SCOOP: The Year in Scholarly Communication: 2019 Edition

It’s time for the SCOOP’s annual recap of happenings across scholarly communication. Atla also had several important headlines from its own scholarly communication program:

• Hosted in February 2019 the ACRL Scholarly Communication Roadshow for Atla members
• Migration of Theology Cataloging Bulletin and the Annual Conference Proceedings to open access publications
• Publication of two new open books (Teaching Religion in a Changing Public University and Information Literacy and Theological Librarianship) by Books@Atla Open Press as well as digital open access reprint of A Broadening Conversation
• Environmental scan of Atla membership engagement with open educational resources
• Publication of the Atla Copyright LibGuide

The Year in Copyright

The Public Domain

After more than twenty years, the public domain date goalpost finally moved from 1923 to 1924 in the United States. On January 1, 2019, many culturally and historically significant works finally entered the public domain by operation of U.S. copyright law.

Impact on Theological Libraries

The growth of the public domain corpus is important for theological libraries because it frees up works that can be digitized, reproduced, and otherwise reused without permission, which directly supports teaching, research, and archival activities of theological libraries.

Further Reading

• Recent SCOOP column on the public domain, which includes resources on how to find public domain materials.
• The Cornell University Public Domain chart is a go-to resource for helping you determine when a work falls into the public domain.
• The Public Domain Sherpa is a great starting point to learn more about the law of and locating resources in the public domain.

Who Owns the Law? Copyright Status of Statutes

Late in 2018, a federal appeals court in the case of Georgia v. Public Resource declared that publishers contracted by a state government could not claim copyright in state statutes. The case arose when the state of Georgia filed suit against the web site Public.Resource.Org, where the web site’s founder Carl Malamud had posted scans of the nearly 190 volume Annotated Code of the State of Georgia. The case turned on the question of whether public law, including annotations, were protected by copyright. The appeals court held that the annotated code, as the official compilation of the state’s statutes, was in the public domain, including the annotations, which the court declared were “part and parcel of the law” even though they did not have the force of law. On December 2, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the issue of whether state laws such as this annotated code are copyrightable or belong in the public domain.

Impact on Theological Libraries

While there is no direct impact on the work of theological libraries, the question at the center of the lawsuit – the copyrightability of state laws including annotations prepared by commercial publishers as part of the official compilation – is an important one for copyright jurisprudence and may influence future determinations about open records, open access, and the public domain.

Further Reading

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is tracking the litigation in the Public Resource case as well as similar lawsuits and legislation.
• An excellent overview of the history of case law and legislation regarding state statutes and other public laws, as well as opinion on the outcome of the Public Resource and similar cases can be found in this article on Medium.

Controlled Digital Lending

A relatively new term to library lexicon, “controlled digital lending” refers to empowering libraries, through interpretation of the fair use and first sale statutes of the U.S. Copyright Act, to permit the lending of a digital copy of a book in lieu of circulating the same physical book from their collection. Once again, the practice has given rise to disagreement among publishers, authors, and libraries. Although in many cases CDL is used to facilitate access to public domain books, there are also use cases (e.g., Internet Archive’s Open Libraries program) for using CDL to also promote access to in-copyright texts.

Impact on Theological Libraries

As holders of both public domain and in-copyright books, particularly titles that may be rare, special collection items, or needed for use by students in rural or foreign locations, the legality and application of CDL is a critical issue for theological libraries.

Further Reading

• The “Controlled Digital Lending by Libraries” web site provides an excellent overview of how libraries are utilizing CDL and the legal reasoning behind it.
• This interview with attorney Jonathan Band by IFLA concisely presents the legal issues around CDL.
• The Internet Archive has a blog series on CDL. The first post in the series is available here.

The Year in Open Access

University of California System Cancels Elsevier Contract

In March 2019, the University of California system made good on its previous year’s threat to cancel its subscription agreement with Elsevier. UC sought a transformative agreement that would provide access to Elsevier content as well as secure open access availability to all UC corresponding-authored articles in Elsevier journal at a cost that reflected fair value for Elsevier content.

Impact on Theological Libraries

As was shared last year, for theological libraries affiliated with larger university systems who may be considering similar negotiations or terminations, they should be aware of what content their patrons access that could be impacted by any big deal terminations. For smaller or stand-alone theological libraries, it is important, as always, to be well-versed in open access and the changing nature of scholarly publishing.

Further Reading

• The University of California has a web site dedicated to the status of negotiations with Elsevier as well as a statement detailing the reasons for the contract termination.
• Scholarly Kitchen’s interview with UC-Berkeley University Librarian Jeffrey McKie-Mason.
• SPARC is tracking the “big deal” publisher cancellations here.

Transformative Agreements

Transformative agreements, also commonly referred to as “read and publish” or “publish and read” agreements, received a lot of attention this past year. This is due in part to both Plan S as well as the Elsevier contract cancellation at the University of California. Simply stated, transformative agreements compensate publishers for open access publishing services rather than for subscriptions. This flip in business model recognizes that the price paid represents a fair price for publishing articles open access.

Impact for Theological Libraries

For theological libraries that are part of larger university systems or consortia negotiating licenses on their behalf, it is important to be aware of the terms of pricing and access as well as adequately communicating these terms to faculty and students who may be seeking to make their own work available open access. For smaller or independent schools, the growth in implementation of transformative agreements will be an important trend to watch and perhaps even adapt at the local level.

Further Reading

• A primer on transformative agreement from Scholarly Kitchen
• The University of California released a toolkit to assist libraries with negotiating transformative agreements.

“GetFTR”

Late in 2019, several large academic publishers announced a new service called “Get Full Text Research” or “GetFTR.” The service is aimed at improving discovery and access to published research, whether to an open access version of an article or the published version of record to which a researcher, faculty, or student may have access through their affiliated institution, provided that user has disclosed their affiliation information to the service. The announcement immediately received a lot of negative attention from librarians, open access advocates, and others in the scholarly communication sphere.

Impact on Theological Libraries

Free services such as Open Access Button and Unpaywall already exist by which users can locate open and legal copies of published articles. Publisher entry into this space on its face is a good step; however, there are legitimate privacy concerns as well as questions as to why existing work in this space by libraries and other entities promoting open content standards and identifiers and existing products like link resolvers and discovery services were ignored by this initiative. This will be an important development to watch in the months ahead.

Further Reading

• Why Librarians are Concerned about GetFTR

How You Can Keep Up on News and Trends in Scholarly Communication

To keep up on scholarly communication issues throughout the year, look for the SCOOP column every month on the Atla blog but also consider these useful and informative sources:

• Open Access Tracking Project – hosted by Harvard University’s Berkman Center, the OATP provides a feed of stories and news on open access in a variety of forms (e.g, Twitter, RSS).
• The Journal of Scholarly Communication and Librarianship is an open access peer-reviewed journal publishing articles investigating the modes and technologies of scholarly communication, particularly as relates to libraries.
• The Scholarly Kitchen is the blog of the Society of Scholarly Publishers and features posts that often inform and tantalize by a wide array of authors from both the scholarly publishing and library worlds.

About SCOOP

The SCOOP, Scholarly COmmunication and Open Publishing, is a monthly column published to inform Atla members of recent developments, new resources, or interesting stories from the realm of scholarly communication and open access publishing.