The cheque will soon be in the post for Irish authors: they are to be paid a royalty every time one of their books is borrowed from a public library. Under pressure from the European commission, the government [of Ireland] will this week announce the creation of a public lending right (PLR) which should mean a financial windfall for writers from next year....“The precise details of the PLR scheme will be worked out by the department of the environment, and the size of the payment to authors has yet to be decided,” said an official. “It depends on how much money is put into the kitty.” Officials say the PLR will not be funded out of the existing library budget but from additional money provided by the exchequer. There were 13.3m book loans from public libraries in 2003, so if the government put €3m into the PLR kitty each year, it would mean a payment of about 4.5c per loan per author. In Britain, authors are paid 5.26p. Several aspects of the British scheme are likely to be copied in Ireland — such as the maximum payment to authors (£6,000 or about €8,700), and the need for writers to register in order to avail of PLR. There is also likely to be a minimum threshold, such as 100 loans or €5, before a royalty payment is processed....Academic libraries will be exempt from the scheme. EU authors will also be eligible for royalty payments. When the EU directive was first introduced in 1992, Ireland availed of an opt-out for seven years. It then introduced a copyright act in 2000 which recognised PLR, but exempted every public library from it on the basis that the cost of collection was too high relative to the benefit to authors. The European commission was so unhappy that it began proceedings against Ireland in the European Court of Justice.
Comment. I'm new to this practice --probably like most Americans-- even though it seems to have been around for a while in the UK. So let me think out loud for a moment. Libraries may still loan books without charge to patrons, and patrons still have this form of free access. But to compensate authors for "lost" royalties, taxpayers pay into a fund to be divided among authors in proportion to the number of times their books are borrowed from public libraries. This is wonderful for authors, especially if it reduces the pressure from author organizations (long-standing but low-heat) to curb free library lending. But why should taxpayers foot the bill when most of them would not buy or borrow the books by compensated authors? There is no public interest in enriching book authors, although there might be a public interest in supporting a form of free access for citizens who cannot afford to buy books. I'm not ready to judge the idea. I just want to point out that any country willing to back such a scheme should be even more willing to require open access to publicly-funded research. There is a public interest in funding the research in the first place and a public interest in footing the much smaller additional cost of disseminating it without charge to all who can make use of it. The alternative is to put a price barrier on access to publicly-funded research, undermining the original public investment. Moreover, in this case the authors voluntarily relinquish payment.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/01/2005 10:51:00 AM.
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.
