Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Publisher stress at the Frankfurt Book Fair

Jean-Baptiste Piggin, Book industry resists free internet access to text, EUX.TV, October 2, 2007.  (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)  Excerrpt:

Fearing that it will lose out financially, much of the book industry is resisting internet pioneers' vision of putting the world's entire store of published information online. 

Some European libraries have portrayed the bid to digitize 500 years of books and newspapers as an imperialist plot, because the big players such as Google are based in the United States.

But other libraries have signed accords with Google. Most readers and internet users who have used services like Google Book Search have been delighted at how it helps track down useful books.

Digitizing, and whether or not it is a threat to "book culture," will be an issue looming over the October 10-14 Frankfurt Book Fair....

Supporters say Google cannot proceed any other way [than with an opt-out policy], since many copyright owners are dead, no longer trading or practically untraceable. But publishers accuse Google of "stealing" the books whenever it copies the content into its huge servers....

Work began in 2005 on the VTO project, which stands for Volltextsuche Online (full-text search online). The VTO is set to be unveiled as a working system with a stock of 7,000 in-print books at the October 10-14 Frankfurt Book Fair....

Publishers' attempts to shut out the "other internet players" are also being resisted by people who say the public should have "open access" to taxpayer-funded scholarly and scientific research....

In Germany, copyright legislation is expected to come into force at the end of this year granting publishers the online rights to pre-1995 work. Before that time, online publication was undreamed of and rights to it were not mentioned in contracts.

Klaus Graf, an open-access advocate in Germany, is encouraging academics to use a one-year opt-out period to claim those online rights to their pre-1995 work and put the papers on the internet.

The prospect of scientists publishing on the internet instead of in paper journals has prompted academic publishers such as Springer to offer authors an open-access option, if they are willing to pay.

Even more worrying, from a publisher's perspective, is the prospect of expensive college textbooks being replaced by e-books that would be free to students. A British government agency, JISC, announced in September a nationwide trial with 26 books issued free....