Re: selling e-articles

["B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2@yahoo.com>]

Pippa Smart said:

"The problem that your colleague was thinking of is Tasini, a 
case where the NYT took photographs that it had used in one 
publication, and then created a new database product without the 
permission of the photographers - the problem was the creation of 
a new product."

Didn't the Tasini case involve freelance writers who claimed that 
publishers had violated their copyrights by placing their works 
in third party electronic databases without obtaining permission 
from the freelance writers?

Bernie Sloan
Sora Associates
Bloomington, IN

--- On Tue, 8/12/08, Pippa Smart <pippa.smart@googlemail.com> wrote:

From: Pippa Smart <pippa.smart@googlemail.com>
Subject: Re: selling e-articles
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Date: Tuesday, August 12, 2008, 7:20 PM

Selling individual articles - on a pay-per-view basis - is quite 
common, and so far as I am aware, most commercial publishers are 
already doing this. The last information I have on this was that 
sales of individual articles are not huge, but slowly increasing. 
The usual model is that the purchaser is able to open the full 
article for a fixed time after payment - commonly 1 month (or in 
a Nature article I recently purchased, 1 day!)

There are no problems with author rights that I am aware of, 
since the articles are still be sold as a "part" of the original 
publication. The problem that your colleague was thinking of is 
Tasini, a case where the NYT took photographs that it had used in 
one publication, and then created a new database product without 
the permission of the photographers - the problem was the 
creation of a new product.

I am not aware of any publishers selling a package of downloads - 
i.e. setting up an account with a library to download up to a 
maximum number for a fixed price (and cheaper than purchasing 
each one individually) - although some libraries offer this (e.g. 
www.ajol.info and - I think - the British Library).

Pippa Smart
Research Communication and Publishing Consultant
PSP Consulting - www.pspconsulting.org
Skype: pippasmart
pippa.smart@gmail.com
****