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SCOPE is administered by the Follett Implementation |
3 July: SCOPE Copyright Advisory Panel met to agree a strategy for clearing copyright. Details of decisions made are documented in the minutes of the meeting. Charles Oppenheim volunteered to supply a draft contract for clearing copyright in materials. Those attending the meeting agreed:
The contract was drafted, amended and supplied to Dennis Farrington who suggested several further amendments.
25 August: DF approved the contract.
Copies of the contract have now been sent to the publishers for consideration.
12 July: requests to clear copyright in materials required for Stage 2 course packs were sent to publishers from the SCOPE offices in Stirling.
24 July: LH returned from vacation and proceeded to follow up on initial correspondence by telephoning publishers. Copyright clearance proved to be a slow process for the following reasons:
The response of most publishers who had received and read SCOPE requests to included their material in the resource bank was positive; many requested a copy of the contract but were not prepared to grant permission to digitize without first reviewing SCOPE terms. The responses of publishers who had been involved previously with on-demand publishing in any form differed from those of other publishers. A few USA publishers can be contacted only in writing and have not responded to SCOPE requests and chasers. It may be more effective to send to those publishers a copy of the contract with a covering letter. To date 30 of 37 publishers have agreed to consider the terms of the SCOPE contract.
16 August: it was clear on this date that permission to digitize material to be included in Stage 2 course packs would not be granted on schedule. The Project Board agreed that, if feasible, SCOPE should honour its commitment to supply course packs in Autumn '95, thus enabling the team to test the market for packs and the SCOPE promotion and distribution strategies. LH supplied costs, estimated using Copyright Licensing Agency default fees for photocopying, of copyright material in each of the three course packs to be produced. George Pitcher supplied estimated production costs for packs photocopied two-to-view, portrait. The Project Board recommended that material for which permission to digitize had been granted should be scanned using OCR technology and that those for which permission had not been granted should be photocopied. Permission to photocopy was sought from the Copyright Licensing Agency.
LH accessed the CLARCS on-line copyright facility(1) to make a more informed estimate of the cost of clearing copyright. It became apparent that the cost would exceed significantly that estimated using the CLA default fee. Alison Bowes(2) was consulted with a view to reducing the total cost of each pack. Her decisions regarding what should remain in the packs were based on both economic and academic factors; one item was too expensive to include, another expensive item was too important to remove. Fortunately, permission to use the former was cleared directly by the publisher at a rate much lower than that offered by the CLA. Ultimately, all items selected by AB were included in course packs.
The CLA grant permission to photocopy only from original publications. Before permission was granted from the CLA, KD confirmed that copies of a quality suitable for photocopying were available to the SCOPE team. As copyright has changed hands in recent years, many of the books included in Stage 2 course packs have been published by several publishers at different times. Permission to digitize an item granted by one publisher (publisher A) was not used because of the poor condition of a copy of their edition of the book available to KD. Permission to photocopy an earlier edition published by a different publisher (publisher B) was granted by the CLA at a price considerably cheaper than that quoted by publisher A.
Of the subsidy available to produce course packs at Stages 2 and 3 the team aimed to use a portion calculated on a pro-rata basis as a percentage of the total available for 1000 packs; the portion required to produce the packs exceeded that figures.
On 3 July the SCOPE Copyright Advisory Board agreed on quality assurance criteria by which SCOPE model agreements will be judged. Discussion with publishers and with those working on the ELINOR project suggests that several of these criteria, e.g. standardization of the terms of contracts with different publishers, are unlikely to be achieved. As a guide to the quality of the work completed by LH therefore, they will be misleading unless amended.
The work of the copyright unit at Stage 2 of the project was made inefficient by lack of information about who currently holds copyright in works to be included in packs. Progress was stymied as approximately half of requests sent to publishers on 12 July were mistargetted. A resource bank of current owners of copyright material would be invaluable to the Project. A senior member of staff at the CLA advised LH that the CLARCS on-line database will not identify current owners.(3) At future stages of the Project LH intends to verify ownership of copyright by telephone before mailing requests to publishers. The SCOPE telephone bill will be large but this procedure should make more efficient use of team members' time. Copyright in material that is out of print reverts to the author. LH had difficulty tracing one author and investigated procedures used by other publishers of anthologies and course texts. LH was advised by one publisher that it takes 'calculated risks' with material for which it cannot trace the copyright owners. LH found evidence among the prelims of course readers produced by other publishers that suggests that this approach in not uncommon. In view of moral rights issues raised with reference to SCOPE resources (see below) LH considers 'calculated risks' to be inappropriate.
The SCOPE Copyright Advisory Panel agreed that SCOPE ought to offer to pay publishers a percentage (approximately 25%) of SCOPE net receipts on a pro-rata basis. Clearly, this would simplify SCOPE accounting and would require a less sophisticated software application for royalty payments. However, several publishers have made clear that they would not be prepared to agree such terms. As indicated in research conducted during the CITED project, publishers wish to price items individually with reference to their commercial value and do not favour blanket copyright fees. During negotiation with publishers, Ann Ramsden of the ELINOR project was unable to impose standardized copyright fees.
The basis for payment of ELINOR resources was agreed in negotiation with publishers, who generally favoured a mixed a priori/a posteriori system. A site license allows 10 users to view simultaneously an item on the resource bank and pages may be printed for a fee. When the ELINOR system is supplied to other sites, however, the number of concurrent users will multiply but the cost of, for example, 100 concurrent users, is prohibitively expensive. An a priori/a posteriori payment system such as that adopted by ELINOR is advantageous in that it allows academic libraries to meet student expectations that texts may be accessed free of charge, as are traditional library resources. It also requires less from a copyright management system. If students are required to pay per-view, payment for clicking on hot-links between documents in the bank will also be required. This may discourage users from taking advantage of the facility to read in a distributed way, thus defeating one of the advantages of on-line document supply.
The issue of moral rights of authors has been raised in discussion of the Project with publishers and authors. Two classes of moral rights granted in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, have implications for SCOPE. The first, the right of paternity, i.e. the right of an author to have his/her work attributed to him/her as author, requires that we name the author on all extracts. Author names are indicated clearly on the first page of all items included in Stage 2 course packs. At later stages of the project, if students are given the facility to print single pages from items in the resource bank, every page of every extract will be required to carry the copyright notice and author name.
The second moral right to affect SCOPE is more difficult to address. The right of integrity gives authors the right not to have their work subjected to 'derogatory treatment', i.e. added to, deleted from, altered or 'adapted in a manner that amounts to distortion or mutilation of the work or is otherwise prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author'. The SCOPE project should ensure that the integrity of documents delivered on-line to students at consortium member institutions is safeguarded. It may be necessary also to prohibit copying on a page-by-page basis, granting permission to make copies only of whole extracts or papers. In this way misrepresentation and distortion should be avoided.
Moral rights cannot be assigned or sold so publishers do not have the authority to grant permission regarding moral rights.
Much of the material selected by lecturers to be included among SCOPE resources pre-date electronic media and network transmission. Thus, publisher–author contracts do not cover the permissions that SCOPE requires. Some publishers may not be authorized to grant the rights requested by SCOPE. Authors increasingly are aware of the value of electronic rights in their work and authors' organizations are advising their members to retain those rights. Authors may be more receptive to requests from SCOPE to include their work in an electronic resource bank as revenue generated through exploitation in this way will not be shared with publishers. However, just as for moral rights, if the Copyright Unit is required to contact authors to clear copyright, the work of the copyright Unit will increase substantially.
The apparent belief in academic circles, that information should be freely disseminated, represents a threat to publishers. Respect for the economic value of copyright material and for the value added by publishers and libraries must be encouraged in Consortium member institutions. The indemnity clause of the Letter of Understanding represents SCOPE's commitment to the security of SCOPE resources. Consortium member representatives should endeavour to educate library users of their duty to respect copyright.
LH was unable to clear copyright on schedule to digitize material to be included in Stage 2 course packs. Publishers are reluctant to grant such permission before the terms on which material will be supplied to students are clear and have been agreed. The standard contract should make more efficient LH's efforts to clear copyright in material to be included in Stage 3 course packs. Copyright clearance procedures on the ELINOR project were initiated without a contract. Subsequently, a standard contract was created and the period required to clear copyright was reduced substantially.(4) It is clear that if SCOPE is to supply resources without subsidy at later stages of the project, publishers' fees for copyright permissions must be considerably lower than those charged both by the CLA and directly by publishers at present. Publishers' representatives recognize that publishers' revenue will increase if material is available at a price that makes illicitly photocopying an unattractive alternative. However, it is widely believed that ultimately, supply on-demand of texts in electronic form will replace first sale of hard copies. In such a market the commercial imperative of publishers would require that revenue generated through sale of, e.g. SCOPE resources covers the cost of origination of electronic texts.
It has become clear that information on use of copyright materials that will be generated by the SCOPE copyright management system is of value to publishers. Although the value of this information cannot be related to the unit cost of a text, its value should be recognized in assessing the level at which publishers set copyright fees.
1 It is possible to access CLARCS on-line and establish the copyright fees for material to be cleared without committing oneself to authorizing the permission. This service was demonstrated by Sue Fraser of the CLA a the University of Stirling on 23 August 1995. (Return to text.)
2Alison Bowes lectures in Social Differentiation, the course to be supplied with course packs at Stage 2 of the project. (Return to text.)
3 Subsequently, a different staff member at the CLA advised LH that the CLA identify the copyright holder in a work by the imprint. Thus, where copyright has changed hands once or twice and several editions have been published by different publishers, the publisher share of the CLA fee for photocopying goes to the publisher of the edition used rather than to the current copyright holder. This procedure does not require the CLA to hold details of current copyright holders. (Return to text.)
4 Many publishers' lawyers rewrote the contract using their own standard terminology but, essentially, the terms of the contract were unchanged. (Return to text.)
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