to best utilize their funds and
this usually means decreasing book purchases (Lewis, 2008). This is one factor
that has led to institutions creating digital repositories.
Institutional Repository
Repositories are
increasing in popularity because they provide academic institutions, usually
created in conjunction with libraries, an ability to counter the publishing
industry by providing the research members of the academic community an
alternative to the traditional publishing model. Institutions are now implementing policies
that require authors to deposit pre-print and post-print editions of their work
into a digital repository for all community members to use and receive benefit
from; by depositing pre-print editions the institution provides researchers
instant access to the scholarly works.
Compared to traditional publishing, scholarly works normally need to go
through a peer review and editing process before being published. This can take
up to a year, if not longer, depending on how often a journal is
published. Researchers find this wait
problematic because by the time the information is published it may be
outdated.
Copyright
Copyright
compliance continues to be a longstanding issue for libraries and academic
institutions. Understanding the complex
copyright laws is difficult for most academic and scientific research
communities, because the laws are written in a way that is too complex for a
lay person to understand, usually requiring a lawyer, sometimes a team of
lawyers, to interpret and understand the complexities in the laws. Libraries typically do not have the luxury to
employ a lawyer in-house so librarians and library administrations struggle
with how to comply with the copyright laws.
In
fact, there are many misconceptions on how copyright laws protect individuals,
particularly people in the academic or research community. The basic concept of
the copyright law is to protect individuals from the initial conception of a
creative work; to many this is important, because it denies individuals the
right to illegally copy, distribute or adapt a protected work. This lack of understanding in the research
community is exhibited by a belief that authors retain rights to their
intellectual property when in reality most authors sign away their rights to
publishers (Coleman, 2007). In order for
an author to have their work published in a scholarly publication, most
publishers require creators to sign a copyright transfer agreement (CTA). CTAs are legal documents relinquishing the
authors rights to their intellectual property.
According to Esther Hoorn (2005) to date copyright laws have always
been reasonably balanced equally protecting the rights of the owner and the
rights of the public to use copyrighted materials. However 71% of authors surveyed by Hoorn
& Van Der Graf (2006) would rather retain the right to their own
intellectual property.
In
addition to understanding copyright laws, institutions need to further
understand or interpret fair use, and how to apply the fair use provision in
the digital age. It is important for
academic institutions to create a fair use policy for all community users to
follow; however some libraries have not created a fair use policy for fear of
potential lawsuits. This lack of policy
impacts the librarys ability to provide course related materials to students
and faculty, and compounding the problem is the increased use of digital
technologies being utilized by the educational community.
Fair
use is a provision of the copyright law that allows research materials to be
used freely (without restrictions) for educational purposes. The problem with the fair use provision and
the copyright law in general is that does not take into account growing trends
in online learning; this is in part due to the laws being written prior to the explosion
of the online learning environment.
Institutions offering online learning face copyright violations if
faculty digitize materials for inclusive in the online environment, even if the
online environment is password protected.
With
more and more in-print materials being accessed and utilized by faculty for
inclusion in course curriculum, specifically journal articles, the need to
digitize scholarly resources has increased.
Libraries, from increased pressure from the user community, have begun
offering digitized and online course reserves.
This allows the entire academic community access to course related
materials twenty-four hours a day seven days anywhere whether it is at home, in
the office, at the library or in the dormitory room. The copyright laws do not make it easy for
libraries to comply when they are digitizing printed materials for use online,
and library staff has a hard time determining if the material warrants seeking
copyright permission. In order for
libraries to digitize materials they need to acquire permission through the
publisher or a copyright clearance center and this can be very costly for
libraries. As stated before libraries continue to see a reduction in their
overall funding so any additional expanse could be problematic. This is also why many libraries are turning
to open access materials.
Open Access Movement
Open
Access (OA) is trend in the international community in which information is
provided freely, instantly, online and without use restriction to anyone in the
world at any time. Open access came into
spotlight at the Budapest Open Access Initiative where the definition was
created in 2002 and two strategies were recommend to accomplish the Open Access
Initiative, creating institutional repositories so authors can self-archive and
push for more Open Access Journals (ARL, 2004).
In the following year two additional meetings occurred further defining
the importance of the Open Access
Initiative: Bethesda Statement on Open
Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to
Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.
Since these initial meetings the OA
movement has increased in popularity.
Creative
Commons was the brainchild of Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford
University. It was founded in 2001 to
provide individuals with an alternative to copyright when creating original and
derivative works. Lawrence Lessig
believes the United States Congress no longer follows the limited terms
originally created by the copyright clause of the United States
Constitution. The copyright provision
states Congress has the power to promote the progress of science and useful
arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive
right to their respective writings and discoveries (Cornell University, 2008).
Over
the years Congress has extended the terms to now include any unpublished or
published works that are copyrighted for a term of 95 years from publication
date, or a total of 120 years from date of creation as defined by the Copyright
Act of 1976 (Carroll, 2002). Lessig
(2003) understands the need for copyright laws, to provide incentives for
individuals to create, but believes that after a limited term the creations
should pass into public domain. For an
individual to wait 95 to 120 years is too long and stifles the progression of
creative or scientific works.
According to Cornish (2005) there
are six main barriers to the Open Access movement: paternity, integrity, copying, distribution,
adaptation and general anxiety by the creator that contribute to the slow success
of the OA movement. These barriers are
similar to what copyright is believed to protect and reflect how society has
been indoctrinated on the importance of copyright and the right to intellectual
property.
Library Outreach
Libraries
must begin to provide their user community open access materials through
permanent links, provide users with access to indexes and databases that
include Open Access resources and demand that vendors index Open Access
materials. At a 2002 conference held in
Copenhagen, Denmark, and sponsored by Lund University of Sweden, an idea of
creating a Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was born. As of today there are 3,727 journals and over
218,149 full text and free accessed scholarly journal articles (Lund University
Libraries, 2008). EBSCOhost database
offers indexing to selected DOAJ titles (Schmidt et al., 2005).
The Public Library of Science (PLoS)
in 2003 launched a new Open Access business model of providing high quality
scholarly journals to anyone with no restrictions. After receiving funding in 2000, PLoSs
initial action was to call upon scientists from around the world to join
together and convince scientific publishers to make research works freely
available to the public. PLoS received
34,000 signatures from research scientists from 130 different countries (PLOS,
n.d.). In 2008, the National Institute
of Health mandated that all scholarly works created from NIH funds must be
provided to PubMed no later than twelve months after publishing (NIH,
2008). Publishers are starting to realize the
importance of making Open Access
materials accessible to the research community.
Libraries,
especially in academic settings, need to outreach to the faculty community to
educate and promote Open Access options now available to the research
community. This gives librarians
opportunity to work with faculty to both educate on the different publishing
options and also to assist faculty with locating Open Access scholarly materials
and including these materials into curriculum.
This could take form in providing one-on-one consultation with faculty
or working collaboratively with teachers to provide these types of resources to
students through course packets or electronic reserves. This also provides an opportunity to work
with the faculty in developing curriculum by incorporating the principles of
information literacy, which promote critical thinking skills by developing
assignments together and by co-teaching classes.
Librarians
need to introduce and promote Open Access initiatives to the academic
administrations; this in many ways takes form in promoting the use of
institutional repositories. This is not
unlike the NIHs policy of Open Access; institutions are now beginning to see
the value in authors (faculty) retaining ownership of scholarly works created
through or from funding by individual institutions. In fact traditional publishers are now
offering authors the right to deposit their materials through institutional
repositories or through self-archiving practices. Hahn (2008) believes this new hybrid model
offered by publishers may cause minor frustrations for authors but in the end
will benefit both the publishers and authors scholarly and financial needs.
Librarians
need to teach their user community about copyright laws, open access and
creative commons. This is especially
true for students who do not understand the complexities of the law. Students need to understand how plagiarism
violates copyright laws and that many educational institutions are employing
plagiarism technology to detect when students are not creating their own
work.
Library profession leading the
charge
The
library profession also needs to lead by example by publishing library related
scholarly materials via open access. At
minimum library professionals should utilize some form of self-archiving,
considering some library and information science (LIS) journals appear to
permit self-archiving (Coleman, 2007).
If their institution has a repository, library professionals should be
required to deposit their scholarly work.
And lastly, library professionals must advocate to publishers,
specifically publishers of library related materials, the need to move from a
traditional publishing model to a hybrid open access-publishing model. Coleman (2007) points out several interesting
findings from her study of library and information science journals and how
publishers require copyright transfer agreements from authors. According to Coleman (2007) 62% of LIS
journals do not provide publicly their CTA policies. 67% of the CTAs are unclear, causing authors
to be misinformed or not informed at all.
40% of LIS journals do not have policies on self-archiving.
In
reviewing the librarys own professional journals it is clear that the library
profession needs to be more proactive in advocating or even demanding Open
Access LIS journals. It is clear that
the library profession is one of the biggest advocates of the Open Access
movement. It also clear that there is a
contradiction in what library professionals say with what library professionals
do. To truly advocate to library users the need to move to the Open Access
movement library professionals first need to advocate and promote it amongst
themselves. The library profession also
needs to discuss open access and the impacts on libraries more, either through
scholarly literature at library related conferences, or through library
education.
Conclusion
Open
Access is here to stay and we will continue to see rapid growth in this
movement. Universities like Stanford and
MIT are promoting and utilizing Open Access publishing options, respected
scholarly journals like PLoS are publishing through an Open Access model,
repositories like the NIH requiring all works created with NIH funding, must be
deposited with 12 months of submission to a publisher. With more and more respected universities,
journals and research entities moving to Open Access models for publishing, it
is likely that more and more authors and publishers will become willing to move
to providing scholarly works freely available to all.
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