Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory, Vol. 13, pp. 213-216, 1989 0364~6408/89 $3.00 + S-JO Printed in the USA. All rights reserved. Copyright 0 1989 Pergamon Press plc

COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE

PUBLISHERS, LIBRARIANS, AND COPYRIGHT

CAROL A. RISHER

Director of Copyright and New Technology

Association of American Publishers

2005 Massachusetts Avenue, NW

Washington, DC u)o36

Publishers, librarians, copyright: it used to be a sure formula for sparks. Whether the forum was Congress, the Copyright Office, or an ALA or AAP meeting, the outcome was the same. But the environment is different today; and I hope to demonstrate why now is the time to begin a new dialogue.

Do you remember ten-plus years ago? Academic libraries then had the same problems as now: limited resources, demands on acquisitions budgets, and an increasing volume of journal literature. An idea was floated in reports, first by the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science and then by the Council on Library Resources, for a National Periodi- cal Center (NIX)-one single collection of the world’s journal literature to supply documents on demand. Do you remember what happened? I do. The greatest benefit that could come from that exercise would be if we together learned from the mistakes, recognized that things are different, and tried to work together.

With NPC, library organizations identified the problem-access to an increasing volume of periodical literature with limited budgets-and tried to solve it without first talking to pub- lishers. So the lines were drawn, and the debates began, and no one was prepared to listen to or work out helpful ideas. Instead, we had rhetoric and sparks. I believe I can identify lots of useful ideas offered by AAP participating publishers . . . but that’s not the point. No one listened. The idea of a single source for document supply or resource-sharing without regard to copyright is still a non-starter.

Just last month at the International Publishers Association (IPA) Congress, a thousand publishers from fifty countries passed a joint resolution condemning the British Library Doc- ument Supply Centre (DSC) for its photocopying activities and urging the British government to take steps to end DSC’s illegal export of photocopied materials. The IPA statement main- tains that “simple, efficient means are readily available” to allow the DSC to conduct its busi- ness in accordance with accepted copyright law and practice by utilizing the services of the various national Reproduction Rights Organizations (RROs). It asks the British government to take steps to prohibit the DSC from “exporting photocopies to commercial entities in other

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countries without payment of freely negotiated compensation to copyright owners,” and to require the DSC to get “enforceable assurance” from photocopy recipients within the U.K. that the copies will not be exported. So clearly, an NPC or the DSC is not the way to go.

If resource-sharing is to be a viable plan to cut costs, you must realize that, if the resources you plan to share are copyrighted works, the laws require permission of the copyright holder to systematically make copies, whether the sharing of copies is done by scanning into elec- tronic media, by sending via facsimile transmission, by photocopying, or by computer-and the copyright holders do care.

However, as I said when I began, the environment has changed. There are new players on the scene-the RROs - Reproduction Rights Organizations. These are collecting societies that operate in over 15 countries. On behalf of copyright holders, they license users to make copies, and they collect royalties for the rights holders. On this issue, we can take a lesson from overseas where the concept of paying for copying is well established. The RROs rep- resent publishers and authors. They recognize that copying is a fact of life and have devel- oped a variety of means to collect royalties for copying, thereby removing this tension. They called themselves Reproduction Rights Organizations because they did not want to be lim- ited to one form of copying. The RROs are joined into the International Federation of Repro- duction Rights Organizations (IFRRO). IFRRO will be meeting in Barcelona this September to address the topic of electrocopying: the display of information, stored in electronic for- mat, whether that display is on a terminal screen or by printing on paper, and whether the storage is on CD-ROM, on-line databases, or other media. Electrocopying has been featured in two separate issues of rights. It is recognized as an issue of such impending significance as to dwarf photocopying.

In this country, the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), the U.S. RRO, has already been asked by several corporations to consider licensing in-house electronic systems where the cor- porations replace book and journal microfiche storage systems with on-line ones. Across the Atlantic, I have just heard that the Norwegian RR0 is seeking a change in Norway’s copy- right law to statutorily mandate collection for electrocopying.

The new player in the mix-publishers, librarians, copyright -is the RR0 and its organi- zation, IFRRO. That this new player is not more of the same can be illustrated in two ways: 1) real income to publishers is being generated, and 2) new types of organizations are look- ing to license copying. CCC distributed $1 million in royalties last year; and CCC is about to embark on something that could significantly impact on both of our organizations. Let me elaborate: recently, several universities approached CCC and said, “We know the copyright law is being violated on our campuses, and we spend a lot of time worrying and researching copyright questions. Could we try a CCC license where, out of university overhead funds, NOT LIBRARY BUDGETS, we pay a set license fee that will cover all of our copying and make it legal, authorized, and compensated?” So CCC and the universities worked out a deal. It is a two-year pilot program of comprehensive data-gathering: recording what is copied, where it is copied, for what purpose it is copied, and what impact the copying has on the use of other materials. For the first time, there will be hard data on university copying. And, again, to ensure that there are no sparks, the CCC arranged a meeting with AAP member publishers to ask them to consider an agreement not to sue the participating universities and to ask publishers what data publishers need in order to decide to permit licensed copying- data such as whether the copying is replacing sales, and why copied materials are being used for various classes. The dialogue begins. The outcome could well be a method to recognize copyright by licensing copying.

Publishers, Librarians, and Copyright 215

Another example of the new environment can be seen in the Library of Congress Optical Disk Project. Five years ago, the Library of Congress set up a joint publisher-librarian advi- sory board to work with the Library of Congress as it explored optical disk as a technology to store journal literature for both preservation and access. The Advisory Board meetings resulted not in sparks, but in cooperative discussions. From publishers came an appreciation of librarians’ needs; from librarians came an understanding of publishers’ concerns; and from both sides came an understanding that there is no point to our government’s duplicating what is already being done by the private sector.

Two of these private sector initiatives are helpful to look at here. ADONIS, a consortium of ten publishers, is also involved in an optical disk trial. The contents of 219 journals in the biomedical field published in 1987 and 1988 are indexed and scanned and stored weekly onto CD-ROMs, which are sent to participating Document Supply Centers (including the British Library). These disks are available before current awareness and bibliographic databases begin to generate requests for the articles.

Retrieval can be via author, title, or unique identifier. In addition to retrieval software, there is software to log what is printed. Every three months, the collected statistics of which items have been printed will be sent to one location for consolidation into a report showing what was copied, when, the age of the article, the type of requestor (academic, government, industrial), and the country of origin of the request. This trial will last until June 1989. The comprehensive statistics available from this survey will help publishers and librarians better know what materials are being read while also providing an alternative document delivery sys- tem that should save on costs.

Here, in the exhibit hall at ALA, University Microfilms International (UMI) is demonstrat- ing its new work station. Using a similar principle of full text stored on CD-ROM, UMI has assembled the most-used journals into a distributed database with associated, specialized soft- ware for Billing and Tracking Royalties (BART). The system uses a debit card, so that library users or the institution or the department can be charged a royalty fee in order to print out copies on demand. The decision of who pays the fee is up to the user institution, but the sys- tem allows for creative approaches while working within the law. Again, technology helps to save costs and demonstrates the effectiveness of cooperation between the private sector and libraries.

The Library of Congress’ Network Advisory Committee (NAC) has already spent a full year in advance of actual implementation exploring the copyright implications of delivering full texts on-line over existing or expanded networks. NAC recognizes that it is time to talk, before doing, to be sure the plan will work and be universally accepted.

Other opportunities for this dialogue are plentiful:

l AAP’s Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division is forming a new library liaison committee. If you are interested in participating, please contact Barbara Meredith in AAP’s New York office. PSP publishers want to talk to and work with academic librarians.

l October 17-19, the Society for Scholarly Publishing will meet at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in a session entitled “Journal Pricing and Libraries.” Librarians and publishers are urged to participate.

l On December 8, the AAP Journals Committee is holding a meeting to discuss a recent PSP library survey in which librarians’ views were particularly sought in an effort to build bridges instead of walls.

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l Perhaps next year’s RTSD pre-conference, or the ALA mid-winter or next year’s ALA, should highlight a panel of publishers. Ann Strong of the New England Journal of Medi- cine chairs AAP’s Journals Committee and has volunteered to help select a variety of publishers for the panel. It is important for librarians to realize that publishers are not monolithic- they are individual and different and bring varying perspectives to any issue. Hence, a panel could be a useful tool to expanding the dialogue.

If one theme has been constant throughout these remarks, it is that the time to talk is NOW. Hence, I was dismayed to see in the June 6 Library Hotline the headline which read: “ALA to Spearhead National Task Force on Periodical and Book Prices.” This task force is to be sponsored by you, the Research and Technical Services Division of ALA (RTSD) and to be chaired by Robert Wedgeworth. There are no publishers invited to participate in this task force. A group that plans to discuss periodical and book prices without publishers’ being present is a formula for disaster. Please, each of you, look for Bob Wedgeworth today and urge him to include publishers in his meeting tomorrow, before the hard battle lines and rhet- oric become entrenched. Make the Task Force meeting useful by opening channels of communication.

Let us not reenact the National Periodical Center disaster. Let us work together now in this new environment where technology and RROs can help libraries fulfill their needs while rec- ognizing the rights of publishers.