L&LR staff blog

I spent Friday at Leicester University at the meeting of UKCORR (UK Council of Research Repositories).  Presentations about Journal ToCs, SHERPA ROMEO, CADAIR among others were all very interesting but it was even more useful to discuss issues with other people in same position as us.  REF, implications of mandate and, especially, eTheses seem to be common concerns to everyone.  Most repositories seem to be heavily dependent on library skills, and the more deposits are mandated, the heavier the burden of review becomes.  A copyright workshop at the end of the day was an excellent forum in which to compare policies and workflows. 

The fabulously hard-working Gareth Johnson twittered and blogged the proceedings as well as forgoing his lunch to give us a guided tour of the David Wilson Library.  It’s wonderful to see what 32 million pounds looks like.  I particularly liked the ‘help zone’, and the information screens which give computer availability throughout the building as well as streaming local news and weather alongside library news!

Thanks to Leicester and Northampton for their joint hospitality, and to the officers of  UKCORR which has no budget so runs on goodwill; luckily there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of this.

As always, if you are curious about the repository, please ask me!

Bev!

I spent a day at Kingston University on Friday with UKCORR (United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories).  There were some very interesting presentations, and it was useful to share experience in the breaks.  Great to know we’re not alone.  These are a few of the themes which came out of the whole day.

Repositories seem to have a much better chance of success if they serve a purpose and are integrated into other University systems; for example Glasgow’s ‘Enlighten’ project really began to take off when the repository was adopted as the principle publications database.  This commitment has to permeate the research establishment, it can’t just be imposed.

The financial and publishing landscape of open-access is not getting easier.  Publishers see open-access publishing as a way to shift the onus for payment from users to authors or institutions.  RoMEO (copyright information service) is seeing no evidence of greater clarity of information from publishers.

The difficulties we have found with authors self-archiving are very common.  Every institution seems to check and edit, at the very least.  Most either train departmental administrators to deposit or have repository or library staff doing the deposits.  These processes are nearly always located within the library, wherever the repository is managed.

Thanks to Kingston for hosting a great meeting and everyone who shared ideas, but especially Morag Greig from Glasgow University and Bill Hubbard from the CRC for their particular help.

If you’re interested in learning any more about the repository please contact Jill and I in the library.

Bev!

The slides that Philippa and I prepared for the “Copyright, teaching and Blackboard – staying legal” workshops are now available online. Please feel free to use, re-use, or edit.

Copyright, teaching and Blackboard – staying legal by Philippa Dyson & Paul Stainthorp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

I’ve been in London for a couple of days, obsessively seeking out free wifi so that I can test out the new L&LR netbook PC, which is one of these.

Observations on the device: 9″ screen fine; mini-keyboard fine and actually easier to use in a confined space (e.g. the 17:03 from King’s Cross to Grantham, coach D, seat 15A) than a normal keyboard; but the tiny, tiny trackpad has been a problem for me (I don’t mind them, normally); I haven’t yet figured out how to turn off the screen resize option which kicks in every time you accidentally brush the pad with your thumb.

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On Monday I accompanied Prof. John Tulloch of the Lincoln School of Journalism to a meeting at Channel 4’s offices. The meeting was about the possibility of Lincoln’s taking on an important archive of journalistic material. I’ll be assisting the LSJ in writing the case for the University’s involvement. Watch this space.

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On Tuesday (today), I was at CILIP headquarters on Ridgemount Street, for a UKeiG seminar:

• ‘Essential Copyright for Information Professionals: What You Need to Know – and Preparing for Change!‘.

The presenter, talking all day with unbelievable stamina, was Laurence Bebbington of the University of Nottingham. He patiently took the delegates through the UK copyright landscape, from basic principles, through the complexities of moral, database, and performance rights, licencing, and the particular concerns attached to copyright in the digital domain; before finishing with a discussion of Gowers Review and the future.

Single, key idea of the day: librarians must engage with national debates around the future of intellectual property law.

After recent conversations at Lincoln, this seminar couldn’t have been more timely. I hope it’ll be really useful in informing my(our) conversations with the faculties, with updating our guide for academic staff, and with arranging our own programme of training.

Some ‘live’ notes and conversations from the day are available on the social-networking site Twitter, tag #copyright.

Lis-copyseek is a closed discussion list for copyright permission seekers to share information and experience.  On 5 March 2009, some of the leading lights on lis-copyseek organised a copyright seminar held at the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester. Professor Charles Oppenheim from Loughborough was in the chair.

Jason Miles-Campbell from JISC Legal spoke on third party copyright in E theses and repositories. How far does the law go? Theses are built on the work of others so you would expect third party material to be used. Definitions of key terms such as fair dealing and substantiality would be helpful. Insubstantiality may justify the inclusion of ’snippets’.

Alma Hales from the Open University spoke about risk assessment  in using third party copyright images. Alma heads a team responsible for copyright clearance for the OU. All their records are kept on a Access database and they know exactly at what stage any transaction is at any time. The OU and the BBC have a close relationship. We watched an extract from the Hollywood Science programme (in Die Hard, could Bruce Willis have saved the world with a singlet and a hosepipe – see http://www.open2.net/science/hollywood_science/) as an example of where Alma had not permitted the inclusion of irrelevant film footage.

Toby Bainton from SCONUL talked about Gowers: the European angle. (The Gowers review of intellectaul property was published in 2006). The European Union Copyright Directive of 2001 harmonised rights across the EU but did not harmonise exceptions. The Directive was formally reviewed in 2007. There was a Green Paper in 2008. In January 2009 a report on copyright by European MEP Manual Medina Ortega was approved which has led to protests from libraries, internet service providers and consumers. It includes the ‘Sarkozy three strikes’ proposal (where three infringements would lead to the withdrawal of access). Go to http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sidesSearch/search.do?type=REPORT&language=EN&term=6&author=1337 for access to the report.

Murray Weston, Chief Executive of the Britsh Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) covered the re-use of video from websites. He covered recent BUFVC licensing and content work. He mentioned BoB (Box of Broadcasts), and TRILT (Televison and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching). Go to http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/ for more information. He had been involved in a consultation on Developing a copyright agenda for the 21st century with the Intellectual Property Office (http://www.ipo.gov.uk/c-policy-consultation.pdf).

Charles Oppenheim’ s presentation was on Web 2.0, new ways of teaching and learning and the copyright issues they raise. He was involved in a JISC-funded project Web2Rights (http://www.web2rights.org.uk/). His presentation covered exceptions, restricted acts, infringement, moral rights, Web 2.0 applications, other legal issues, and getting started with a new teaching project.

The last speaker was David Anderson-Evans from UUK on the UUK role in negotiating with licensing bodies. He described the process of negotiating the latest CLA licences. The user guidelines at 24 pages were the same length as the licence. There are two working groups, one on data collection by the CLA, and one on secondary publishing.

We’ve just had a meeting with David Crook of the CLA, about the new (comprehensive) Higher Education Licence, which covers photocopying, scanning, and now digital use.

You can read the new licence user guidelines, at:

• http://www.cla.co.uk/assets/169/uukguildhe_userguidelines.pdf

Key differences between the old licence and the new:

• We’re now permitted to photocopy material published in Italy and Japan, as those countries have been added to the CLA’s list of international mandating territories.
• The ’scanning’ part of the licence now allows digitisation from works published in the U.S.A., as long as the publisher is not listed on the list of excluded US publishers.
• We now need only report our digitised copies (the dreaded spreadsheet!) to the CLA once a year, instead of every 6 months: within 15 days of the end of the licence period (i.e. by the end of August).

And…

• Most significantly, we can now create digital copies on Blackboard from digital originals (e-books and e-journals) published by certain publishers in the UK and the US. This is new ground for us: we’re one of only 35 HEIs to have signed up for this part of the licence, and we need to be seen to be getting value from the extra expense. I’m having meetings with C.E.R.D. next week to try and identify some pilot areas that could start using this part of the licence.

A few people have asked me if it’s possible to create reliable, persistent links to journal articles on Blackboard, via the link resolver, but without having to use the LibraryLink OpenURL tool.

• Yes, it is (Word doc.)

When you add the resulting link to Blackboard, you must make sure that it’s set to open in a new window. This is for two reasons:

1. Copyright – it’s considered “bad form” (i.e. borderline infringement) to open a third-party site in frames (it can look as if you’re appropriating the content and claiming it as your own). Blackboard uses frames.
2. Not doing so breaks Athens authentication, as I’ve discovered to my cost (I had to re-do a load of links to e-books that were’nt authenticating properly because the authentication was taking place in a frame).

Paul

Last Tuesday, the 16th of September, I attended the first meeting of the University’s new Institutional Repository Steering Group.

The group has representatives from L&LR, ICT Services (formerly known as CS!), C.E.R.D., the Research Office, and the faculties, and is chaired by Prof. Andrew Hunter, Dean of Research.

Its job is to make recommendations relating to the management and development of the Institutional Repository, and to report to the University Research Policy Committee on issues relating to the I.R. and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) – the successor to the RAE.

At the first meeting, we reviewed the I.R. policy, discussed the group’s terms of reference and membership, and drew up a list of issues for consideration, which included the scope of the repository project, copyright and IPR, bibliographic control [i.e. cataloguing!], advocacy and support for the faculties, and our use of bibliometric data (e.g. the Journal Citation Reports or eigenfactor) which will help inform the University in the run up to the next REF excercise.

Paul

The University of Michigan have a video podcast on their website about their new “Espresso Book Machine”, which prints on-demand, out-of-copyright or open-content books for their users, for around £3-£5 (at today’s exchange rate!) in under 10 minutes.

• Video at: http://www.ns.umich.edu/podcast/video.php?id=405

Story in Business Week, spotted on LISNews.org

Paul

Welcome to issue thirteen of the Library and Learning Resources newsletter “The Buzz”. The aim of the newsletter is to share news and information between teams and campuses. Ultimately it hopes to find out what
staff are doing, what is new in the department and to improve communication between all staff.

• Read on…