Re: Posting vendors' PDFs

[Karl Bridges <Karl.Bridges@uvm.edu>]

It depends on your license agreement with the vendor.  I strongly 
suspect that they retain the rights to "their" PDF and would take 
great exception to having it posted somewhere else.  For example, 
I noticed a while ago that, although the University of Virginia 
has a number of publicly available PDFs of documents available 
for anyone to use, they very specifically deny people the rights 
to mount copies of these elsewhere, claiming that it does not 
serve their interest to have multiple copies of these documents 
existing.

My take on this would be that the PDF from a particular vendor 
represents their work product.  As such you would not be allowed 
to simply make copies. By doing that you are actually creating a 
disincentive to people to purchase the particular product (JSTOR, 
whatever).  I realize that it's just one, but if you had a 
thousands of people doing this you, essentially, given the nature 
of Google, have essentially dismantled the product.

It's actually a very interesting question: Vendors generally have 
licenses and technology in place to prevent individual 
institutions from disaggregating the product e.g. creating local 
archives of massive amounts of a particular database. I have a 
number of databases that record and have mechanisms to make 
downloading lots of material impossible or very difficult.

What your mentioning is a kind of "distributed disaggregation". 
Individually, no one is violating their licenses, but the 
collective effect is the same.  I strongly suspect in future you 
will see publishers adding license language that prevents 
participation in these kinds of schemes.

Quoting Liblicense-L Listowner <liblicen@pantheon.yale.edu>:

> From another list ... of possible interest (and response) to
> readers of liblicense-l?  Ann Okerson
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 10:49:38 -0400
> From: Richard Griscom <griscom@pobox.upenn.edu>
> To: SPARC Institutional Repositories Discussion List <SPARC-IR@arl.org>
> Subject: [SPARC-IR] Posting vendors' PDFs
>
> The following question came up in a recent meeting of the repository
> oversight group at Penn: Do vendors retain proprietary rights over
> the PDF files they prepare for full-text databases? For example, if
> we receive permission from Publisher Y to mount Professor X's paper
> in our repository, may we use a PDF created by Project Muse or JSTOR
> in lieu of scanning the article ourselves?  Do these vendors exercise
> rights over the use of the PDFs that they have prepared?
>
> Best,
> Richard Griscom
>
> --
> Richard Griscom                                office 215/898-3450
> Head, Otto E. Albrecht Music Library and          fax 215/898-0559
>   Eugene Ormandy Music and Media Center    griscom@pobox.upenn.edu
> University of Pennsylvania
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