Re: Desktop document Delivery

[Lloyd Davidson <Ldavids@northwestern.edu>]

I meant Prospero, of course, not Pegasus.  That's what I get for trusting 
my increasingly faulty memory. I have changed the text below accordingly.

Lloyd

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/Propsero 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/Prospero (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)