L&LR staff blog

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.

Academic librarians are unhappy that some of the UK’s largest university business schools are being asked to pay extra to be allowed to link to articles published in a key journal in their field.

Harvard Business Review (issn:0017-8012), published by HBP (Harvard Business Press), has long been available as part of the EBSCOhost Business Source suite of databases.

However, in an email to the chair of the BBSLG (British Business Schools Librarians Group), EBSCO outlined that, as a vendor of HBP’s content, they are obliged to disable persistent linking to Harvard Business Review, at the publisher’s request.

According to EBSCO, the terms & conditions of their supply of HBP content have always included a clause limiting use of the journal to individual, private study, and explicitly prohibiting linking from Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) for teaching purposes.

Three libraries have already had their facility to create persistent links removed, according to the BBSLG, who have written a letter of complaint to EBSCO.

A flyer circulated by EBSCO ‘invites’ individual BBSLG member-libraries to upgrade their EBSCOhost Business Source subscriptions to a level which would “continue to allow [the institution] to persistent link to HBR articles for an additional annual fee“: each institution’s fee being calculated on past use of the journal and their business-school student numbers.

For one, Russell Group, UK university, EBSCO have demanded £15,000 in order that the institution be allowed to go on creating persistent links for use in teaching.

According to correspondence between EBSCO and the BBSLG, Harvard Business Press are concerned that unauthorised persistent-linking from VLEs to EBSCOhost has harmed HBP’s separate provision of course packs for HEIs on a commercial basis. They cite a “direct quantifiable link between the two which can be clearly demonstrated financially between the diminishing course pack use and persistent linking“.

Should institutions decline the opportunity to pay the additional EBSCOhost fee, EBSCO asks that they inform their users that persistent-linking from a VLE to the HBR is not permitted, and that EBSCO may disable the ability to create such links.

This will not only remove the ability of academic staff to create links from a VLE, but also break any persistent links to the e-journal created by individuals in the course of their own personal study or research.

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This is a retrograde step for usability in online scholarly content. Storing, recalling, and broadcasting stable hyperlinks is fundamental to the Web. It is not an add-on or a luxury.

Private, subscription-only environment it may be, but users of EBSCOhost [remembering that this includes fee-paying students] have had the rug pulled from under a basic Web experience. It may currently affect only one journal title, in one database, but this is a dangerous precedent, and one that the library community has a right to question and challenge.

Paul

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.

More than 36,000 e-journal titles are listed on our A-to-Z, but student and staff interest is not spread equally between those titles.

Plotting a graph of the individual usage of each title shows a sharp ’spike’ of concentrated use within a very small number of titles, and a very long tail of thousands of titles which are barely used, if at all. In fact, as a raw graph it’s almost impossible to read, as all the action takes place at the extreme right-hand edge (click the image for bigger):

Some comparisons to put the distribution of usage into context:

A single title—the British Journal of Social Work—is responsible for 5% of all of our e-journal hits via the A-to-Z (5,185 hits in the last year). This is fairly remarkable in itself. What’s the secret there?

Anyway, imagine that this one e-journal (0.0027% of the total number of titles) is represented by the area of the West Common in Lincoln: about 100 hectares. Remember that 5% of all our A-to-Z usage is here.

Photo by Julian Beckton

The next 10% of A-to-Z usage can be accounted for by just 14 titles. If one title is the Lincoln West Common, then 14 cover an area about the size of the London Borough of Islington (or Windermere, if you prefer): approx. 6 square miles. These 14 titles each receive between 500 and 5,000 hits/year.

(Scale outline maps reproduced from Ordnance Survey map data by permission of the Ordnance Survey © Crown copyright 2001.)

The next 366 titles get fewer than 500 hits/year (39% of total usage) They tot up to just a bit bigger than Rutland, the smallest county in England (not counting the made-up counties), at 147 square miles.

We’re getting in to the beginning of the long tail now: 2,365 titles (the East Riding, including Hull, pushing 1,000 square miles), with 50 hits/year or fewer - this represents the next 34% of usage.

And 6,122 titles; 5 hits/year or fewer; south of the river to Lincolnshire, at 2,687 square miles the second-largest English county. Just 12% of our total A-to-Z usage from 17% of our titles.

Finally, 75% of all our e-journals - 27,745 titles in total – are never used via the A-to-Z.

That’s zero A-to-Z hits in the last year, although it’s quite possible they’ve been accessed via the native database or publisher interface, or through tools such as Google Scholar. To represent those 27,745 unused titles at the same scale, we’d have to use…

…Belgium, which won’t fit on this page.

Imagine that: a medium-sized European country full of e-journals, and none of them used. Quel dommage! Or, if you prefer, Een welk medelijden*.

*Reckons Babelfish. I don’t speak Flemish.

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.

I’m beginning to see that there’s quite a large difference between the approach used by the vast majority of UK HE libraries (us included), and the standard model used across the pond to authenticate users to third-party subscription databases.

In a nutshell, Athens and Shibboleth don’t seem to have made much of an impression over there, and most North American universities rely heavily on a proxy server (often using EZProxy). Whereas here, proxy servers are very much a tool of ‘last resort’. (Our own LibResProxy.lincoln.ac.uk certainly is, at least – anyway, it’s not just a proxy server: it’s much more clever than that!)

Maybe 90% of the traffic on the RefWorks administrators’ mailing list at one point was about getting RefWorks to speak to EZProxy, and I pick up the occasional blog post which opens a window onto this parallel universe (like this one about identifying users by role when authenticating via a proxy server [originally spotted on Planet Code4Lib], which echos debates ‘over here’ about identifying users by role in the AD and exposing that data via the UK Federation).

It’s made me wonder whether (and how well) an American approach to authentication would work here? I can see a certain elegant simplicity in dispensing with the current multitude of off-campus authentication mechanisms (Athens, Shibboleth, FCU, Proxy, additional username/password) and just locking everything to our IP range, with an option to dial in and piggyback on that IP using something like EZProxy / a VPN / thin-client delivery of desktop).

Also, why the UK model of off-campus access never took off in educational libraries in the USA?

Paul