Archivalia

http://www.iwaw.net/05/index.html

All papers are licensed with CC-NC-ND.

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Electronic Reserve and Open Access

By Klaus Graf

Can administrators of Electronic Reserves (ERs) and staff using them in order to support Open Access (OA)? Copyright law requires that an ER must be restricted to students and staff. Even if the ER is in the same repository as the OA eprints (this is the case e.g. in Essen-Duisburg, see http://miless.uni-duisburg-essen.de) web users without a specific account cannot view the course materials.

It is clear that staff members’ own works (syllabus, link lists, bibliographies etc.) can be made freely available on websites or in repositories. You can learn why it is important to make course materials open to the general public on the excellent MIT OpenCourseWare? website: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

ERs contain both copyrighted modern works and Public Domain (PD) materials which were scanned for classroom use.

It is not known which portion of ERs is PD (which could be displayed freely on a website). Maybe it’s a very small portion (depending from the academic discipline). In a unified system (one server for eprints, multimedia and course materials) one can give access rights for these documents to the general public, but in a non-unified system one has to move to the OA repository.

PD materials don’t have to be deleted at the end of the course.

Administrators and staff of ERs should give the general public access to PD documents

Administrators should encourage staff members to do so, and inform them about the legal framework and copyright issues (e.g. in Germany a work is PD if the author is 70 years dead).

Concerning the copyrighted material (modern articles and book chapters) there is also a way to support OA. When preparing a course ER scholars can ask the authors for permission to make the materials available freely. In the US it is likely that the rights holder is the publisher. If publishers agree with OA (a lot of them do so) there is no legal problem to put OA versions in the web. Administrators of OA repositories should allow moving stuff from ERs (i.e. from mostly non-affiliated authors) into the archive. In the case of an unified system one has only to set access rights for the public.

What is the advantage for the authors if their works are put into the OA part of an ER? They don’t have to scan the documents and upload them to the repository.

A permission request to an author can educate that author about OA, who may then be interested to know more about OA.

Sending some permission mails is not really a lot of work.

Conclusion: Administrators and staff of ERs should support OA by asking for permission to make OA versions of ER materials available.

This text is dedicated to the Public Domain

You can edit the text at
http://wiki.netbib.de/coma/ElectronicReserve

Update:
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4931438

Erik Möller, Are Creative Commons-NC Licenses Harmful? Podcasting News, October 4, 2005. Excerpt:

http://www.podcastingnews.com/archives/2005/10/are_creative_co.html

When the Creative Commons project published its first licenses in December 2002, it finally brought a sense of unity behind the free content movement….One particular licensing option, however, is a growing problem for the free content community. It is the allow non-commercial use only (-NC) option. The “non-commercial use only” variants of the Creative Commons licenses are non-free, and in some ways worse than traditional copyright law — because it can be harder to move away from them once people have made the choice. There may be circumstances where -NC is the only (and therefore best) available option, but that number of circumstances should decrease as the business models around free content evolve. The key problems with -NC licenses are as follows: [1] They make your work incompatible with a growing body of free content, even if you do want to allow derivative works or combinations. [2] They may rule out other basic uses which you want to allow. [3] They support current, near-infinite copyright terms. [4] They are unlikely to increase the potential profit from your work, and a share-alike license serves the goal to protect your work from exploitation equally well…..As we will see, there are many desirable commercial uses….[I]f you choose an -NC license, your work will not be compatible with Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikibooks, and similar free content projects. One reason for this is that licenses like Wikipedia’s, the GNU Free Documentation License, work according to the copyleft (or…”share-alike”) principle: You can make derivative works, but they have to be licensed under the same terms. You cannot make a derivative work through addition of -NC content, as you can no longer apply the (more liberal) “share-alike” license to the entire work. Even where the license allows it, marking up regions of content as non-commercial and consistently following these boundaries is almost impossible in a collaborative environment….The use of an -NC license is very rarely justifiable on economic or ideological grounds….Finally, if you must use such a license for one reason or another, please do add an additional notice specifying the term of copyright protection you desire for your work. Otherwise, traditional copyright law will apply, and commercial use will be forbidden long beyond your death.

Source: Open Acess News

http://www.stoa.org/?p=211

The Archive, the Activist, and the Audience, or Black European Studies: A Comparative Interdisciplinary Study of Identities, Positionalities, and Differences
FATIMA EL-TAYEB

in: Transit [new E-Journal]
Special Topic: Migration, Culture, and the Nation State
http://german.berkeley.edu/transit

PDF
http://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2005/TRANSIT50910.pdf

Abstract:
My aim in this brief article is the introduction of a new international and interdisciplinary project on Black Europe, which could be of some interest to German Studies for a variety of reasons that will hopefully become evident. In doing so, though, I would like to focus initially on one particular aspect of this project; it is, incidentally, the one that might seem less than fascinating at first sight: the attempt to re-discover and re-contextualize archival materials on the black presence in Europe. My central argument here is that a rethinking of the uses of archives could open up a number of exciting possibilities going beyond this particular subject: in making history usable and relevant for people who would not normally go near an archive, for students who have abilities in information processing their teachers often fail to tap into, for activists linking worldwide through internet-based networks, and for a new reading of existing but largely unknown or ignored materials.