RE: PsycArticles License

[David Goodman <dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>]

But there is no real risk that libraries will abuse copyright in ILL
transactions. If anything, ILL people I've known are over-scrupulous,
paying for things that come within free use rather than examining the
statutory criteria.

If a publisher is concerned with students, who in some cases may cheat
(though not usually about scientific journals in comparison to things that
tend to interest them more), why do they make things difficult for the
people who are known not to cheat?  Possibly because they are may be so
afraid that their whole business will collapse once their contributors
realize the true price/benefit ratio, that they are self protective in a
way which is so extreme as to be self destructive.

The very organizations they are harming are their only remaining
customers. When libraries do not sign licenses because they don't like
difficult copyright clauses, or for that matter clauses dealing with the
legal forum for hypothetical suits that have never been known to take
place, or liabilities that are unlikely beyond the point of reason--what
could hurt the publisher more than this?

If they wasted less money on things like this, their journals might just
be more affordable; if we had to spend less money dealing with these
things, we might just have more to buy the journals with.

David Goodman, Princeton University Biology Library
dgoodman@princeton.edu            609-258-3235

On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, Rick Anderson wrote:

> > I doubt that many undergrads anywhere would consider these functions to be
> > "buried," and am quite astounded that this would occur to anyone as an
> > argument for forbidding ILL.
>
> Who's talking about forbidding ILL?  We're talking about whether it's
> reasonable for publishers to specify that ILL requests can only be
> fulfilled with print copies.
>
> I'll certainly concede the point that publishers who put their content on
> the Web are taking a risk that users will redistribute it by using "Send
> Page"-type functions.  The problem is that the publishers we're talking
> about no longer have an acceptable alternative to providing their content
> via the Web -- it's something they simply have to do, or will have to do
> sooner than later in order to survive, so they don't have any choice about
> taking that particular risk.  They do, however, have an acceptable (to
> them) alternative to providing their articles via ILL in electronic
> formats: that is, to forbid electronic ILL and require that their
> customers perform ILL functions in print.  Risk is inevitable; minimizing
> risk is rational.
>
> I suspect everyone except me is completely sick of this thread by now, so
> I promise to stop contributing to it.  If anyone else wants to continue
> the discussion, please contact me off-list.
>
> -------------
> Rick Anderson
> Director of Resource Acquisition
> The University Libraries
> University of Nevada, Reno