Streamlining and Simplifying: Advances in Consortial Licensing

What has your success rate been getting DRM free ebooks?­

Christine Stamison (CMS): While NERL does not have many deals for ebooks, we have Springer and Elsevier ebooks which are both DRM free.

Anne McKee (AMc): GWLA has very few deals for ebooks (our members decided they learned something with the bundled e-journal packages and did not want to make that same mistake in buying bundled ebook packages). However, we have a few specialized deal (vet-med ebooks etc) and they are all DRM free. We won’t sign licenses with DRM.

On data mining, does the publisher sell "seats" for campus users?­

(CMS): I haven’t come across that yet. Most publishers I have been working with don’t even know how to proceed.

(AMc): I ditto Christine’s remarks. I frankly would hope not and would encourage you to not consider this if a publisher has offered it to you. By the way Dave-I think it’s TERRIFIC that Springer is going to try and do T&DM!!!

Dave Celano (DC): Please see http://www.springer.com/us/rights-permissions/springer-s-text-and-data-mining-policy/29056 for our newly released TDM policy.

Author rights - Would this include sharing university works with other libraries? ­

(CMS): The way NERL words it in the model license:

“Authors' Rights to Use Their Own Work. Notwithstanding any terms or conditions to the contrary in any author agreement between Authors and Licensor, Authors affiliated with Licensee whose work ("Content") is accepted for publication within the Licensed Materials shall retain the non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free right to use their Content for scholarly and educational purposes, including self-archiving or depositing the Content in institutional, subject-based, national or other open repositories or archives (including the author's own web pages or departmental servers), and to comply with all grant or institutional requirements associated with the Content.

For the avoidance of doubt, it is the intent of the parties to this agreement that Authors are third party beneficiaries of this provision of the Agreement.

Definitions.

Content. Any version (including the published version) of any work by an author affiliated with Licensee that is published in the Licensed Materials.

Scholarly and educational purposes. Purposes encompassing teaching, research, and institutional needs, including but not limited to the right to (a) use, reproduce, distribute, perform, and display the Content in connection with teaching, conference presentations, and lectures; (b) make full use of the Content in future research and publications; (c) republish, update or revise the Content in whole or in part for later publication; (d) meet requirements and conditions of research grants or publishing subventions provided by government agencies or non-profit foundations, and; (e) grant to the Author's employing institution some or all of the foregoing rights, as well as permission to use the Content in connection with administrative activities such as accreditation, mandated reports to state or federal governments, and similar purposes. In all cases, the Author and/or the Author's employing institution will be expected to provide proper citation to the published version.

Repositories or archives. Open-access digital repository services such as those provided by the Author's employing institution, an academic consortium, a discipline-based entity, or a governmental funding agency.”

Therefore, the author could share with a library if it falls into any of the above categories.

(AMc): GWLA’s wording is a little more brief:

Authors Rights
6.1 Authors' Rights to Use Their Own Work. Notwithstanding any terms or conditions to the contrary in any author agreement between Authors and Licensor, Authors affiliated with Licensee whose work ("Content") is accepted for publication within the Licensed Materials shall retain the non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free right to use their Content for scholarly and educational purposes, including self-archiving or depositing the Content in institutional, subject-based, national or other open repositories or archives (including the author's own web pages or departmental servers), and to comply with all grant or institutional requirements associated with the Content.

For the avoidance of doubt, it is the intent of the parties to this agreement that Authors are third party beneficiaries of this provision of the Agreement.

(DC): Our author rights primarily cover the methodology and timing of posting author accepted manuscripts to their own websites and/or any repository. For further details, please see:http://www.springer.com/gp/open-access/authors-rights/self-archiving-policy/2124 We also have a liberal eILL policy that follows CONTU guidelines and International Copyright Law.

ADA - are most vendors agreeing to this?­

(CMS): Most larger database publishers have this in place already. Many smaller publishers know the importance of this and are working on it. Many state laws dictate that electronic resources be ADA compliant.

(AMc): Ditto what Christine said again. A few publishers have been reluctant when I’ve approached them (not because they don’t believe in it, they are just worried about legal actions if they don’t offer it.) My simple message is this: any new license OR renegotiated license must have this or GWLA cannot sign.

Please explain why International ILL is a deal breaker.­

(CS) ARL has made the statement that there is nothing in the Fair Use documents or in the copyright law that explicitly forbid this. Therefore, not allowing international ILL is restricting copyright. Also, nowadays, many institutions have programs in place world-wide and see no reason not to be able to offer ILL to them.

(AMc): This is a VERY important clause for us. We have NEVER signed a license that surrenders ILL (and as I said in the webinar, we now don’t accept CONTU language as well). We have faculty, researchers, and students traveling all over the world and they must have the same access to what is licensed at their home institution -- regardless of location. This is an absolute deal breaker for us.

Can you elaborate on what content or members might affect your 501(c)3 status?­

(AMc): Our legal counsel and tax accountant have advised us that accepting any members that are for-profit would most likely affect our 501(c)3 status. So any of the for-profit universities are out. While they most likely would not meet our membership criteria anyway, we cannot allow them into any deal as non-members as well.

Content is a little “iffy-er.” Off that top of my head, I can’t think of any content but if anything was even a teensy bit questionable when looking to new content, we would avoid that content.

Have you used SERU in conjunction with a 3rd party vendor like GOBI/YBP?­

(AMc): I haven’t as a consortial officer since we do not have consortium-wide deals with subscription vendors or book vendors. (Each member has their own unique dislikes and preferences when working with vendors and we do not want to step on their toes.) However, it’s a VERY interesting thought; particularly since I BELIEVE some of the book vendors are starting to ask libraries to sign licenses to use GOBI which they have never done before. Actually, a REALLY interesting thought…. I may go to the SERU Standing Committee to consider this one.

My institution recently joined the SERU registry, but our legal counsel cautioned that licenses provide the advantage of spelling out what we can do with a resource. Have you run across any standard library practices that aren't covered by fair use?­

(AMc): I have not. Remember, any license you sign is the license you must comply with. So if you sign a license that limits Fair Use (examples such as : CONTU, any license that doesn’t allow for international ILL, etc.) -- you must legally abide by that license. If your legal counsel feels you need something a bit more than just an email stating that you are invoking SERU, work with her/him to get a few sentences that you can append to the email/purchase order that would appease them. I frankly would do this as a last resort. Try working with him/her, go over the SERU documents with them. Then if they are still uneasy, come up with a few FRIENDLY, non-legal sounding clauses you could append to the purchase order. Please go to the SERU Standing Committee webpage and feel free to contact one of the publishers on how they handle it on their end if you’d like. I’m happy to act as a sounding board if you’d like from the library end.

Docusign has never worked for us. Do others have problems with this?­

(AMc): I don’t use Docusign. What I have done is taken my written signature, turned it into a “transparent” print (so the background is gone leaving only the signature). I then appended that “picture” of my signature to all licenses, etc. I haven’t signed a paper, hard copy license in probably 4 years. Every publisher/content provider has accepted this signature on the Word document and our legal counsel has advised us that this is a legal, fully executable license when done this way.

As an FYI: I know most licenses come in a .pdf format. I pay $19 a year for an Adobe sponsored program that allows me to transfer the .pdf into a Word document. I then go into the Word document, append my signature picture, save it as a .pdf and send it back to the publisher. Call me if you want me to explain more to you how to do this.