UNBOUND

You are teaching a college history course and you want to make copies of an essay for your students, but you don’t have the rights to it. You’re a rap musician and you want to sample an old jazz song, but you can’t find any definitive proof of who owns the rights to it, so you can’t ask permission. You’re a filmmaker working on a horror movie about a cult, and you want to use copyrighted historical footage of the Jonestown cult in your film. In each of these cases, Fair Use could save you from major legal consequences.

Fair use is a doctrine of copyright law that allows one to use portions of a copyrighted work that one does not own the rights to without legal consequences. Without Fair Use, derivative works including parody, satire, educational excerpts, and more would be subject to legal consequences.

This past week was Fair Use Week, an annual celebration to spread awareness of Fair Use and to advocate for its continued strength. As our contribution to the cause, we here at Unbound would like to walk you through a hypothetical example of how Fair Use can be beneficial, from two different perspectives: education and the arts.

Let’s say a filmmaker is working on a documentary about media representations of the city of Sarasota, Florida. Across the street, a college professor is teaching a class about Sarasota’s history. Both of them acquire a copy of “White Sandy Beaches,” a short video commissioned by the Sarasota County government in 1953 to promote tourism. The filmmaker would like to use a clip from the video in her film, in order to comment on its factually inaccurate depiction of the city’s beaches. The history professor would like to show her class this video, as it includes unique footage of an important speech by a former mayor of Sarasota.

The history professor has used footage like this before in class, and knows that she doesn’t have to worry about rights issues when displaying it in the classroom. However, this semester she would like to include the full video as part of the students’ out-of-class studies, and have it streaming online for them. She visits the university library and speaks with the librarian in charge of digitization.

The librarian decides to consult the ARL Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries (PDF link). The first section, “Supporting Teaching and Learning with Access to Library Materials via Digital Technologies”, lays out both the requirements and the ideal procedures for making course material available online. Normally, it would be illegal to stream a copyrighted work online, but there are several factors that make it possible to do so legally in this case through Fair Use. This video was originally intended as television advertising for a city, to draw in tourists. Taking that video and placing it into an educational context transforms its usage such that the librarian would not be impinging on its original purpose. It is being viewed on an online instructional technology platform instead of television, and it is being used to teach students history rather than to advertise. These differences in context and usage make this work a good fit for fair use. If the librarian were digitizing a work that was originally created for academic educational purposes, then this usage would be a bit sketchier, as it would not significantly change the context or purpose of the work. If that were the case, it would be best to use only an excerpt.

Though this video is a good fit for educational fair use, there are still best practices to use when making it available. It’s important that only enrolled students, and faculty/staff working in an educational capacity have access to the digitized video (this can be legally problematic when teaching MOOCs, as any member of the public can enroll and access the work). The video needs to be available only over the course of the semester the class is being taught in. Students accessing the video should be presented with a full scholarly attribution, and a paragraph explaining the students’ rights and responsibility when accessing the material under Fair Use. With these measures in place, there will be no legal trouble with streaming the video.

The documentary filmmaker has a much greater challenge in store for her, as she is not creating this work in a non-profit capacity or as part of an educational institution. If she is taken to court by the rights holder of “White Sandy Beaches,” then she will not have an air-tight defense in the same way our academic librarian would. In the domain of the arts, Fair Use can be fairly subjective, and rulings can be based in large part on the whim of a case’s judge. Fair Use is codified into law as a series of guidelines, not hard rules. The four factors that are considered in a Fair Use case are as follows:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

The filmmaker’s best bet would be to first find the copyright holder of the video and ask for permission to use it. If she can officially license an excerpt of the video for her film, the she will not have to worry about Fair Use in the first place. In many cases this is untenable for financial reasons. In our case, the filmmaker simply cannot identify the current rights holder. She attempted to seek out the film’s copyright record using the US Copyright Office’s web search but was unable to find it. Due to their relative obscurity and short lifespan of use, ephemeral promotional videos like this one can often pose a challenge when tracking down the owner. It’s quite possible that the creators never filed an officially documented copyright claim on this film in the first place. Even so, they still own the copyright and can bring a legal challenge in the case of infringement.

In a world without Fair Use, this would be the end of the line for the filmmaker. Without any way to get permission from the rights holder, any usage of material from “White Sandy Beaches” would leave her open to a lawsuit for copyright infringement. She would have to make do without the excerpt, and her future audience would not have the chance to appreciate these rare images of the past from a city that is rarely filmed.

Luckily, her usage of this video does arguably fall under the realm of Fair Use, and there is a path she can take to safely show clips from it in her film. The Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use (PDF link) specifically discusses situations like this. If a filmmaker is “employing copyrighted material as the object of social, political, or cultural critique,” then such usage generally constitutes Fair Use. In the same way that an essay about a play would need to be able to quote that play, a film discussing another film must be able to quote that film. Because the filmmaker in our example is critiquing media representations of Sarasota, it is legally permissible for her to show clips of those media representations as part of that critique.

The one critical point to consider in this usage is this: the filmmaker’s use of “White Sandy Beaches” must not damage the original work’s market value by taking its place. In order to minimize the chance of that happening, the filmmaker would be best off using only portions of “White Sandy Beaches” and not the entire film. She would need to ensure that the footage is used for a different effect than the source material was originally intended for. As her documentary will be about media representation and not about selling Sarasota to tourists, the filmmaker does not have to worry about taking over the original film’s market share. The two films will occupy very different places on the market. A Fair Use defense never guarantees a win in court due to Fair Use’s openness to interpretation, but this is certainly a strong enough case that the filmmaker could feel confident with moving forward.

Through the careful application of Fair Use best practices, both librarians and artists are able to educate and entertain in ways that would otherwise be illegal. Because Fair Use is determined on a case-by-case basis, best practices are constantly evolving as court decisions create new precedents. New innovations in technology and communications have created possibilities for media appropriation that were unimaginable in 1976 when Fair Use was first codified: fanfiction, fan art, YouTube supercuts, music mash-ups, and so many other internet-based artworks are driving the law to keep up. MOOCs, which can accommodate many thousands of students from across the world, are pushing the boundaries of what Fair Use will allow. With luck and with strong advocacy, we’ll keep the protections we have, and see Fair Use expand to cover these new cases, keeping innovation in education and the arts possible.

 

The New York Public Library explains how Fair Use helps them accomplish education and preservation goals.

 

(Post by Derek Murphy)

Student loan debt has fast become a major economic factor in the 21^st century US. The percentage of students taking on debt and the average amount of debt have both increased dramatically in the past twenty years. The specter of student loan debt looms large in students’ minds, and can have a major influence on their career choices. Library and Information Science as a field is not immune to this.

In 2012, 74% of Master’s degree recipients had taken on student loan debt. The median debt of graduate borrowers was $57,600. For comparison, librarians’ median yearly income that same year was $55, 370. When the cost of an MLIS degree is higher than a librarian’s yearly income, it can present a problem for prospective MLIS students. A student considering pursuing an MLIS degree may opt against it to avoid a punishing debt load, preferring to remain in a paraprofessional position or dedicate themselves to another field entirely. Students who do decide to attain the degree may, upon graduation, find themselves unemployed, underemployed, or simply not earning enough to cover their monthly loan payments.

Students have always faced challenges related to the price of master’s degrees, but the fast increase in cost of both undergraduate and graduate education has amplified these problems to a never-before-seen level. The long-term effects on our profession may be significant. If the cost of education continues to rise, we risk creating barriers to entry for MLIS students of a lower socioeconomic status, leading to a field that self-selects for only those candidates who can afford to pay. This would have a deleterious effect on diversity in the field. We also risk alienating talented students who might opt to seek a different degree that will remunerate them enough to pay back their debts. Additionally, if potential MLIS students opt to remain in paraprofessional positions en masse, then we risk the MLIS degree falling from prominence.

These are extremely difficult problems to solve, but there are, thankfully, a few valves for releasing the pressure on MLIS graduates. We’ll focus on one in particular: student loan forgiveness plans. The federal government has reacted to the fast growth in student loan burdens by instituting programs to help graduates have their monthly payments lowered and their debts forgiven. These programs tend to be aimed at helping graduates who are entering public service positions. Luckily for us, librarians are included under that umbrella.

These programs have an unfortunate tendency toward unnecessary complexity and obscurity, so in this post I’ll explain the one that has the greatest potential to help MLIS graduates: Public Service Loan Forgiveness (also known as PSLF). To put it simply, PSLF allows you to greatly reduce your monthly loan payments, but still repay the loan in the same time span as a normal repayment plan (ten years).

Who is Eligible?

Any person working at least 30 hours per week in public service can use PSLF. This includes those working a single full-time job as well as those working multiple part-time jobs, as long as the total number of hours worked is at least 30. A public service position, for the purpose of PSLF, is defined as “any employment with a federal, state, or local government agency, entity, or organization or a not-for-profit organization that has been designated as tax-exempt by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC).” Any librarians or archivists working full-time at a public library, public university, private non-profit university (almost all private universities are non-profit), public school library, non-profit private school library, non-profit archive, or non-profit organization are eligible. Almost any librarian, archivist, or other information professional job works with PSLF, as long as it’s not at a for-profit company.

It’s very important to remember that not all loans work with PSLF; only Federal Direct Loans are eligible. FFEL and Perkins loans are not eligible, but they can be consolidated into Federal Consolidation Loans, which can then be used with PSLF.

How does it work?

PSLF allows you to forgive the entire remaining balance of your loan after making 120 monthly payments (the equivalent of 10 years), while meeting the eligibility requirements detailed above (basically, working full-time in the public sector). You may see this and ask, “wait, after ten years of payments shouldn’t my loans be paid off normally anyway?” This is true, the standard loan repayment plan does set your payments so that your loan is fully repaid after ten years. The reason that PSLF works is that you can combine it with a repayment plan that shrinks your monthly payments. This way, you can make much smaller payments per month, but still have the loan paid off in the same amount of time. Because the remaining balance will be forgiven, you will have potentially put far less money into repaying the loan than you would if you’d paid it in full.

There are three repayment plans you can use while pursuing PSLF:

Income Based Repayment Plan: Your payments per month are capped at 15% of your discretionary income if you borrowed before 7/1/2014, or 10% of your discretionary income if you borrowed after 7/1/2014.

Pay As You Earn Plan: Your payments per month are capped at 10% of your discretionary income.

Income Contingent Repayment Plan: Your payments per month are capped at either:

-20% of your discretionary income, or

– what you would pay on a repayment plan with a fixed payment over the course of 12 years, adjusted according to your income.

Each of these plans has different requirements you must fit to be eligible. When combined with PSLF, then it is, of course, best to use whichever of the three reduces your payments the most. Most librarians will be eligible for either Income Based Repayment or Pay as You Earn, depending on when you took out your loans. Check the links to each plan I included above for more information on whether you’re eligible for them.

An example case:

Finaid.org has a very helpful Income-Based Repayment Calculator, which we’ll use to crunch some numbers. We’ll use the numbers from the statistics at the beginning of this article. If you have loans from before 7/1/2014, and you switch your repayment plan to Income Based Repayment, then your loan payments will be capped at 15% of your monthly income. Our example borrower is a single librarian living in MA, earning $55,370 per year and carrying $57,600 in Direct Unsubsidized loan debt with a 6% interest rate. We’ll use the 2014 median income growth rate, 1.58%, to project his potential growth in income over the next ten years as he’s making payments. According to the Repayment Calculator, if our hero uses 15% Income Based Repayment combined with Public Service Loan Forgiveness, then after 10 years his loans will be forgiven and he will have paid $60,404.43 in total. Under a standard repayment plan, he would have paid $76,737.29 in total. By using IBR and PSLF, he will have saved $16,332.86.

The previous example used median numbers, but your own particular situation will have its own unique characteristics. If you’re making less than average for a librarian, or you have a particularly high debt load, then you stand to save much more money from the use of PSLF. You’re also likely to save more money if you’re able to use Pay as You Earn or the new 10% IBR plan. It’s important to crunch the numbers yourself before committing to a plan.

How do I sign up?

Making use of PSLF is a little strange in that there is no up-front application to be considered for it. You must apply after making the 120 qualifying payments, not before. However, there are methods you can take to organize and verify your qualifying payments while working towards PSLF. The Federal Student Aid Office has recently published an Employment Certification form, which you can fill out and send in, in order to confirm that your employment makes you eligible for PSLF. The form also allows you to officially log the qualifying payments you’ve made thus far. For more details about how you can make use of this form, see The Federal Student Aid Office’s letter for borrowers considering PSLF.

Once you have made all 120 qualifying payments, you’ll need to submit the official PSLF application to have your loan balance immediately forgiven. This application actually does not exist yet. Because the PSLF program was created in 2007 and it takes a minimum of 10 years to complete, the first round of PSLF forgiveness will occur in 2017. The official PSLF application is currently under development, and the Federal Student Loan Office plans to make it available by 2017.

How do I know the program will still exist in ten years?

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that PSLF will still be around by the time your minimum ten years of payments are completed. The Federal Student Loan Office had this to say on the subject: “The U. S. Department of Education (ED) cannot make any guarantees regarding the future availability of PSLF. The PSLF Program was created by Congress, and, while not likely, Congress could change or end the PSLF program.” The life or death of PSLF is dependent on politics, and as such it’s not entirely predictable what will happen to it. Any one looking to make use of PSLF must grapple with this uncertainty. 2017 is the first year that PSLF will begin forgiving applicants’ loan money. That first wave of forgiveness may invite extra scrutiny of PSLF from congress, and it may see some changes. At this point, however, it’s all a matter of speculation.

Further resources for librarians considering PSLF:

• The American Library Association has a page on Federal Student Loan Forgiveness for librarians which sums up both PSLF and Perkins Loan Forgiveness, the latter of which is a potentially attractive option for title 1 school librarians.
• The Federal Student Aid Office maintains some very comprehensive and helpful pages about PSLF: An FAQ and a fact sheet.
• The Federal Student Aid Office also hosts a page on Income-Driven Plans, the payment plans that you can combine with PSLF. This page contains comprehensive information on Income Based Repayment, Pay As You Earn, and Income Contingent Repayment.
• The PSLF Employment Certification Form and the official instructions for completing it. These documents are used to confirm that your current employment works with PSLF, and to officially log your payments while working there.
• FinAid has a helpful FAQ about PSLF and Income Based Repayment as well as a very useful Income Based Repayment Calculator which can factor in PSLF to help you run the numbers to determine whether the programs are right for you.
• For the final word on PSLF, you can refer to the actual text of the law at the Cornell Legal Information Institute’s online database, filed under 20 U.S.C. § 1087e(m). Be warned, it’s written in legalese.
• It’s also a good idea to find out who your student loan servicer is and contact them for advice on what plans to consider. Their website should have a number you can call for help.

---

Student loan repayment plans are a complicated matter, and it’s essential that you do a good deal of research before you commit to one. It’s best that you do some math to determine for yourself whether a repayment plan makes financial sense for you.

While I’ve taken great care to be accurate in my reporting, if you have found an inaccuracy, or something I’ve left out, then please don’t hesitate to let me know in the blog comments below! Government programs like this one are often changed and updated, and sometimes outdated or ambiguous facts can survive past their expiration date. Do let me know if one of those facts ended up reaching this blog.

 

(Post by Derek Murphy)

UPDATE, 1/5/2015: According to the Internet Public Library’s Manager of Reference Services, Jennifer Lau-Bond, the Internet Public Library’s shutdown has been put on hold, and it will remain open at least through June 2015. This will allow them to reach their 20th anniversary after all.

---

 

Last Month, Joseph Janes, the main founder of the Internet Public Library, announced that it would be closing its virtual doors at the end of this year. The Internet Public Library was founded in 1995, and will be just three months short of reaching its twentieth birthday when it shuts down.

The Internet Public Library (now known as the ipl2 after a 2010 merger with the Librarians’ Internet Index) was one of the first projects aimed at providing library services over the internet. The ipl2 maintains a collection of trusted internet resources which are available to and searchable by the public. It also runs a reference service manned by LIS graduate students which answers users’ questions. The ipl2 site maintains robust kids’ and teens’ sections as well as exhibits of digitized multimedia objects.

Following the announcement of its closure, LIS professionals with fond memories of the ipl2 said their goodbyes on Twitter:

Internet Public Library shuttering. Kudos to all involved, I learned a lot volunteering while in library school. http://t.co/WNRO41jNTt

— Kristopher Meen (@KristopherMeen) November 13, 2014

https://twitter.com/ekelistic/status/534379097565061121

I decided to make use of the ipl2’s reference services to check whether they were still actively answering questions. I was in the process of researching ways that librarians can minimize their student loan burdens, and I’d had a difficult time clarifying a point that was ambiguous in the literature I’d found. When it comes to student loan forgiveness programs, the information out there is extremely complex and frequently incomplete or contradictory. Even the supposed authorities on the matter sometimes don’t know the answers to the more obscure questions regarding the laws.

I asked the ipl2’s reference service a specific, very difficult question about a fringe rule relating to Public Service Loan Forgiveness. They emailed me their response the same day. Their answer was lengthy and exhaustive. They employed best practices in answering reference questions. They restated my question to ensure they’d understood correctly. They rightly pointed out that, as librarians, they were not in a position to offer financial advice. However, they did provide annotated links to various official publications with relevant information, including difficult-to-locate sources I’d missed. They also included contact information for relevant authorities on student loan plans. They closed by letting me know that if I still needed more information I could contact them again. Their answer was extremely helpful, and the resources provided contained the information I needed. I was very impressed with the quality and alacrity of the ipl2’s reference services, especially this close to shutdown.

However, despite the high quality of the ipl2’s services, the ways that librarians interact with the internet has undergone a sea change, and new approaches are needed. I spoke with Eileen Abels, Dean of Simmons College’s School of Library and Information Science, about her thoughts on the ipl2’s shutdown. Abels formerly oversaw the ipl2 while serving as associate dean of the iSchool at Drexel. She had this to say:

When the IPL first came on the scene in 1995, it was a visionary resource.  Joe Janes asked his students at Michigan to imagine what the Internet could do for librarians and what librarians could do for the Internet. How the world has changed since then, with tools and resources that we could not have imagined in 1995!  The IPL served a purpose and met a need at that time.  New resources are being introduced at a rapid pace. It is remarkable that the IPL was sustained for as long was it was.

When the IPL was first introduced, libraries did not have internet-based services.  That was what was so forward-thinking at that time.  Now, most libraries offer e-mail, chat, and/or text services.  Most libraries have websites that patrons can navigate for themselves.  Now, libraries have to offer services via the Web and they have to be easily accessible to their patrons who now have many options for information seeking.

Librarians need to look for ways to integrate themselves into information seeking.  We need to offer services that highlight our expertise – evaluating information, finding the right information in the right format at the right time, and packaging the information for easy use. At this point, it is time for LIS educators to develop a new and novel resource.  The IPL will be our inspiration.

In social psychology, the contact hypothesis of prejudice reduction holds that sustained personal interaction with members of a group can decrease negative feelings and prejudice toward that group. Following this principle, a recent development in public and academic libraries has made a marked difference in divided communities.

Beginning at an anti-violence festival in Copenhagen in 2000, the Human Library has taken on a life of its own, with events held at public and academic libraries, festivals, and conferences in every continent. At a Human Library event, it’s not books or media that are on loan, it’s people. Patrons, or “Readers”, at the library can check out “Human Books”, volunteers who represent a marginalized group or who have a unique story to tell. Typically, Readers are presented with a list of Books and allowed to choose whom they’d like to check out. When a Reader checks out a Book, the two individuals sit down for a conversation. Readers are able to ask the Book the questions they’ve always wondered but been too afraid to ask. Often Readers are encouraged to ask about common stereotypes related to the Book. For example, those who are misinformed about Islam and harbor negative views towards Muslims could speak with a Muslim Book and have their prejudices weakened through friendly, compassionate discourse.

Potentially rocky conversations like this need to happen in the right kind of venue, to minimize the potential for conflict and foster positive interactions. Libraries are a natural fit. As community learning centers, they promote a spirit of inquiry and discovery. They are calm, quiet, and comfortable. People are used to keeping interactions calm and low-key in a library. Libraries are widely recognized as a safe space.

I recently spoke with Rosanne Rosella, Adult Program Coordinator at the Henrietta Public Library (HPL), about a Human Library program they conducted in September of this year. Lately the HPL has been experimenting with new types of programming including running pop-up libraries around town. They’re currently planning to build a little free library. Running a Human Library program fit right in with these initiatives.

Their first challenge was seeking out volunteers to serve as Human Books. They first made a list of potential demographics their Books could represent. They considered the dynamics of their local community when brainstorming ideas. Rochester has the nation’s largest deaf population per capita, so they sought to include a deaf person in their program.  They contacted high profile community members (like Arun Gandhi, non-violence activist and grandson of Mohandas Gandhi), people who’d broken new ground in the community (like a black woman who’d served as the first woman patrol officer in Rochester’s police force), and people whose personal lives intersect with political controversy (like a married gay couple living in Rochester). Some of their Books came to them unbidden—one employee asked if she could represent people with learning disabilities in the program. They interviewed their potential Books to ensure that they’d fit the goals of the program and would be able to carry on potentially difficult conversations with strangers in an amiable way.

The event was a success. Attendance was good for a mid-sized community library. The demographics of the attendees were in line with the general demographics of their other programs’ attendees: mostly young seniors around their early 60’s. There were a few younger couples and a family with teenagers as well. Many of the Readers were regular program attendees, but there was also a surprising boost in attendance thanks to the efforts of the Books. One Book advertised the event at her church, and a lot of her fellow churchgoers came to see her at the library. The Readers in attendance were very positive about the experience. The Books had enjoyed the experience as well, and some of them were very moved by it. The previously-mentioned gay couple remarked that they were surprised at how deep the Readers’ questions were, and said they’d been changed by the experience. Rosella hopes that Readers had their minds changed in positive ways from the interactions the program had fostered.

Rosella would love to run a Human Library program again. She feels that about eighteen months would be a good buffer period between Human Library programs, so that it’s a fresh and surprising experience every time. For librarians looking to run their own Human Library programs, she recommends that special attention be paid to the logistics of connecting Readers with Books. Typically Readers are given a set period of time to converse with a Book, to ensure that the Book is able to speak with every interested Reader during the program. It can be difficult to organize the transitions from Reader to Reader, as keeping the timing straight for all of the Books at once can be daunting. Rosella recommends having an individual volunteer assigned to each Book, if possible, to help keep things running smoothly. Before running a Human Library program, it’s a good idea to contact the Copenhagen-based Human Library Organization. They provide free support to all Human Library events in the form of print training materials, web publicity, and more.

Human Library programs aren’t just bringing community members together, they’re also bringing organizations together. The HPL’s program was not the first Human Library event in Rochester, NY; the Rochester Public Library had previously teamed up with the University of Rochester’s libraries to run a successful event this past January. This partnership is an excellent example of how public and academic libraries can collaborate to better serve both of their patron pools. Their collaboration didn’t stop with their first program either. They’re now planning on teaming up to create a catalog of all Human Books who have made appearances in Rochester to date, to facilitate in running future Human Library Programs. The University of Rochester produced this lovely video of one of their past Human Library Programs:

You’ve probably been there at some point in your life: You’ve met someone whose lived experience is completely different to yours. You want to learn more about them, but you worry that your questions might come off as uninformed, gauche, or flat-out offensive. Usually these questions go unasked, but now librarians have the power to create safe spaces for this kind of dialog, and in this way help to stamp out prejudice in our communities.

 

(Post by Derek Murphy)

Open access is a matter of publishers and paywalls, research and restrictions, copyright and creative commons. Just last week, librarians and information professionals of all stripes spoke out in support of open access publishing, as part of International Open Access Week 2014. Open access publishing is an often-overlooked issue that has an outsized impact on everyone—academics, publishers, scientists, medical practitioners, students, and even the everyday person-on-the-street.

When an academic paper is published in a subscription journal, it’s traditional for the publisher to assume control of the paper’s copyright, and release the paper only to those institutions that pay a subscription fee. Unfortunately, as The Guardian notes, “the price of journals has exploded. Harvard, the richest university in the world, says it can’t keep up and has started cutting subscriptions. This is happening everywhere.” It’s already extremely difficult for members of the public who aren’t affiliated with major universities to access many traditionally published papers. Now that universities are being priced out of the game too, even those who’d normally have full access are finding themselves wanting.

Most cutting-edge research in the US is funded in some way by the federal government and, ultimately, the tax-paying public. When access to these papers is restricted to wealthy institutions, members of the general public who contribute to the process are unable to see the results. Though public libraries do their best to provide access to major databases, when high-powered schools like Harvard can’t keep up, it’s hard to imagine public libraries’ comparatively smaller budgets being sufficient. Oftentimes, new research contains information with the power to potentially change the lives of regular people, but they aren’t able to see it or make use of it.

Proponents of open access are working on ways to curb these problems. An open access paper is one which can be accessed on the internet for free, with no restrictions on who can view and download it. In its purest form, sometimes called libre open access, it guarantees that papers are subject to less restrictive copyright controls. Libre open access papers let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship…” Not all open access papers have this quality, but it is generally striven for.

There are any number of ways for an author to release their paper as open access, but two paths are the most common. First off, in the last decade we’ve seen a proliferation of new open access journals entering the picture. An open access journal does not place any restrictions on who can access its contents, and does not charge a fee for access. Its contents are available for free on the internet. Open access journals still conduct peer review, so there is still robust quality control on what gets selected for inclusion. Open Access Journals are funded in a variety of ways. Some accept author fees, some are funded by an institution, some feature advertising, et cetera. The Directory of Open Access Journals indexes all open access journals to facilitate discovery.

The other most popular way of releasing an open access paper is to place it in an open repository or archive. Repositories don’t peer review papers or institute any other method of quality control. They mainly serve as a simple access point for papers, though they also often do what they can to provide long-term preservation as well. An open repository is accessible to anyone, without restrictions. Even if a paper has been published by a closed journal, if the original author has retained the paper’s copyright then she or he can still put it in an open repository without consequence. Traditionally, closed journals retain a paper’s copyright, but as part of the push for open access many authors have insisted on retaining control of the copyright when publishing.

Open access does more than just help people read your paper. It also allows more options for its usage. In his article on Massive Open Online Course syllabuses, Simmons SLIS alumnus Kyle Courtney points out that MOOCs don’t have the same legal fair-use protections that regular university courses do, making it very hard to assign readings. Because a MOOC’s students are not necessarily enrolled in the college, it’s considered copyright infringement for the school to provide them access to articles from closed journals and databases. In some cases, instructors can’t even share their own writing without breaking the law, as they’d assigned their copyright to a publisher upon publication. In his article, Courtney recommends four different strategies for solving this problem, and the strongest of them involve open access. He recommends using open access articles in MOOCs, and either publishing your paper as open access in the first place, or striking a contractual deal with your publisher allowing you the rights to your own open access copy of the paper for unrestricted use in the future. This way, you maximize availability to course readings for students who may not have access to closed databases or the money to purchase assigned texts.

The American Library Association officially supports the open access movement, and has published a handy briefing summarizing it and explaining its relevance for librarians. It includes this pretty definitive list of ways that librarians can support the open access movement:

• Plan workshops for faculty about why open access is important to them and what they should know when publishing.
• Advocate for the inclusion of open-access journals in the pool of publications used when evaluating for tenure.
• Educate public library users on how open-access issues impact their ability to access pertinent information, particularly medical and other scientific information.
• Encourage the use of open-access repositories and journals by including them in our electronic resources, LibGuides and other local information sources.
• Promote the copyright rights of authors by educating faculty on negotiating with publishers regarding the deposit of published articles in digital repositories for access and preservation.
• Avoid looking at open access as a “technology issue.” Open access is as much an information freedom issue, and librarians outside of digital collections, scholarly communications and IT departments are needed to engage with stakeholders, both representing their interests to the library and educating them about open-access issues.
• Subscribe to discussion lists and use RSS feeds to remain abreast of changes and advancements in the open-access movement.
• Learn about the relationship between open access and copyright.
• Remind patrons that if they pay federal taxes, they have funded federal research, including research conducted by federal grant recipients.

The open access movement appears to be making good progress, as Nature’s news blog recently announced that more than half of research articles published from 2007-2012 are now free to read. Hopefully we’ll see this trend increasing in the future as early-career researchers stick to their guns on open access.

 

P.S. For further information on open access, please see Peter Suber’s extremely thorough and elegant overview of the subject, as well as Simmons SLIS’s own Open Access Directory, which links to a panoply of related resources. Also of interest is Jill Walker Rettberg’s explanation of how she was able to publish a full scholarly book with an open access license.

 

(Post by Derek Murphy)