...[Our] wide-ranging interview with Dan Clancy, engineering director in charge of Google Book Search, and Tom Turvey, Google director of content partnerships, will run in the May 1 issue of Library Journal, but we wanted to provide some excerpts from the discussion, which ranged over pricing issues and access for libraries and consumers, the legal settlement’s impact on orphan works and the public domain, and how the program would actually translate from paper to practice once —or perhaps if— approved....
Of course, Clancy said Google was confident that their initial “fair use” claim would have prevailed—eventually. “We strongly believed in our fair use position,” he said, "but we didn’t start this project to win a court case on fair use. I can honestly say that the settlement was completely driven by what we felt was in the end better for everyone and in particular, users.” ...
If the price is not appropriate, he noted, universities "can choose not to subscribe," Clancy said. He suggested that "the existence of a robust consumer model" in general drives prices down. "We think it has to be a price point where schools feel like it’s delivering value commensurate with the price they have to pay."
What are the other options? Certainly an online preview--"free preview of books is very much in the public interest," Clancy said--as well as use of interlibrary loan.
Turvey said that no pricing could be addressed until after the settlement but that Google was looking at various models for academic libraries based on FTE users....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/16/2009 01:47:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
