Bókasafnið - 01.07.2017, Page 38

38 Bókasafnið
been on books with continuing commercial value the situa-
tion would have been different.
Author frustrations
One of the lessons learned during the project was that liv-
ing authors who wish to place their published works in an
open-access digital repository are often frustrated in their
efforts to find an enduring digital home for their works. It
was authors like these, in fact, who were the original impe-
tus for the project.
In the writer’s experience, such authors are generally only
too happy to donate a copy of their book and if needed, to
pay postage and scanning costs so that their book can live
on. Unfortunately, this willingness did not normally suf-
fice. Google Books only fulfilled direct scanning requests
from individuals for a short time and even while it did so,
the workflow was far from ideal. Google will still scan in-
copyright books submitted by HathiTrust partner libraries
if the rightsholder opens access in Google Books, but the
collaboration involved is quite difficult to engineer. While
the Internet Archive offers scanning at a reasonable cost,
its program is suitable really only for libraries and institu-
tions rather than individual scholars, particularly because of
metadata requirements which individual scholars usually do
not understand.
The writer’s experience is that there is sometimes no practi-
cal way for authors to get their works distributed for free.
After filling out the forms to open access to a book which
was already in the HathiTrust collection, one well-respected
Icelandic scholar wrote (e-mail to the writer, 28 January
2015, writer’s translation):
“ This looks good to me. I just wish more of my books were
in there, especially A. And B, which is a sort of sequel to C.
I paid completely by myself for that book to be published,
partly with money from a grant from the University of
Iceland research fund, so there are no other rightsholders. I
can send a copy of the book anywhere in the country or in
the world. ”
Authors like this have something to contribute and are even
willing to pay the costs of contribution. They hope for a
very small amount of collaboration from institutions (such
as covering the almost negligible cost of housing a digital
file). They imagine that institutions have an incentive to do
this, given their public mission. But getting a work scanned
often turns out to be unfeasible for reasons that are mostly
bureaucratic.
The writer sees a need for institutions to open channels for
digital contributions from individuals (and to manage
scanning and metadata creation) in the same way as they
have traditionally welcomed contributions of physical books
from authors (and have been generally willing to mark and
catalog them).
Rights clearance one by one or as a class?
Our project involved rights clearance by individual authors
acting one at a time. A contrasting approach involves open-
ing access (under specific conditions) to entire classes of
publications without the explicit involvement of the authors
themselves. This approach is known as extended collective
licensing (hereafter ECL). In the realm of print publication,
ECL is most typically encountered as a proposed solution
to the problem of orphan works (whose rightsholders can-
not be identified). However, proposals for orphan works
sometimes suggest treating works by living authors in the
same way as those which are truly “orphaned.”
For example, an ECL approach was taken for both de-
ceased and living rightsholders by the Norwegian National
Library in its bokhylla.no project. The idea was to scan
masses of books, including in-copyright works which may
or may not have had identifiable rightsholders; to allow free
access to the public; and then to make payments per view
to a rightsholders organization which was seen as standing
in for book authors themselves (Nasjonalbiblioteket, 2012).
This is also similar to the approach envisioned by Google
in its failed 2008-2009 settlement with the Authors’ Guild
and the Association of American Publishers, although in
Google’s case it intended to charge for subscriptions to the
content involved.4 In Norway, the payments would amount
to a subsidy to rightsholder associations from the (relatively
wealthy) state.
An ECL approach that would include living authors has
been under discussion in Iceland too. It was first proposed
in a report by a working group that was largely composed
of representatives of Icelandic publishers and rightsholders
associations (Njörður Sigurjónsson et al., 2014). Note that
the members of the working group primarily represented
institutions who would stand to benefit financially from the
approach, and that the group did not include representation
from the library or user community.
When the input of libraries, readers (i.e. users), and indi-
vidual authors is considered, a more nuanced picture of
the pros and cons of ECL emerges. A fact-finding report
on the rights clearance of orphan works for the European
Commission by Anna Vuopala (2010), which surveyed
libraries and other cultural institutions involved in digitiza-
tion efforts, is useful in understanding the concerns of insti-
tutions which do not stand to benefit financially from ECL.
4. The text of the settlement and related documents can be found at
https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/authors-guild-v-google-settlement-resources-page.