Authors' ability to share pdfs with other researchers?
- September 30, 2004 @ 2:11pmjuliem12 says:This is a follow up question to the topic of 7/29/04 "Faculty scanned pdf". I am a librarian at a research institute. Our scientists are rather prolific, and our institute has created an online bibliography - with abstracts - on our extranet, of all our authors' published and unpublished work for the last 20 years. We are starting to get requests from researchers outside of our organization for some of these articles. Our staff would like to send out pdfs of these articles, and if pdfs don't already exist, then scan and create them.
I have contacted 9 or 10 major publishers who have told me that I must get permission from them to do this on a case-by-case basis, and I have contacted the Copyright Clearance Center who has informed me that they can be the intermediary between our organization and the publishers for a $3.50 per request processing fee. It is likely that the permissions may not cost anything since it is an author request - though nothing is certain.
On the other hand, I have gone to both the Elsevier site mentioned in the previous email (http://authors.elsevier.com) and also read their pamphlet "Ways to use journal articles published by Elsevier" (http://www.elsevier.com/framework_products/promis_misc/672915lcp1_04bfinal.pdf) - which pretty much state that authors can share their work for research purposes. This surprises me since the other publishers have told me we _cannot_ do this, yet Elsevier - one of the biggest publishers - seems to be OK with this. Something just doesn't smell right.
I've spoken with a friend who is an intellectual property rights attorney, and she feels it's best to try to get retrospective author rights (most of them have signed them away upon publication) - yet my former library school professors say that what we are doing probably falls under "fair use" and not to worry too much.
I don't want our organization to be legally liable, yet I also don't want to be in a position where we are paying unnecessarily for something that we have rights for.
Does anyone out there have similar experience in terms of making their organization's research more public?
Many thanks,
Julie Murphy
Prevention Research Center - September 14, 2005 @ 11:13amCarrie says:Are the articles published in scholarly journals? If so, check the journals because many do note in the pub information that copying for research purposes is okay.
Faculty at other instititions could also request articles through interlibrary loan or document delivery if their library provides that service.
I wouldn't say that all of these copies are fair use copies. It would depend on the situation, the nature of the work, whether or not your institution owns a copy of the publication etc.
Using CCC is your decision. I suppose I would first consider how oftenr these requests come in and if they cannot be met in another way. -carrie
[quote]This is a follow up question to the topic of 7/29/04 "Faculty scanned pdf". I am a librarian at a research institute. Our scientists are rather prolific, and our institute has created an online bibliography - with abstracts - on our extranet, of all our authors' published and unpublished work for the last 20 years. We are starting to get requests from researchers outside of our organization for some of these articles. Our staff would like to send out pdfs of these articles, and if pdfs don't already exist, then scan and create them.
I have contacted 9 or 10 major publishers who have told me that I must get permission from them to do this on a case-by-case basis, and I have contacted the Copyright Clearance Center who has informed me that they can be the intermediary between our organization and the publishers for a $3.50 per request processing fee. It is likely that the permissions may not cost anything since it is an author request - though nothing is certain.
On the other hand, I have gone to both the Elsevier site mentioned in the previous email (http://authors.elsevier.com) and also read their pamphlet "Ways to use journal articles published by Elsevier" (http://www.elsevier.com/framework_products/promis_misc/672915lcp1_04bfinal.pdf) - which pretty much state that authors can share their work for research purposes. This surprises me since the other publishers have told me we _cannot_ do this, yet Elsevier - one of the biggest publishers - seems to be OK with this. Something just doesn't smell right.
I've spoken with a friend who is an intellectual property rights attorney, and she feels it's best to try to get retrospective author rights (most of them have signed them away upon publication) - yet my former library school professors say that what we are doing probably falls under "fair use" and not to worry too much.
I don't want our organization to be legally liable, yet I also don't want to be in a position where we are paying unnecessarily for something that we have rights for.
Does anyone out there have similar experience in terms of making their organization's research more public?
Many thanks,
Julie Murphy
Prevention Research Center[/quote] - September 14, 2005 @ 4:09pmjuliem12 says:[quote="Carrie"]Are the articles published in scholarly journals? If so, check the journals because many do note in the pub information that copying for research purposes is okay.
Thanks for responding.
The articles are published in scholarly journals, but often times the author him/herself needs to pay to get their own copy of their work. We no longer routinely get reprints upon publication.
"Faculty at other instititions could also request articles through interlibrary loan or document delivery if their library provides that service."
What we would like to do essentially is have these articles available on a public website for other researchers' to download. We already have the articles for the most part so I don't need to request them for the sake of obtaining them. The question is whether or not we can digitize these articles and make them freely available on the net and/or email them out to any who request them. It is fair use in the sense that it is scholarly material being shared among scientists for furtherin research - but I believe that because they are pdfs, we can't do this, unless we decide to set up an Institutional Repository and start the process of depositing pre-prints, post-prints and the like. This is more work than our organization is capable of at this time. Since my post I did contact another public health related library that had an online bibliography of one of their scientist's work, and many of those citations linked to the full text of the article. However, it took months and months for them to get permission to do this, and many journals did not give permission at all.
Julie Murphy
Prevention Research Center - September 14, 2005 @ 6:29pmCOvalle says:My school is investigating a very similar problem. Here's my take on the problem so far.
If the authors signed away all rights to their articles, then they don't have rights to their articles unless their copying/use fall under a copyright exemption.
You don't need to get the publishers' permission for uses if the use falls under a copyright exemption unless your institution has some kind of contract with the publishers that limits your actions.
Libraries and archives do have rights that don't require copyright holder permission, but those rights are very restricted as far as digital information goes, which makes a public website problematic unless you have the rights to the work. Digital copies of a work are limited to the physical confines of the institution, ie, you can't put them up on the web using the Section 108 library and archives exemption unless you limit access to the physical confines of the institution, which defeats the purpose of trying to put it on the web. ^_^;
The sending out the pdfs on a case by case basis, for research purposes, may fall under fair use (and IMHO probably would fall under fair use under ordinary research circumstances). But that needs to have a fair use evaluation on a case by case basis. I would think that putting all of the articles up on a publicly accessible website would not be fair use- but other people will have different takes.
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