Welcome to the Free Online
Scholarship Newsletter
July 17, 2001
Separating electronic rights from print rights
Standard book contracts give the publisher the exclusive right to publish
the author's work in "book form". A federal district court in New York
ruled on July 11 that this contract language covers print books but not
electronic books. The effect is that even authors who have signed such
contracts retain the electronic rights to their books and may shop them around
or put their books online without charge and without the consent of their
publishers.
Rosetta Books is an e-book publisher which has purchased the electronic
rights to over 100 print novels, including some by three notable Random House
authors, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, and Robert Parker. Random House
charged that this violated its contracts with the authors and went to court for
an injunction to stop Rosetta from publishing any of the books in electronic
form. This is the case that Rosetta just won in district court.
The case obviously has consequences for the commercial publication of
e-books. But it also has consequences for FOS. On the one hand, this
appears to be a victory for authors. They retain more rights to their work
than publishers had thought, and perhaps more than the authors themselves had
thought. But on the other hand, publishers will respond to this decision
by asking authors for electronic rights along with print rights. Authors
usually lack bargaining power with publishers and therefore will usually
acquiesce. But if publishers routinely demand and receive electronic
rights, then authors will be worse off than they are today. They will not
be free to post their books to the web without the publisher's consent, and
publishers will not consent if they believe that free online access will reduce
sales of the print edition.
In this sense, Rosetta is like the Tasini case decided by the Supreme Court
on June 25. Tasini did for freelance authors of newspaper and magazine
articles roughly what Rosetta does for book authors (though Rosetta does not
cite Tasini). Both decisions recognize that electronic publication is a
new medium, sufficiently different from print publication that contracts
covering the latter will not be construed to cover the former. However,
publishers will respond to both decisions by asking for electronic rights in
addition to print rights. The victory for authors seems limited to those
who signed contracts before publishers woke up to how their interests have
changed in the digital age.
David Kirkpatrick, Judge Grants Authors a Victory in Fight Over
Digital-Book Rights
From _The New York Times_
Rosetta Books home page
Rosetta's lawsuit update page
Amicus brief for Rosetta Books by The Authors Guild
Random House v. Rosetta Books (July 11 decision, U.S. District Court)
New York Times v. Tasini (June 25 decision, U.S. Supreme Court)
* Postscript. I haven't seen a case settling these issues for authors
of scholarly journal articles. If you know one that I'm overlooking, or
one in the pipeline, please let me know about it.
----------
Los Alamos arXiv moving to Cornell
Paul Ginsparg is moving from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to Cornell,
and his international e-print archive will move with him. One reason for
the move is that the archive needs to grow beyond the size that Los Alamos can
support.
Ginsparg's archive is the oldest and largest repository of free online
scholarship, and the foremost demonstration that FOS is not electronic vanity
publishing, but an unprecedented tool to facilitate cutting edge
research.
Florence Olsen, Pioneer in Electronic Scholarly Publishing Leaves Los
Alamos, With Archive in Tow
Ginsparg's arXiv
----------
California offers free online books and one journal
The University of California Press is experimenting with free online access
to the full text of more than 60 of its e-books and one of its e-journals.
I visited one of the books and the journal to check on the experiment.
The content is very well presented, thanks to content management software
from eBT International. The text is real text, not an image. Hence
it can be cut and pasted, printed in whole or part, and searched through your
browser. However, the search engine accompanying the text is better than
the one in your browser, if only because it crosses file boundaries (hence
chapters). The texts are not hidden in a database and can be crawled by
public search engines like Google. Illustrations are well-rendered and
integrated with the text. The texts use frames as unobtrusively as it is
possible to use frames, to keep tables of contents and other navigation aids in
view.
Unfortunately, eBT is going out of business. Let's hope that
California can hold on to the software or find an equally satisfactory
replacement.
California plans to offer more free online e-books in coming months, some
of them before their print counterparts. By contrast, while it plans to
offer nearly all of its journals electronically, most will be accessible only to
paying subscribers. It doesn't explain the different treatment at its web
site, but it is probably thinking that many readers of a printable online e-book
will still want to buy the printed volume, while very few readers of a printable
online journal article will want more from it than they already have.
If you wonder what the payback is for California, the site offers no
answer. California seems to believe that free online e-books will trigger
a net growth in the sales of print books. If so, and especially if it has
evidence, I wish it had been as explicit as the National Academy Press, which
explains on its web site that publishing all its books in both formats has more
than paid the costs of doing so. This position may be well-grounded in
evidence for those who have tried it, but it is so incredible in the industry
that publishers who have the evidence should speak loud and clear.
University of California Press E-Editions
[Sample book] Peter Green (ed.), _Hellenistic History and Culture_
[Sample journal] _The Public Historian_
eBT
National Academy Press (NAP)
NAP's rationale for publishing free online e-books
* Postscript. See the May 11 issue of the newsletter for a
description of Princeton's digital books program, which is slightly different
from California's or NAP's. If you know other academic publishers
experimenting with the coexistence of free online editions and priced print
editions, then please post a note to the discussion forum or send me an
email.
----------
Free + commercial = commercial
STN Easy is a database offered by the Chemical Abstracts Service
(CAS). (STN stands for Scientific and Technical Information
Network.) CAS recently introduced a new feature for STN Easy, which
extends STN searches to the wider web. If you run an STN search, you will
now find a new button labelled "Search the Web" on your page of
hits. Press the button and STN will transfer your search to Google or
ChemIndustry.com, at your choice. In this way you can collect web pages to
supplement the proprietary content you found in STN. Eventually CAS will
offer this service for all its databases.
STN searches cost money, while Google and ChemIndustry searches are
free. What CAS is doing, in other words, is bundling a free service with
its proprietary service.
Redirecting a query from one search engine to another can be a convenience,
especially when the two cover different domains. But does simple
redirection to free, public search engines deserve to be called *eScience*, as
this one is? The self-important name makes me wonder whether CAS is hoping
that users will mistake this freebie for the kind of added value that explains
price hikes. There are some clues. CAS calls eScience a "new
resource" and "your passport to a select variety of the most valuable
science-related websites."
Even if this is just promotional bloviating, providers of free content
should beware of what might be called the hijacked freeloader problem. If
you give your content to everyone, then you also give it to commercial services,
which might add it to the feature list they use to justify their prices.
This isn't a case of enclosing the commons, since the free content is still
available for free through a different doorway. It's a case of deceiving
users, who aren't told that the new feature at the commercial service is
available elsewhere for free. The solution is not to force commercial
providers to pay for content which is free to everyone else, but to educate
users.
Chemical Abstracts Service
eScience
Google
ChemIndustry.com search engine
* Postscript. Here's a digression on the hijacked freeloader
problem. One day there will be much more free online scholarship in
distributed archives than there is today. Suppose that the first
comprehensive portal to it all charges money. This would be a non-trivial
and useful service, especially compared to eScience. Would you pay for
it? Instead of losing much sleep trying to answer this question, let's
just make sure that the second such portal, launched a week later, is
free.
----------
Another approach to digital preservation
France has just adopted a law requiring all French web pages to be
archived. Webmasters may do this themselves, but they'll only be
duplicating the back-ups created by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF)
and the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA). The archive will update
itself at varying intervals, visiting newspaper sites, for example, more often
than personal home pages. There are still a few problems to be worked out,
like what counts as a French web page and how to archive Flash animations and
other dynamic content with the same completeness as HTML. BNA and INA are
committed to making all elements of the archive searchable.
I haven't been able to discover whether the plan also includes the
invisible web (database contents not usually accessible to outside crawlers) and
password protected content.
Frans van Mieghem, Entire French web to be archived
From EuropeMedia.net
Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Institut National de l'Audiovisuel
----------
Following up
* In the last two issues, in my comments on the Hague Convention on
Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments, I cited the Taliban as a premier example of
a regime you would not want to have jurisdiction over your online
writings. On cue, the Taliban banned the internet from Afghanistan
yesterday. Not just pornography or sites criticizing church or state, but
the internet itself. The bad news is that Afghan citizens are being
repressed. The good news is that the Hague Convention is slightly less
dangerous now that the Taliban will not be reading your online writings.
The Taliban Foreign Minister said, "We want to establish a system in Afghanistan
through which we can control all those things that are wrong, obscene, immoral
and against Islam." Exactly.
* Remember the Digital Promise Project? This is the ambitious
proposal to take $18 billion from the federal sale of radio spectrum and spend
it on digital media and digital content to improve American education. See
the May 18 issue of the newsletter for more details.
On June 22, a federal appeals court seems to have thrown a monkey wrench
into this plan when it invalidated about $16 billion worth of auction
sales. The government had sold licences that formerly belonged to NextWave
Personal Communications, thinking that NextWave forfeited the licenses by
defaulting on its payments. However, NextWave was in bankruptcy
proceedings at the time of the default and some of its assets, including the
licenses, were protected from this kind of forfeiture.
The government, which hoped to have $16 billion in sales revenue, and a
handful of media giants (including Verizon Wireless, ATT Wireless, and
Cingular), which hoped to have licenses to bands of radio spectrum, are stunned
by the decision and trying to figure out what it means for their plans.
The waters are equally murky for the Digital Promise Project.
NextWave v. FCC (June 22 decision, U.S. Court of Appeals)
Stephen Labaton and Riva Atlas, U.S. Court Upends Plans to Improve Cellular
Service
From the _New York Times_
The Digital Promise Project
----------
In other publications
* In a June 27 paper posted at XML.com, John McKeown and Benjamin Jung give
step-by-step instructions for creating an electronic publication with XML.
If you need to make electronic publications which flexibly adapt themselves to
different display formats, or which are maximally compatible with different
platforms and applications, then these instructions will help you.
* In the July issue of _Online_, Péter Jacsó points out that database
collections of digital journals do a poor job covering the journals in field of
library and information science (LIS). Moreover, when they do cover
digital LIS journals, they frequently fail to provide active links to the
journals.
* In a guest editorial in the July issue of _Learned Publishing_, Sally
Morris discusses the special problems facing non-profit publishers. They
are more likely than for-profit publishers, for example, to let authors retain
copyright and to post their writings to free web archives. When they lose
revenue because their journals have moved to an FOS model, then they will need
new sources of revenue to subsidize their other activities, or else cut back on
their activities.
* Also in the July issue of _Learned Publishing_, John Houghton studies the
economics of scholarly publication, using Australian journals as a case
study. He argues that scholarly publishing is in transition from print to
electronic media. While the transition is highly desirable, it itself has
costs that are easy to overlook.
* In the new issue of _College and Research Libraries News_, Mary Case
reviews the Public Library of Science initiative and its September deadline to
boycott science journals that don't put their content online free of charge
within six months of print publication. She includes a handful of
suggestions for libraries that wish to support the initiative.
* The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) and Research Libraries Group
(RLG) joined forces in March to study the best practices for long-term
preservation of digital literature. Its working group has just issued a
white paper reviewing the state of the art.
----------
Conferences
If you plan to attend one of the following conferences, please share your
observations with us through our discussion forum.
* Summer Seminars at the Oxford Humanities Computing Unit
Oxford, July 23-27
* Biological Research with Information Extraction & Open-Access
Publications
Copenhagen, July 26
* International Summer School on the Digital Library
Tilburg, Holland, August 5-10
* The International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting
Milan, September 3-7
* 5th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital
Libraries
Darmstadt, September 4-9
* DELOS Workshop on Interoperability in Digital Libraries
Darmstadt, September 8-9
* Experimental OAI Based Digital Library Systems
Darmstadt, September 8
* Preserving Online Content for Future Generations
Darmstadt, September 8
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I've updated the FOS home page to describe how to subscribe to the
discussion forum and receive the postings in digest form or not receive the
postings by email at all.
==========
This is the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter (ISSN 1535-7848).
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Peter Suber
Copyright (c) 2001, Peter Suber