SL07_RightsHolderCooperationNotes

Cooperation with Rights Holders (Wednesday, September 12, 2007: 2pm -3:15pm) Discussion Leader, Connie Rinaldo

• Working with contributing non-profit members (e.g. UIUC, Academy of Natural Sciences, etc.) (Martin Kalfatovic)
• Working with commercial publishers (Graham Higley)
• Working with learned societies (Tom Garnett)

Draft of Notes:
Working with contributing non-profit members
As more institutions become interested in working with BHL, how we should "formalize" the relationship of BHL to non-members, e.g., UIUC other OCA members, who are providing content or skill sets. Should we call them "contributing members" ...? And what happens when we open it up to the larger European partnerships?
The executive committee discussed similar issues in this morning's session, particularly related to the issues of branding, and as a result Tom will draft a position paper on a "taxonomy" of partners - this will allow us to separate out partners who are following our workflows (scanning) from partners who are just "new collection pools". He hopes to have this paper in draft form by mid-October.
A related issue is how other IA/OCA partners (e.g., CDL) who are scanning BHL-type material will fit in to the BHL member schema. If they have scanned things we want, how can we approach them to ask for content?
The good news is that technically, ingest of these "non-workflow partners" content is not complicated. Just the scanned images are needed, we can do the OCR after the fact. What/how much/format of accompanying metadata is necessary to go with the scans will have to be part of a specifications/requirements/guidelines document.
The larger question is the value of the collections and the partnership - it will not be worth our time to ingest material if it is only a few titles.
It was proposed that a task/working group be formed with the goal of working on a specifications toolkit - with the details of what sorts of materials we can accept and what data should be included.
It was also asked how contributing members can identify collections that would be valuable to BHL and offer to scan? Tom felt we should revisit this question again tomorrow during the selection discussion.

Working with Commercial Publishers:
Graham has been in preliminary talks with Wiley-Blackwell and Cambridge University Press. Wiley has 150-200 titles that might be relevant to the BHL that will be scanned (by them) by the end of next year. The tentative proposal is for BHL to take the OCR (not the images) of the pages and make them available through the BHL portal. We would provide links to the scanned pages on the Wiley servers - subscribers and developing countries would have seamless access, but others would pay. The main question is do we want a relationship like this with a commercial publisher? If not, we will not be able to scan/provide access to any of the Wiley titles in Europe. (Note Elsevier will have similar issues.) Tom felt that the access to the OCR and the one time fee for BHL members to access Wiley titles is a bargain, since we are already spending $$ licensing their content. Graham was not sure if the agreement would cover access to the OCR of future issues of the titles- there might also be technical issues there because the current issues are in XML.

A major question is, are we were limiting ourselves too much by just offering the OCR text? The value to scientists is really in the images - by not providing the images, are we really providing a service to our primary user group? Does the click-through to a non-free site count as access? We must remember that we have never said it would be free access - just that we would provide access to freely available materials. We already have limitations to what we can provide (e.g., copyright) - the key is to adjust user expectations and clearly explain what we are offering and why

Another issue is what we can do with Wiley titles of value that we have already scanned, e.g., Curtis' Botanical Mag. These would have to be discussed, perhaps in a separate deal.

Christie noted that with this agreement, we are providing a service to Wiley - driving traffic to their site. Perhaps we should ask for something in return for this service? Graham felt that we eventually might be able to get something in return provided our contracts are well written.
Another question is how our relationship with the commercial publishers might affect our relationship with non-commercial publishers? Tom felt that both are such different models - we scan stuff for free for the non-commercial publishers, vs. driving traffic to already scanned titles for the commercial publishers - that it is not a question. However, non-comm. publishers are not getting any traffic or income stream from our scans, e.g., a la JSTOR. will they be upset by that?


Learned Societes:
There is a spectrum in publishing - it's not just black and white, commercial and non-profit. Tom handed out his tracking document, which he will put on the wiki, that shows which societies he has spoken with and who we have agreements with. Most societies are very happy to have us scan their stuff.
Most agreements cover scanning titles up to (or close to) the current issues. There are many more other titles in the pipeline. If BHL members' staff or colleagues are sympathetic to our cause, Tom requests that they enter in to dialogue with these societies, but keep him informed. He has a boilerplate agreement drafted by EFF that most seem willing to sign without many changes. We can also offer various Creative Commons license agreements as well.
How much are we promising the societies - e.g., when their files will be up on the web? Connie has been telling people that their titles will be a "priority" but most societies are not demanding any immediate results.
Diane asked who will be providing the dead trees for scanning? the library? the publisher? The answer is yes and yes - however we work it out.
Tom has also had a discussion with BioOne, they have significant relationships with small society publishers. Part of the discussion with BioOne will be about the current issues - perhaps we will need to implement a 'moving wall'.
And what about JSTOR? We did talk to them early on, and will talk to them again. They have a lot of BHL relevant content. Could we provide a portal to their stuff? How different would this be than providing access to Wiley content? Tom could appraoch JSTOR with a proposal similar to the Wiley model - for access to their OCR.
Would working directly with JSTOR for access to small publisher/society titles upset or infringe on agreements the learned societies have with JSTOR..might their agreements preclude our activities?
Suzanne asked why would bother to talk to JSTOR, why not just scan the titles and provide them in their entirety for free? Is it a cost thing?
We will likely revisit the JSTOR question.