RE: PsycArticles License

["Paul Burry" <paul.burry@techbc.ca>]

"That's why they impose stringent license agreements that often say, among
other things, that the library is responsible for any copyright
infringement by its users and that the library will make sure its users
understand what kinds of use are and are not allowed."

The above quote is your own argument, Rick-if this kind of wording in a
license is good enough for publishers/aggregators (and apparently also for
you) to allow these "fuzzy" undergrads access to 1000s of journal
articles, why wouldn't a similar clause regarding restrictions on ILL also
be enough (given that this kind of distribution is far less likely via ILL
than it is via the 1000s of electronic journals these undergrads have 24/7
access to, simply by virtue of the greater number of opportunities)?

I'll tell you why-and again, as you point out yourself-"because there is
money to be made" providing electronic access to libraries, while on the
other hand, no money to be made from allowing ILL. Pretty clear from your
own arguments what the intentions of publishers are.

Paul Burry
Information Services Support Specialist
Information Resources & Digital Library
Technical University of British Columbia
paul.burry@techbc.ca
604.586.6019


 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Rick Anderson [mailto:rickand@unr.edu]
Sent:	Saturday, December 01, 2001 12:51 PM
To:	liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject:	RE: PsycArticles License

> Help me here-do you have undergrads who would take an academic article
> from APA and e-mail it to several thousand users?

Absolutely.

Picture this: A fourth-year psychology major needs an article for a
class on the therapeutic treatment of depression.  His library doesn't
subscribe to the journal in question, so he submits an ILL request.  The
article arrives a couple of days later in his e-mailbox.  Because he's a
helpful guy, he takes five seconds out of his busy day and forwards the
message to the other 28 students in his class; after all, they need the
article too and most of them don't know what ILL is.  In the course of
five seconds, that one copy has become 29 copies.  (If he'd gotten the
article in paper, could he have made 28 photocopies, collated and
stapled them and handed them out to his classmates?  You bet.  Would he
have done so?  Probably not.)  Now, most of his classmates will just
read the copy they've got, and discard it later in the semester when
they clean out their e-mailboxes.  But one of them is a regular
participant in DEPRESSION-L, an online discussion group that includes
850 other participants.  This article addresses several issues that have
been discussed on the list recently, so she forwards it to the group.
Now the 29 copies have become 879 copies, all in the course of a day or
two, and it only took two people with a fuzzy understanding of copyright
law to make it happen.

I submit to you that this scenario is not far-fetched.  And it is only
possible in the electronic realm; there is no way this kind of fast,
wholesale redistribution can take place with print.  And that, I
believe, is why publishers often (though not always) want us to use
print copies for ILL.  I'm not saying it's wonderful, only that it seems
reasonable to me.

-------------
Rick Anderson
Director of Resource Acquisition
The University Libraries
University of Nevada, Reno