I think students, researchers, and historians especially should become more aware of a disturbing trend in the world of digitized archival materials: contractual licenses replacing copyrights.
I have already been concerned with this in the non-digital world. Many archives I have visited now ask visitors to sign a “license agreement” which, if you read it closely, restricts the freedom of the visiting researcher. Thus, when I go to the Ôya Sôichi bunko in Tokyo and look at old Japanese magazines that are no longer protected by copyright, I might think I have the freedom to reproduce, publish, etc. materials I have photocopied there. No copyright – then no problem, right?
Well, no. Along with the entry fee to the archive, you sign an agreement in which you agree to give up your freedoms to the use of even out-of-copyrighted material. You are now required to get the archive’s permission before you use any of the material.
This is spreading to the online world like wildfire. Examples abound. One recent case, however, has gotten some deserved attention: the deal between the United States National Archives and Footnote.com. Read this article at Dan Cohen’s blog for the details. Footnote.com, which digitizes the materials of the National Archives, which, it should be noted, are NOT protected by copyright, has the following to say in their terms and conditions agreement:
professional researchers, professional historians and others conducting scholarly research may use the Website, provided that they do so within the scope of their professional work, that they obtain written permission from us before using an image obtained from the Website for publication, and that they credit the source. You further agree that (i) you will not copy or distribute any part of the Website or the Service in any medium without Footnote.com’s prior written authorization
You see, the images they have, of non-copyrighted materials, cannot be copyrighted by Footnote.com, because their scans of these documents do not meet the minimum “creative” or “original” work required to establish a copyright. However, by agreeing to this license, you are not bound by copyright, you are bound by contract. Dan Cohen points to a great section of the Digital History guide which suggests that these licenses might still not prevent you from using non-copyrighted materials…but who wants to risk the lawsuit?
Fortunately, the National Archives made a non-exclusive agreement with Footnote.com, just as libraries have made non-exclusive agreements with Google. Despite this, I am concerned that these massive projects, many of them commercial and not freely accessible like Footnote.com will dissuade academic partners, libraries, archives, and governments from being willing to put serious money into creating large, free, and open collections without these restrictions.
I got a cheap used Griffin AirClick for USB to control my older laptop Macintosh by remote control. Another remote I like better (KeyPOINT) has been acting up so I got the Griffin as a replacement. The downside with Griffin is that it has fewer buttons, no mouse control, and a limited set of applications that it works with. One of the applications that I want to use the remote with is the best flashcard program on the Macintosh, iFlash. I use this almost every day to practice Korean vocab and other languages. Since this is not one of the supported applications, this afternoon I hacked the AirClick.app program that comes with the remote to add support for iFlash. You may download my modified version of the AirClick application here.
For those who wish to add support for their own program I briefly outline how I did the hack below:
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Peter Suber has summed up the Open Access developments for 2006 in the most recent issue of his OA newsletter. You can view the article on his OA blog: Open Access Newsletter 1/2/07. While I haven’t been keeping up with all the changes he mentions in the report, when summed up it is clear that a lot of fantastic progress has been made in the past year, which includes a rapid growth in OA Mandates, Hybrid OA journals, fully OA journals, OA archiving, OA text repositories like Google and Microsoft books, a gradual shift in funding from toll-access journal subscriptions to OA journal publication fees, governments mandating OA for their data, the rise of peer reviewed wikis, the continuing growth in importance of blogs as sources of information, and so on.
Peter Suber takes a look at the long-term progress of the OA movement and sums up his thoughts:
There are roughly three phases for a movement like ours. First, it’s known only to a small group of activists and opponents. Second, familiarity explodes and lots of newcomers start to think and talk about it, not necessarily with good understanding. Third, pretty much all the stakeholders know about it even if they don’t understand it or haven’t made up their minds about it. In my estimation, we entered Phase Two in early 2004 and we started entering Phase Three in 2006. Phase Three is by no means the finish line; the open source movement has been in Phase Three for many years and is still widely misunderstood and slow to make critical gains. And we’re not yet fully in Phase Three. I suspect that nearly all journals and journal publishers have heard of OA, and that the percentage is about as high among funders of research. There are people knowledgeable about OA in almost every university and academic library in the world. But familiarity among professional researchers is still woefully low and good understanding is even further behind.
Regrettably, progress towards OA has been slowest in my own field of humanities. There has been some progress, however. Here is his summary of the developments on this front:
The slowest progress toward OA has been in the humanities, but in 2006 we saw significant acceleration. The US National Endowment for the Humanities adopted a policy to favor applications that promise OA for their results. The long-awaited report from the American Council of Learned Societies not only recommended OA for the humanities, but recommended OA mandates by funders and supportive actions by universities. The EU funded the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH). The OA Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy took large strides toward building its endowment. MediaCommons began to self-assemble as a cooperative OA book press for the humanities. The Karman Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Bern committed itself to OA for all its future projects. The Task Force on Electronic Publication for the American Philological Association and Archaeological Institute of America recommended that American classicists self-archive and may later recommend that American classics journals convert to OA. Eight classicists issued an open letter to colleagues calling for more OA in the field. Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council reaffirmed its support for OA, though it still stops short of a mandate. JISC and two of the UK Research Councils –the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)– are extending the UK’s e-Science program to the arts and humanities. The AHRC is covered by the general RCUK commitment to OA but is still deciding on the exact form of its own policy. The British Academy wrote a report showing how UK copyright law hindered scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. The Modern Language Association recommended tenure reforms to encourage digital publication and departmental rewards for it. And there was wider recognition, approaching a consensus, that the journal pricing crisis in the sciences is a major cause of the monograph crisis in the humanities –and that OA will help both.
My own feeling is that there has to be a greater recognition of and accepted place for a wider variety of the types of contributions scholars can make. It seems to me that currently that the main forms recognized as productive scholarship are: full monograph, chapter in an edited volume, full length journal article; and to a lesser extent: conference paper, translation work, and book reviews. I think that the new mediums we have available to us to spread the results of our research should spark some new thinking and new appreciation for those who make valuable scholarly contributions in a range of new formats, lengths, and mediums.
The first of January is a rather arbitrary time to talk about new beginnings, especially for students whose lives revolve around the academic year. However, the beginning and end of my academic year tend to be much busier so I suppose now is best time to reflect on all that has happened in the past dozen months.
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