Bókasafnið - 01.07.2017, Qupperneq 39

Bókasafnið 41. árg – 2017 39
The writer’s experience confirms that an ECL-style solu-
tion would be a much more speedy way of making a large
number of Icelandic works digitally accessible than book-
by-book copyright clearance. The time and cost involved in
contacting individual authors makes it a slow and frustrat-
ing way of bringing works into open access. As Vuopala
observes: “The cost of clearing rights may amount to several
times the cost of digitising the material” (2010, 44). There
seems to be general agreement that the “costly and cum-
bersome” individual clearance of out-of-print, copyrighted
works is far from ideal (Vuopala 2010, 5-6) - though per-
haps this is more true for older works whose rightsholders
are difficult to locate than for the recent works that were
the subject of this project.
At the same time, the writer believes that direct involve-
ment by authors in the rights clearance process is prefer-
able on ethical grounds and that ECL-based solutions
raise a number of concerns. The first concern relates to the
idea that rightsholder associations would receive a micro-
payment each time a work in an ECL-based repository is
viewed, in a way similar to how libraries in many countries
pay authors a small fee each time one of their books is bor-
rowed. When one sees this idea proposed, it is natural to
wonder whether rightsholder associations are acting strictly
in the interests of their authors or rather in the financial in-
terests of themselves as associations. Vuopala observes that
remuneration of this type is desired by rightsholders organ-
izations but often not by authors themselves (2010, 14-15,
20). This was the writer’s experience as well: authors, when
contacted individually, were happy to license their scholarly
work for reuse without a fee, and those works indeed had
never been created with the expectation of profit.
The institutional staff surveyed by Vuopala saw micro-pay-
ments as unreasonable “when the money collected would
not in fact benefit [authors] personally, but only the collect-
ing society” (2010, 15). A larger issue here is the question
of the legitimacy of rightsholder organizations to benefit
financially from content creation on behalf of the content
creators themselves. While it might be convenient to see
rightsholder organizations as true representatives of content
creators, the writer suspects that such a view is contestable
(Band and Butler, 2013).
The Norwegian project that some Icelanders see as a model
gave the impression of allowing open access to large num-
bers of works, but in fact took a very conservative strategy
in its decisions about how that access would actually be
implemented. Thus the Norwegian project, at least to begin
with, allowed access to scanned books only from Norwe-
gian IP addresses, and did not permit the downloading or
printing of in-copyright works (Vuopala, 2010, 37; Groven
2012). The writer’s experience is that many Icelandic au-
thors of in-copyright, out-of-print scholarly works would
gladly permit downloading, printing, and access from IP
addresses worldwide. Furthermore the Norwegian system
did not, at least at the beginning, have a robust text search
facility and did not assign permanent URLs to scanned
pages.
As well, the writer wonders whether the costs of an ECL-
style solution might, over time, approach the costs of
one-by-one rights clearance. The Norwegian system envi-
sions transfers to rightsholder associations that appear to
average €13 per viewed book per year (Vuopala, 2010, 37).
Over the long term, this cost could well exceed the costs of
book-by-book rights clearance. Even though one-by-one
rights clearance may feel slow, the marginal costs of keep-
ing a work available once access to it has been opened are
negligible.
Finally, the writer sees a danger that ECL-style solutions
might be tailored towards the desires of authors and pub-
lishers whose books were written to be sold. Yet it is in the
public interest to consider the desires of authors who wrote
to be read scholarly authors for whom publication on paper
was a necessary evil in order to distribute their words. The
project described in this article shows that in Iceland, and
probably elsewhere too, many such authors would like to
see free and open access to their works access which is free,
as well, from entanglement in a system which transfers
public funds to rightsholder organizations.
Acknowledgements
The writer gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Sólveig
Ólafsdóttir, who found funding for the project, and Guðný
Kristín Bjarnadóttir and Ólafur Hrafn Júlíusson, who pro-
vided technical support.