Re: Nature Contract Provisions

[kaemper@ub.uni-stuttgart.de]

I carefully compared the present version of the Nature site license with
the previous one - if you don't have it, an ascii version of the PDF has
been archived by Google under

> http://www.google.de/search?q=cache:http://www.nature.com/help/sitelicences/licence_agreements/nature_americas_academic.pdf

(If you want to have a look at the old license summaries, you find them in
Google also; for links to it, see my "Introduction" to "Nature - what
other libraries say".)

Remarkably, there are only two small differences:

Section "Licensed Material" (Front page): the new version has

Licensed Material: the electronic versions of the most recent *printed
edition* [my emphasis] of 'Nature' at the date of access and the editions
of 'Nature' published since ...

whereas the old version had:

Licensed Material: the edition of 'Nature' at the date of access and the
editions of Electronic 'Nature' published since ...

together with an interpretation of the term "Electronic Nature" in (1.1)

"Electronic Nature": the brief communications, articles and letters to
Nature sections contained in the relevant printed edition of Nature

that has been deleted in the new version.

Note that this "Electronic Nature" was the part accessible immediately to
institutions under the old site license while the rest was embargoed for
12 issues.

Am I the only one who has difficulties to grasp the intended meaning? What
is 'Nature' or the edition of 'Nature' without qualification as printed or
electronic? Is it more than the electronic version of the printed edition?
Has it changed its meaning from the previous to the present version?

And am I right to presume that the present language "electronic versions
... of the most recent *printed edition* [my emphasis] of 'Nature' ..."
prepares the introduction of Naturexpress articles as a Personal
Subscriber benefit (just as the Sciencexpress articles are a AAAS Member
benefit)?

Note that the "license summaries" provided are not really summaries of the
actual licenses but are much more detailed in certain respects. It would
seem prudent to explicitely make them (or important sentences of it) part
of the contract, for if you only sign the license agreement the summaries
can assert what they want, it will not be binding in any legal sense. For
example, the present summary states

"Licensed institutions shall have immediate access to the material on the
date of publication as well as full functionality including searchability,
the ability to view and download articles from the archives, etc."

I would certainly want to include that in the contract, as the actual
license agreement (as cited above) grants much less, especially in view of
that ominous clause 7.7. (After all, Sciencexpress articles and their
would-be analogon for Nature, are considered published on the date they
appear on the web not on the date they appear in the printed edition.)

Furthermore, I must admit that I have no idea what is really meant by the
sentence included in the old an new version "... from time to time
together with any additional material that the Licensor makes available to
the Licensee."

Note that (5.4) this still has the license fee being assessed on 
"the number of the Licensee's Staff and Students during the 12 month
..." 
where "staff" is defined (as before) as "teaching and research staff
employed by or otherwise accredited to the Licensee". However, whereas
the precious license summaries spoke of the "number of students, faculty
and researchers" (SFR count), the present speaks of the FTE count of
Students, Faculty and Researchers. If this is the new basis (FTE counts
usually will be somewhat smaller although the difference won't matter in
many cases because of the now adopted pricing in broad categories of FTE
counts), the language of the license agreement should be adapted to it.  

(2.2) This also gives me headaches. What exactly is meant (in a legal
sense) by "subsidiary" organizations (in the case of academic
institutions)? Could you think of an example? Is this a 'fair' or
'reasonable' clause? Should one accept it? I had a look at the Liblicense
Resources, and found some example clauses under the heading "Assignment or
Transfer of Licensing Agreement",

http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/assigcls.shtml

>From that I do not quite understand why (controlled) subsidiaries of a
party should be excluded (see example 1).

Any help with this would be appreciated very much.

Thanks in advance,
Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, Stuttgart University Library

Nature - what other libraries say
http://www.ub.uni-stuttgart.de/ejournals/Nature_andere_Univ.html