Abstract (aka. tweet): Many university libraries are primed to run OER and OCW shops, but no one is doing it. The University of Michigan just might lead the way.

Reaching the Heart of the University: Libraries and the Future of OER

University libraries are well positioned to run OER production and publication operations, but so far most institutions developing OER or OCW have little or no integration with their respective libraries. Given a number of aligning factors, the University of Michigan (U-M) has an excellent opportunity to integrate Open.Michigan, its OER operation, with the Library. While the U-M Library’s established publishing apparatus is larger than that of most academic libraries, many institutions share elements that would make OER integration feasible in one form or another. We propose an interactive strategy session where we present the case for greater university library involvement in OER projects generally, with U-M as a case study.

University libraries were among the first OER producers. Early projects to digitize and share public domain materials were spearheaded by libraries in support of their missions to collect, preserve, and provide access to knowledge and information. The Making of America project was a Mellon Foundation-funded partnership among U-M, Cornell University, and the Library of Congress that created one of the first digital libraries of public domain content. Since then, the U-M Library MPublishing department has built a robust digital publishing program that includes a copyright office, an institutional repository, and an experimental unit that publishes open access scholarly journals, monograph series, public domain image collections, print-on-demand textbooks, and reprints. When it assumed responsibility for the University of Michigan Press in 2009, the U-M Library consolidated within MPublishing tremendous expertise in the skills necessary to create and publish open digital content. Recently, the U-M Library began exploring the addition of OER to its portfolio with a strategy to integrate Open.Michigan into MPublishing.

This is what makes Michigan unique. However, the key elements that university libraries share – and OER initiatives need – are infrastructure and relationships. Many university libraries already have the technical, service, and policy infrastructure in place that would provide economies of scale for nascent OER projects. Areas where existing library infrastructure could support OER includes search and discovery, scholarly communications, assessment, metadata and indexing, and institutional repositories. Assessment skills are particularly valuable at this moment as the budget pressures that have pushed academic libraries to scrutinze how their resources and instructional services affect learning are also beginning to shape the world of OER. Meanwhile, most university libraries have a central and trusted position in the lives of faculty, students, and administrators on their campuses. Librarians support curriculum development, guide instructors to appropriate course content, and assist with research. Libraries are already at the heart of universities, which would make mainstreaming OER much easier.

When an OER shop is a stand-alone unit isolated from the day-to-day activities of students and faculty, it becomes difficult to sustain. To achieve long-term sustainability, university-based OER projects need a stable and well-funded home. Libraries could provide that home, and the University of Michigan, which has already established an ethos of sharing and a policy of open licensing in its library, is poised to figure out how.

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, it’s worth heading over to the post on the Offbeat Bride site because the comments have been lively. Lots of photographers weighing in, which shouldn’t have surprised me.

Copyright, Creative Commons, and your wedding photos

I’m really excited by the amazing success we had negotiating with our wedding photographer around copyright, and I wanted to share what we did with the Offbeat Bride community.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I’m a librarian with a background in publishing who frequently does outreach and education about copyright. None of this is legal advice, etc.

Okay. So before I explain what our photographer is doing for us, you need a very very abbreviated introduction to copyright. (I’m sorry, I’m a librarian, I have to teach you things, I can’t help myself).

1) The purpose of copyright law is to promote the progress of science and art. Hardly anyone knows that anymore. So many people think it’s about generating profit for the music industry and giving individual artists total control over their work, but that’s just not true. Once upon a time, copyright law was balanced between the needs of creators and the needs of the public. Things have gotten really unbalanced over the last 40 years, but the goal of serving the public and promoting progress is still in there.

2) Copyright protects creative works that are fixed in a tangible medium of expression. This means that in order for something to be protected by copyright, it has to be recorded some way, on paper or on a hard drive some other physical thing. There are several classes of creative work that qualify for copyright protection: literary works, musical works, dramatic works, choreographic works, pictorial, graphics, and sculptural works, motion pictures and other audiovisual works, sound recordings, and architectural works.

3) Copyright does not protect ideas or facts. Those are free for anyone to use, even if it makes them look like they’re biting someone else’s style. A work has to be at least a little bit creative to qualify for copyright protection. Something that is purely factual, like a phone book, does not have enough creativity to be copyrightable even if it takes a lot of effort and hard work to make it.

4) Copyright attaches to a work automatically the moment it is recorded. There is no need to register the copyright, or to put a little (c) on it, or even claim it. If a work is relatively new (created in the last 50 years or so) creative, and recorded in some way, it’s almost definitely copyrighted. Copyright also lasts a really long time (currently, life of the creator plus 70 years after the creator dies). This means that most of what you find online is under copyright, even if there is no copyright symbol and no attribution and no source listed.

5) Copyright comes with a set of exclusive rights. These are things the copyright holder can do with the work that other people mostly cannot do (there are some important exceptions, but it would take way too much space for me to go into them here). The rights that come with copyright are: 1) The right to make copies. 2) The right to distribute copies. 3) The right to make derivative works. 4) The right to perform or display the work. The copyright holder may keep these rights to herself, or she may give some or all of them away, usually with a contract or a license.

So what does any of this have to do with your wedding photos? Everything. The way the default rules of copyright ownership work, the photographer you hire to shoot your wedding holds the copyrights in your wedding photos. She is free to sell them, publish them, Photoshop them, and share them. You are not. I hear all the time from people who believe that because they are the subjects of the photos, or because they are the ones who hired the photographer, then they are the ones who hold the copyright in the photos. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Those exclusive rights are hers, not yours.

But that’s just the default. You can change all that with the contract you sign when you hire your photographer. Most wedding photographers these days do retain the copyrights in the photos they take of your wedding, but they may give you a license to make personal, non-commercial uses of your photos. This is especially common when photographers offer a CD or DVD containing the high-res files of all your pictures. You usually have to pay extra, but a license like this means you can print copies yourself, post your pictures on Facebook, and send them to your friends, without asking for permission and without violating your photographer’s copyright. These are all good rights to have, and I highly recommend reading your contract carefully to see if you get them, and if you don’t, to ask.

For me and my boyfriend, a personal license was absolutely the bare minimum of what we would accept from our photographer. We’re both copyright nerds, and we knew we needed a license to use our own wedding pictures. But what we really wanted – and ended up getting – was more. A couple of weeks ago in the post about the XKCD save the dates, Ariel alluded to something called Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a system that allows creators to attach a license to their work that gives certain permissions to the whole world. There are several Creative Commons licenses to choose from. All the licenses require that whoever uses the work must attribute the creator and provide a link back to the original. Other options permit only non-commercial uses, forbid derivative works, or require people who build on a work to share the new work under the same license as the original. Many photographers, artists, musicians, and authors – including the ones who make a living from their art – now use Creative Commons licenses because they recognize that it is good for them. They always get credit as the creator, and it’s easier for people to discover and fall in love with their work when fans are free to copy and share it. I love love love Creative Commons because it has made possible a huge pool of new creative material that we are free to use and build on without worrying about copyright infringement. This is especially exciting to librarians and educators like me and my boyfriend, but anyone who loves remixes or mashups or funny cat pictures on the internet should appreciate how much better life is when people feel free to build on the creative work of others.

So back to wedding photos. Instead of a license that would just allow me and my boyfriend to use our wedding pics, we wanted a license that would allow anyone in the world to use our photos. We wanted a Creative Commons license. I really didn’t think we’d be able to convince a professional photographer to license our photos this way, but we did, and it wasn’t even that hard. First, we found an amazing photographer who already offers a personal copyright license along with the CD of high-res files. This way, we already knew we had someone who didn’t feel the need to retain complete control over the images. Once we’d gotten past the initial email exchange figuring out whether she was available, telling her how much we loved her work, describing our offbeat wedding plans, etc., I explained in an email a little bit about Creative Commons and why it was important to us, and I provided a couple of links to information where she could learn more. I was afraid we’d lose her right there, but to my surprise, she was just excited to be working with people who actually understood copyright law, and was totally open to hearing more about CC. Then we set up a phone call where we could talk about all the usual stuff you talk about with a photographer, but in addition we discussed the CC license. I explained again why it was important to us, and talked about ways in which it could be good for her as well. We agreed that it would have to be a non-commercial license – anyone who wanted to make a commercial use of a photo, like for advertising, would have to contact her for permission. Her biggest concern was that if the license was attached to high-resolution versions of the photos it would be too easy for people to make infringing uses, especially in print. Ultimately, we compromised with an agreement that we would be allowed to attach a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license only to low-res versions of the files. This is enough to allow for web-based reuses of our photos, but was limited enough that our photographer was comfortable giving it a try. We edited the language in her standard photographer contract to reflect the new license, and that was it.

Contracts can be intimidating and full of legalese, but it’s really worth taking the time to understand what is in your agreement with your photographer, and to negotiate for more rights if they’re not in the standard agreement. I was surprised by how much we were able to get just by asking.

If you want a concise overview of what Creative Commons is and why it is valuable, I highly recommend this video.

1) Every year, Creative Commons holds a big fundraising campaign, and they ask a few members of the CC community to write letters explaining what makes CC so important and why they support it. This year I wrote one of those letters focusing on CC Learn and the tremendous value of open educational resources. This feels a bit like self promotion, but it’s me promoting myself promoting CC, so I’m going to go ahead and do it anyway: Check it out, grow the Commons.

2) I just found out that several months ago CC Learn launched a series of reports, guides and documentation to help support people who are running and building open education initiatives. They’re short and clear and useful; I’m particularly fond of Why CC BY? (pdf). Now the folks at CC Learn are developing a series of advanced topics that go into more detail on particularly complicated subjects. The first one is on trademark, a topic almost as confusing as copyright for most humans, and in particular on the ways that CC and trademark are not necessarily incompatible. It clarified some things for me and I recommend checking it out if you have any concerns at all about branding and the use of CC licenses.

La la, CC is awesome, happy December!

The report is long and detailed, with a lot of interesting information about how creators and users approach the question of what is and isn’t noncommercial. While the research did identify a spectrum of opinion about NC that suggests that not everyone is on the same page, in general the results seemed to be that the existing definition of NC is pretty good, and the range of understanding may not be a bad thing. From CC’s blog post announcing the report.

Overall, our NC licenses appear to be working rather well — they are our most popular licenses and we are not aware of a large number of disputes between licensors and licensees over the meaning of the term. The study hints at some of the potential reasons for this state of affairs, including that users are in some cases more conservative in their interpretation of what is noncommercial than are creators and that in some cases creators who earn more money from their work (i.e., have more reason to dispute questionable uses) are more liberal in their interpretation of what is noncommercial than are those who earn less.

As an advocate of the use of NC licenses by scholars and others, I’m glad to know that they’re not as broken as we feared they might be. There are lots more findings in the report that may interest you; it’s worth perusing the executive summary at the very least.

So what does this mean for this blog? I hope to get back to it and post a bit more regularly. I still plan to focus on copyright and scholarly publishing because those topics remain important and interesting to me, but I may also write about other issues in academic libraries as my new role develops and I start branching out into other areas. Outside of the U-M Library my work in the area of scholarly communications continues: I’m still a member of ALA’s Copyright Advisory Network, and this summer I’m also an instructor for ACRL’s Scholarly Communications 101 Roadshow. Occasionally people who find me through this blog send me questions or invite me to speak about Creative Commons or copyright instruction, and I still welcome those questions and invitations and will do my best to answer them promptly and accept as often as I can.

Thank you to everyone who has been reading this over the last year and a half for your insightful comments and questions. I hope this new era in my professional life provides fodder for more interesting discussions here and elsewhere.

Now that I’ve had a little time to catch my breath and look back, I’m realizing that OA Week gave me a much-needed opportunity to refine and reflect on my thinking about open access. Over the course of the week, I learned a few valuable lessons, and even changed my mind about a couple of things. Before I forget it all, I wanted to share them here.

Lesson #1: A formal definition of open access should include re-use rights The Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin definitions of open access all require not just free online access to the work for all users with an internet connection, but also a license that permits copying and redistribution of the work. Prior to Open Access Week, I believed that a definition of open access that required usage rights was sacrificing the good for the sake of the perfect, and that therefore all three of these founding documents were deeply flawed. In an environment where scholarly authors must often haggle mightily just to keep the right to deposit their articles in an institutional repository, such a requirement was asking too much. We shouldn’t disparage those who do the valuable and important work of promoting subject and institutional repositories just because in an ideal world we’d have something even better.

Discussions at the Open Access and the Academy panel have convinced me that the difference between a work that is freely available and a work that is freely reusable is tremendous, and that true openness does require the possibility of future adaptation and use. We can draw a distinction between free access and Open Access without demeaning those who have only been able to achieve free access. In very many situations, free access is enough.

There is also a broader Open with a capital O movement – Open Source, Open Education, Open Content – and those opens all require Open Licenses. As a child of the branded generation, I think it makes sense for all those Open movements to have a recognizable theme, and since Open Source, Open Education, and Open Content all call for Open Licenses, so should Open Access. (The question of which licenses constitute Open Licenses is another matter, one on which I tend to disagree with the majority.)

Lesson #2: Undergraduates have an important role to play in advocating for Open Access This is the second thing about which my mind has been changed. In the past, I have argued that Open Access outreach programs targeting students are misguided, because undergrads have nothing to do with any part of the publishing process. Most of them don’t write articles for academic journals, and they don’t publish academic journals. The points in the system where change could happen involved the author and the journal, and those were the two audiences to which we should be directing our message.

While nobody spoke directly about undergraduate engagement during OA Week, the week made me think about it because it reminded me that it’s damned hard to get faculty into a room they’re not contractually obligated to be in. Despite a determined marketing push, faculty did not turn out to our events in large numbers. The same is true in my day to day work. Most of the time, I only hear from faculty seeking copyright advice after they have a problem. Until they have a problem, author rights and open access are simply not on their radar. I can send postcards and emails and speak at department meetings until I’m blue in the face, but it’s going to take an outside force to convince busy academics that this is something they should be paying attention to. As evidenced by the faculties at Harvard, MIT, and elsewhere, the winds are starting to shift, but progress is still very slow.

So now imagine what a little undergraduate activism can do. The high cost of purchasing scholarly journals contributes to the rising cost of education, and the rising cost of education is a hot topic in these dire economic times. If we can get students riled up about open access – and that’s still a big if – they might have more luck influencing the behavior of their professors than librarians have. While before I thought that targeting students for open access outreach was a waste of time, now I believe it’s worth a shot. Some infrastructure for it already exists, and in the coming months I plan to look into how I can promote student participation here at Michigan.

Lesson #3: Never lose sight of the Great Conversation Jean-Claude Guédon, one of the panelists on Tuesday, spoke of the importance of open access in facilitating what he called “The Great Conversation.” The Great Conversation is the purpose of all scholarship. It signifies engagement with knowledge, ideas, and a worldwide community of scholars. To frame the issue this way, open access is not about money or fairness or social justice, it’s about something more romantic. Perhaps the way to win over the hearts and minds of faculty is to put open access in loftier, more idealistic terms. People who do not have access to scholarly output cannot participate in the Great Conversation, and neither can people whose works are not widely accessible. And who can resist the seduction of a Great Conversation, a free-flowing, boundary-crossing exchange of opinion and understanding?

We in libraries often get bogged down in the numbers, the line graphs that show the skyrocketing prices of journals relative to inflation, the mundanities of our stagnant or shrinking budgets. We believe these fiscal arguments should resonate with faculty, and sometimes they do, but there is nothing terribly inspiring about a line graph. When we talk about the importance of Open Access, we should remember to speak not only about what is broken right now, but also the tantalizing possibilities for the Great Conversation that lies ahead.

It’s less than three weeks away, and as the schedule has come together I’m struck by how timely these events are, and how much we could conceivably do under the umbrella of discussing open access and the future of scholarship. When we started planning several months ago, I was concerned that a whole week might be too ambitious; I wasn’t sure how we would fill it. Now we’re starting to turn down proposals for events because there is so much going on already. The confluence of circumstances nationally has made this the perfect moment to discuss what’s wrong with existing modes of academic publishing, and to start getting aggressive about making change.

First we have the return of the dreadful Fair Copyright In Research Works Act, which is opposed by just about everyone except commercial publishers, including 33 Nobel Laureates in science. Then comes the word that together Elsevier and LexisNexis earned over $1.5 billion US in profit in 2008. For Elsevier that’s an adjusted operating margin — a profit — of 33%. While universities across the country are facing budget cuts of 20% or more, Elsevier brings in 33% profits, largely on the backs of university libraries. And economic news more broadly indicates that no library will escape unscathed. When Harvard starts laying off librarians and eliminating subscriptions, we’re all in trouble.

Now is the perfect time to get serious about adopting alternate modes of scholarly publishing, and Open Access models are serious alternatives. I’ll be the first to admit that we still haven’t figured out how to make OA work long term, or how to make it financially sustainable. We know it’s cheaper than Elsevier, but real costs remain. The more we experiment with new models, the better our chances that some of them will succeed. My hope is that our series of events during Open Access Week will help raise awareness among faculty and researchers here, and also build some energy for action and experimentation. I’d love to see an Open Access deposit mandate here at Michigan, or a commitment among faculty to edit and referee for OA journals. These ideas have been around for a long time, but this economic moment might be just what we need to push them forward. A recession is a terrible thing to waste.

I like the Featured Commoner series because I think it’s helpful for people who are new to CC to get a sense of how the licenses apply in the real world. Frequently the series highlights musicians, artists, and cool webby projects. Several months ago the blog featured Otago Polytechnic University’s adoption of CC-BY for all their educational content, and that was part of the inspiration for the U-M library’s decision to start licensing our work. These case studies are a proven way to spread good ideas, and I’m excited we got to share ours.

Updated: Duh! The whole thing is licensed CC-BY, so I’m reproducing it here for your reading pleasure.

University of Michigan Library
Cameron Parkins, February 19th, 2009

Over the past year, the University of Michigan Library has shown itself to be particularly sensible in regards to open content licensing, the public domain, and issues of copyright in the digital age. The U-M Library has integrated public domain book machines, adopted CC licensing for their content, and independently had their Copyright Specialist, Molly Kleinman, articulate the importance of proper attribution in using CC licenses. We recently caught up with Molly to learn more about these efforts – primarily how they came to be and the results they have yielded – as well as discuss CC’s place in educational institutions at large and how CC and Fair Use interact in the academic sphere.

Book, Suzanne Chapman | CC BY-NC-SA

What is your role at the University of Michigan Library? How does the University Library interact with the rest of the University?

I’m the University Library’s copyright specialist. I provide copyright and publishing assistance for faculty, students, researchers, staff, and librarians throughout the University of Michigan, and occasionally to the community at large. I handle questions on both sides of the copyright universe: people come to me as users of copyrighted works and also as creators with concerns about their own rights. At a university just about everybody is both a user and a creator, so I think it’s important to promote a balanced perspective on copyright. A big part of my job is teaching workshops and providing one-on-one consultations about copyright and scholarly publishing basics. I work with librarians all over campus to raise awareness about topics like fair use, Open Access, and author rights. I also support a number of the Library’s activities, including our institutional repository Deep Blue, the Scholarly Publishing Office, and Special Collections exhibits. People always ask if I’m an attorney… I’m not. I’m a librarian by training, and have a background in publishing. A law degree is useful when dealing with copyright, and it’s certainly necessary when you’re providing legal advice, but in many other situations it’s not essential. Copyright is messy and confusing and it makes a lot of people nervous and scared. Approaching these issues as a librarian allows me to explain things in “human readable” language instead of legalese. My goal is to demystify the law and empower students and faculty to advocate for their rights as both users and creators.

As for the role of the Library in the University, I think it remains true, if a bit cliche, that the library is the heart of the university, both physically and intellectually. At the University of Michigan we have a flagship building at the middle of the central campus in Ann Arbor and many smaller libraries located in the hearts of the departments and campuses throughout the University, and we’re also at the heart of scholarly activity and information on campus. The difference now is that so much of the information to which we provide access is online. We still have millions of print books, and our physical spaces remain tremendously important, but more and more our buildings are gathering places for group work, studying, and instruction. This means our interactions with the rest of the University are increasingly distributed. Many scholars use the Library every day without ever entering one of our buildings, and at the same time the information services that the Library offers are expanding. We continue to answer reference questions, but in addition to staffing the reference desk we answer questions via phone, email, and instant message. Librarians teach classic bibliographic instruction and also classes on Google searching, citation management software, PowerPoint, and Photoshop. We have three locations on campus where people can get assistance scanning documents, building websites, and creating posters, and we have facilities dedicated to supporting patrons who use spatial data, numeric data, and statistics. And for the last two and a half years my office has made copyright and publishing support services available. The role of the library in universities has grown as human access to information has grown. We do much more than just keep track of a bunch of old books.

Can you explain the Espresso Book Machines? What kind of impact has on demand printing had in the UM libraries? All the books printed in the machines are public domain – would this sort of system been possible if the works had been All Rights Reserved?

The Espresso Book Machine can produce a perfect-bound paperback book in less than ten minutes. The U-M Library got one last fall. The technology is still very new and there aren’t very many of them, but the premise is that you could distribute book production to point of need, which in many contexts would be cheaper and more convenient than the current system. All you would need is a network connection and a few terabytes of storage somewhere to hold all the digital files. For now, the machine is still a sort of proof of concept. It’s wonderful for the long tail of books, the rare or obscure books that are long out of print and hard to find. The Espresso Book Machine can give these books new life, and give the two or three people to whom these books might actually be important a copy of their very own. The fact that it’s networked is key, because it allows us to print much more than just books digitized from our Library; it means that someone a thousand miles away can print copies of books held by the University of Michigan. We currently print books digitized by the Open Content Alliance, and in the future we imagine printing CC-licensed books as well, provided the license permits it. My understanding is that On Demand Books, the company that produces the Espresso Book Machine, is working out a royalty-payment system so that it will be possible to print books that are still under copyright, but so far at U-M we’re only printing public domain books. Eventually we’d like to partner with people from the University community to experiment with printing new works, things like poetry collections from a writing class, or textbooks.

You can see a video about MLibrary’s Espresso Book Machine here.

You wrote up a great piece on how to on how to use CC licenses and CC licensed works – how important is proper attribution in your line of work? For culture at large?

Attribution is tremendously important in academic research. Without properly cited sources, it is impossible for future scholars to follow the line of thinking that led to a given conclusion. Attribution is the trail of breadcrumbs that gets us back to the beginning. There is something of a plagiarism panic on college campuses, and while I think some of it is overblown, citation and attribution remain some of the first skills we teach undergraduates.

Attribution is also important from the perspective of scholars who are trying to build their careers. Young scholars want credit for their work so they can get tenure-track jobs and eventually tenure. Tenured faculty want credit so they can get more research funding. I see this as one of the selling points for Creative Commons in academic settings. U.S. law doesn’t have the framework of moral rights that exist in the U.K. and elsewhere requiring that an author always be given proper credit for a work even if she has signed away all the other rights. The attribution requirement that is the baseline in all CC licenses provides some reassurance to academic authors who may not expect to profit financially from their work but for whom credit is very important.

How can CC licenses and CC-licensed material help instructional librarians?

CC-licensed material is an incredibly valuable resource for all kinds of instructors. Creative Commons has supported the creation of a wealth of new works that are available for use without permissions or fees, which means that instructors, librarians, and students don’t have to rely on the public domain for materials that they can repurpose without fear or risk of copyright infringement. This is a huge thing. I have a hard time not using superlatives when I talk about what a wonderful resource it is. We can even use the tool we’ve always used – Google – to find Creative Commons-licensed photographs, illustrations, music, video, and educational resources.

I know instructional librarians who use CC-licensed works in a number of ways: many use CC-licensed images to spice up their workshop slideshows, one colleague uses music from ccMixter for instructional videos he posts on YouTube, and a handful use CC-licensed teaching materials as the basis for creating their own classes.

For librarians who write and teach, Creative Commons-licensed resources are a windfall, but there is much more to our work than just our own writing and instruction. Though it’s not usually framed this way, academic librarians spend a lot of time assisting people with the production of scholarship. Everyone knows that librarians help people do the research, but we may also help them with the writing and the teaching, and guide them through the publishing process, too. In those roles, Creative Commons-licensed material is a gift we can give our users. One of the most common copyright questions librarians get is, “Is it okay for me to use this copyrighted thing in this way?” With Creative Commons, we can say, “Well, it might be really hard to clear the rights on that random picture you found on the internet, but look, here are hundreds of pictures of the same thing that you are free to use without asking!” I’ve had consultations with faculty that ended abruptly when I showed them how to search Flickr for licensed images. The faculty member was so thrilled by the realization that she wouldn’t have to spend the next six months tracking down permissions, and so distracted by the discovery of this treasure trove of usable photographs, that all she wanted to do was be left alone to browse.

Most of the people reading this blog already know about the benefits of licensing their work so I won’t go into it too much, but needless to say those benefits apply to librarians as well. Many of the works that librarians create, like bibliographies or technology guides, are useful across many institutions, so CC licenses make a lot of sense for us. Licensing our work is also a great way to connect with colleagues at other institutions and to get our names out there.

How do librarians balance CC licensing with fair use rights?

I’d like to say that librarians as a profession are all staunch defenders of fair use and that we all promote a balanced view of copyright that takes full advantage of all the exceptions and limitations available to us. But unfortunately many librarians have been as terrified by the content industry’s scare tactics as everyone else, and they interpret fair use and other exceptions narrowly and with great caution. As a result, some librarians don’t make all the uses they could of copyrighted material, and the guidance they provide to their patrons is similarly limited. One of the things I love about CC is that it provides content that people can copy and build upon without relying on fair use. If you already have permission, you don’t need to worry about four factor analyses or risk assessments. CC-licensed content is such a valuable resource because people can use it without fear. Still, I always make it a point to explain that CC licenses are permissions that have been granted above and beyond the fair use rights that everyone already has, and that those fair use rights are broader than most people realize.

None of this is to say that fair use isn’t tremendously important to librarians and academics; it is. When patrons come to me with a specific work that they’d like to use, I help them through the process of making a best-guess fair use determination, and I always encourage people to take advantage of their rights as users. If we don’t fight for a robust fair use exception we will lose it.

In October of 2008, the University Library decided to release all their own content under a CC BY-NC license. What was the motivation behind this decision? What kind of outcomes have there been? Have you seen any interesting cases of reuse?

There were few motivating factors behind the decision to use Creative Commons licenses for Library-created content. The biggest was that it aligned well with our overall commitment to openness and access. Part of the Library’s mission is “to contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.” We promote open access publishing models, we have a strong history of digitizing public domain works and making them available online, and we partnered with Google to scan all of the books in our collection, even the works under copyright. Adopting a Creative Commons license for our own content – things like study guides, bibliographies, and technology tutorials – seemed like a logical next step. In part we were inspired by the story of Otago Polytechnic University, which was a Featured Commoner a while ago for making all of its open educational resources available under the CC-BY license. We don’t produce as much content, but what we do produce we wanted to make freely available for reuse.

There was also a more practical consideration: we receive permission requests to use Library-produced content with some regularity, and those requests often go to people who have no idea what to do with them. They get bounced around until someone finally just says yes, and these requests can take a lot of time to handle. Creative Commons licenses were made to help reduce transaction costs, and we saw that as a potential benefit for the Library. It turns out that we still sometimes receive permission requests, but now it’s very easy to point the requester to the CC license. It can even be a teaching moment, a chance to introduce a person to Creative Commons for the first time.

We have only had the licenses up for a few months, but I am aware of a couple of instances of reuse so far. There is a liberal arts college that is building a website of copyright and publishing resources based on the U-M Library’s copyright website. I also heard recently about a scholar who is publishing a paper on digital libraries and plans to use screenshots of our digital collections. That’s the kind of use that would probably be considered fair, but publishers sometimes ask authors to clear the permissions anyway. Now she can just point to the CC license instead.

Can you explain the mission of the HathiTrust? What is UM’s invovlement?

HathiTrust is a collaborative trusted repository for digital book and journal content. It was launched by the 12 university libraries that are a part of the Committee for Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the 11 University of California libraries. At the moment it’s composed primarily of books that were scanned by Google as a part of the Google Digitization Project, but it will also include works digitized by the partner libraries. Even though much of the content in HathiTrust is duplicated in Google Book Search, the models are very different. Google emphasizes access and search, while HathiTrust is dedicated to long-term preservation, stewarding the files through changes in format and hardware. HathiTrust also has an interest in serving scholarly research needs, and developed a system to serve users with print disabilities that provides access to screen-reader-optimized versions of the OCR files, even for works that are still under copyright.

U-M has been the primary developer of the software platform for the repository, much of which was based on existing open source projects. The U-M Library also recently received a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to create a Copyright Review Management System, the result of which will partly support HathiTrust. HathiTrust only provides access to books in the public domain. The Copyright Review Management System is dedicated to reliably identifying books that are in the public domain that were published in the United States from 1923 to 1963. Those works may be in the public domain if certain requirements weren’t met, but it each book has to be researched individually. This grant will help us set up a reliable and collaborative system for identifying books in the public domain so that we can make those books available to the world through the HathiTrust, and share that information with other organizations that are dedicated to improving access.

Is there anything else our readers should know about the University Library? What are your plans for the future?

We have an event coming up that might of interest to your readers in or near Ann Arbor. From March 23rd – 27th we’re having Open Access Week, a series of events promoting and investigating the Open Access movement and its impact on scholarship. Creative Commons licenses play an important part in open access publishing, and I expect we’ll be talking about CC a lot that week. It’s primarily for a local audience, but all events are free and open to the public. A full schedule of events is here.

The bill is a direct response to the NIH Public Access Policy; it would prohibit any policy requiring a copyright transfer or license from federal grantees, making the current NIH policy illegal. Publishers are afraid that mandated public access to federally funded research would hurt their profit margins, and this bill is basically a gift from Conyers to Springer, Elsevier, and the AAP. Meanwhile, it contravenes everything President Obama has said about increasing openness in government, not to mention improving access to information, strengthening our education system, and “restor[ing] science to its rightful place and wield[ing] technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” American citizens pay a lot of money for research; this bill would ensure that the vast majority of us will never see the results of that research.

This is not nearly as big or headline-worthy as the colossal banking bailout, but the spirit is the same: Use taxpayer money to save a private industry from its own failings. The big STM publishers are clinging to a dying business model, and nothing Congress does will save them if they don’t get with the program and stop fearing the giant copy machine that is the Internet. Blah blah, we know this already.

Well, the bill failed once. Here’s hoping it fails again.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003. Critics say the legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music. And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.

Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider’s customers making music available online for others to take.

The RIAA plans to finish pursuing all currently active lawsuits – so Jammie Thomas isn’t safe, yet – but when the last one is over we will finally be able to close the book on one of the most absurd chapters in American copyright history.

I have to say, while the end of these lawsuits is wonderful news, especially for my employer and other universities and colleges across the country, a part of me is a little sad. The story of the crazily misguided RIAA suing its customers (and dead people) has become one of the mainstays of my copyright lectures. With the RIAA finally approaching sanity, I lose one of my favorite villains.

Hat tip to Fred Benenson via Twitter.

Update 12/21/08, 8:14 am EST: It turns out that the WSJ article was misleading about the RIAA’s phasing out of lawsuits. It claims the organization stopped filing lawsuits “early this fall”, but Ray Beckerman has uncovered suits filed as recently as last Monday. It’s unclear whether the WSJ was misleading on purpose, or simply misled by RIAA spokespeople. So nevermind, for now. Our villain remains villainous.