[Taxacom] BHL and print on demand publishers

[Kalfatovic, Martin]

Dear Taxacom members:

I want to thank you all for your participation on the discussion around the discovery that print on demand publishers, specifically, Nabu Press, have been using BHL digitized materials for commercial purposes.

BHL has worked closely with scientific societies and publishers for permission to digitize and make available via BHL (and the Internet Archive, our scanning partner) in a free and open manner. At the same time, we have discouraged 3rd party commercial use of the digitized content without permission from the copyright holders.

Generally, this is in the spirit of a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) license.

In looking specifically into the Nabu Press issue, BHL staff have found that we've had some erroneous metadata in the rights field that indicated "NOT IN COPYRIGHT". We believe this has led to Nabu scooping this content. We are working now to correct this problem and will work with Nabu, Amazon, etc. to remove the copyrighted materials from commercial sites. It is also possible that Nabu and other POD publishers have scooped content with appropriate metadata, we will also investigate that.

I also wanted to address a couple of points that have come up in the discussion, specifically, "BHL would no doubt like to have a monopoly on providing access to the publications it has (even though the access is free, it can still make money indirectly)". BHL does not seek a monopoly on access to taxonomic literature. Our mission and mandate has been provide ease of access to as much content as possible. This is why content is available through both the BHL site as well as the Internet Archive (and its associated site, OpenLibrary.org). We hope that the BHL portal provides the tools and services to make the content more findable and usable there (through APIs, web services, etc.) but hope that the community doesn't feel that we're enclosing the content in just a different way.

Again, our apologies to rights holders who entrusted their content to BHL in good faith agreements. Be assured we will revise our workflow to make certain that our digitization work will reflect the parameters  given to BHL by the rights holders.

Martin Kalfatovic
BHL Program Director




------------------------------------------------------------------
Martin R. Kalfatovic
Associate Director, Digital Services Division || Program Director, Biodiversity Heritage Library
Smithsonian Institution Libraries
10th Street & Constitution Ave., NW
Room 24 Mz
MRC 154 PO Box 37012
Washington, DC 20013-7012
email: kalfatovicm at si.edu<mailto:kalfatovicm at si.edu>
tel: 202.633.1705
twitter.com/silibraries | smithsonianlibraries.si.edu | research.si.edu | biodiversitylibrary.org
Help save trees by printing only what you need.