The University of California’s secret agreement with Google for book digitization promises to improve access to parts of its library collections, but the contractual restrictions UC has accepted may enrich Google’s shareholders at public expense....[I]t's troubling to see public institutions transfer cultural assets, accumulated with public funds, into private hands without disclosing the terms of the transaction....
Transparency is a primary value [according to the digitization principles of] both the OCA, and the ALA....
The [UC] president’s office says it expects that [contract] terms will only come out after it receives the equivalent of a FOIA request. Since when does it take a FOIA request to get information from the library?
But it isn’t just the public that is excluded --it’s the rest of the library community....By isolating librarians from each other, Google dramatically strengthens its negotiating position, and UC negates the goal of academic openness....
[P]rivate companies, at least profitable ones like Google, don’t work for free....[U]se of and access to the digitized cultural works is usually limited in some way to benefit the private firm. This has to be done in the open.
The recent Smithsonian/Showtime agreement is a case in point that clearly shows what can go wrong in such a process. To recap, Showtime convinced the Smithsonian to sign a secret 170 page, 30 year agreement which gives Showtime control of the Smithsonian’s film and video archive. This particular saga has been widely covered elsewhere, but the roots of catastrophe are in 1) secret negotiations 2) exclusivity 3) length of term.
UC’s agreement is probably not explicitly exclusive. But as a practical matter, scanning doesn’t happen twice; libraries learned this when their material was microfilmed....
That extreme scenario may not come to pass, but there are many other questions about the Google / UC deal:
What more might UC be able to do if its scanning project were funded by the legislature or foundations, rather than by Google?
UC says the “digitized books will be searchable through Google Book Search.” Can anyone else build services that access this data? Or is it another case of “Google can crawl everyone else’s data, no one can crawl Google’s data?”
What quality assurances will Google provide? How can we ensure this won’t be a repeat of the microfilm experience?
Will UC have copies of the full, high quality scans, or will certain information, such as image positioning data needed for searching, be kept by Google alone?
What restrictions will be placed on UC’s use of those scans?
What will be the different treatments for material in copyright, or orphaned, or in the public domain?
Is it reasonable to ask the public to pay a second time (or watch ads) for material already purchased, simply because it’s now necessary to convert the format in which it is stored?
Why haven’t the Regents appointed a panel of advisors on this matter?
Clearly, UC’s high level goals are laudable. The Google people I’ve met believe in the company motto, “don’t be evil.” And it is not really in the public interest to side with the publishers who are the loudest voices now attacking Google, and a primary cause of the all the secrecy. Yet by acquiescing to Google’s demands for secrecy, UC has compromised the public interest, and set a dangerous precedent for the rest of the academic community.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/15/2006 05:47:00 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.
