Re: Desktop document Delivery

[Lloyd Davidson <Ldavids@northwestern.edu>]

At 14:41 03/25/2001 -0500, Hao-Ren Ke wrote:

>Hi Everybody,
>
>Today I read an article entitled "Interlibary Load -- a new Frontier"
>published in Vol. 18 No. 2 of Library Hi Tech (2000).
>
>In this article, the author mentioned a cooperative project between
>Michigan State University (MSU) and University of Michigan. This project
>aims at providing desktop document delivery to patrons by converting an
>article received at an Ariel workstation to a PDF file and transferring
>the PDF file to a Web server. Then the patron requesting the article can
>download the PDF file from the Web server. The PDF file will either remain
>on the Web server for three weeks or be viewed five times, whichever comes
>first, and then removed from the server.
>
>My questions is whether this approach complies with copyright law or is
>acceptable for publishers?
>
>Regards,
>Hao-Ren Ke

An excellent question.

Many universities are distributing materials, mainly journal articles,
between their libraries, for fair use scholarly purposes only, through the
use of the ARIEL and Pegasus combined system, which is what you have
described.  So far there hasn't been much outcry from publishers, as long
as the digital copies are made from paper copies rather than sending
digital copies directly from e-journals, although a very few journals
allow even that.  Thus far this system merely simplifies the photocopy
distribution system it is replacing and so has relatively little impact on
publishers' sales (although there are publishers unhappy even with the
distribution of paper copies).  However, since the patron is provided with
an electronic copy of the original, albeit a slightly degraded one, it
would theoretically be possible to redistribute this to other people.  
The fact is, however, that there is little market for each individual
preprint and the majority of scientific articles are read only by a few
people in the world and actually cited by even fewer, and such
redistribution would clearly be illegal.  Ten citations for an article in
a year, as listed in Science Citation Index, is unusually high and the
average impact factor of journals (the average number of citations each
article in that journal get per year) is probably someplace between one
and two.  Nevertheless, publishers could begin protesting this system,
although if they succeeded in inhibiting it significantly, scholarly
communication would suffer greatly.  Since the creation of the articles
needed to fill their journals depends on the health of the scholarly
communication system, such an restrictive policy on their part could be
self defeating, even if had some small short-term benefit.  However, if
publishers begin to allow pay-per-use Internet retrieval of individual
articles from their online journals (which doesn't seem likely, since this
would rapidly cut into their subscription income), there will be fewer and
fewer arguments for the continuation by libraries of such electronic, or
even paper, distribution methods. Publishers are already saying that the
age of interlibrary loan is over, although so far I certainly haven't seen
any decrease in the number of requests or apparent need for such ILL
services at my institution; just the opposite.

Some legal offices have warned libraries about the possible liabilities
that ARIEL and Pegasus (which facilitates the sending of PDF files to a
campus server) opens a university to, but at the moment there have not
been any significant legal challenges that I know of to the use of this
system (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong here) and until a
law suit is initiated and adjudicated, no one will know for sure whether
it is legal or not.  Most libraries believe, I think, that the improvement
in service that this system provides makes that small legal risk
worthwhile.  It is certainly much less expensive and faster than sending
photocopies between university libraries.

I'm sure there will be other respondents to this query who will be bullish
about the rights of libraries to use such procedures and I look forward to
seeing their arguments.


-----------------------------------------------------
Lloyd A. Davidson, Ph. D.
Life Sciences Bibliographer and Head, Access Services	
Northwestern University
Seeley G. Mudd Library for Science and Engineering
2233 N. Campus Drive
Evanston, IL  60208
LDavids@northwestern.edu  847-491-2906   847-491-4655 (fax)