Bókasafnið - 01.07.2017, Qupperneq 35

Bókasafnið 41. árg – 2017 35
lished by various Scandinavian universities or other non-
profit organizations, and were poorly or not at all available
through commercial sales channels. At the time, it was pos-
sible to mail single works to Google for scanning into the
Google Books website (books.google.com), and this was
the access channel the writer initially used. Once Google
scanned the work, one had to select an option making the
book fully accessible and allowing downloads in PDF form.
At around this point, HathiTrust’s book collection was
coming fully online. The writer, now aware of authors’
interest in opening access to their work, noticed that a sub-
stantial number of relatively recent, in-copyright works by
Icelandic authors had been scanned as part of the collabo-
ration between Google and HathiTrust member libraries.
Because these books were under copyright, their full text
was not publicly accessible. Moreover, Google had stopped
scanning in-copyright works like these without author per-
mission, and was focusing on older, out-of-copyright titles.2
But in-copyright works that had already been scanned be-
fore this policy change remained in the collection. Of par-
ticular interest were books published between about 1965
and 2005, recently enough so that the author might still be
alive, but long enough ago so that they were probably out of
print. Crucially, HathiTrust had set up a fairly straightfor-
ward workflow which allowed rightsholders to request that
books like these be made publicly available under a Creative
Commons license. Rightsholders needed only to submit a
single form to HathiTrust.
From the writer’s previous experience, it seemed that many
of the authors of such works might wish to make them
openly accessible. This was especially likely to be true of
scholarly books which were not published with financial
gain in mind. In Iceland, a small society of a little over
300,000 people, why not contact the authors of these books
directly and ask them whether they would like to send
HathiTrust the forms needed to open access?
A search for similar projects uncovered reports of efforts
in the United States by George (2001) and Akmon (2010).
These conveyed a sense of both optimism about the poten-
tial outcome of the project (as many authors were favorable
towards opening access to their works) and pessimism
(since making contact was time-consuming and not always
successful). After work was underway, the writer discovered
articles by Stratton (2011) and Stobo (2013), reporting on
projects in Great Britain, which came to generally similar
conclusions. As the project concluded, the Authors’ Alliance
published Understanding Rights Reversion (Cabrera et al.,
2015), a guide for authors interested in opening access to
their previously published works.
A much larger literature existed on the related subject of
access to orphan works. However, the books involved in this
project were not orphan works. Rather, they were works
where the identity and contact details of the rightsholder
were known or easy to find out, and where the rightsholder
might approve of open release of the work.
The project
The writer contacted HathiTrust and obtained a list of
621 books in Icelandic, published between 1965 and 2005,
which had been scanned and were held in digital format in
HathiTrust’s collections. At the time, full-text view was not
enabled for any of these books in HathiTrust, as they were
subject to normal copyright restrictions.
Of these, the writer identified about 110 books which
seemed to be favorable candidates for rightsholder contact.
The ideal candidate book had been published with little
expectation of profit; was no longer commercially available;
and had a single author who was still living and likely to be
the sole rightsholder to the book. The books identified met
most, and sometimes all, of these criteria.
In addition, among the English-language books in
HathiTrust’s collection, the writer identified three books by
Icelanders on Icelandic themes that also seemed to be good
candidates for rightsholder contact.
The writer began to make contact with these books’ right-
sholders, starting with those that appeared most promising.
In the time available, contact was ultimately made with 36
authors (or sets of authors in the case of multiple author-
ship) or their heirs. As several authors had more than one
book on the list, the total number of titles involved was 43.
These contacts had the following resolutions:
Resolution of contact Number of rightsholders
Number of
titles
Rightsholder opened access to title under a CC-BY license 25 28
Rightsholder expressed the intention to open access to title but did not ultimately follow
through 4 5
Rightsholder expressed personal interest in opening access but publisher consent was
needed or desired and could not be obtained 2 2
Rightsholder did not want to open access to the title 3 6
Rightsholder reacted to contact as to a crank call 2 2
Total 36 43
2. In a separate but related project, the Dagsbrún Library staff systematically linked HathiTrust’s scans of older (mostly 19th-century)
Icelandic works to the Icelandic national library catalogue. After doing this, Icelandic library patrons could quickly see that these
works are available in digital format.