clearing the way: copyright clearance in uk libraries for this study was facilitated by lizzie’s...

Elizabeth Gadd LISU Occasional Paper no. 31

Library & Information Statistics Unit (LISU) Department of Information Science Loughborough University ISBN 1 901786 51 X February 2002

Clearing the way: copyright clearance in UK libraries

GADD, Elizabeth


Loughborough: Library & Information Statistics Unit (LISU), 2002

LISU Occasional Paper no. 31

ISBN 1 901786 51 X

© Elizabeth Gadd

Typographical arrangement © LISU

Published and distributed by

Library & Information Statistics Unit (LISU)

Loughborough University • Loughborough • Leicestershire • LE11 3TU

Tel: +44 (0)1509 223071 • Fax: +44 (0)1509 223072 • E-mail: [email protected]

web: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/lisu/lisuhp.html

Clearing the way: copyright clearance in UK libraries i

Contents

Foreword ......................................................................................................................... iii

Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................... iv

1.0 Introduction........................................................................................................... 1

2.0 Methodology ......................................................................................................... 4

3.0 Questionnaire results............................................................................................ 5

4.0 Responses from Copyright Advisors................................................................... 30

5.0 Interview Visits.................................................................................................... 32

6.0 Conclusions and discussion ............................................................................... 44

7.0 Recommendations summary .............................................................................. 62

References .................................................................................................................... 66

Appendix 1 Clearing the way questionnaire .............................................................. 70

Appendix 2 Clearing the way interview schedule ...................................................... 75

Appendix 3 Sample clearance request forms............................................................ 77

Appendix 4 Sample forms from a clearance management database........................ 99

Appendix 5 Sample permission request letters ........................................................100

Appendix 6 Sample “sign-off” forms for internal customers......................................106

Bibliography..................................................................................................................108

List of Tables

Table 1 Individuals undertaking clearance elsewhere in the organisation................... 6

Table 2 Job titles of staff undertaking clearance ......................................................... 8

Table 3 Other licences taken by respondents ........................................................... 12

Table 4 Highest fees requested and paid .................................................................. 18

Table 5 Items cleared per annum.............................................................................. 21

Table 6 Clearance time by clearance type ................................................................ 22

Table 7 ‘Age’ of the clearance units/posts ................................................................. 28

Table 8 Organisations selected for interview............................................................. 32

Table 9 Responsibilities of the clearance services .................................................... 33

Table 10 Other IP responsibilities................................................................................ 34

ii Clearing the way: copyright clearance in UK libraries

List of Figures

Fig 1 Respondents’ organisations .............................................................................. 5

Fig 2 Where clearance takes place ............................................................................ 6

Fig 3 Number of staff clearing rights........................................................................... 7

Fig 4 Staff time required for clearance........................................................................ 8

Fig 5 Number of services requiring clearance ............................................................ 9

Fig 6 Services requiring copyright clearance............................................................ 10

Fig 7 Main activity (60-100% of clearance time)....................................................... 11

Fig 8 Materials cleared ............................................................................................. 11

Fig 9 Licences taken by responding organisations................................................... 12

Fig 10 Clearance services used ................................................................................. 13

Fig 11 Experiences of CLARCS ................................................................................. 13

Fig 12 Percentage of permissions granted for no charge........................................... 17

Fig 13 Charging mechanisms..................................................................................... 19

Fig 14 Who pays the fees........................................................................................... 19

Fig 15 What departments pay for ............................................................................... 20

Fig 16 What libraries pay for....................................................................................... 20

Fig 17 Weeks to gain permission ............................................................................... 22

Fig 18 Permissions requiring chasing......................................................................... 23

Fig 19 Times a permission is chased ......................................................................... 23

Fig 20 Requests that are never answered.................................................................. 24

Fig 21 Is copyright clearance going to become easier? ............................................. 24

Fig 22 How the unit/post is funded ............................................................................. 28

Fig 23 Percentage advice vs clearance...................................................................... 29

Clearing the way: copyright clearance in UK libraries iii

Foreword

Copyright has become highly topical, not least because, as we prepare to go to press, theterms of the Licence agreement between the Copyright Licensing agency and UniversitiesUK [formerly; the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals - CVCP] have beenreferred to the Copyright Tribunal. Moreover, there is growing anxiety about the extent towhich higher education is able, within constrained budgets, to provide adequate learningresource support for students and to maintain access to appropriate scholarly publishing forthe research community. Affording the compensation paid to rights owners is an issue;another is ensuring compliance in an institution by getting appropriate permission, orclearance to use material. The advent of digitised information, whilst opening up newhorizons for communicating important knowledge, serves also to exacerbate an alreadydifficult situation in clearing and paying for the use of copyright material. That the issuetends to polarise interests that, ideally, should be allies in the communication chain is causefor regret.

This study explores in detail the issues surrounding the process of securing the use ofcopyright information in the UK higher education sector. The more light that can be shedon the processes of copyright compliance the better for all those involved. Through thisstudy Lizzie Gadd has performed an important service to rights owners and those in highereducation, especially librarians who often bear the brunt of solving copyright matters. Theresearch for this study was facilitated by Lizzie’s well deserved winning, in 2000, of theElsevier-LIRG Research Award.

It was felt here at LISU that Lizzie’s work was of such importance and quality that itshould be disseminated widely. The most obvious solution was to publish the study in itsentirety in the Occasional Papers series, which LISU is delighted to undertake. Whateverthe outcome of the Tribunal there is valuable information and opinion to be gleaned fromthis work.

Dr J Eric DaviesDirector LISU (Library and Information Statistics Unit)

Loughborough 2001

iv Clearing the way: copyright clearance in UK libraries

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the Library andInformation Research Group and Elsevierfor the Research Award that made thisinvestigation possible. Thanks are also dueto Mary Morley, Librarian at LoughboroughUniversity, and my team leaders,Bob Rhodes, and Mary Hodgkinson, forallowing me the time to pursue this research.I’m grateful to Dr J Eric Davies andClaire Creaser of the Library and

Information Statistics Unit, andProf Charles Oppenheim of the Departmentof Information Science, all at LoughboroughUniversity, for interest taken and advicegiven. Perhaps most importantly, I’mthankful to all those that completed thequestionnaire, and to those who agreed to beinterviewed. Without all of this support, theresearch would have been by far the poorer.

INTRODUCTION

Clearing the way: copyright clearance in UK libraries 1

1.0 Introduction

1.1 The problem of copyrightLibraries today face a problem. Their raisond’etre: to provide access to information fortheir users is on the one hand being enabledby new technologies and developments, andon the other is in danger of being hinderedby copyright restrictions. New developmentsin libraries, learning and teaching, such aselectronic short loan collections, computeraided learning packages, distance learningpackages and so on, all seek to providebetter educational support for students.However to include ready-publishedmaterial in all these services requirescopyright clearance.

Quotes such as “Copyright was seen as amajor barrier to the scaling up of electronicshort loan”1, and “one of the most taxingconcerns for courseware developers…isto...obtain the legitimate use of existingcopyright works to include in newproducts”2 abound in the library and relatedliterature.

In fact, the current legal and legislativeframework makes copyright clearance anessential library activity.

1.2 The lawThe Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of1988 basically performs two functions.Firstly, it spells out what rights belong to thecreators of original works (rightsholders).Secondly, it lists exceptions to those rights,allowing users the ability to make certaincopies of those works for certain purposes.The exceptions relating to libraries can befound in sections 38-44 of the Act and havebeen called the “Library Privileges”. Theseprivileges allow libraries to make copies forproviding various library services.However, the privileges are limited andspecific. Should libraries wish to copy morethan is permitted by the Act, they wouldhave had to have approached rights holdersindividually for permission every time –

were it not for the provision made in the Actfor the establishment of licensing bodies.

1.3 LicencesThe existence of licensing bodies savesrights holders from being deluged withrequests from organisations for permissionto make more copies of copyright materialthan the Act allows. Licensing bodiesrepresent groups of copyright holders(artists, publishers, musicians, etc), andlicence additional rights (for a fee) toorganisations wishing to make additionalcopies of their work. There is a wide rangeof licences now available. It would be niceto be able to say that they make theLibrarian’s job a whole lot easier. In fact,they leave something to be desired. Manylibraries’ activities are not covered by these(often expensive) licences, and thus stillrequire individual clearance. A positivedevelopment however has been the design oflicences for electronic full-text sources. Suchlicences are often developed through muchuser consultation, and include provisions forusing electronic materials in printed course-packs and for other educational purposes. Agood example of this is the NESLI (NationalElectronic Site Licence Initiative) modellicence3.

1.4 Copyright clearanceWhen it comes to copyright clearancelibraries have two options: they can identifyrights holders themselves and approach themindependently, or they can use a centralcopyright clearance service (termed“clearing houses” in this report todistinguish them from organisations’in-house clearance services). In the UK forprint material there are three such clearinghouses. The first is the Copyright LicensingAgency’s Rapid Clearance Service4

(CLARCS) for both print and, morerecently, electronic clearances. The second,for the purchase of copyright-cleared journalarticles, is the British Library Document

INTRODUCTION

2 Clearing the way: copyright clearance in UK libraries

Supply Centre5. And the third, and newest,service is HERON6 (Higher EducationResources ON-demand), a JISC-fundedservice still in its project-phase, offeringelectronic copyright clearance anddigitisation.

Until the advent of HERON and the CLADigitisation Licence (and its accompanyingelectronic clearing house), libraries had nooption but to clear rights to make electroniccopies directly with individual rightsholders. The experience of eLib projects7,many of which were at the forefront of thisactivity, has shown how difficult this canbe8.

Unfortunately, just as licences did not solvethe difficulties arising from the 1988Copyright Act, clearing houses have notproven a panacea to the problems leftunsolved by licensing. No centralisedclearing house represents every rightsholder, so there is always the need toapproach some individually. Finding outwho owns the rights in a copyright work canbe complex, locating them even more so. Inthe digital arena, some publishers are warythat they do not in fact own electronic rights,and are therefore reluctant to license themon. In some cases, publishers are reviewingtheir options and seeking new agreementsfrom authors regarding digital publishing.

1.5 Signs of the timesSuch is the complexity of the situation thatmore and more organisations are dedicatinghuman resources to deal with it. We are nowseeing Copyright Librarian posts beingadvertised in the LA “Appointments”supplement, for example9. Indeed, in arecent issue of Appointments, there were noless than three posts that involved copyrightclearance duties10. Also, the mailbasediscussion list, “Lis-Copyseek”, set up forthe discussion of copyright clearance issuesamongst librarians, has recently reached arecord 190 members. What compounds thesituation is its fluidity. New technologies

have in some cases been answered by newintellectual property legislation – such as theCopyright and Rights in DatabasesRegulations introduced in 199811. And newlicences, or amendments to licences seem toappear with alarming regularity. The HigherEducation Copying Accord, introduced inOctober 1998 in addition to the CLA’s HELicence is one example. Each newregulation sends librarians back to thedrawing board to assess the legality of theircurrent collections and practices12.Librarians are currently facing anotherseismic shift in the form of the Copyrightand Related Rights in the InformationSociety Directive being finalised in Europeas part of the EU legal harmonisationprocess.

At the time of writing the final text of thedirective has not been agreed. However,there are still concerns in the librarycommunity as to whether the balance will beweighted in favour of the vociferous rightsholder lobby. The other impending change isthe renegotiation of the CLA’s HE Licenceincluding the Accord. These are due forrenewal in January 2001. Again, at the timeof writing the CVCP has referred the CLAlicence renewal to the Copyright Tribunal.The CLA have responded and both partiesnow await the response from the Tribunal13.

1.6 Prepared and informedIn order to prepare for these changes, thereis currently a great deal of activity in theLibrary Sector. The Library Association hasfunded a six-month research project into thecosts of copyright generally to the Furtherand Higher Education sectors. The Libraryand Information Statistics Unit14 atLoughborough University are undertakingthis. Also in the HE sector, a group ofacademic lawyers recently founded theCopyright in Higher Education WorkingGroup (CHEW)15. Their first campaign is thereform of the Higher Education CopyingAccord (HECA) that accompanies the CLAHE Licence. This research into the copyright

INTRODUCTION


clearance activities in UK Libraries occupiesa position between these two projects in thatit focuses on the whole library sector (notjust FE and HE) and is looking at copyrightclearance which includes costs, but is notsolely occupied with them. Also, while itaims to inform the creation oflibrary-friendly legislation and licensing,this is just one of its goals.

1.7 Copyright clearance in UKlibraries

The aims of this research were to:

• Raise awareness as to the volume ofclearance that needs to be undertaken inlibraries as a result of current copyrightlegislation and licensing

• Inform centralised clearing houses andlicensing organisations in theestablishment of library-friendly services

• Gain a better understanding of the mainareas of confusion surrounding copyrightlaw and library services

In order to achieve these aims, the followingobjectives were set:

• To provide an overview of the copyrightclearance activities being undertakenwithin different library sectors;

• To provide a comprehensive survey ofcurrent UK practice with regard tocopyright clearance;

• To distil best practice guidelines tolibraries undertaking copyrightclearance.

Although the research was interested inbuilding up a picture of the entire librarysector, it was decided to focus on HigherEducation. This was partly because the HEsector has had a great deal of experience inthis area and would therefore constitute aninteresting focus for the study. Practicalityalso dictated that a small-scale piece ofpractitioner-based research couldn’t hope tocover the wide range of library sectors inany detail. It also became clear that a studyof copyright clearance activities could not belimited to libraries only, as many differentdepartments were assuming clearanceresponsibilities. Therefore, anyoneundertaking clearance was encouraged toparticipate in the research.

METHODOLOGY


2.0 Methodology

A two-pronged methodology was adopted:firstly a questionnaire to copyright clearersin libraries generally and in HigherEducation in particular; and secondly aseries of interview visits.

The questionnaire was drawn up inconsultation with Dr Eric Davies, Directorof the Library and Information StatisticsUnit. Dr Davies’ experience as a researcher,and his knowledge of copyright, alongsidehis role as Director of the LibraryAssociation-funded research into the costs ofcopyright in FE and HE, made him an idealmentor for this purpose. The questionnairewas then piloted on two practitioners knownto the project researcher, and alterationsmade in line with their comments. As thequestions were numerous it was decided tomake them as easy to complete as possible.This meant: a) encouraging respondents toanswer as many questions as possible, butnot demanding ‘all or nothing’; b) allowingrespondents to estimate where necessary;and c) allowing respondents to answer intheir own measures – i.e. when giving thetime spent clearing rights they could do so inhours, days, weeks or percentages. The finalversion of the questionnaire is given inAppendix 1, but in summary it covered thefollowing topics:

• Section A: The type of organisationworked for; where the clearance tookplace; and by whom;

• Section B: What rights were beingcleared (i.e. for what purpose – ShortLoan Collections etc);

• Section C: What materials were beingcleared (i.e. book chapters, video clips,etc.)

• Section D: What licences weresubscribed to; what clearing houses wereused; and how the clearance process wasmanaged;

• Section E: The costs and the chargingmechanisms;

• Section F: The length of the clearanceprocess;

• Section G: What the future holds forcopyright clearance;

• Section H: Specific information aboutCopyright Clearance Services (Units orPosts).

The questionnaire was mounted on theproject web site with the option to eithercomplete online, or to print off a WORDversion for completion by hand. Theresearch and questionnaire was thenadvertised on five electronic mailing lists:lis-copyseek, lis-link, UPMG (UniversityPrint Managers list), lis-pub-libs, andlis-sconul-copyright.

As the responses came in, it became clearthat some libraries’ copyright workconsisted solely in giving advice, and not ingaining clearances. In order to build up apicture of this activity, an email was sent tothe same lists encouraging such advisors tocontact me about their copyright advicework.

Respondents answering Section H of thequestionnaire about Copyright Units or Postswere asked if they would be willing to becontacted for interview. Fourteen agreed bygiving their contact details. Fiveorganisations were selected for interview onthe basis of the number of years of theirexperience, their geographical location, thetype of organisation (Old or NewUniversity) and whether the Unit was basedin the Library or elsewhere. The aim was toget a range of organisations with differentexperiences. Four of the five interviewswere conducted face-to-face; one wasconducted by telephone. The interviewschedule is given in Appendix 2.

QUESTIONNAIRE RESULTS


3.0 Questionnaire results

Fifty-seven questionnaire responses werereceived together with 11 separate emailsabout copyright advice work. That makes atotal of 68 copyright clearers and advisors.The results have been analysed separately.

3.1 Respondents’ organisationsFifty-one (89%) of the respondents classedtheir organisation as a Higher EducationInstitution. Only two respondents stated theywere from Further Education, and two werefrom Public Libraries. Of the two “other”respondents, one worked on a project basedin a public library, and the other worked fora NHS Trust running post-graduate courses.

Fig 1 Respondents’ organisations

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The high proportion of respondents from HEcould be due to a number of factors. Firstly,the questionnaire was primarily advertisedvia Mailbase discussion lists, and Mailbasewas initially established by, and for the HEcommunity. Secondly, as mentioned in theintroduction, Higher Education libraries arevery experienced in copyright clearance asmany of their services depend upon it.

Conversely, other sectors have previouslyhad less experience in this area, although theclimate is now changing. Thirdly, the projectwebsite stated that the main focus of theresearch was on the Higher Educationcommunity, so this may have particularlyencouraged HE respondents – or deterrednon-HE respondents.

The 51 HE respondents represent 30% of thetotal 169 HEIs16. However, as therespondents were a self-selecting sample, itwould be inaccurate to infer any statisticalsignificance from the results. The very smallnumber of non-HE respondents has made itimpossible to draw any conclusions aboutcopyright clearance in those sectors.

3.2 Where the clearance takes placeIt was not assumed that respondents wouldall be based in libraries, so the question wasposed: “Where does the majority of yourorganisation’s copyright clearance activitiestake place?”. There were 56 responses to thisquestion. Nineteen (37%) stated that themajority of their organisation’s copyrightclearance took place in the library by librarystaff. The two Public Library respondentsfell into this category. Ten furtherrespondents (18%) indicated that clearancetook place in the library by dedicatedcopyright staff/units. In total 55% ofrespondents said clearance was done in theLibrary. The remaining 45% indicated thatcopyright clearance was undertakenelsewhere. Twenty respondents (35%) statedthat this was done by individuals, and five(9%) by dedicated copyright units,elsewhere in the organisation. The two FErespondents fell into this latter category (seeFig 2 overleaf).



Fig 2 Where clearance takes place

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Although these responses gave an indicationas to where the majority of clearance wasundertaken, seven respondents (13%)commented that responsibility for clearancewas shared with other parts of theorganisation. One HE respondent stated thatclearance was done both “in the Library byLibrary staff and by UniversityDepartmental Staff for Departmentalmaterial”. This was a common occurrence,as someone else concurred “Library staffclear material for stock (i.e. offprintcollection) but academic depts clear forstudy packs.” Another stated that “clearancefor CLARCS is undertaken by a separatedept.”

Where respondents indicated that individualselsewhere in the organisation(20 respondents) undertook clearance,14 stated who took on that role.

Table 1 Individuals undertaking clearanceelsewhere in the organisation

Job title No.

Project staff 1

Central Copyright/Licensing Officer 2

Dept’l Secretaries/Administrators 5

Academic staff 6

Its interesting to note that in most casescited, academics are expected to undertaketheir own clearance. However, from thelarge number of departmental secretaries andadministrators listed as clearers we mayinfer that many academics delegate thiswork to departmental staff. The two centralcopyright/licensing officers cited exposed aflaw in the questionnaire, in that copyrightstaff or units were library options, but under“elsewhere” only copyright units werementioned.

3.3 Who takes on clearanceThere were 52 responses to the question,“As far as you know, how many people inyour organisation clear rights?” and therequest to give their job titles, and theproportion of their time they spend clearingrights. However five of these responses werecomments suggesting this was “impossibleto answer” due to the large number clearingrights in various parts of the organisation.Another raised the point that more and morestaff are taking on many different roles andtherefore often have multiple job titles!



Fig 3 Number of staff clearing rights

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3.3.1 Number of staff clearing rights

There were forty-three responses fromwhich the number of clearance personnelcould be measured. For analysis purposes afigure of >1 was entered where therespondent hadn’t given a number but whereit was clear there were multiple clearancestaff. The “>4” was entered on the basis ofthe job titles specified. The responses aregiven in Fig 3.

Sixteen respondents (37%) thought that theywere the only one in their organisation thatcleared rights. The remaining 63% oforganisations committed at least twomembers of staff to this activity. Indeedthree organisations had five staff clearingrights, and two had 24 rights clearers. Thislatter category included an organisation thatoffers courses by part-time and distancelearning, and an organisation that has onerights clearer for each of its 24 schools.

3.3.2 Percentage of time spent on rightsclearance

Perhaps a more significant measure of thestaff intensity of rights clearance is not thenumber of staff clearing rights, but the timethey spend doing it. There may be two staffclearing rights, but if they each just spendfive hours a week on it, this amounts to justunder one-third of a FTE staff member. Thedata was therefore analysed by convertingresponses into percentages of a staffmember’s time, using an average 35-hourweek, and a 20-day month.

Thirty-nine respondents (68%) estimated theamount of time they and their colleaguesspent on rights clearance.



Fig 4 Staff time required for clearance

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Fig 4 plots the percentage of a full time staffmember required for clearance, against thenumber of respondents citing that figure fortheir organisation. The median amount oftime spent clearing rights is 15% or five andthree-quarter hours (almost a day) a weekover the year. The mean number of hoursper week (excluding the HEI that had 24full-time clearers) is 30% or ten and aquarter hours (a day and a half) per weekover the year. However, as manyrespondents commented, clearance work isvery seasonal. “The time spent depends onthe time of year” said one respondent, “LateAugust, September, December and January Icould be spending at least the equivalent of aworking day a week clearing rights if youcount advising tutors and ringing CLARCSwith alterations to the original lists.” Also,where the respondent knew there were alarge number of clearers at theirorganisation, they often only counted theclearance done by their department, or madeno estimate at all. This makes the resultingfigure artificially low.

3.3.3 Job titles of staff undertakingclearance

Thirteen different job titles were specified asthose with clearance responsibilities. Thelist, together with the number of times theyappeared in responses, given in the tablebelow.

Table 2 Job titles of staff undertakingclearance

Job Title No.

Dedicated Copyright personnel 32

Library Asst 9

Subject Librarian 9

Admin. Assistant 7

Senior Library Asst 5

Media Librarian 3

Contracts/Legal Advisor 2

Director LIS 2

Course Managers 2<

Academic 1

Editorial Asst 1

Students Services Librarian 1

Technician 1



The most frequently mentioned group werededicated copyright personnel, although thisfigure is perhaps artificially inflated by theteam of 24 dedicated copyright clearers atone institution. Disregarding this 24, thereremained eight clearers with job titles suchas Copyright and Licensing Officer,Copyright Librarian and CopyrightAssistant. Interestingly, Subject Librariansand Library Assistants occurred equallyfrequently, and Administrative Assistantswere cited as copyright clearers in eightorganisations. The three occurrences of“Media Librarian” indicate a departure fromtraditional library posts, illustrating the newemphasis on the range of media with whichlibraries now work.

3.4 What rights are being cleared?Section B asked respondents to select from alist the purposes for which they wereclearing copyright. There were 13 optionsincluding an “other” category. These arelisted below:

• Short Loan Collections (print)

• Other Library Collection (print)

• Electronic Short Loan Collection

• Coursepacks (print)

• Distance Learning materials (print)

• Distance Learning materials (web)

• Distance Learning materials (CD)

• Electronic Learning Environment(internal)

• Computer Aided Learning (CAL)packages

• Digitisation of unique/importantcollections

• Current Awareness Service

• Staff members’ own publications

• Other

Fifty-three responded to this question. Only“current awareness service” did not appearamongst the responses. Fig 5 shows thenumber of services or purposes for whichrespondents were clearing rights.

Fig 5 Number of services requiring clearance

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It can be seen that the majority ofrespondents (60%) clear rights for only oneor two services. Just under 30% needed toclear rights for three or four services, and10% had over five services for which theyundertook clearance. Fig 6 (overleaf)illustrates the different types of service orpurpose for which the respondents clearedrights.

3.4.1 Services requiring clearance

The purpose for which the largest proportionof respondents cleared rights was thecreation of coursepacks. Indeed 55% ofrespondents (29) undertook this activity. Ascoursepacks are not usually cleared forlibrary collections17 but for classes ofstudents, further analysis was performed tosee whether it was the library-based clearerswho were undertaking the clearance. For 16of the 29 organisations (55%) coursepackclearance was done in the library, leaving 13institutions (45%) where coursepacks werecleared elsewhere. This ratio correlatesexactly with the overall numbers ofcopyright clearers within and outsidelibraries as given in Section 3.2.



Fig 6 Services requiring copyright clearance

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Coursepack

SLC

Printed DL materials

Web DL materials

Electronic SLC

Electronic Learning Environment

CD-ROM DL materials

CAL

Staff member

Digitisation project

Other Library Collection

Other

No. of respondents

Following closely behind coursepackclearance was clearance for Short LoanCollections with 47% of respondentsundertaking this activity. Only onerespondent mentioned clearance for otherlibrary collections.

Clearance for distance learning activitieswas very common. Overall 20 (38%)respondents indicated that they clearedrights for distance learning course materialsof some kind. Interestingly printed distancelearning materials were the most popular.They were cleared by 25% of respondents.Distance learning materials for web deliverywere cleared by 21% of respondents and forCD-ROM delivery by 9%. Electronic ShortLoan Collections were cited by ninerespondents (17%) as a service requiringclearance, and Electronic LearningEnvironments by seven respondents (13%).Other electronic developments such ascomputer aided learning packages anddigitisation projects were mentioned by asmall number of respondents, as was

clearance for individual staff members’ ownpublications.

Twenty-one respondents (40%) said theycleared rights for purposes other than thoselisted. These included theatrical productions,slide collections, clearance of individualpages for journal binding, “Village packs ofhistorical material”, TV, AV and video,examination-paper collections, software andfilm footage. One large clearance unit cited along list of additional clearance activitiesthus: “TV, Video, Audio, Collaborativepackages, University publications, actors,film footage, scripts, sound recordings,presenters, musicians etc.”

3.4.2 The main clearance activities

Respondents were asked to indicate whichwas their main clearance activity. Fororganisations only undertaking one activitythis was an easy question to answer! Of the16 respondents in this category, eight (half)cleared for Short Loan, and five (just under athird) cleared coursepacks. The full pictureis illustrated in Fig 7.



Fig 7 Main activity (60-100% of clearance time)

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Coursepack and Short Loan clearance is themajor activity for most respondents,although clearance for Electronic Short Loanand distance learning materials constitute themain activity for a small number ofrespondents.

3.5 What materials are clearedHaving asked respondents to list the servicesfor which they cleared rights, Section Casked which material types were beingcleared. Thirteen options were givenincluding an “other” category. Fig 8 lists theresponses to this question.

Fig 8 Materials cleared

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bkchap jrnart news confpap illus photo slide video book advert music journal

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A substantial ninety-four per cent ofrespondents said that they cleared bookchapters and/or journal articles. Less thanhalf this figure (42%) cleared the next mostpopular category of materials: newspaperarticles. Graphic and audio-visual materialssuch as illustrations, photographs, slides andvideo were cleared by between 23-27% ofrespondents. Interestingly, just over one fifth(21%) of respondents stated that theyattempted to clear whole books.Advertisements were cleared by 11% ofrespondents, as was music.

3.6 LicencesSection D focussed on how the clearancewas done. The first question askedrespondents to indicate which copyrightlicences they took out from a list of eleven

(including an “other” category). Fifty-fourorganisations responded. The results aregiven in Fig 9.

As the largest group of respondents (89%)were from Higher Education it is hardlysurprising that 93% of those responding tothis question took the CLA’s HE Licence.The Educational Recording Agency (ERA)licence and the Newspaper LicensingAgency Licence were subscribed to in fairlyequal numbers. Between 31-46% ofrespondents took out Design and ArtistsCopyright Society (DACS), OrdnanceSurvey (OS) and British Standards (BS)licences. Thirty-seven percent ofrespondents indicated that they took “other”licences. These are listed in Table 3.

Fig 9 Licences taken by responding organisations

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CLA HE ERA NLA DACS OS BS CLA FE Other

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Table 3 Other licences taken by respondents

Licence No. subscribing

OU Off-Air Recording Scheme 8

Licences with individuals 4

CLA Artistic Works Protocol 3

Performing Rights Society 2

Mechanical Copyright Protection Society 2

Electronic database licences 2

TV 1



Fifteen per cent of respondents stated thatthey subscribed to the Open UniversityOff-Air Recording Scheme. Fourrespondents said they drew up licences withindividual rights holders, presumablybecause generic licences were not available.Three stated that they had taken out theCLA’s new Artistic Works Protocol.

3.7 Clearing houses usedRespondents were asked to indicate whichclearing houses they used and what theirexperiences of them were. Forty-four of the57 respondents (77%) indicated that theyused some form of clearing house. That lefta large proportion – almost one-quarter(23%) that did not rely on clearing houses atall. Fig 10 shows the services used.

Fig 10 Clearance services used

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CLARCS(for

digisation)

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Corresponding with the large number ofrespondents clearing printed coursepacks(Section 3.4) CLARCS was the mostfrequently cited clearing house.Interestingly, the new Digitisation clearinghouse was fairly well used too. The pilotHERON service was in use by one-quarterof the clearing house-using respondents. Ofthe “other” responses, six mentioned theBritish Library Copyright-Cleared CopyService. This was omitted from the serviceslisted as options because the primary focusof the service is document delivery.However, many organisations use thecopyright-cleared facility and in retrospect it

would have been useful to have included iton the list. The US Copyright ClearanceCenter (CCC) was cited by two respondentsas a service they use.

3.8 Experiences of clearing houses3.8.1 CLARCS

Thirty-five respondents commented on theirexperience of the CLARCS service.Responses were analysed and categorised aspositive, mixed or negative, to get anoverview of the community’s experience.The results are shown in Fig 11.

Fig 11 Experiences of CLARCS

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Opinion is clearly split about CLARCS. Thepositive comments included two that ratedCLARCS as either “excellent” or “verygood”. Eight were broadly positive withcomments such as “In general good”, “OKon the whole”, and “Quite good, somenon-replies”. Two praised the speed of theservice as “quick” while three applauded thestaff with comments such as “staff verycourteous and helpful even when underduress”. Another wrote:

“CLARCS is a very good service,especially the web-based database forinitial checking of clearance prices. I havehad very positive experiences dealing withthe CLARCS operators; they are efficientand tend to respond very quickly to



enquiries (same day for phone calls andwithin 2 days for faxed queries).”

The “mixed” responses consisted of thosethat found the service changeable, and thosethat saw a good and a bad side to the service.In the first category there were commentslike: “Recently been a bit slow, but generallygood”, “Previously bad but have sinceimproved slightly”, and “It varies.Sometimes good, at other times not so.” Inthe second category comments were of the“good but…” variety, with complaints about“the high costs for study packs”, CLARCSnot giving “advice” or giving poor advice,“offhand” staff and “problems gettingthrough to CLARCS and …long delays inreceiving quotes.”

The negative comments were stronglyworded using verbs such as “appalling”,“dreadful” and “terrible”. Many complainedabout “a very poor level of customerservice”. One person described it as“bureaucratic, old fashioned, not designedwith users needs in mind [and] wasteful ofresources”, another as “very slow andcumbersome”. One respondent found theCLA a prohibitive intermediary betweenlibrary and publisher:

“[CLARCS is] inadequate for my needs,quite often the CLA is unable to clear thequantity I require or clear for electronicuse. So time is often wasted going betweenthe CLA and the publisher. The publisherdoesn’t want to know and the CLA can notmove without the publisher amending theiroriginal contract!”

There were also complaints of an “unhelpfulattitude”, amongst staff. One respondentwrote:

“their staff do not always know what theyare doing and they have a “the customer isalways wrong” attitude.”

Another wrote,“the ‘front desk’ of CLA is intellectuallynot up to the job”.

The length of time taken for clearance wasbemoaned by a number of respondents withcomments such as “slow to respond toemails”, “poor response time – takes severaldays”, and “takes weeks in busy periods”.One respondent pinpointed specific delayproblems with the introduction of newlicence clauses.

“CLARCS printed material service wasappalling just after the 1998 re-negotiatedlicence came into force. CLARCS printedmaterial service evidently could not copewith the volume of requests from all HEIinstitutions at the start of the currentacademic year, in October 1999. Myinstitution signed up to the CLA ArtisticWorks (photocopying) protocol last year -CLARCS procedures for clearing artisticworks in course packs were initiallydreadful, with delays of several months.”

Finally there were two comments about theexpense of course pack creation.

3.8.2 HERON

There were just four comments relating tothe HERON service. One stated that“HERON is developing nicely”. Anotherwrote that “HERON promise a lot, but so farwe haven’t had any delivery for variousreasons and we have little faith in theirability to meet our needs.” OneHERON-user cited the difficulties ofcopyright clearance generally as the mainhindrance to the new service:

“We are piloting HERON, thinking thiswould be an easy way to create electronicshort loan materials. They are doing agreat job, but we have found the wholething takes so long to get clearances andthen have stuff digitised, that it hasn’t beenof much practical use this session. Costsquoted by many publishers were well over



the £100 mark and although we acceptedsome in the interests of getting some stuffready to work with, it’s not something we’ddo on a larger scale or in the longer term.Costs of £10-20 were much moreacceptable. We’re also having difficultywith the system of them quoting for oneacademic session - if we request thingslate, then effectively we’ve wasted moneybecause we can only use them for a fewweeks/months before our time runs out andwe have to pay again.”

This issue of payment was raised by anotherrespondent who stated that they would“mostly” use “HERON but will also use theCLA for the big British publishers, as theydon’t charge 10% on top of the clearancefee.” However, this respondent was “awarethat using HERON is important to HigherEducation Institutions” because they felt “itgives us a stronger negotiating position tolower fees.”

3.9 The clearance processThe last two questions in Section D relatedto how the clearance process was managed.Respondents were asked to indicate whetherthey used manual files, manual andelectronic files, or an electronic database tokeep track of their clearances. They werealso given the opportunity to commentgenerally on the clearance process.

No respondents used an electronic databasealone to manage clearance. Twenty-two usedmanual files, and twenty-seven used acombination of manual and electronic files.Twenty-seven respondents made commentson the clearance process. They could begrouped in the following categories.

3.9.1 Liaising with academics and faculty

Many respondents complained that theirinternal customers didn’t understand theneed for clearance, or the time-scales andprocesses involved in gaining clearance.According to one respondent “the library isoften seen as ‘being awkward’ by our

academic colleagues because we have toimplement these [copyright] regulations.”One respondent wrote of the “constant battleagainst the attitude that it is all aboutinterfering with academic freedom.”Another wrote that they needed to educate“faculty administrative staff…[to ensure]that they know when clearances are reallyneeded.” There were a number of commentssuggesting that “Internal customers don’trealise just how difficult it is to set [acopyright clearance service] up”. As anotherwrote: “In the field of HE I am concernedthat the volume of work is not clearlyunderstood.”

This misunderstanding leads to difficultiesin getting adequate bibliographicinformation from academic staff within anappropriate time-scale. One respondent putthis succinctly: “Requests from internalcustomers, Problems: 1. Insufficientbibliographic information. 2. Unrealistictime-scales (e.g. academic staff as requestorsdon’t leave enough time for the clearanceprocess.)” Another reported: “[Its] a constantproblem to make academics appreciate thepossible delays in getting clearance”, whichresults in “Internal customers [that] neverallow sufficient time to obtain permission”.

3.9.2 Administration

Respondents drew attention to the fact thatcopyright clearance is a heavilyadministrative process that requires “on theball’ admin staff”. One wrote, “There is a lotof paperwork especially when I have toshare information with academics andcourse administrator”. Another echoed thiscomment, “A lot of paperwork is involved inrecord keeping and tracking progress, as aback-up to the electronic database.”

3.9.3 Liaising with CLA and rights holders

There were many comments about liaisingwith the CLA and individual rights holders.Three explained that “frequently the CLAhave no mandate from the publisher” whichmeans they have to approach rights holders



directly. One wrote that they deliberatelyavoid the CLA and write directly topublishers.

“We now write direct to the Publishers forclearance as we did before the inception ofthe Licence. The Licence has not eased theclearance problem it has in fact made itmore complicated and contentious. We aremade to feel guilty until proven innocentand not the other way around. There is noconsideration for education or researchpurposes. As an institution we are notattempting to defraud but to provideeducation. In many respects it easier towrite direct to the Publishers than to dealwith the CLA.”

Two main problems were highlighted withapproaching rights holders directly: tracingthem, and the delay in getting a response.Eleven comments related to thetime-consuming nature of clearance. Onewrote,

“it is very very time consuming for allconcerned - despite being asked to give uscourse packs in plenty of time I always endup with a great rush at the beginning ofeach semester. It can be very hard to tracesmall publishers and imprints which havebeen swallowed up by big multi nationalpublishers”.

Another commented, “It is time consuming,lecturers often supply inadequateinformation and publishers tend to move farmore frequently than the rest of thepopulation without leaving a forwardingaddress.” One respondent suggested that thereason for the delays was that “a significantnumber of publishers only seem to have onepart-time person to deal with clearances”. Tocompound the problem, not all rights holdersgrant permission as one person commented,

“often it can take months if not years to getpermission for some items. Somepublishers refuse altogether…which is very

frustrating as there is nothing you can doabout it.”

A final comment was from a copyrightclearer who suggested that “The CLA needsto develop an easier way of doing repeatclearance for study packs”.

3.9.4 Terms of permission

Once permission has been gained, problemsstill occurred in the form of “all the differentpublishers licences and requirements[which] can be very confusing and make theprocess more difficult when you have totailor the system for each item”. Onerespondent commented that “Licenceagreements need to be written in plainEnglish and crystal clear - a lot oflis-copyseek is about how to interpretambiguity.”

3.10 Clearance feesSection E asked six questions relating toclearance fees:

• What’s the average permission fee forthe different types of clearance youundertake?

• What’s the highest fee you’ve beenasked to pay for a single item? And whatwas it for?

• What’s the highest fee you’ve actuallypaid?

• What proportion of your clearancerequests are granted without charge?

• What different types of chargingmechanism have you come across?(e.g. royalties per use, one-off licencefees, etc).

• Who pays the clearance fees? (i.e.library, departments or individuals?)

3.10.1 Average permission fee

This data were difficult to analyse as fewrespondents actually indicated what the feeswere for. Thus, some of the following notes



are interpretive rather than analytical. Therewere three “average coursepack” quotes thatranged from £350, through £650, up to£1,000. There were eleven smaller quotesranging from 70p to £66.34 which may wellhave been for individual items withincoursepacks or items for Short LoanCollections, as these were the mostfrequently cited services requiring clearance.Three respondents cited a five or six penceper page per student charge which againmust have been for coursepack or electronicshort loan materials. Two respondents saidthey wouldn’t pay a fee for material. Onewrote “We don’t pay - if we are asked topay, we find an alternative”, and anotherstated, “We have currently not been payingas our site acts as a vehicle to promote thepublishers materials and they only agree to avery small proportion to be used of eachbook.”

3.10.2 Highest fees requested and paid

Twenty-three respondents stated the highestfee they were asked to pay and the highestfee they have actually paid. The results arelisted in Table 4 (overleaf).

The top two highest prices were in dollars,which perhaps indicates that US rightsholders charge some of the highest fees. It isdifficult to draw any firm conclusions fromthis small sample, however, as in many

cases it was unclear exactly for what wasbeing charged. However it can be seen thatfees that appear small at the per page level,can soon escalate when multiplied by theaverage number of pages in a journal articlemultiplied by a large class of students. It isworth bearing in mind that it is the largestclasses of students that benefit the most fromcoursepacks, as traditional library provisioncannot adequately meet their needs.

3.10.3 Permission granted for no charge

Thirty-seven respondents indicated thepercentage of their permissions that weregranted for no charge. The responses can beseen in Fig 12.

The largest group of respondents to thisquestion (54%) indicated that less than 10%of their permissions were granted for nocharge. Six respondents (16%) stated thatbetween 31-50% of their permissions weregranted for no charge. There was anotherpeak of three respondents in the 71-80%range, and, interestingly, four in the91-100% range. Although this lattercategory contained two respondents that onprinciple did not pay for their permissions(either by only copying material that wasfee-free or by arrangement), that left twoothers that seemed to be quite successfulpermission-seekers!

Fig 12 Percentage of permissions granted for no charge

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Table 4 Highest fees requested and paid

Highest request What for?Did they

pay?Highest paid

“Many thousands ofdollars”

To place an article onCD-ROM

N“Less many thousands of dollars for the article onCD-ROM”

$7500 ? ? £217.50 for 150 copies

£2,265(£7.55 an article)

300 copies of anarticle

N 10p per page

£900 Coursepack Y Not given

£639(12p per page)

130 copies of 41 pp ofbook

Y Not given

£500 TV clip N £250

£400One item incoursepack

N not more than £200

£300Digitising bookchapter

N£222 for book chapter for use by 50 students in adistance learning course pack

£250 ? N 0 - we don’t use it if we have to pay

£200 Journal article N £25 – article which was very heavily used

£188.75(£7.55 an article)

25 copies of an article Y Not given

£174.85 One article Y Not given

$100 Book chapter N £41

£60(60p per copy)

100 copies of tinyphotograph

N Not given

£50 ? N £20 journal

£50 Book chapter Y Not given

£20 Business publication Y Not given

£7.50 Journal article Y Not given

£4.60Multiple journalarticles

Y Not given

£2.77 Journal article Y Not given

50p per page Book chapter Y Not given

25p page (per student) Y Not given

12p per page Book chapter ? Not given

Two respondents made interestingannotations to their response to thisquestion. One wrote that CLARCS requestswere never free, but that 46% of their direct

requests were. Another commented that 55%of Short Loan requests were granted withoutcharge, but only 7% of coursepack requests.



3.10.4 Charging mechanisms

Respondents were asked to list the differentcharging mechanisms that they hadexperienced. The results are given in Fig 13.

Six basic charging mechanisms wereidentified although they went by manydifferent names. The most popular was theone-off fee, not limited by time or theamount copied. BLDSC copyright-clearedcopies fall into this category. Fees could belimited by time in the form of annual fees oreven a fee per semester, however a fee basedon the number of pages or items copied and

also limited by time was the second mostcommon mechanism reported. This methodis used for CLARCS fees where the numberof pages in the item to be copied ismultiplied by the number of students on thecourse. With the advent of electroniccopying, fees per use – often referred to asroyalty fees – also occurred.

3.10.5 Who pays?

The final question in this section askedrespondents “who pays the clearance fees?(i.e. library, departments, individuals)”.There were 48 responses to this question.The results are shown in Fig 14.

Fig 13 Charging mechanisms

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Fee based onpages/itemscopied and

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Fee per use(print/view?)

Donation Buy-outs

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Fig 14 Who pays the fees

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Dept Library Library & Dept Library, Dept,and

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University University &Faculty

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Overall, departments were most frequentlylisted as those that pay the clearance fees.Fifty-two per cent of respondents saiddepartments’ alone foot the bills. Less thanhalf this number, 23%, said the library alonepaid the clearance fees. In six cases the feeswere split between the library anddepartments, and in three other cases withindividuals as well. Two said that theUniversity pays and one said that fees arepaid at University and Faculty level.

To understand which services each categorywere paying for, data from section B on thereasons for clearance were plotted againstthe above data. The analysis may be flawed

in that the services specified as requiringclearance in section B, may not have allbeen accounted for in section E, when thequestion about who pays for them was put.However, it was thought this correlationmay indicate some general trends. Fig 15illustrates what services departments werepaying for.

It can be seen that coursepacks featuredheavily in the analysis – 16 occurrences(64%) in total. There were 9 occurrences ofShort Loan, 3 of DL materials, and one ofElectronic Short Loan.

Fig 16 illustrates what clearance feeslibraries pay.

Fig 15 What departments pay for

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Fig 16 What libraries pay for

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Short Loan Collection clearance fees – bothprint and electronic - feature quite heavily inthis analysis. However three librariesindicated that they paid coursepack fees, andfees for DL materials. Three respondentsstated that their current paymentarrangements (two paid for DL materials,and one for coursepacks), were onlytemporary and that in future they would lookto charge the clearance fees back to internalcustomers.

3.11 The length of the clearanceprocess

One of the most frequent complaints aboutthe clearance process given in section Dconcerned the length of time it takes to getpermission. Section F of the questionnaireasked five questions about the length of theclearance process:

• Can you estimate how many items youattempt to clear (as an organisation) perannum?

• What’s the average time a permissiontakes to come through? (please specifyfor different types of material andpurpose if possible)

• What percentage of permission requestsdo you have to chase?

• How many times will you chase arequest before giving up?

• What proportion of permission requestsare never answered?

It was expected that not all respondentswould have accurate data with which toanswer these questions, so estimates wereencouraged. This does mean that the resultsare indicative rather than categorical.

3.11.1 Number of items cleared

Twenty-nine respondents estimated thenumber of items they cleared per annum.Three respondents gave their answer interms of coursepacks produced, namely, lessthan ten, 22 and 100 per annum. The otherresponses are shown in Table 5.

Table 5 Items cleared per annum

Items cleared p.a. No. of respondents

1-100 10

101-500 7

501-1000 6

Over 1000 4

Excluding the large number of items clearedby one dedicated copyright unit with 24 fulltime staff (7,000-8,000 p.a.), the mediannumber of items cleared per annum was 300and the mean number was 439. However,the largest group of respondents clearedunder 100 items per annum. Two institutionsonly cleared 2-3 items a year. Of the nineorganisations that cleared over 500 items ayear, eight did so using staff based in thelibrary. Five of these had dedicatedcopyright staff based in the library and threeused regular library staff who dealt withclearance alongside their other duties. Theother organisation had a dedicated copyrightofficer based outside the library.

3.11.2 Average time to gain permission

Respondents were asked how long it takes,on average, for permission to come through,and to specify according to different types ofmaterial and purpose where possible.Thirty-six responded to the question. Twentygave a figure without specifying the type ofmaterial or purpose to which it applied andthese responses are illustrated in Fig 17(overleaf). The other sixteen responses areshown in Table 6 (overleaf).

Two weeks was the median length of timetaken to gain permission, although the mean(and mode) was one month. However,waiting for two or three months was notuncommon, and for some the waiting timewas over three months. Those respondentsthat specified the length of time taken for avariety of clearance purposes shed morelight on this. (Please note that the number ofrespondents does not add up to 16 asrespondents gave different estimates fordifferent clearance activities.)

lssf



Fig 17 Weeks to gain permission

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Table 6 Clearance time by clearance type

Type of clearanceNo. of

respondentsTime taken for

clearance (days)

BLDSC 3 3-14

CLARCS 10 instant - 21

CLARCS Digitisation 1 90

HERON 1 40

Music 1 60

Pictures/extracts 1 135

Direct to publisher 8 10-75

Many respondents drew the distinctionbetween the time taken for clearance ifCLARCS had a mandate compared to thetime taken if they do not. Responses such as“CLARCS 1-2 weeks, Direct 4-8 weeks”were fairly common. Another respondentcompared the response time from UK andUS publishers thus: “Direct from UKpublishers - 2 weeks, Direct from USpublishers - 2-3 months”.

3.11.3 Chasing permissions

Respondents were asked to give thepercentage of permissions they had to chasebefore receiving a response. Twenty-nineresponded to this question, three of whichsaid they did not have to chase anyresponses. The remaining 90% ofrespondents had to chase. The responses aregiven in Fig 18.

The largest group of respondents (8) chasedbetween one and ten per cent of theirpermissions. The remaining responses werespread right across the spectrum with twosaying they had to chase all or virtually allof their permission requests for a response.The mean percentage of items requiringchasing was 35%. The median figure was30%.

Eighteen respondents gave both theapproximate number of items they clearedper annum, and the percentage of itemsrequiring chasing per annum. This allowedthe calculation of a mean number of itemschased per annum. Excluding the unusuallyhigh number of items chased by the largededicated Copyright Unit (4200), theaverage number of items chased per HEIcame to 97. The median number of itemschased per annum was 40.



Fig 18 Permissions requiring chasing

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The second question asked respondents howmany times they would chase an item beforegiving up. Twenty-four respondentsanswered this question. Two stated theywould “keep going as long as the personasking for the copy is willing to wait”.Another said they would “never give up!”.The responses of the remaining 21 are givenin Fig 19.

Fig 19 Times a permission is chased

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Most respondents said they would chasemore than once – and four stated that theywould chase up to five or six times. Themedian number of chases performed wastwo.

Fifteen respondents gave the approximatenumber of items they cleared per annum, thepercentage of items requiring chasing perannum, as well as the average number ofchases they gave to an item per annum. Thisallowed the calculation of a mean number ofchases per annum. Again, excluding theunusually high number of chases performedby the large dedicated Copyright Unit, theaverage number of chases per annum was315.

3.11.4 Requests never answered

The final question in this section asked howmany permission requests are neveranswered at all. Twenty-three answered thisquestion. Two stated that they alwaysreceive a response. Five said that very fewrequests were never answered. One wrote“Publishers are hopeless if we have to godirect to them...most never respond but aspart of the total clearance process this is avery small [percentage]”. Others concurredthat it was the direct applications topublishers that were more likely to receiveno response. Another elaborated that it was“mainly overseas publishers” that fell intothis category. The remaining respondentsgave a percentage of their total requests thatnever receive a response. The results aregiven in Fig 20 (overleaf).



Fig 20 Requests that are never answered

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Fifty-six per cent of those answering thisquestion said that between one and ten percent of their requests were never answered.A smaller proportion said the figure wasbetween 11 and 20 per cent. One respondentstated that 80% of their HERON requestshad received no response. This was probablydue to the pilot nature of this new service.Excluding this one respondent’s experienceof HERON, the mean proportion of requestsnever answered was 12.5%, while themedian was 5%.

Thirteen respondents gave both theapproximate number of items they clearedper annum, and the percentage of requeststhat were never answered. From thesefigures, the mean number of requests thatwere never answered came to 25, while themedian figure was higher at 40.

3.12 What the future holdsSection G offered respondents theopportunity to give their view on what thefuture holds for copyright clearance. Thefirst question was a “straw poll” on thequestion: “Do you think copyright clearanceis going to become easier in the future?”.Forty-four respondents answered thisquestion, sixteen (36%) believed it wouldget easier, 28 (64%) thought it would not.

Fig 21 Is copyright clearance going tobecome easier?

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3.12.1 Copyright clearance will get easier…

Those respondents that thought copyrightclearance would become easier gave avariety of reasons for their optimism. One ortwo felt it just couldn’t get any worse, withone saying “Otherwise the law will beignored - ‘they’ cannot sue everybody.”Only one respondent put their hope in thenew EU Copyright Directive to improve theclearance situation. More cited a change inthe licensing and clearance arrangements asa catalyst for improvement – i.e. “morepublishers… participating in the CLA/CCCagreement which makes clearance muchquicker”, and the establishment of HERONas an alternative one-stop-shop.

Others thought that the solution wastechnological and allied to a shift in theculture of academic publishing. Onerespondent wrote:

“I think the current move towardse-archiving, once it becomes a criticalmass and RAE-acceptable, will lead to thedownfall of traditional journals and thefreeing of academic work for academicuse. Well, on optimistic days I do!”

Some commented that the increase inelectronic products, such as e-journals andfull-text databases, that can be used underlicence, will gradually eliminate the need to



clear multiple print copies for coursepacks,or for copies for Short Loan. Others felt thatan increase in the electronic trading ofintellectually property would mean thatpublishers would be more geared up todealing with electronic copyright clearancerequests, and therefore the process would bequicker.

3.12.2 Copyright clearance will not geteasier…

The reasons why respondents thought thatclearance would not get easier fell into fourmain categories: electronic copyrightclearance, legislation, licences, and volumeof clearance.

3.12.2.1 Electronic copyright clearanceSix respondents thought that the relativelynew need to gain copyright permission toinclude items in electronic collections wouldincrease the complexity of the clearanceprocess. One of the reasons cited was thatmany “publishers [are] not in any system ofclearance” for digital copyright. Anotherspeculated whether the BLDSC servicewould “transpose…into an electronicenvironment”.

3.12.2.2 LegislationThere were many concerns about theforthcoming EU Directive and subsequentchanges to copyright law. One respondentwrote: “[The] implementation of EUdirectives may mean more material has to becleared individually (i.e. if S41 disappears)”.Another thought the “forthcomingDirective” was “bound to be more difficult”.It struck one respondent that copyright isnow “an international problem which willnot be solved in our interests.”

3.12.2.3 LicencesFive respondents made comments about theincreasing volume and complexity oflicensing arrangements. One respondentwrote: “more and more legislation isappearing, e.g. now for photocopyingimages within books!” Another stated:

“More and more has to be clearedseparately for each item and more andmore fees paid (e.g. under CLA HEdigitisation licence) this increases theadministrative burden…[The] complexityof licences and material covered bycopyright (e.g. all the electronicdevelopments) means that we spend moretime puzzling out what is legal and makingsure we are applying the right rules.”

Two felt the situation would be exacerbatedas fewer publishers licensed their rights tointermediaries. One wrote: “I think that inthe future publishers will be less willing toallow rights agencies to work on their behalfparticularly when clearing forinternet/digitisation use.”

Three respondents felt that licensors werebecoming more “aggressive” by activelypursuing those organisations that they feltshould be taking out their licences. Oneperson bemoaned what they saw to be theeducation sector’s weak bargaining positionwhen it came to copyright licences, andanother complained that the “The CVCPseem unable to negotiate a sensible licence”and that “The CLA /publishers seem to haveall the clout.”

3.12.2.4 Volume of permissionsSome respondents saw the volume ofclearance increasing in the future with morerestrictive legislation necessitating moreclearance, and for a wider variety ofservices. “People will want to use copyrightmaterial in more and more different ways”,said one respondent. It was felt that theincrease in demand would slow theclearance process down - as anotherrespondent wrote: “I’ve been waiting yearsand people are still saying ‘the publisherscan’t cope with this’”.



3.13 Other commentsThe last question in Section G gaverespondents an opportunity to make anyother comments about “copyright clearancein libraries generally, or your library inparticular”.

Many comments reiterated how burdensomecopyright clearance was. Attention wasdrawn to ambiguous legislation and licences,the time-consuming nature of clearance andthe costly administrative burden. One personwrote:

“It has created a whole level ofadministration, in the library mainlyrelating to our offprints collection, and theneed to constantly monitor the facultyadministrators and ensure that new staffare properly informed.”

Another suggested:

“Clearance is very costly in administrativeterms. Agencies and owners should look atstreamlining applications through Websitesor agencies and go for standard pricing.Reduced prices would expand the market,and revenue flows - read Adam Smith!”

Three libraries stated that they only haveenough staff to take on clearance for libraryservices and that they have to getdepartments to undertake their owncoursepack clearance. Many realised thatthis wasn’t economically sensible for theorganisation as a whole, and stated the needfor a centralised copyright unit.

“Except where obtaining permissiondirectly affects the library, I think thatobtaining clearance (e.g. for courses)should be done by those who areresponsible for putting the materialtogether (and who pay for it) or preferablyby a central Copyright unit/person.”

Another wrote:

“I think the copyright situation is gettingso complex now that real expertise isneeded to keep legal. Specialist dedicatedunits need to be established withinorganisations who need a lot of clearance.I don’t have strong feelings about whetherthis sits within the library structure or not,so long as we can work closely with theUnit.”

One or two respondents looked at thecopyright situation more broadly andsuggested action:

“the LIS community needs to get its acttogether to influence all those involved(rights holders, publishers, governments)to improve the copyright situationespecially in educational establishments.The process is unnecessarily complicatedand the CLA never give a straight answer!Our students are losing out and cannotunderstand why an item can’t go into theshort loan when so much other informationis freely available over the WWW. Studentsand lecturers get frustrated and I feel like abureaucrat which is not why I chose acareer in librarianship. (I had one instancewhere a law lecturer here had written anarticle (about music copyright) and wantedit to go into the short loan - the publisherrefused permission and I had to tell him hecouldn’t put his own article into thecollection! Ridiculous!)”

Two respondents commented that theywould be starting electronic reservecollections in the future, one of which wouldbe using HERON.



3.14 Copyright Clearance Units andCopyright Officers

The final section of the questionnaire wasaddressed to organisations with dedicatedcopyright clearance posts or units. Thequestions were:

• What was the impetus behind theestablishment of the copyright unit orcopyright post(s)?

• When was the unit or post(s)established?

• How is the unit or post(s) funded?

• How is the unit or post(s) managed?(i.e. to whom do they report?)

• What proportion of the unit or post’stime is spent giving copyright advice asopposed to performing copyrightclearance?

Eighteen respondents completed this section.Referring back to the data provided inSection A, it could be seen that the numberof dedicated copyright clearance staff inthese organisations ranged from 0.2 to 24.The mean was 2.4 staff and the median andmode was 0.5 staff.

3.14.1 Why establish a copyright post/unit?

There were a variety of motives forestablishing a dedicated copyright clearancepost or unit. One third of respondents (6)cited the desire to “stay within the law” astheir primary impetus. One organisation hadpreviously been fined for “selling illegalcoursepacks” and had set up the Unit toensure it didn’t happen again. One personwrote:

“The VC was frightened he was going tobe jailed for unlicensed computer softwareand hired me to go to jail instead. I jest - Ithink!”

Four respondents cited the “CLA” as one oftheir main reasons for setting up a copyrightunit. Two expounded on this: one said theunit was initially responsible for dealingwith CLA surveys, and the other said theunit was set up in response to the 1998Licence with accompanying HE CopyingAccord.

Three respondents cited efficiency, orderand visibility as the primary motives forsetting up a centralised copyright unit. Asone stated, the impetus behind theestablishment of the unit was:

“To centralise the clearances which weretaking place within each faculty. Toprovide a point of contact for help andadvice. To raise awareness of copyrightwithin the University and ensurecompliance.”

For another it was:

“To have an authority on Copyright towhom staff would be able to direct queriesin all aspects of Copyright. Also to ensurea standard procedure is maintained acrossthe University.”

Others set up copyright units for particularinitiatives such as electronic reserveprojects, and coursepack services, or inresponse to general demand, or in one case,the “awareness of [the] importance ofcopyright in [the] QAA”. One largeCopyright Unit was set up in response to theorganisation’s huge publishing output.

3.14.2 When were the posts/unitsestablished?

Sixteen respondents stated when their unit orpost was established. This information isshown in Table 7 (overleaf).



Table 7 ‘Age’ of the clearance units/posts

Yearestablished

Years inexistence

No. ofunits/posts

1971 29 1

1984 16 1

1988 12 2

1989 11 1

1990 10 1

1997 3 2

1998 2 3

1999 1 4

2000 0.1 1

It can be seen that the majority of units wereset up in the last three years, although a fairnumber have been in existence for over tenyears. All but one unit was set up after thecreation of the CLA in 1982.

3.14.3 How is the unit funded?

Again, sixteen responded to this question.The responses are given in Fig 22.

It can be seen that the majority of posts arefunded out of a library or informationservices budget. Other posts are eitherfunded centrally or through a generic“learning support”-type budget. Tworespondents mentioned funding from a trustor grant but no further details were given.

3.14.4 How is the unit/post managed?

As was to be expected considering the widevariety of job titles involved in copyrightclearance, there were a range of personnelresponsible for line-managing the clearanceactivities. The answers are given below:

How is the unit/post managed?

• Pro-Vice Chancellor

• University Librarian

• Librarian

• Deputy Director of LIS

• Assistant Director of InformationServices.

• TV Services Manager and Head ofAcademic Services

• Online Learning Centre Manger andLearning Support Services Manager

• Dept Admin Manager

• Academic Services Librarian

• Copyright Co-ordinator

• Student Services Librarian

• Project Manager

Fig 22 How the unit/post is funded

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Library Centralfunding

Generallearningsupport

Trust/Grant Dept HEFC

No.

of r

espo

nden

ts



Those responsible for managing theclearance activities of the dedicated postsand units ranged from Pro-Vice Chancellorthrough Librarians, Library Staff, CopyrightCo-ordinators, and Project Managers.

3.14.5 Advice vs clearance

The last question in this section asked whatproportion of the post/unit’s total“copyright” time is spent giving copyrightadvice as opposed to clearance. Elevenrespondents were able to answer this bygiving a percentage. The results areillustrated in Fig 23.

Fig 23 Percentage advice vs clearance

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

1-10 11-20 21-30 31-40 41-50

Percentage

No.

of r

espo

nden

ts

No respondent spent more than 50% of theirtime giving advice. The most commonresponse was ten per cent, although fourrespondents spent between 11-20% of theirtime giving copyright advice.

RESPONSES FROM COPYRIGHT ADVISORS


4.0 Responses from Copyright Advisors

To supplement the questionnaire tocopyright clearers an email was distributedasking those that only advised on copyrightto answer some questions on their advisoryrole.

4.1 OrganisationsEleven organisations responded to the email,ten of which described their organisation asa Higher Education Institution and one ofwhich was from an organisation representingHE Libraries.

4.2 Job titlesOnce again, there was a wide range of jobtitles associated with copyright advice inHEIs. However one theme did arise: six ofthe ten HEI respondents were employed atAssistant or Subject Librarian level and hadcopyright responsibilities that wereadditional to their main duties. Four weresubject specialists with the additional title of“Copyright Officer”, “Copyright LicensingCo-ordinator” or “Copyright Co-ordinator”.One respondent had copyright duties writteninto her main job title of “IPR and ProjectsOfficer”. The four other HEI respondentsincluded a “Head of Library and MediaServices”, a “Teaching Fellow & Open &Distance Learning Policy Manager”, a“Legal and Constitutional Adviser”, and a“Planning and Administration Co-ordinatorfrom an Information Services Directorate”.

4.3 Time spent giving copyrightadvice

Only five respondents gave an estimate ofthe amount of time they spent advising oncopyright. The responses were convertedinto percentages. They ranged from 1-20%of a staff member’s time. One respondentwrote, “I would say that I am rarelyconsulted, perhaps 4/5 times a year, but thatsome of the questions can take an inordinateamount of time to resolve”. Another

respondent highlighted that it wasn’t just thecopyright advice that occupied her, but thetime spent “learning up about copyright”.

4.4 Advisory areasThe final question asked respondents to listthe sorts of topics they have had to cover ascopyright advisors. Some responses coveredtheir general remit as an advisor and othersgave some of the more detailed queries theyhave had to answer.

In terms of the overall remit of the copyrightadvisor, one respondent wrote:

“My role in theory involves onlyresponsibility for copyright matters as theyrelate to the library, and one of the seniormembers of the University’s centraladministration has overall responsibilityfor copyright matters at the University.However, many general questions aboutcopyright are posed to the Library(presumably because library users areaccustomed to view the library as ‘theplace to get information’, and don’t viewthe central administration in this way)either by phone or in person at the enquirydesks, and these questions tend to bereferred on to me.”

No other respondents drew this distinction,but the core areas on which most seemed toadvise were:

• What is allowable under the CLABlanket Licence;

• What is allowable under the DACS,NLA, and ERA licences;

• How to create coursepacks;

• What can and cannot go into Short LoanCollections.

RESPONSES FROM COPYRIGHT ADVISORS


However, the actual breadth and diversity ofqueries was far greater. One respondent’ssample of queries included “copying [an]illustration from [an] old book to use in [a]new, 1920s photographs, tape-recordedarchive of dialect speakers…[and] how totrace [a] copyright holder for a song”. Othersmentioned digitisation, copyright in theses,and “the rather bizarre restrictionsconcerning replacing vandalised pages”.Two people mentioned that their copyrightduties involved negotiating licences forcommercially produced electronic databases.

However, many stated that they “produced anumber of leaflets and copy for our website,and regularly do mailshots to our academicstaff to remind them of copyrightregulations” or similar.

Only one person was also involved inadvising staff on their own copyright interms of “ownership, publishing and relatedcontracts” in addition to the exploitation ofthird party copyright.

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5.0 Interview visits

Five HEIs with Copyright ClearanceServices were selected for interview. Theywere selected on the basis of the number ofyears they had been established, theirgeographical location, whether they were a“new” or “old” University and whether theservice was based in the Library orelsewhere. The aim was to get a range oforganisations with different experiences.Table 8 describes the interview candidates’organisations.

The purpose of the interviews was to gain afuller picture of the variety of copyrightclearance services offered in HEIs. Theinterview schedule covered the followingmain areas:

• How the copyright clearance services fitsinto the larger intellectual propertymanagement structure in theorganisation;

• Why the service was established andhow it is funded;

• How the service is received by, andpromoted to, the organisation;

• How clearances are processed;

• Views on the future of copyrightclearance;

• How the service staff keep up-to-datewith copyright issues.

5.1 How the clearance service fits intothe overall IP management structure

Table 9 illustrates the responsibilities of thefive clearance services. It can be seen thatthe remit of the services varies from takingresponsibility for a whole range of differentlegal and intellectual property matters suchas data protection, ownership of theorganisation’s copyright and negotiatinglicences for electronic resources, through toa specific coursepack clearance-only remit.

Table 8 Organisations selected for interview

OrganisationLocation ofclearanceservice

Yearsexperience

New or oldHEI

Total students(1998/99)

Location of HEI

A Library 1 Old 4,020 South East England

B Library 4 New 22,544 North England

C Library 5 New 23,042 North England

D Elsewhere 10 Old 19,571 Wales

E Elsewhere 29 Old 148,675 East England

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Table 9 Responsibilities of the clearance services

Organisation A B C D E

© awareness raising Y Y Y Y Y

Advice on use of third party © N Y Y Y Y

ClearanceY

(coursepacksonly)

Y(except

music/ film)Y Y Y

© Licences - Designated contact N N Y Y Y

Main © Advisory Centre for HEI N Y Y Y Y

Negotiate electronic resourcelicences

N N N YY

(in conjunction with Library)

Protection of Univ IP N NY

(adviceonly)

NY

(Owns © in Univ.teaching materials)

Data protection N N N Y N

The clearance services within institutions Dand E had the most IPR responsibilities.Institution D had recently merged itscomputing and library service and a newpost “Copyright, Data Protection andLicensing Officer” was created out of therestructure. As the job title suggests, thispost is the focus for IP management for theinstitution. This institution is the only onethat dealt with data protection and copyrightclearance in the same place. Institution E isa large clearance service with 24 full-timecopyright staff. It is little wonder thereforethat they are able to take on so many rightsmanagement responsibilities. Institutions Band C had similar responsibilities to eachother. This may stem from the fact that theirsituations are similar: both are new

universities with large student numbers, andboth units were set up in the last 4-5 years.Both services were seen as the maincopyright advisory centre for theirorganisation, and took on a wide variety ofclearances. The “youngest” clearanceservice in Institution A had the most closelydefined remit. This service was onlyresponsible for coursepack clearance andsome awareness raising. It may be that thisrole will expand once the service becomesmore established.

Table 10 (overleaf) illustrates some of theother intellectual property responsibilitieswithin the organisations, and who takes onthose responsibilities.

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Table 10 Other IP responsibilities

A B C D E

Overall IPRresponsibilityfor HEI

InstitutionSecretary

UniversitySecretary andLicensingCo-ordinator

Pro ViceChancellor(Research &BusinessDevelopment)

Research andConsultancy

UniversitySecretary

Protection ofHEI IP


UniversitySecretary andResearchCentre

BusinessDvlpmnt Office


[ClearanceService ownsmost HEI IP]

Universitycontracts


UniversitySecretary andLicensingCo-ordinator

BusinessDevelopmentOffice


Finance Dept

Copyrightlicencesdesignatedcontact


UniversitySecretary

[ClearanceService]

[ClearanceService]

[ClearanceService]

Data protection

InstitutionSecretary andCirculationLibrarian

Head ofComputing andCommunicationServices

PlanningSupport Office

[ClearanceService]

DataProtectionCo-ordinator

Patents N/A

UniversitySecretary andResearchCentre

BusinessDevelopmentOffice


Finance Dept

Licensingelectronicresources

Head of PublicServices(within Info.Services)

ElectronicResourcesCo-ordinator

CollectionDevelopmentManager

[ClearanceService]

[ClearanceService]

Otherclearances

Dept’ladministrators

Learning andTechnologyServices -clearance foruse of film andmusic in studentprojects

-Some Deptsmay clear theirown rights

-

Other adviceMediaServicesLibrarian

- -Graphics Unit;Library

-

It can be seen that in four of the fiveinstitutions, overall IPR responsibility laywith a senior member of administrationstaff. In two of the five institutions, aresearch division managed the organisation’sown intellectual property. In two other casesthe clearance unit took on this role.University contracts were managed by avariety of different departments rangingfrom the Institution Secretary through theBusiness Development Office to the FinanceDepartment. The designated contact forinstitution-wide copyright licences such asthe CLA Licence was either the institution

secretary or the clearance unit itself. A widerange of different university departmentsmanaged data protection. This may havebeen because the legislation has recentlychanged, causing the data protection issue tobe revisited by organisations. Patents did notfall within the remit of any of the clearanceservices interviewed. They remained theresponsibility of commercial or researcharms of the organisation. Two clearanceservices were involved in the negotiation ofelectronic resource licences. In the otherthree cases this was the responsibility oflibrary staff. Similarly two services indicated

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that other parties within the institution alsocleared their own rights. In Institution B aspecific service (entitled Learning andTechnology Services) were responsible for aspecific subset of clearances, namely,clearance for the use of film and music instudent projects.

5.2 Establishment of the clearanceservice

5.2.1 Why the service was established

The introduction of the CLA Licence andCLARCS motivated many institutions toappoint specific staff to handle copyrightand its associated clearances. Indeed four ofthe five services interviewed cited the CLALicence and/or CLARCS as one of theprinciple factors behind the establishment oftheir service. Institution A found thatincreasingly restrictive CLA licences meantthat clearances were becoming tooburdensome for departmental administrativestaff. Academics therefore lobbied for acentralised clearance service that was set upin the Library. In the three other cases theimpetus for establishing the service camefrom the Library itself. Institution B wrote aproposal document that gave the followingpersuasive arguments for setting up aclearance service:

“[A centralised clearance service] enablesexperience and knowledge to beconsolidated for the benefit of the wholeUniversity and enables the sharing ofexperience with similar services in otherUniversities. This should ensure that theUniversity not only complies withcopyright legislation by that the best valuefor money is obtained when negotiatingclearances. The availability of the servicealso raises awareness of how copyrightmaterial can be used imaginatively andlegitimately to support students’ learning.”

The document also listed the followingbenefits of a clearance service:

“ • Reduce the risk of legal actionagainst the University and itsemployees for breach of copyright –failure to obtain the necessaryclearances could result in legalaction against the University, itsmanagers, and lecturing staffincluding, in extreme cases, thepossibility of criminal proceedings.

• Provide an enabling service tosupport innovation in learningstrategies, especially open anddistance learning, by negotiatingrights clearances for the inclusionof copyright material in learningmaterials (in both printed andelectronic formats).

• Improve the educational experienceof students by negotiatingclearances for the production ofcourse readers so that students caneasily obtain basic informationneeded for modules which they arestudying.”

This service was initially set up as a pilot in1997 for six months. The success of theservice has meant it has continued on apermanent basis

Institution C gave similar reasons forestablishing their service. The LearningCentre was concerned that the institutionstayed within the law, and that they offered astreamlined service to staff thus encouraginglegitimate and creative learning materials. Itwas also a Librarian at Institution D thatchampioned the creation of the “DataProtection, Copyright and LicensingCo-ordinator” post. The only very differentapproach to establishing a clearance servicecame from Institution E. Here the servicewas originally set up to support thepublishing activities of the organisation.Although the remit of the service has nowconsiderably widened, it is still principallyconcerned with published outputs, rather

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than “home-photocopied” coursepacks orteaching materials.

5.2.2 How the service is funded

All the clearance services interviewedreceive top-sliced funding from theinstitution. In all cases copyright fees arecharged back to internal customers, butadministration charges are not passed on. AtInstitution A, funding for the CopyrightLibrarian and a small budget of £1000 p.a.forms a part of the Librarian’s annual budgetbid to the Institution. The budget pays forstationery, training courses, and for someinterim copyright fees before the monies arereclaimed from departments. At InstitutionB, the establishment of a campus bookshopby the Library created surplus income thatwas used initially to fund the clearance staffduring the pilot stage of the service. Withrecent restructuring, the clearance servicehas been fully incorporated into the LearningSupport Services structure. Somedepartments choose to sell coursepacks tostudents through the Campus Bookshop.Originally the bookshop earned £2 on eachpack sold. However, the new management ofthe bookshop are adding 10% commission inthe first year. The clearance service invoicesthe bookshop for the copyright fees for thepacks, and all unsold packs have to bepurchased by the Department. Last yearalmost £6,000 was lost through unsoldcoursepacks. However, the CLA’s recentlyproposed “sale or return” coursepackclearances initiative may eliminate suchlosses. At Institution C, the central fundingfor the copyright unit also covers the maininstitution-wide copyright licence fees(CLA, NLA, DACS, ERA, and OU).Institution E has the largest staff bill at£600,000 per annum - and the operation isstill expanding. Six new posts were createdlast year. Each course has its own budgetfrom which copyright clearance charges arepaid.

5.3 Relationship between theclearance service and theorganisation

The relationship between a copyrightclearance service and the organisation itserves is an interesting one. At the sametime the service can be seen to be botherecting barriers to the use of copyrightmaterials by raising awareness of copyrightlaw, and dismantling those barriers throughthe provision of a one-stop-shop clearanceservice. This question intended to examinethat relationship at the five institutionsinterviewed.

5.3.1 Promotion of services to theorganisation

The clearance units used a variety ofmethods to promote their services to theirorganisations. These included web pages,information leaflets, meetings with courseleaders and heads of schools, email adverts,and memos on changes to the licence and soon. Two institutions run internal trainingcourses and presentations on copyright.Another places notices by photocopiersexplaining what constitutes coursepackcopying, and advertising the clearanceservice. One service is advertised in theUniversity Handbook. At Institution Bsubject learning advisors promote theservice to the departments with which theyregularly liaise.

5.3.2 How the service is received by theorganisation

Four of the five institutions received positiveinformal feedback from their internalcustomers. At Institution A, the CopyrightLibrarian has received praise for her newlydesigned web pages and copyright clearanceforms. She has also built up a goodrelationship with staff through her “opendoor” policy. Institution E saw a positiveattitude as being very important whendealing with copyright. They never like to

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say “no” to a request outright, but alwayslike to provide alternative options for theirinternal customers. Rather than picturingrights issues as another hurdle over whichacademics must leap, they offer to “take theproblem off [academics’] hands” so that itwill be “one less thing for them to worryabout”. Rights are seen as an essential partof the teaching materials production processat Institution E. This is not only because ofthe professional, published nature of thematerials, but also because the RightsManager has the authority to preventpublication of those materials if he is notsatisfied that all the rights issues have beenproperly dealt with. Needless to say no otherinstitution had this level of control overcopied materials at their organisation.

Alongside the generally positive feedbackreceived by the clearance service atInstitution B, there is some confusion andwariness at training sessions (mainlydisbelief at the various terms andconditions). A small amount of negativefeedback has been received concerning thecost and the length of time it takes to prepareand clear a course pack. At Institution C thenumber of enquiries and requests aregrowing so this is taken as a positive sign.

5.4 The clearance processes5.4.1 Clearances undertaken

Three of the services interviewed would takeon any clearance requests submitted to them.Institution A restricts its service tocoursepack clearances and is rarely asked totake on other clearances. However, theCopyright Librarian may assist inidentifying rights holders for otherpermissions if they are not too busy.Institution B tends to avoid audiovisualclearances, such as use of music/film instudents’ projects, although they do offeradvice. This is because of the amount ofwork involved, the high number of requestsand the low success rate. The technicians inLearning & Technology Services usuallyhandle the bulk of these requests.

5.4.2 Receiving requests

All of the services have designed clearancerequest forms to ensure they receive all theinformation they need for the clearanceprocess. Institutions D and E have one formper item to be cleared, whereas InstitutionsA-C allow multiple requests to be entered onone form. Institution D has two forms: onefor book requests and one for journals.Institution C has three forms, one forCLARCS, one for HERON, and one foranything else (e.g. clearance for a lecturer’sown book). Institutions C and E haveguidance notes to accompany the forms.Samples of the forms can be found inAppendix 3.

The forms vary according to the range ofclearance work undertaken by the service.The common denominators of each form arethe bibliographic details of the item to becleared, the number of copies required andinternal customer details. The more detailedforms ask for:

• Format of reproduction (Hard copy,CD-ROM, Internet etc.);

• The proposed distribution (internal, UK,world-wide, etc);

• Two copies of the material to be cleared(including the copyright line of theoriginal source, etc.)

• Publisher name and address;

• Percentage of original book or article;

• Details of illustrations or figures andwhether they are to be redrawn;

• If the material was authored by amember of the Institution.

Institution A is in the process of designing anew clearance database through which ithopes to receive requests online.

In terms of lead-in times, one institutionsuggests a four week lead-in time, threeinstitutions recommend that requests are

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submitted six to eight weeks prior to thecourse start date, although Institution E asksfor a six month lead-in time for textclearances. (Audiovisual clearances can bevirtually instantaneous as they are agreed bytelephone.) However, these are onlyrecommendations, as one interviewee said:

“I usually ask for 6-8 weeks, but thatdoesn’t seem possible for most academics!Either they don’t realise they needclearance until just before the coursebegins, or they don’t know what materialthey will be using until the last minute.”

Backlogs of requests are common as a result.Institution B dates the request forms onarrival so they can be dealt with on a strictlyfirst-come, first-served basis. At InstitutionA the backlogs deter some departments fromusing the centralised service if they are in ahurry. Such departments often clear theirown coursepacks as well using the centralservice.

5.4.3 Distribution of workload

The clearance service at Institution Aconsists of the Copyright Librarian soinevitably she takes on all the clearancework. Only the reprographics element is leftto the ordering department. Two members ofstaff run the services at institutions B, C andD. At Institution B the workload isdistributed as follows between the full-timeCopyright Clearance Officer and a part-time(0.5 FTE) Copyright Assistant.

Copyright Clearance Officer -• identification of rights holders/contact

details

• contact CLARCS (online database) ordraft letters to rights holders,

• provide progress reports to requester

• establish costs –whether CLARCS feesor invoices from rights holders

• update clearance database

• final report (excel spreadsheet, or table)

• authorise any CLARCS fees/re-charge/pass invoices to Schools

• if course pack is for sale throughbookshop:

• collate and compile material

• determine reprographics costs

• send to reprographics with appropriatecover pages

• update pricing/stock control spreadsheetfor bookshop

• deliver finished packs to the bookshop

Copyright Assistant-• check address details, fax numbers

• fax requests to rights holders

• update database and code book

• sort incoming mail & faxes

• send out chaser letters

• administration tasks connected withtraining sessions etc

At Institution C, the Senior InformationAdvisor (Media Services), spends 40% ofher total employment time dealing withcopyright matters. These include managingthe clearance service and dealing withadvisory questions. This takes about 40 percent of her time. The 0.5 FTE ClearanceAssistant deals with all aspects of theclearance work. There is a similar set up atInstitution D where the Data Protection,Copyright and Licensing Co-ordinatormanages the service, and a ClearanceAssistant spends two hours per day (approx.30% of her time), clearing the rights.

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The 24 full-time clearance staff at Institution E are organised into the following teamstructure:

RightsManager

Deputy RightsManager(Acquisitions)

RightsAdvisor

RightsAdvisor

3 RightsExecutives

3 RightsExecutives

3 S+C staff3 S+C staff

Assistant

FinanceAdministrator

3 S+C staff

Legal AffairsAdministrator

Assistant

It can be seen that the Deputy RightsManager who oversees two teams, each ofwhich is headed up by a Rights Advisor,manages the main clearance work. The twoteams used to be divided by specialism intoaudiovisual or text clearances. However,they found that the different teams werenegotiating with the same rights holders forpermission to make material available indifferent formats (CD and print, say). Theyare now reorganised into a faculty-basedstructure, each team serving a differentcombination of faculties. The new structureallows one team to assist another if one isless busy than the other.

5.4.4 Set procedures

Each institution had its own establishedclearance procedures depending on the typeof clearance involved. However, the firststage of all text clearance processes wasbibliographic checking of the receiptedrequests. A number of bibliographic toolswere cited as being of use. These are listedbelow:

• CLARCS database

• Local OPACs

• BL OPAC

• COPAC

• Internet (e.g. publishers home pages)

• Dawsons

• LibWeb

• Ullrichs

• Book Data’s Bookfind

• AcqWeb’s Directory of Publishers andVendors

The practice at Institution A is to check theCLA database for mandates and prices andthen submit an initial quotation to thedepartment for approval, before approachingthe CLA for formal clearance. AtInstitutions B and E, the material is checkedto see whether it actually requires clearance.For example, some material may be coveredby an existing agreement (e.g. the BMJallows course pack copying for no charge if

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the institution holds a subscription). Othermaterial may be out of copyright or in thepublic domain. Some copying may actuallybe regarded as insubstantial use or fairdealing. No institution checks to see whetherthe material exists on an electronic resourcesuch as a full-text database or electronicjournal. (The potential benefit of doing so isthat the resource may be governed by alicence that allows educational copies of thematerial to be made.) This is partly becausethe volume of requests makes itimpracticable, and partly because theyassume the academic will have done thischecking before submitting the request.Institution C did say that they mightconsider doing this when they begin clearingfor an electronic reserve service18. This isbecause it will save them digitisation costsas well as copyright clearance costs.

Two institutions check if the material isauthored within the institution. Institution Awill contact the rightsholder directly forpermission if the CLA fee for use of suchmaterial is high. Institution B is responsiblefor the reproduction of coursepacks oncepermission has been received. None of theother institutions interviewed take on thisresponsibility, unless the cleared materialsare for library use – e.g. copying to replace alost item. Institution A passes a permissionnote to departments that then do the copyingand return a copy to the Copyright Librarianfor her records.

5.4.5 Tools (database/standard letters)

All the services interviewed used a databaseto manage the clearance process and all fiveof them – from the newest to the largest –created that database in Microsoft Access.The databases varied in complexity. AtInstitutions A and B the Copyright Officersdesigned their own databases initially.However, technical staff within thoseinstitutions are currently working on moresophisticated versions of the databases withadditional functionality. Clearance Staff atInstitution C also designed their clearance

database. Each CLARCS application isrecorded as one entry on the database,whereas items requiring clearance directlyfrom the publisher are recorded individually.Some sample forms from Institution D’sdatabase are provided in Appendix 4.Institution E has two Access databases: onefor text permissions and one for AVpermissions. They are looking to rationalisethe two into one new database in the nearfuture.

All the Institutions used standard requestletters to rights holders. A selection ofsample letters is provided in Appendix 5.Some letters are linked to the Accessdatabase and are generated automaticallywhen a new request is entered. Threeinstitutions attached a permissions form totheir request letter that the rights holdersimply has to sign to grant permission.

5.4.6 Chasing procedures

The length of time spent waiting beforechasing a request varies between institutions.Institution A only waits one week aftersending the initial request before chasing,and will chase clearances up to five times.Institution B has found that chasing requeststoo early or too frequently can result inthreats from the rights holder that their letterwill be placed at the bottom of the pile!They run a query on the database pulling upall unanswered requests, and only chasethose requests with no reply after fourweeks. Requests are chased three timesbefore being cancelled.

Institution C has a similar procedure. Aquery is run on the database for requests thathave been outstanding for four weeks ormore. A chaser letter is sent to these rightsholders. If no response is received theaddress is checked and a second letter issent. The third chase will be by phone. If noresponse is received after three chases, thelecturer is notified to see whether the item isstill required. Institution C also made thatvalid point that the other party requiring

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chasing is the academics! Grantedpermissions are sent to academics to signoff. Often they don’t get back to theClearance Service and require chasing.

Institution D waits a little longer - between6-8 weeks - before chasing. After 3 monthsthey give up, and inform the lecturer that therequest hasn’t been successful. Institution Echases text permission requests three times.After the third request, they may use thematerial without the permission of the rightsholder and “await claim” depending on therisk involved in its use. The clearanceservice tends to do all “follow ups” on aFriday to regulate them. Once a permissioncomes through, a permission granted form iscreated listing the conditions under whichpermission is granted. Three copies aremade, one for the Course Manager to signoff, accepting the conditions of grant, onefor the course file kept in the RightsDepartment, and one for the Finance sectionto facilitate payment. Examples of “sign-off”forms for internal customers are given inAppendix 6.

5.4.7 Fees (types and levels)

The types of fee charged (e.g. up-front,royalty, etc) varied according to the types ofclearance undertaken. For text clearances, allthe fees were up-front. However options fordifferent user groups for AV materials, androyalties on the use of film were paid byInstitution E. In Institutions A, B, C, and Dthe decision as to whether to accept or rejecta fee is left to the department. In InstitutionA, an expensive item may be replaced with aless expensive item. In Institution B severallecturers have dropped their original ideaswhen they discover the costs and tryalternative ways of delivering their courses.There is sometimes negotiation betweenteaching staff, the Clearance Officer, and therights holders. Institution C has found that apublisher may re-quote if their first quote isrefused on cost grounds. Institution E takes aproactive approach to fee negotiation andwill negotiate any fee that they consider too

high. As the Rights Department there clearsbetween 300-400 items per month, they havea good idea as to what is an acceptable pricefor certain types of material, and will usethat knowledge in negotiations. If fees areunacceptable they may consider advising theuse of alternative materials. They havefound material from American journals to beparticularly expensive.

Three institutions gave an indication of thecost of clearance fees to their institution.Between February and August 2000,Institution A paid £11,197 (inc. VAT) inclearance fees for 53 course packs. In 1999(Jan-Dec) Institution B paid £ 19,180 (inc.VAT) in CLARCS fees for 345 items, andInstitution C paid £34,500 (inc. VAT) inCLARCS fees.

5.4.8 Advice for those setting up a service

Interviewees were asked what advice theywould give to those setting up a new service.The advice ranged from staff skills, topractical day-to-day management issues.The advice given was used to compile thebest practice guidelines in therecommendations of this report, andtherefore hasn’t been repeated here.

5.5 Views on the future ofcopyright clearance

Views on the future of copyright clearancemainly centred on the forthcomingre-negotiation (or not) of the CLA Licence.One institution expressed concern at theCVCP’s decision to submit the CLA Licencenegotiations to the Copyright Tribunal. Thiswas because they felt the Tribunal hashistorically found in favour of the rightsholders, and a decision by the Tribunal isnon-negotiable. Another institution hopedthat the CVCP’s actions would result in afairer CLA Licence. One institution wasencouraged by the CLA’s recentconsultation days and hoped the new CLAlicence would be “more understandable”than the current one as a result. They alsonoted that more publishers seemed to have

INTERVIEW VISITS


moved towards representation by the CLA,making the CLA more of a one-stop-shopfor rights clearance.

Another institution had little hope of animprovement in the CLA Licence. Theynoted that the copyright licensing trend hasbeen for everything to become increasinglycomplicated and restrictive. As an example,they said that the CLA Licence initiallyallowed multiple copies for educationalpurposes. The only restrictions were on theamount and number of copies made and oncopying from some excluded publishers’materials. In 1993, they continued, studypacks were explicitly excluded from thebasic licence, and they had to be clearedthrough CLARCS. However, reprints couldbe distributed to students throughout amodule without extra fees being incurred.As of April 1998, they noted thatdistributing such reprints to students countedas a study pack if the “intention” was that acollection of readings was to be built up.They felt that such restrictions increasinglythrow into question the value of the basiclicence that is already costing organisationsa great deal of money. Ideally, they believe asimpler licensing solution should be found -for example, paying a higher fee, and nothaving to clear on a transactional basis. Theyfeel the scale of the clearance operation isout of proportion with the value of thecleared materials.

Two institutions mentioned the new EUdirective: one in a negative light withconcerns that it might drive more rightsholders to negotiate their own licences ratherthan working with a one-stop-shop. Anotherhoped that it would force the updating orclarification of the UK Copyright Act.

One institution pointed out the centrality ofcopyright clearance to developments inteaching and learning, and thought that moreand more institutions would have to invest inthis area. Another felt that this was a goodtime to establish Clearance Units in HEIs as

they move from holdings to access on manylevels.

5.6 Keeping up-to-date with copyrightThe final interview question focussed onhow clearance staff kept up-to-date with thechanging world of copyright licensing, andwhere they went for copyright advice.

5.6.1 Keeping current

The various means of keeping up-to-datewith copyright licensing that theinterviewees used are listed below.

• Attendance at conferences/seminars

• Library Association web site

• CLA/CVCP correspondence (which getscopied to the Copyright Librarian)

• EU IPR HelpDesk

• Mailbase lists such as lis-copyseek,lis-sconul and e-collections.

• Internet – any project reports or latestupdates posted by JISC etc

• Newsletters and journals (e.g. EuropeanIntellectual Property Review)

• Courses (e.g. The Publishing IndustryTraining Centre run rights and contractscourses at Book House(www.train4publishing.co.uk/), or aPost-Graduate Diploma course in Law)

• Basic Copyright texts such as thecontinually updated Aslib Guide toCopyright

5.6.2 Copyright advice

The interviewees went for specific copyrightadvice to a variety of different sources. AtInstitution A the Media Librarian providescopyright advice to the clearance unit. Theclearance staff at Institution B also speak totheir line managers, as well as consultingtextbooks, emailing one of the discussionlists, or consulting directly with either aclearance colleague at another institution, orwith a recognised library copyright expert

INTERVIEW VISITS


such as Graham Cornish, Sandy Norman, orCharles Oppenheim. Rarely but occasionallyshe may approach the CLA directly. Atinstitution C the same experts were cited as asource of copyright advice. However staffthere may also consult the CVCP for aninterpretation of the CVCP-negotiated CLAlicence. Only Institution E mentionedlawyers as a source of copyright advice.

However in the last ten years, they have onlyhad to consult a lawyer three or four times.As the consultation process is extremelyexpensive, they don’t undertake it lightly.They have also found that lawyers will notadvise you whether or not to pursue a case,they will only advise you on your options.

CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION


6.0 Conclusions and discussion

Without question, copyright clearance is feltto be a real burden to UK HE, in time,complexity and cost. Two-thirds ofresponding HEIs involved at least twomembers of staff on the task. On average anHEI submits over 400 clearance requests peryear, one-third of which require chasing,five per cent of which are never answered atall. The clearance process itself is lengthy,requiring a minimum of twelve distinctsteps. There are up to fourteen differentcopyright licences with which to get to grips,and there is clearly room for improvementwith some clearing houses.

So how could the situation be improved?What are the characteristics of an efficientcopyright marketplace? Multimedia clearersCarmel and Collins offer four suchcharacteristics:

“First…the buyer can easily search for thecopyright holder. Second, once that holderis identified, standardized usageagreements reduce negotiation effort.Third standardized pricing facilitates rapid“buy” decisions. Fourth, an efficient andunintrusive system exists for collectingusage charges (royalties) from thebuyer.”19

They conclude that any future internationalsolution to copyright management mustreduce clearance transaction costs byaddressing these areas. The situation in theUK regarding clearance is no different.

There are many different levels at which theclearance problem could be addressed froma copyright clearer’s point of view. Firstly,and most fundamentally, it could beaddressed by a change in copyright law.Secondly, copyright licences could bealtered to allow additional copying withoutrequiring individual clearance. Thirdly,centralised clearing houses could makecertain changes as could, fourthly, rights

holders. Of course, more and more copyrightmaterial is now being producedelectronically which may mark thebeginning of some technological solutions tothe clearance problem. “The answer to themachine is the machine” as Charles Clarkonce famously said. However, electronicmaterials are more commonly governed bylicence agreements than copyright law, sothe answer to some clearance problems maybe found in negotiating library-friendlyelectronic resource licences.

Assuming that the current copyrightsituation is not going to change for the timebeing, how are organisations to deal withincreasing copyright clearance demands andcomplexities? And assuming we are stilldependent on in-house clearance services,how are they to operate successfully? Thefollowing sections attempt to discuss someof these issues.

6.1 Copyright lawAs respondents were very aware, copyrightlaw in the UK may be changed as a result ofthe EU Directive currently going through theEuropean Parliament which aims toharmonise certain copyright and relatedrights in the Information Society20. Once theDirective has been adopted, member stateswill have two years in which to implementthe Directive. Faced with the possibility of achange in the law, the question is raised as tohow the balance between copyright holdersand users could be addressed in order toreduce the burdensome clearance transactioncosts with which they are currently faced.Years of imperfect copyright law prove thatthis is not an easy question to answer.

6.1.1 Provision for educational use

One proposal might be more provisionwithin the law for legitimate educational useof copyright materials. Clearly, many rightsholders are currently of the opinion thateducational use of their materials does not



damage their economic interests, as theyallow educational copying for no charge21.Perhaps they see education as the start of acreative process without which futureintellectual property may be under threat.

6.1.2 Mandatory clearing houses

Another proposal – and one already in placein other countries such as Norway and Japan– could be the implementation of mandatoryclearing houses. Under such a scheme itwould be compulsory for all rights holdersto make their works available for licensingthrough a central source. Carmel and Collinsprovide an excellent discussion of theadvantages and disadvantages of mandatoryclearing houses. They recognise that whilethey strengthen the position of the user andmake clearance activities a lot lessburdensome, “some creators of some workswill be reluctant to produce or distributeworks in such an environment.”22

6.1.3 Clearer clauses

Of course many copyright clearers have noaspirations to change copyright law in suchmajor ways, but would simply settle for aclear, no-nonsense interpretation of the lawwe already have. What is “fair dealing”?What does constitute a “reasonableproportion” or “substantially the same”? Thedifficulty is that when such terms areexplained in minute detail, they have atendency to look petty or ridiculous. TheCLA’s Higher Education Copying Accord isa document that fell foul of this principle.The CLA made every effort to define acoursepack in as clear terms as they wereable: “a compilation of materials…of four ormore photocopied extracts from one or moresources, totalling over 25 pages ofmaterial…”23 However, academics are oftenbemused that 25 one-page journal articlesdoes not constitute a coursepack, neitherdoes three fifty-page journal articles, butfour ten-page articles does. This is the priceyou pay for quantifying copyrightregulations.

6.2 Copyright licencesAssuming copyright law is not changedsignificantly by the forthcoming EUDirective, another level at which theclearance problem could be addressed is atlicence level. The number of differentcopyright and related licences specified byrespondents was fourteen. It is to be hopedthat not every copyright clearer has to cometo a detailed working understanding of thatmany licences. However, it does give anindication of the scale of the licensingproblem.

6.2.1 Value for money

One of the main complaints fromrespondents was that licences werebecoming more and more restrictive,offering users less for their money, andnecessitating additional clearances.Respondents were most vociferous about theCLA Licence, however one person madethis comment about the DACS Licence:

“DACS do not cover image areas that weparticularly need for our collection, e.g.graphics / advertising / logos, which meansthat whilst paying substantial sums fortheir licence, we still have the expense ofstaff and resources of clearing otherimages with individual copyright holders -if we can trace them!”

This is a serious issue. The intention of theprovision made in the CDPA88 wherebyrights holders could offer licences foradditional copying was surely to save usersfrom extra burdensome clearances.Somewhere along the line users have foundthemselves with up to fourteen additionallicences, and a large clearance bill. Oneinterviewee disclosed that their CLA HELicence fee in 1999 amounted to £71,700while their CLARCS clearances for the sameyear cost a further £34,500 – an additional50% on top of the licence fee. It is anobvious recommendation therefore that more



copying is allowed under licence, resultingin less transactional clearances. It might alsoprove beneficial if further research wasundertaken into exactly what extra copyingrights are provided by such licences and atwhat cost.

6.2.2 The law/licence interface

As licences are meant to offer an extensionto the law in terms of the amount of copyingthat can be done by the signatoryorganisation, it is important that licences donot take away any rights provided by thelaw. It is also important that licencees do notagree to such terms as they may stand up incourt. It is recommended that all licences bechecked for an explicit statement that theydo not prevent activities allowable underlaw. It also causes confusion if a licensor’sinterpretation of the law is different to thatwidely accepted by the licensed community.As the Copyright Act is ambiguous on anumber of counts, it is not surprising thatthere are differences of opinion about itsmeaning, particularly between rights holdersand rights users. Examples of this arefrequently discussed on the Lis-Copyseekdiscussion list. As there is very little caselaw in this area – and no copyright clearerwants to become case law – most err on theside of caution.

With regard to the HE community, it wouldbe extremely beneficial if there were acentral body that interpreted the law and thevarious HE-related licences on their behalf.The body could provide advice (andpreferably indemnity to HEIs taking thatadvice) on common areas of confusion aboutwhat is and is not permissible under the lawor licences. Weedon’s research intocopyright policies in UK HEIsrecommended that the

“JISC might act as a co-ordinating centrefor the dissemination of information onCopyright; might provide funding for acentre of expertise and a national officer

for copyright, along with funding forfurther research”.24

This recommendation has now beenimplemented in the form of the JISC LegalInformation Service25. It may be therefore,that the above might become a part of itsremit.

6.2.3 Administering licences

One of the administrative problems withlicences is that of where they are actuallykept on file, and how their contents arefiltered down to users. The signatory fororganisation-wide licences is usually amember of senior management staff, and insome cases the licences can stop there, ratherthan their contents and implications being‘filtered down’ to those that need to interpretthem for their every day work. Alternativelythey may be sent on to some users, but notothers. Weedon noted that

“The various copyright licences could bedealt with in a number of places within aninstitution – at one place it was inReprographics while their library dealtwith copyright on short loans and exampapers and the Research Office withcopyright in postgraduates’ work.”26

Such a large number of licences can be aparticular problem for clearance staff, thevast majority of whom are a) not trained tointerpret legal contracts (which is effectivelywhat a licence is), and b) part-time.Copyright licences, like copyright law, arenotorious for vague terminology andcomplex clauses. One respondent pleaded:

“Licence agreements need to be written inplain English and crystal clear – a lot oflis-copyseek is about how to interpretambiguity”.

This is again an area where licensors canimprove the experience of copyrightclearers.



6.3 Centralised clearing housesIf mandatory clearing houses such as thosementioned in 6.1.2 are out of the question,we are left with voluntary schemes such asthe BLDSC Copyright-cleared service,CLARCS and HERON. Such services doaddress the four principles for an effectivecopyright marketplace as outlined inSection 6.0. Namely, they can allow for theeasy identification of rights holders, theyprovide standard terms of permission oftenfor standard prices, and allow for the easypayment of rights holders.

Perhaps the most surprising findingregarding clearing houses therefore was thatalmost a quarter of respondents did not usethem. As 94% of respondents clear bookchapters and journal articles, it’s unlikelythat all those not using clearing houses donot do so because the services do not clearthe materials needed. It is more likely thatthe services are not mandated to clear thevolume of copies needed, as mentionedbelow in Section 6.4.1. However it appearsthat others do not use them on principle. Asone respondent wrote:

“We now write direct to the Publishers forclearance as we did before the inception ofthe Licence. The Licence has not erasedthe clearance problem it has in fact made itmore complicated and contentious…Inmany respects it is easier to write direct tothe Publishers than to deal with the CLA”

6.3.1 CLARCS

The Copyright Licensing Agency wasestablished in 1982 by the Authors’Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS)and the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS).It exists to represent the interests of authorsand publishers with respect to copying frommaterials produced by the two groups. Themain way it does this is by offering licencesto various sectors (Business, Government,Higher Education, Further Education andSchools) that allow more copying than theCDPA88 permits. Until recently all such

licences were for paper-to-paper copying.However in 1999 the CLA introduced adigitisation licence for Higher Education. Itis expected that this will be ‘rolled out’ toother sectors in the future. Copying notcovered by the “blanket” licences mentionedabove, can be cleared on a transactionalbasis through the CLA’s Rapid ClearanceService (CLARCS). All electronic copieshave to be cleared through CLARCS inaccordance with the accompanyingdigitisation licence.

Historically the relationship between theCLA and the HE community has beenstrained. The recent reference of the CLAHE Licence to the Copyright Tribunal by theCVCP illustrates this. In a recent papergiven by Peter Shepherd, CEO of the CLAat their HE Consultation Day, theforthcoming renewal of the CLA Licencewas discussed. He felt that any objections toa “smooth rollover” would fall under threeheadings “administrative, economicand...philosophical”27. These headings neatlydescribe the issues raised by respondentsabout CLARCS.

6.3.1.1 AdministrativeThere is no doubt that one-stop clearinghouses such as CLARCS can considerablyreduce the clearance workload for copyrightclearers when the service is functioningsmoothly. Comments comparing responsetimes from CLARCS to those directly frompublishers illustrate this: “CLARCS 1-2Weeks, Direct 4-8 weeks”. Having said that,many respondents bemoaned a slowresponse time from CLARCS, particularly atpeak times of the year, and after changes tothe licence. Other administrativefrustrations reported by respondents resultedfrom the interface between the CLA andtheir rights holders. Further details on thisare given in Section 6.4.1 below.

Another difficulty raised by respondents wasthe absence of a simple method of orderingrepeat coursepacks over consecutive years.This latter concern has been recognised by



the CLA who hope to address it in the nearfuture28. Perhaps the most unnecessaryadministrative burden experienced byrespondents was the “unhelpful attitude ofstaff”, described by one as “the customer isalways wrong” attitude. It would seem thatthis might be the easiest administrativeproblem to address.

6.3.1.2 EconomicIt is not only the expense of CLARCS feesthat concern clearers, but the cost ofclearance fees generally. However, thepayment of CLARCS fees afterorganisations have already paid for a basicCLA Licence does seem to irritate manyclearers. As highlighted above in section6.2.1 some institutions are paying half thecost of their CLA Licence again in CLARCSfees. In 1999 CLARCS transactions in theHE sector totalled £538,32529. Thatrepresents over half of the total CLARCSincome of £1,026,174. The other £487,849was generated from the business sector. Itconcerns many that cash-strapped HE ispaying more than the business sector inCLARCS fees. One of the main reasons forthis concern is the belief that HE is paying tocopy materials that were produced by theHE sector in the first instance. This leads onto the philosophical issues below.

6.3.1.3 PhilosophicalThe seeming injustice of academia having topay to copy materials originally produced byacademia – materials that were “given away”to publishers in return for publication in a“publish or perish” environment - has beenmuch bemoaned. As mentioned above, theincome collected in CLARCS fees from HEis considerable and many believe that HE ispaying many times over for material theyinitially produced. Various solutions to thisproblem have been proposed. They includeHEIs retaining copyright in work written bytheir employees30; HE setting up their ownUniversity Presses; self-archiving of drafts ofarticles on e-print servers31; and so on. Somepublishers have responded to these concernsby allowing authors to retain their copyright

under certain conditions32. The SPARCinitiative, through which academia isexploring alternative models to conventionalpublishing, is yet another symptom of thephilosophical reservations surrounding theissue. In the UK SCONUL is promoting theCreate Change movement 33.

It would seem prudent for HEIs toencourage their academics to licence theircopyright to publishers rather than to assignit. This would at least enable them to usetheir own work in their own teaching. Inorder to benefit other institutions, however,self-archiving is a good option. Academicsneed only point their students to theelectronic archive where the research isfreely available. No need for clearance.

6.3.2 HERON

HERON was set up in 1998 in response to acall from the JISC under Phase 3of the eLib programme. Projects in this areaconcentrate on the electronic storage ofdocuments for the purposes of customisedon-demand publishing to support taughtcourse students in their essay and projectwork34. It built on the work of theOn-Demand Publishing and ElectronicReserve strand of projects funded underPhase Two of the eLib programme. HERONhas been funded over a period of three yearson a reducing basis. Funding has beenprovided by JISC and by Blackwell RetailLtd, HERON’s commercial partner.

The specified aims of HERON are to:

• develop a national database and resourcebank of electronic texts which will widenaccess to course materials and improvethe quality of learning throughout HigherEducation in the UK;

• co-operate with rights holders andrepresentative bodies to removeblockages in copyright clearance and todetermine appropriate fee levels andconditions for the digital age;



• provide a one stop shop for copyrightclearance and digitisation for UK HigherEducation Institutions (HEIs).

In undertaking this role, HERON aims toreduce duplication of effort in digitisationand remove the burden of copyrightclearance from individual HEIs. At the sametime it hopes to reduce problems forpublishers that might otherwise findthemselves being deluged with requestsfrom multiple sources. HERON are workingwith the CLA’s Digitisation Service forsome clearances, while negotiating others ontheir own.

6.3.2.1 BenefitsThere is no doubt that HERON offers aservice that is the nearest in effect to amandatory clearing house, as they willattempt to clear any printed materials onbehalf of an institution, unlike the BL andthe CLA that are only able to clear materialsfrom rights holders that have mandatedthem. HE certainly seems to have caught onto the fact that HERON offers a convenient,value-added, interface to the CLA’sDigitisation service, as the recent CLAnewsletter notes: “Most licensed HEinstitutions have chosen to manage theirdigitisations through the JISC-fundedHERON project”35. Because the service isbased in the HE sector and is not employedby rights holders it should avoid some of thedifficulties that CLARCS has faced.

HERON may also give HE “a strongernegotiating position to lower fees” as onerespondent hoped, and there may be othereconomic benefits. One interviewee pointedout that the current subscription price toHERON at £800 is cheaper than a memberof staff would cost to undertake theclearances. Also, if HERON are unable toget clearance and/or provide a digital file ofthe material needed, within the timescalespecified, no fee is payable. It thereforeoffers a ‘no-risk’ option for cash-strappedHEIs embarking on digitisation projects.

6.3.2.2 DisadvantagesThere are a number of difficulties thatHERON has to face, however. Firstly, thelong-term viability of a resource bank seemsto rest on the assumption that there is somesignificant overlap amongst HEIs as to whatthey want cleared and digitised. Initial workundertaken by some of the On-DemandPublishing and Electronic Reserve eLibprojects cast doubt whether this was thecase.36 37

Secondly, although HERON is workingclosely with the CLA to obtain clearance formaterials from publishers that mandate theCLA, there are many requests that cannot becleared through this route. For example,overseas publishers and many smaller rightsholders need to be approached individually.Typically, such rights holders are the moredifficult part of the marketplace; smallerpublishers can be hard to locate, andoverseas publishers can be hard to contactand communication can be difficult. Directnegotiations with any rights holder is timeconsuming, but this is even more so whennegotiating electronic rights. Untilpublishers begin to develop their ownpolicies on electronic permissions thesituation is likely to remain problematical.

Thirdly, in addition to the subscription fee,HERON adds an administration fee to eachsuccessful transaction. This is done as partof HERON’s move towards becomingself-supporting, but may make HERON’scosts appear high to institutions.

Many of these problems can be regarded asteething problems. Once the service is upand running and agreements are made with agood proportion of the rights holders, theprocess should speed up and prove more andmore valuable to HE. In one sense it is ashame HERON limits its role to electroniccopyright permissions. If HERON providedsuch a service for print permissions, manycopyright clearers might consider theirproblems over.



6.3.3 British Library Document SupplyService – Copyright Cleared copies

The British Library’s Copyright Clearedservice38 was established in the 1990s inresponse to pressure from corporatecustomers, particularly from the USA, mostof whom would only use a copyright clearedarticle service. BLDSC supplies over500,000 articles per year of which only100,000 are supplied within the UK. Of this100,000 only 18,647 were supplied to UKHE in 1999/2000 so the HE market is still afairly small one. That said, there was analmost three-fold increase in requestsbetween 1997/98 (6,859 requests) and1998/99 (16,968 requests)39, undoubtedly inresponse to the introduction of the HECA.

This service provides another approach tocopyright clearance that has parallels in theHERON service. Namely, they bothcombine document supply with theclearance necessary to use the document in aspecific way. It raises the question as towhether there could be a parallel in theprimary publication market. For example,could HE libraries purchase “librarycopyright-cleared copies” of certain texts - ata premium of course - which they could thenre-copy for coursepacks, short loan, andother educational purposes?

6.4 Rights holders6.4.1 Mandating centralised clearing

houses

Rights holders are also in a position toalleviate transaction costs for copyrightclearers. The most obvious way that they cando this is to mandate central clearing housessuch as those mentioned above. Clearerswould not then need to approach themindividually for frequent clearance requestssuch as coursepacks. However it is alsoimportant to clearers that rights holdersmandate centralised clearing houses for theappropriate volume of copying needed. Anumber of respondents reported difficultiestrying to clear book chapters throughCLARCS where publishers had limited the

volume of clearance allowable (either interms of the number of pages, the number ofcopies or the financial value of the clearancetransaction). The reason that publishersimpose such limits results from their concernthat CLARCS sales might replace booksales. However, some respondents foundthat book chapters often exceeded thenumber of pages CLARCS have beenmandated to clear. Others said that thenumber of students on their courses weregreater than the number of coursepackcopies they were sometimes permitted tomake. It is important to remember that it isthe larger groups of students whose needsare the least likely to be met by traditionallibrary provision, and who benefit the mostfrom coursepacks cleared by services likeCLARCS.

Difficulties also arise when copyrightclearers apply direct to rights holders thathave mandated CLARCS. A clearer mightdo this if more copies than CLARCS hasbeen mandated to clear are required, or if thematerial was to be used for a purpose otherthan that for which CLARCS has beenmandated. Respondents’ reported that somerights holders automatically forwarded theirrequests to CLARCS without reading themto see what they were actually asking. Someconfusion can also arise when rights holdersboth mandate CLARCS, and deal direct withclearers. This can result in two separate ratesbeing offered to copyright clearers for thesame material, and raises doubts in theirminds as to whether they are always gettingthe best deal.

6.4.2 Publishing on a chapter-by-chapterbasis

Clearly if whole textbooks were meeting theneeds of all courses of education, then therewould be no need to “pick and mix” chaptersof individual books for coursepacks.However this is apparently not always thecase. It is the view of some copyrightclearers that this problem could be overcomeif books were sold as they were often used,



namely, on a chapter-by-chapter basis.Although some publishers are concernedthat this not a viable economic model, onepublisher in the US, IDG Books, is testingthis out40. The development of more ‘coursereaders’ could be another alternative.

6.4.3 Making rights decisions prior topublication

Whichever way rights holders choose tohandle their secondary rights, it is importantthat conscious decisions are made on thismatter prior to publication. If the decision ismade to handle permissions in-house, thepublisher should ensure that there areenough staff to deal with inevitable demandfor clearance. One respondent felt that“publishers don’t have enough staff to dealwith clearances”. Another respondent wrote“I’ve been waiting years, and people are stillsaying ‘the publishers can’t cope with this’”.

If the decision is made to grant permissionfor no charge for certain educational uses, itwould be helpful to copyright clearers if thisinformation was made clear on the materialitself. Indeed, the inclusion of rightsmetadata on items of intellectual propertylooks set to become the norm in theelectronic environment. It would also beuseful if this information was available inthe print environment. Perhaps a series ofrights codes that have clear meanings couldbe developed. These could be marked on allnewly published items of intellectualproperty.

6.5 Electronic solutions6.5.1 Metadata

As mentioned in section 6.4.3, the idea ofmaking rights information available ondocuments may be novel in the printenvironment, but it looks set to become astandard in the electronic environment withthe development of metadata schemes. Boththe Dublin Core Metadata Initiative41 and theIMS (Instructional Managements System)learning resource metadata scheme42 makeprovisions for including information on the

rights status of a piece of intellectualproperty. This can only be good news forcopyright clearers. The development ofelectronic copyright management systemsthat offer technical protection to digitalintellectual property, and only allow viewingon electronic payment are also wellunderway.43 44

6.5.2 Electronic resource licensing

Most electronically published intellectualproperty is licensed to libraries rather thansold. In such cases it is these individuallicence agreements, rather than copyrightlaw or general licensing schemes, thatgovern what can and cannot be done withthese resources. This may mean that clearersbecome less dependent on individualclearance applications to rights holders, andmore dependent on well-negotiatedelectronic resource licences in future.

6.5.2.1 Standard agreementsHowever, if an institution subscribes to over170 electronic databases, (as is the case itLoughborough University for example) thenpotentially there are over 170 licences withwhich to become familiar– and that does notinclude electronic journals. Some excellentwork has been done by the JISC and thePublishers Association on the developmentof a model licence for electronic resources45

that should make the implementation of suchlicences easier within institutions. TheNESLI model licence for electronic journalshas also been developed jointly by rightsholders and users. As such, it offers a fairbalance of interests. Of particular benefit tocopyright clearers is that it encourages rightsholders to allow users to incorporate articlesin coursepacks and short loan collections.46

6.5.2.2 The wider remit of electronicresource licences

Although electronic resource licences doencompass what further copying (digital orprint) can be done with the resource, this isonly one aspect of a licence. Ann Okerson,founder of the US LibLicence initiative47,makes the point that “unlike copyright law,



which governs copying only, the licencedescribes the thing being sold and all theterms and conditions under which this isdone. Its reach is far wider than copying.”48

Therefore, although it is very useful forcopyright clearers to be involved in thenegotiation of such licences, there does needto be a wide range of other people included.Okerson concludes that “libraries mustdetermine how to incorporate licensing intotheir skill set and work flow.” Duranceaudepicts librarians “racing to catch up:learning the new language of licenseagreements, learning new – or modifying old– negotiating skills, figuring out what ismost important for our institutions and users,and trying to make sense of widely variableaccess restrictions and pricing models.”49

6.6 Organisational copyrightmanagement

Assuming that the current copyrightframework does not change in the nearfuture, how can organisations best deal withincreasing clearance demands andcomplexities? One thing this research madevery clear was that the copyright clearanceactivities of an organisation could not beviewed in isolation from the broadercopyright management (indeed intellectualproperty management) activities. Manyrespondents could not disentangle the timethey spent clearing rights with the time theyspent giving advice or keeping up-to-datewith copyright. Dedicated clearance serviceswere often mandated to raise awareness ofcopyright, act as designated contact forcopyright licences, and create organisationalcopyright policy and guidelines. Some werealso involved with the protection of theorganisation’s own copyrights, and otherbroader intellectual property concerns.

It makes a lot of sense to group various IPresponsibilities together because thedifferent aspects of IP tend to impact oneach other. Also, the larger the remit of acentral service, the more useful andtransparent it appears to be to members of

the organisation. For example, if anorganisation asserts it’s employer’scopyright in the work of its employees andthen retains that copyright rather thanassigning it to publishers, then the clearanceservice will not have to clear those workswith publishers.

The message is firstly that an organisationneeds a clearly defined IP managementinfrastructure, and secondly, that anyclearance service needs a clearly definedrole within that infrastructure. This willenable the various parties to work closelywith one another to create an efficientapproach to IP management. This view wasstrongly affirmed by interviewees.

6.6.1 Organising copyright responsibilitieswithin the organisation

In one sense, where the various IPresponsibilities lie within an organisation(that is in the library or elsewhere) should beirrelevant as long as the infrastructure isclear enough for all parties to workseamlessly together. Having said that, thenumber of questionnaire respondents thatworked in the library compared to anywhereelse in the organisation showed that thelibrary is still perceived as a centre ofcopyright clearance expertise. Initially thefigures may look marginal (only 55% ofrespondents were based in libraries,compared to 45% elsewhere). Howeverthose respondents in the “elsewhere”category were based in a variety of differentlocations, including media services andacademic departments.

This view of the library as a focus ofcopyright expertise was noted by Weedon’srecent research into IPR policies in HigherEducation Institutions 50. He writes:

“… librarians have an excellentunderstanding of copyright law, especiallyas it pertains to ‘Fair Dealing’ and theconditions under which their ownorganisation has to operate. However, by



default they also find themselves in the roleof monitoring compliance, often at oddswith the service they are trying to providefor their readers.”

This was certainly the experience of onecopyright advisor who wrote:

“My role in theory involves onlyresponsibility for copyright matters as theyrelate to the library… However manygeneral questions about copyright areposed to the Library (presumably becauselibrary users are accustomed to view thelibrary as ‘the place to getinformation’)…and these questions tend tobe referred on to me.”

It is important to stress the point thatlibraries are not only centres of copyrightexpertise but also major clearance centres.Some rightsholders and their representativeshave expressed the view that libraries shouldnot be involved in clearing coursepacksbecause, under the CLA HE Licence,libraries cannot house them. However thisshows a misunderstanding of the way rightsare cleared in institutions – more often thannot libraries clear not only for their ownservices, but also for those of the wholeinstitution.

6.6.2 The status of copyright clearance

Although libraries predominated in terms ofwhere clearance takes place, the range of jobtitles cited in association with clearance wasquite broad. In some organisations it wasdedicated copyright staff, in othersadministrative staff, library staff, contractsadvisors, managers, or technical staff. Invery few HEI’s was the clearance staffingthe same. This is not necessarily an indicatorthat the approach to copyright clearance inHE is haphazard or unplanned, but theredoes seem to be confusion as to the status ofcopyright clearance. Is it an administrativerole, a library professional’s role, a technicalrole, or a managerial role? The short answeris, that it depends. It depends on what types

of materials are being cleared, for whatpurpose and in what way. This is discussedfurther in the Section 6.8 below.

6.6.3 The spread of expertise

Some respondents could not give the jobtitles of the clearers in their organisation, asthere were so many of them. Indeed over63% of HEI respondents had more than twopeople clearing copyright. This spread ofexpertise is again something that Weedonfound in his research. He wrote:

“often the person completing thequestionnaire had to consult a number ofother people in different departments andsections. In particular it became clear thatcopyright was rarely the dedicatedresponsibility of one person.”51

Again:

“In no institution we visited was there asingle person, administrative or academic,solely responsible for copyright and it wasvery rare for any institution to have a‘copyright officer”52

In Weedon’s research this spread ofcopyright knowledge may have been due todifferent people having different copyrightresponsibilities. Even so, he did note “a lackof management systems for copyright andhorizontal co-ordination withininstitutions.”53 However where there aremultiple copyright clearers in oneorganisation it stands to reason that someduplication of effort is taking place.

6.7 Setting up a clearance serviceAvoiding duplication of effort is just one ofmany ways in which the establishment of aclearance service can benefit anorganisation.

6.7.1 Avoiding duplication of effort

It is precisely because copyright clearance issuch a time-consuming and heavilyadministrative process, that centralising it



can save so much staff time in anorganisation. One of the mosttime-consuming elements is ‘untangling’ thecopyright law and licence terms that governwhat should, and should not be cleared inthe first place. As one respondentcommented,

“I think the copyright situation is gettingso complex now that real expertise isneeded to keep legal. Specialist dedicatedunits need to be established withinorganisations who need a lot of clearance.I don’t have strong feelings about whetherthis sits within the library structure or not,so long as we can work closely with theUnit.”

Central clearance services save theduplication of clearance systems, such asclearance management databases andstandard letters. They also prevent repeatapplications going to the same rightsholders. Repeat applications not only wastethe organisation’s resources, but may alsohinder the rights holder.

6.7.2 Economic savings

Inevitably, avoiding duplication of effortwill save money. The creation of oneclearance management database is lessexpensive than the creation of two. Havingone dedicated copyright clearer is less costlythan having multiple clearers in differentdepartments, all trying to interpret licencesand clear rights. A centralised clearanceofficer may also be able to save moneythrough negotiating good institutional ratesfor materials, with their knowledge of the“going rate” for particular types ofclearance.

6.7.3 A one-stop-shop for internalcustomers

One of the key benefits of a centralisedclearance unit is the streamlined service itoffers to internal ‘customers’. In a HEI,academics need not concern themselves ortheir departmental administrators with

clearing their own coursepacks because thejob – and all its associated complexities -can easily be passed on to the centralservice. Similarly, assuming the serviceoffers copyright advice, an organisation canbe reassured that standard, well-researchedcopyright advice is accessible to allmembers of staff.

6.7.4 Legal and pedagogic benefits

The existence of a clearance service isevidence that an organisation is making asincere effort to respect copyright and tostay within the law. Many questionnairerespondents and interviewees madereference to the importance of “stayinglegal”. However it is also a proactive meansof encouraging the creative use of copyrightmaterials – particularly in teaching andlearning: in some cases perhaps anticipatingfuture developments rather than reacting tothem. Teaching and learning developmentsin turn enhance the students’ educationalexperience.

6.8 Staffing clearance servicesWhen establishing a new clearance service,deciding how to staff it can be problematic.It has been demonstrated in Section 6.6.2-3that there are really no standard approachesto staffing a clearance service.

6.8.1 Time allocation

Knowing how much time to allocate to anew service is very difficult. It depends, notonly on the sorts of clearances the serviceexpects to take on, but also on demand. Thefigures provided by the research offer someindication; however, caution is advised, asthose figures may only represent the timespent on clearance, not on the accompanyingtasks such as advice-giving,keeping-up-to-date with changes in the lawor licences, and awareness raising. As oneadvisor commented, it wasn’t just the advicethat occupied her, but the time spent“learning up about copyright”. One serviceprovider interviewed explained that the



service began as a pilot in order to gauge thedemand and staffing levels required.

Clearance work is also very seasonal withpeaks over the summer, and at the beginningof each term or semester. Many respondentscommented on this, and it does add to thestaffing problem. Clearance staff may belooking for additional duties at certain timesof the year, and overburdened and in need ofadditional help at others! Certain clearances,particularly requests not frequently dealtwith by the service, may take adisproportionate length of time to deal with,as may imparting some advice. As onerespondent stated, “some of the questionscan take an inordinate amount of time toresolve”. It is worth noting that legal advice– which is effectively what CopyrightAdvisors are offering – is time-consumingfor qualified lawyers, let alone theunqualified.

6.8.2 Staffing models and skills

The staffing model for any clearance serviceneeds to be appropriate to clearancesundertaken by that unit. A number ofinterviewees stressed the importance ofhaving a dedicated member of clearancestaff because of the expertise required andthe time it takes to keeping up-to-date withlegislative and licence developments.

In terms of skills, text clearances (forcoursepacks or short loan copies forexample) can be fairly routine, and mayeasily be taken on by a good administrator.However, where there’s a clearance servicethere will always be complex questionsregarding the interpretation of the law or alicence term. Therefore, every service willrequire some oversight by a professional ortechnical person who is able to answer thosequestions (and take responsibility for thoseanswers!) as well as create procedures andpolicy with confidence. If the service aims tonegotiate clearances proactively rather thansimply accepting or rejecting offers as they

come through, obviously negotiation skillswill also be needed.

If the service is to take on theresponsibilities of audio-visual (AV)clearances, administrative skills alone maynot be enough. One clearance service thatdealt with a large proportion of AVclearances indicated that film and musicclearances demand “strong negotiators”.Also “strong persuasive skills” are requiredof those attempting picture clearances in thedigital environment “as rights holders areoften nervous about the level of protectionthey are offered against infringement”.Specialised legal expertise may also berequired for some clearances as theinterviewee confirmed:

“when clearing for non print media…thesources from which material is chosen areincreasingly based overseas (e.g. softwareowners are often in the US etc) and staffare required to deal with differingpractices and onerous contracts. Theserequire knowledge of other laws that UK inorder to judge acceptability.”

This service noted that finding the rightcombination of skills in an individual forAV clearances could be difficult. This isbecause people need both the ability tonegotiate and drive a deal through, and anattention to detail for contractual work. Inthe experience of this particular service,people usually have one or the other, notboth.

The staffing models adopted by theinterviewees included two with a part-timemanager and a part-time clearance officer.Another had a full time copyright officer,and part-time assistant. These three servicesonly (or mainly) took on text clearances.Their models therefore match theoverseer/administrator model suggestedabove. One interviewee commented on thedifficulty of getting extra staff for herservice. Managers would not provide



additional staff unless she could prove thatthe existing staff was massively overworked.However, she was unable actively topromote the service, because she knew herexisting staff could not have dealt with theresulting workload; a ‘catch 22’ scenario.

6.9 The clearance processHaving decided to establish a clearanceservice, what are the issues facing suchservices, and how might they best operate?This section aims to answer some of thesequestions.

6.9.1 The “Piggy-in-the-middle” factor

Perhaps the prevailing difficulty facingclearance services is something bestdescribed as the “piggy-in-the-middle”factor. Librarians and other copyrightclearers occupy an uncomfortable middleground between their users and the copyrightlegislation rights owners and licensingagencies. As professionals they are eager toensure that intellectual property is respectedand used only with appropriate permission.As service providers they are keen to makeintellectual property as accessible aspossible, and to remove all barriers to itsuse. However, the copyright legislation thatintends to protect intellectual property frommisuse also creates considerable barriers toits use. In their role of educating their usersabout copyright legislation, librarians are notinfrequently accused by those users ofpedantry and bureaucracy as though theyhad created the laws themselves. On theother hand, in their role of lobbyinglegislators and licensors for clarification onthe copyright situation, and for faireducational use of intellectual property,copyright clearers are often suspected ofencouraging the abuse of the copyrightsystem.

Tensions are evident both in the relationshipbetween clearers and rights holders above,

and also in the relationship between clearersand their internal customer base. Onerespondent wrote: “the library is often seenas ‘being awkward’ by our academiccolleagues because we have to implementthese [copyright] regulations.” Anotherwrote:

“Students and lecturers get frustrated andI feel like a bureaucrat which is not why Ichose a career in librarianship. (I had oneinstance where a law lecturer here hadwritten an article (about music copyright)and wanted it to go into the short loan –the publisher refused permission and I hadto tell him he couldn’t put his own articleinto the collection! Ridiculous!)”

One clearance service that was very awareof its “piggy-in-the-middle” status tried toturn it to advantage. Instead of allowingitself to be seen as erecting barriers to theuse of materials, it tried to market itself as acopyright ‘problem-solver’. Seeking neverto say ‘no’ to a request outright, it alwaystried to find an alternative for the customer.In this way the customers saw the unit as aproblem-solver rather than a problemcreator.

6.9.2 Administration and its legalimplications

Copyright clearance involves a lot ofpaperwork and thus requires staff whopossess meticulous attention to detail andaccuracy. This is particular importantbecause the terms of permission constitute alegal contract and a clearer may be asked atany time to produce evidence of permissionto reproduce that intellectual property. Thefollowing sections provide a step-by-stepguide to the clearance process, providingcomment on some of the issues faced at eachstep. See flow chart of the clearance process.



Clearance process flow chartReceive requestfrom internal

customer

Checkbibliographic

details

Check ifitems wereauthoredin-house.

No

Does it require clearance(i.e. not insubstantial use

or covered by anagreement)?

No clearancerequired.Notify

customer

Yes

Trace rightsholders

Generate andsend request

letter.

Noresponse

Perm.granted

Perm.refused

Send chaserletter

(email/fax)

Check terms& conditions

of perm.

Negotiatewith rights

holder?

Notifyinternal

customer

Receivesign-off from

customer

Pay rightsholder



6.9.3 Receiving requests from internalcustomers

One of the main difficulties clearers face isgetting adequate bibliographic informationfrom internal customers in order to processtheir requests. Designing a clearance requestform is an excellent way of ensuring one hasall that information (assuming that it is filledin correctly). This also puts some of the onusback on the customers during busy periods.It is certainly very important to ascertainwhether a member of the organisationauthored the material requiring clearance.This may help in negotiating a lower fee (orno fee) for materials written by members ofstaff.

6.9.4 Checking requests

All the interviewees checked thebibliographic references of all the requeststhat they received. This is a massive, but (itwas felt by respondents) unavoidable, task.They then checked to see whether thematerials actually required clearance byconsidering whether the copying fell withinthe fair dealing or insubstantial useexceptions of the CDPA88. Regrettably,those interviewed found it tootime-consuming to check whether requestsare covered by electronic full-text sourcespurchased by the institution. This probablymeans that some clearance requests arebeing made unnecessarily. However, someresearch undertaken by Calvert into theimpact of full-text databases on inter-libraryloans (ILL) revealed that only a very smallpercentage of ILL requests were available onsuch databases, and that it was not costeffective to check them prior to submittingILL requests54. It seems likely that the samewould apply to clearance requests. A final‘double check’ done by interviewees was tosee whether the items requested wereauthored by someone in the organisation, ifthis information hadn’t already beenreceived.

6.9.5 Tracing rights holders

Having checked the requests, the next stepwas to trace the holders of rights in thoseworks (unless the request was first sent to acentral clearing house). Tracing rightsholders – particularly small publishers,individual authors or creators, or those fromoverseas – is notoriously difficult55. As onerespondent wrote, “it can be very hard totrace small publishers and imprints that havebeen ‘swallowed up’ by big multi-nationalpublishers.”

6.9.6 Sending requests

Creating a standard request letter is a verynecessary aid for the frequent clearer and astandard response form to go with it is also avery useful addition. The use of suchdocumentation may speed up the process ifthe rights holder is small and not geared upto such activity with no systems in place. Inaddition, it ensures that all the relevant andappropriate rights are asked for and receivedsince the form reflects this.

6.9.7 Rights holder response times

Most respondents cited an average time ofone month for a clearance to come through,hence the six-week lead-time required bymost copyright services (and often ignoredby internal customers!). However, the lengthof time taken for rights holders to respondvaried according to the type of clearance,hence the six-month lead-time required byone interviewee. The author of this reportrequested permission to create electroniccopies of three journal articles from awell-known American publisher in October1996 and received no response until July2000 when the permission finally camethrough! Against a backdrop of horrorstories such as these, the merit of anestablished one-stop-shop can be clearlyappreciated.



6.9.8 Chasing

With rights holder responses taking weeks ifnot months, chasing requests becomes anecessary part of the clearance process.According to respondents, approximatelyone-third of their requests required chasing.As most of the institutions interviewedwaited 4-8 weeks before chasing, theycannot be accused of impatience. Again,most respondents chased at least twice, thusleading to a mean of about 315 chases perannum per organisation. That represents alot of additional administration on top of analready paper-intensive and time-consumingprocess.

6.9.9 Refusals

The issue of refused requests was notcovered by the questionnaire. However somedata on the proportion of refusals wasreceived from one interview candidate andfrom HERON. Of the 706 requests to whichHERON had received a response in March2000, 66 of them (9%) were refused56. Injust over three years, Institution B hadreceived responses to 792 requests of whichonly 21 (1%) were refusals. However, therewere an additional 75 requests that hadreceived no reply.

6.9.10 Requests never answered

In most respondents’ experience, up to tenper cent of their requests go unanswered –these are mainly direct applications topublishers. A lack of response defiesaccurate interpretation, however, one legalinterpretation is a refusal – i.e. one cannot goahead and copy without explicit permission.At a recent seminar attended by the author,one delegate made the point that only thosewho are prepared to make use of rightsshould own them. It would certainly be mosthelpful to clearers if this were the case.

6.9.11 Terms of permission

Even if a request has been successful andpermission has been granted, a copyrightclearer’s work is still not over. This isbecause permissions are often granted under

certain terms and conditions. Sometimes itmay be as simple as a requirement for aparticular wording to go on the copied texts,or for a time limit to apply on the usage ofthe material. For other clearances,particularly the re-publication ofaudio-visual materials, the terms may bemore complex to implement. However, eventhe simple terms and conditions becomeharder to manage when they are scaled up.The mean number of items cleared perannum by respondents was over 400.Potentially then, there are over 400 differentsets of wording, time limitations, securitymeasures and other conditions to deal with.Of course one of the most important terms ofpermission is the price that has to be paid fora fee.

6.9.12 Average fees

6.9.12.1 None – or negotiableNot all permissions had a price attached.Respondents indicated that between 1-10%of requests were granted for no charge. Thiscompares with HERON’s experience where13% of requests were granted for nocharge57. Some respondents also found feesto be negotiable. On rejecting the offer ofpermission on cost grounds, one respondenthad the fee reduced by the publisher to anacceptable level.

Unfortunately it was impossible to ascertainan average permission fee from the datagiven. However CLARCS recommend 5pper page per student to their rights holdersfor printed coursepacks. I Information fromHERON confirmed that the vast majority ofrightsholders charge 5p per page per studentfor digitising material58. Another respondentnoted that average fees vary widely betweenthe types of rights holder approached. Shewrote “the average per page fee beingcharged via the CLA is 5.5p. The averagefee from publishers is 4.5p. The average feefrom authors is 1.5p.”

6.9.12.2 Per page The logic of a ‘per-page’ charge mayhowever, be queried; what are clearers



actually paying for? For example, if clearersare paying to reproduce a unit of intellectualproperty, of what significance is the numberof pages on which that intellectual propertyis printed? Why does it affect the price?Consider a real example where an authorwho has written an article that is parallelpublished in two journals – in one it isprinted on four pages, in the other on fivepages. Anyone wanting to reproduce itwould pay more for one article than theother. This does seem to make a mockery ofthe per-page system. It appears to be aninappropriate transfer of per-pagephotocopying charges (which do makesense) to clearance charges.

A similar situation may arise if the CLA’ssuggested amendments to the artistic worksprotocol were to be accepted by the CVCP.Instead of HE having to pay an additionalfee for every artistic work accompanying thetext in materials requiring clearance, it hasbeen suggested that HE pay an additional feeonly for those illustrations that are printedon the whole page, not for those onpart-pages59. Again, if the purpose of the feeis for the privilege of reproducingintellectual property, whether thatintellectual property is printed on a wholepage of part of a page is immaterial.

6.9.12.3 Other charging mechanismsThe per-page tariff is just one example of acharging mechanism, however. According torespondents there are six different methodsof charging to reproduce intellectualproperty. Any in-house clearancemanagement system therefore needs notonly to be able to cope with the differenttypes of fees, but the different variations ofthat fee. For example, a fee limited by timemight be for a semester, a year, two years,five years, and so on. Fees per use might beper print or per view. Charges foraudiovisual materials become more complexstill when taking territorial rights andoptions into consideration.

6.9.13 Who pays?

The data revealed in the questionnaire onwho pays the copyright fees was confirmedby the interview results. None of thecopyright clearance services paid theclearance fees themselves, they were allpassed back to the relevant internalcustomers. Therefore, the decision as towhether to accept or reject a permission feehas to be made by that internal customer andnot by the clearance service. This addsanother layer of correspondence to theclearance process. All the servicesinterviewed were centrally funded, sointernal customers were not charged for thecosts of administration of the clearanceservice.

In most of the interviewees’ experience,cleared coursepacks were given free tostudents and the costs borne by thedepartment. One interviewee relatedexperience selling coursepacks through thelibrary bookshop. This had resulted in lossesas not all students had bought them. Theselosses had to be borne by the department.The CLA have recently mentionedintroducing a sale or return facility oncoursepacks. This would dramaticallychange the economics of selling packs tostudents and reduce the risk of expensiveclearance.

6.9.14 Clearance tools

Fifty-five per cent of respondents used anelectronic database to help manage theclearance process, leaving just under halfthat use paper files alone. Of the fiveservices interviewed, all had designedin-house databases based on MicrosoftAccess. It is apparent that many institutionsare “reinventing the wheel” as far asclearance management systems go. The eLibproject, ACORN, designed a clearancemanagement system called CLEAR60 whichwas offered to UK HEIs for no charge as anoutput of a publicly funded project. The takeup was high, however no support could beoffered to users. Another eLib project,



ERCOMS61 (Electronic Reserves COpyrightManagement System) also worked on ageneric electronic copyright management formanaging documents as well as theclearance process. However, this researchwas subject to delays and difficulties. Itcertainly appears that there is still room forwork in this area, as more and moreorganisations take on more clearances.Perhaps there is a role for HERON in thedesign of a generic clearance managementdatabase with which subscribingorganisations can work;it could even bemade to interface directly with the HERONsystem.

RECOMMENDATIONS SUMMARY


7.0 Recommendations summary

7.1 Copyright law• If changes are made to the UK Copyright

Act as a result of the EU CopyrightDirective, it would be a good opportunityto clarify some of the terms that havealways caused confusion in the copyrightcommunity.

7.2 Licences• It is recommended that Licensors

reconsider what they offer for a flat feeto reduce the volume of additionalclearances required.

• It is recommended that further researchis undertaken into what additionalcopying copyright licences offer and atwhat cost.

• It is recommended that central licensingnegotiation bodies such as CHESTinclude a clause in licence agreementsallowing licensees to exploit full-textresources for teaching activities such asprinted coursepacks and short loancollections wherever possible.

• It is recommended that publishersproducing material in electronic formbase their licences on the JISC/PA modellicence agreement62.

• Licence agreements need to be written inplain English, avoiding the use of jargon.Licensors need to remember that theinterpreters of copyright licences areusually not legally qualified. Termsshould be unambiguous.

• It is recommended that licensees checkall licences before signing to ensure theyare not signing away exceptions thathave been afforded them by law.

7.3 Centralised clearing houses7.3.1 CLARCS

• It is recommended that CLARCSprovide additional clearance staff at peaktimes of the year (particularly over thesummer) and after any changes to theLicence.

• CLARCS are encouraged to implement a“sale or return” scheme for coursepacksthat are cleared and then not sold.

• CLARCS are encouraged to create asimple way of ordering repeatcoursepacks.

• It is recommended that the CLA expandupon recent moves towards userconsultation, perhaps performing athorough CLARCS user survey.

• It is suggested that CLARCS establish acustomer charter. This would bothprovide clarity over the level of servicecustomers should expect, and allowCLARCS to chart their service levelagainst set goals and criteria.

7.3.2 HERON

• There may be a role for HERON inkeeping a centralised database of theconditions governing some of theCHEST and/or NESLI licences forfull-text materials. Their database couldthen warn clearers requesting digitalcopies of those materials that they mayalready have them in full-text if theysubscribe to a particular databasethrough the CHEST deal.

• There may also be a role for HERON inthe design of a generic clearancemanagement database that is suitable forsubscribing organisations to use.



7.4 Rights holders• It is recommended that rights holders

think carefully about if, and how, theyintend to exploit secondary rights inmaterial before they publish it.

• It is recommended that rights holdersadd permissions information to theirpublished materials (i.e. “copyrightwaived”, “apply to this address”, “freefor educational use”, etc.)

• It is recommended that a series ofunambiguous rights “codes” aredeveloped which provide at-a-glancepermissions information for users.

• It is recommended that rights metadata isincluded on electronically publishedmaterials.

• It is strongly recommended that if rightsholders intend to manage the exploitationof their secondary rights for a fee thatthey employ enough staff to cater for theinevitable and increasing demand fromthose wishing to use material.

• It is recommended that the PLSencourage their members to mandateCLARCS to at least allow the copying ofa whole chapter even if that chaptercontains more pages than the existingupper limit. Preferably, upper limits onthe number of pages copied, or on thenumber of copies made could beremoved altogether to meet growingdemand.

• It is recommended that rights holdersread permissions letters carefully ratherthan forwarding all such requests toCLARCS automatically. There isprobably a good reason why they arebeing approached directly.

• It is recommended that rights holdersliase with CLARCS to ensure thatwhether an item is cleared direct with therights holder, or through CLARCS, thefee is the same.

• It is recommended that rights holdersmove away from a per-page mechanismfor charging for intellectual property,and that they move towards a per-itemcharge. This will make fees moretransparent to users, and moremeaningful.

• It is recommended that publishersinvestigate new ways of marketingmaterials that meet the needs of the HEsector (e.g. books on achapter-by-chapter basis).

7.5 The HE community• It is recommended that a central HE-

wide body be established to act as anauthority on the interpretation ofcopyright law and licences as theypertain to Higher Education. Such a bodyshould provide advice (and indemnifyHEIs taking that advice) on commonareas of confusion about what is and isnot permissible under the law orlicences. This is a role that could betaken on by the new JISC LegalInformation Service.

7.6 Organisations• All organisations need a clearly defined

and transparent intellectual propertymanagement infrastructure.

• Organisations may wish to survey theirdepartments to assess how muchclearance is being undertaken and inwhat way.

• Organisations that are undertaking a lotof clearance are advised to establish aclearance service to avoid duplication ofeffort.

• Any clearance service needs awell-defined role within the IPinfrastructure of the organisation. Thiswill ensure the various aspects workseamlessly together.

• The signatory for organisation-widelicences needs to ensure that the terms of



those licences are filtered down to thosethat need to interpret them for their everyday work.

• HEIs should encourage their academicstaff to licence their rights to publishersrather than assigning them, whereverpossible. HEIs might also encouragestaff to self-archive their work to benefit

7.7 Establishing a new clearanceservice

• In writing a proposal document for anew service, it may help to stress thebenefits of such a service in terms ofavoiding duplication, saving money,offering a better service to internalcustomers, staying legal, encouraging thedevelopment of innovative teaching andlearning methods, and thus enhancingthe student experience.

• It is recommended that any new servicebegin as a pilot project in order to gaugethe demand and staffing levels required.

• It is recommended that any clearanceservice has a dedicated member of staff.This is because even when there is noclearance to be done, there are alwaysnew developments and issues with whichto keep up-to-date.

• If it is impossible to have a dedicatedmember of staff, it is still important tohave someone available full-time toanswer queries, even if the personanswering queries does not spend allhis/her time on copyright.

• The skills required of a copyright clearerinclude: excellent administration skills;negotiation skills; the ability to networkand create contacts (people skills);problem-solving skills; the ability to readand interpret the fine print of contractsand licences; and most importantly agrasp of the concept of intellectualproperty.

• Establish the service as a “problemsolver” rather than a “problem creator”.

This is difficult when copyright doesappear to erect so many barriers, but isan option for those seeking to engender apositive stance to copyright.

7.8 Good practice for clearanceservices.

The following recommendations include theadvice given by clearance serviceinterviewees on establishing a service, andtheir best practices.

• Become familiar with the copyrightpolicies of the organisation as a whole.Find out where the service “sits” inrelation to the other IPR procedures.

• Establish good administrative systemsfrom the outset.

• Document everything - in such a waythat it still makes sense when you referback to it six months later.

• Provide clear literature to internalcustomers on the clearance procedures.

• Encourage teaching staff to prepare wellin advance and incorporate the copyrightclearance process into their timetable.

• Stress the importance of a six-weeklead-time time for requests.

• Create a clearance request form templatefor internal customers. (Sample formsfrom interviewees are given inAppendix 3.

• Ask internal customers to indicate wherea member of the organisation wrote arequested item.

• Date stamp all requests so they can bedealt with on a first come first servedbasis.

• Check all requests to see whether thematerials actually require clearance byconsidering whether the copying fallswithin the fair dealing or insubstantialuse exceptions of the CDPA88.



• Always remain one step ahead ofinternal customers and have alternativesat hand for those that make difficultclearance requests (e.g. be aware ofsources of library music, andcopyright-free graphics, etc)

• Design standard proformas forcorrespondence (letters and forms etc)

• When approaching a rights holder directthat has already mandated CLARCS,make it explicit why you need toapproach them directly.

• If possible, create a clearancemanagement database to keep electronicrecords of all the different aspects of theclearance requests (customers, itemsrequested, publishers, addresses, etc).Remember that a database allowssearching, unlike paper files.

• If designing a database from scratch,make sure you consider all theinformation that you will need and all theoptions it should offer. For example, canyou search by rightsholder/date/requester? How do yourecord chases? How do you know whena request needs renewing?

• Keep a record of any advice you give, tocover yourself.

• If you are working alone, ensure youhave a clearance email-box as well as apersonal one. This allows colleagues to

keep an eye on requests when you areaway.

• If in doubt – ask. Get onto the relevantmailing lists.

• Use the Internet – it can be very usefulfor publisher/company/institutioninformation. It can also be useful forkeeping up to date on new copyrightdevelopments and the progress of relatedprojects

• Attend as many courses as possible andalways keep the copyright “bibles” athand63

• Get support from colleagues – uselibrarians/learning advisors to help raiseawareness

• Create a file of FAQs based on what youlearn from discussion lists and in-housequeries.

• Regularly assess average fees forparticular types of material and keep tohand. Such information can be usefulwhen negotiating with rights holders.

• Ensure that the organisation’s paymentsystem is accurate and fast. Good payersbuild up goodwill with rights holders. Asone interviewee said, “£50 now is wortha lot more than £50 later on”.

REFERENCES


References

1 HEWETT, Elizabeth. The Impact of the Electronic Delivery of Learning Materials in UKHigher Education. November 1999. URL:http://builder.bham.ac.uk/reports/html/stakeholder.asp

2 Copyright Guidelines for the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme. Bristol : TLTP,1994

3 NESLI Model Licence. URL: http://www.nesli.ac.uk/ModelLicence8a.html

4 CLARCS Homepage http://www.cla.co.uk/www/clarcs.html

5 BLDSC Homepage http://www.bl.uk/services/bsds/dsc/

6 HERON Homepage http://www.stir.ac.uk/infoserv/heron/

7 eLib Projects. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/

8 GADD, Elizabeth. ‘Copyright Clearance for the Digital Library : a practical guide’, LearnedPublishing, 1997, 10 (3), 255-259

9 [Advert for Copyright Librarian, Information Services, Institute of Education] Library andInformation Appointments, 2(25), 3 December 1999.

10 Library and Information Appointments, 3(20), 22 September, 2000. Pp470, 472, and 474.

11 The Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1996. SI 1996 No. 3032

12 Patel, Kam. Copyright laws causing chaos. Times Higher Education Supplement.6 November 1998.

13 See: Copyright Tribunal Reference on the Copyright in Higher Education Working Group website at: URL: http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/copyright/ctref.html

14 The Library and Information Statistics Unit.http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/lisu/lisuhp.html

15 The Copyright in Higher Education Working Grouphttp://www.law.warwick.ac.uk/ncle/Copyright/

16 1998/99 figure taken from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA)http://www.hesa.ac.uk/

17 Indeed under the CLA Licence, it is not permitted for coursepacks to be placed in the LibraryShort Loan Collection.

18 This service is now in place and Institution C are checking electronic resources beforesubmitting requests.

19 Carmel, Erran, and Collins, Elizabeth. Impact of copyright management on multimediamarkets. Telematics and Informatics. 1997. 14(1), 97-109.

REFERENCES


20 Commission of the European Communities. Amended proposal for a European Parliamentand Council Directive on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rightsin the Information Society. CE COM(1999)0250

21 See section 3.10.3 Permission granted for no charge.

22 Carmel, Erran, and Collins, Elizabeth. Impact of copyright management on multimediamarkets. Telematics and Informatics. 1997. 14(1), 97-109.

23 CLA. Higher Education Copying Accord. London : CLA, 1998.

24 Weedon, Ralph. Policy approaches to copyright in HEIs : a study for the JSC Committee forAwareness, Liaison and Training (JCALT). Glasgow : Centre for Educational Systems, 2000,p. 24.

25 The JISC Legal Information Service web site is due to go live at the end of 2000. The URLwill be: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/legal/


27 Shepherd, Peter. The Higher Education Copying Accord. [Paper given at the CLA HigherEducation Consultation Day, 6 July 2000]. URL http://www.cla.co.uk/www/heca.htm

28 Shepherd, Peter. The Higher Education Copying Accord. [Paper presented at the CLA HEConsultation Day, 6 July, 2000.] http://www.cla.co.uk/www/heca.htm

29 Copyright Licensing Agency. A year of growth : the Copyright Licensing Agency : a review1999. CLA : London, 1999. P. 11.

30 Patel, Kam. Libraries unite over copyright. Times Higher Education Supplement. 26 May2000.

31 Patel, Kam. Team finds way round copyright. Times Higher Education Supplement.25 February 2000.

32 See: The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers’ Model Grant of Licencefor Journal Authors URL: http://www.alpsp.org.uk/grantli.pdf

33 Create Change: http://www.sconul.ac.uk/createchange.htm

34 See: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elib/projects.html#dp

35 Digitisation news. CLARION : the newsletter of the Copyright Licensing Agency. Winter2000, p.5.

36 The ACORN Project, URL: http://acorn.lboro.ac.uk/

37 HERON staff believe that as the content of the resource bank grows and will show cost as wellas availability of digitised materials, overlap will increase as users begin to select items whichare already available for a known price.

REFERENCES


38 The British Library Document Supply Centre: Copyright Fee Paid Option. URL:http://www.bl.ul/services/bsds/dsc/intCFPPS.html

39 Figures from correspondence with the Head of Publisher Liaison at The British Library.26 April 2000.

40 Guernsey, Lisa. Books by the chapter or verse arrive on the internet this fall. New York Timeson the web. July 18, 2000. URLhttp://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/biztech/articles/18book.html

41 Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, URL: http://purl.oclc.org/dc/

42 IMS Metadata Scheme, URL: http://www.imsproject.org/metadata/

43 Isaias, Petros. Technology issues and electronic copyright management systems.Ariadne 1999. Issue 21. URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/ecms/

44 Isaias, Petros. Electronic copyright management systems : aspects to consider. Ariadne 1999.Issue 20. URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue20/ecms/

45 Joint Information Systems Committee and the Publishers Association. Model licence formaterial supplied in electronic form. 1999. URL: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/modellic.pdf

46 NESLI Model Licence. URL: http://www.nesli.ac.uk/ModelLicence8a.html

47 Liblicence : Licensing electronic information : a resource for Librarians. URL:http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/index.shtml

48 Okerson, Ann. Copyright or contract? Library Journal 122(14), 1997, 136-137,139.

49 Duranceau, Ellen Finnie. Electronic journal forum : why you can’t learn license negotiation inthree easy lessons : a conversation with Georgia Harper, Office of General Counsel,University of Texas. Serials Review, 23(3) 1997, 69-71.


51 Weedon, Ralph. Policy approaches to copyright in HEIs : a study for the JISC Committee forAwareness, Liaison and Training (JCALT). Glasgow : Centre for Educational Systems, 2000,p.50.

52 Weedon, Ralph. Policy approaches to copyright in HEIs : a study for the JISC Committee forAwareness, Liaison and Training (JCALT). Glasgow : Centre for Educational Systems, 2000,p. 79.

53 Weedon, Ralph. Policy approaches to copyright in HEIs : a study for the JISC Committee forAwareness, Liaison and Training (JCALT). Glasgow : Centre for Educational Systems, 2000,p. 80.

54 Calvert, H.G. The impact of electronic journals and aggregate databases on interlibrary loan: acase study at Ball State University Libraries. New World Library , 2000, 101(1153), 28-31.

REFERENCES


55 GADD, Elizabeth. ‘Copyright Clearance for the Digital Library : a practical guide’, LearnedPublishing, 1997, 10 (3), 255-259

56 Private correspondence from Helen Pickering, HERON Copyright Officer, 9 March 2000.



59 Shepherd, Peter. The Higher Education Copying Accord. [Paper presented at the CLA HEConsultation Day, 6 July, 2000.] http://www.cla.co.uk/www/heca.htm

60 GADD, Elizabeth, GOODMAN, Richard, and MUIR, Adrienne. ‘CLEAR Design: developingan electronic copyright management system for Project ACORN.’ The Electronic Library,1998, 16(4), 253-9.

61 ERCOMS homepage, URL: http://www.iielr.dmu.ac.uk/Projects/ERCOMS/

62 Joint Information Systems Committee and the Publishers Association. Model licence formaterial supplied in electronic form. 1999. URL: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/modellic.pdf

63 e.g. Cornish,G. P. (Graham Peter),1942- Copyright : interpreting the law for libraries,archives and information services. 3rd ed. London : Library Association Publishing,1999.Norman, Sandy. Copyright in further and higher education libraries. 4th ed., London :Library Association,1999; The Aslib guide to copyright. London : Aslib.

APPENDIX 1: QUESTIONNAIRE


Clearing the wayAn investigation into the copyright clearance undertaken by UK

Libraries

The aim of this research is to document the copyright clearance activities that are beingundertaken by libraries and their organisations in the UK with a particular focus onHigher Education. It is hoped that the results will:

• Raise awareness as to the volume of clearance that needs to be undertaken inlibraries as a result of current copyright legislation and licensing;

• Inform centralised clearance services and licensing organisations in theestablishment of library-friendly services;

• Result in best practice guidelines for libraries undertaking copyright clearance.

It would be most helpful if the person(s) responsible for copyright clearance atyour organisation could complete this questionnaire. All the information will betreated in the strictest confidence.

A: You and your organisation.1 How would you describe the organisation you work for:� National Library� Higher Education Institution� Further Education Institution� Public Library� Special Library� School Library� Other – please specify____________________________________

2 Where does the majority of your organisation’s copyright clearanceactivities take place?

� In the Library, by Library staff� In the Library, by a dedicated Copyright Unit/ copyright staff member� In a separate Copyright Unit elsewhere within the organisation� By individuals elsewhere in the organisation: please specify

______________________________________________________

3 As far as you know, how many people in your organisation clear rights?Please give their job titles, and the proportion of their time they spendclearing rights: (e.g. Library Assistant, 5 hours a week)

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________



B: Why do you clear rights?1 What are you doing the clearance for? Please tick any that apply:

� Short Loan Collections (print)� Other Library Collection (print)� Electronic Short Loan Collection� Coursepacks (print)� Distance Learning materials (print)� Distance Learning materials (web)� Distance Learning materials (CD)� Electronic Learning Environment (internal)� CAL packages� Digitisation project� Other electronic project� Current Awareness Service� I'm sure there will be others, please list:______________________________________________________

2 Which of the above constitute your main clearance activities?Please list, estimating the percentage they make up of your workload (e.g.Short Loan - 90%)

______________________________________________________

C: What materials are you clearing?1 Tick any of the following that you clear rights for:� Book chapters� Books - whole� Journal articles� Journals -whole� Newspapers� Photographs� Illustrations/plates� Slides� Music� Video� I’m sure there will be others, please list:______________________________________________________________

D: How is it done?1 What licences do you take out?� British Standards� CLA HE Licence� CLA Business & Industry Licence� CLA Central/Local Government Licence� CLA FE Licence� CLA Schools Licence� Education Recording Agency� Design and Artists Copyright Society



� Newspaper Licensing Agency� Ordnance Survey� Other (please specify)______________________________________

2 Do you use any copyright clearance services?� CLARCS – printed material� CLARCS - digitisation licence� HERON� Other (please specify)_______________________________________

3 What is your experience, good or bad, of using these services?____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

4 How do you keep track of the rights clearance process? Please tick all thatapply.

� Manual files� Electronic database� Combination of manual and electronic files.� Other (please specify)______________________________________

5 Would you like to make any comments about the rights clearance process(e.g. receiving requests from internal customers, timescales, paperworketc)?

_____________________________________________________________

E: What does it cost?1 Whats the average permission fee for the different types of clearance you

undertake? (e.g. journal article for SL - £5 one-off fee)_________________________________________________________

2 Whats the highest fee you've been asked to pay?______________________________________________________________

3 Whats the highest fee you've actually paid?______________________________________________________________

4 What proportion of your clearance requests are granted without charge?______________________________________________________________

5 What different types of charging mechanism have you come across? (e.g.royalties per use, one-off licence fees, etc). Please list:

__________________________________________________________



F: How long does it take?1 Can you estimate how many items you attempt to clear (as an organisation)

per annum?

2 What’s the average time a permission takes to come through? (pleasespecify for different types of material and purpose if possible)

3 What percentage of permission requests do you have to chase?

4 How many times will you chase a request before giving up?

5 What proportion of permission requests are never answered?

G: What does the future hold?1 Do you think copyright clearance is going to become easier in the future?

Y/NPlease explain your answer:

2 Would you like to make any other comments about copyright clearance inlibraries generally, or your library in particular?

H: Copyright Clearance Units and Copyright OfficersIf you work in a dedicated copyright clearance unit and/or a major part of your jobdescription involves copyright clearance activities, please answer the followingquestions:

1 What was the impetus behind the establishment of the copyright unit orcopyright post(s)?

2 When was the unit or post(s) established?

3 How is the unit or post(s) funded?

4 How is the unit or post(s) managed? (i.e. to whom do they report?)



5 What proportion of the unit or post’s time is spent giving copyright adviceas opposed to performing copyright clearance?

6 Would you be willing to be contacted for further discussion on yourexperiences of copyright clearance? If so, please give your contact detailsbelow:

Name:

Job title:

Organisation:

Address:

Telephone:

Email:

Thank you for completing this questionnaire. Your response is much appreciated.

Please return to: Elizabeth Gadd, Pilkington Library, Loughborough University,Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU

APPENDIX 2: INTERVIEW SCHEDULE


Clearing the way – interview schedule

1. Copyright in the organisationa) How does your unit/post fit into the overall Intellectual Property managementinfrastructure of your organisation?

b) What is your general remit? (clearance, advice, copyright awareness raising, patents,licence negotiations, etc)

c) What other ‘players’ are there in your organisation?

d) Are you the official copyright advisory centre for your organisation?

2. Establishment of the unit/posta) Can you explain why the unit/post was established?

b) Can you explain how the unit/post is funded? (income generation)

3. Feedback from the organisationa) How are your services received by the organisation? (good feedback?)

b) [How] do you promote your services to the organisation?

4. Clearance processesa) Are there any clearances you won’t undertake? (guidelines? Why?)

b) b) Can you describe the whole clearance process?Receiving requests fromcustomers

APPENDIX 2: INTERVIEW SCHEDULE


i) Different clearance activities taken on by different staff members?ii) Set processes/ guidelines / practice for different clearance types – Check existing

FT databases to see if already held in usable form?iii) Resources used – CLA database, other publisher sources etc.iv) Database, standard lettersv) Chasing proceduresvi) All types of fee accepted?vii) All levels of fee accepted?viii) Are procedures documented – and your understanding of the law/licences for

internal guidance.ix) Do you have any ‘best practice’ advice/hints/tips for copyright clearers in other

organisations?

5. Viewsa) What are your views on the future of copyright law/licences/clearance? (improve orworsen etc)

6. Keeping up-to-datea) How do you keep up-to-date with the latest changes in copyright law and licences

etc?

b) Where do you go for copyright advice?

APPENDIX 3: SAMPLE CLEARANCE REQUEST FORMS


Learning Centre

Copyright Clearance Application Form (CCS1)

Return to: Office UseCopyright Clearance Service

Date received Initial Reference

Email:Tel:

Copyright Clearance Service staff will be pleased to discuss your needs and assist in the completionof this form. Please allow a minimum of six weeks for clearance, and supply details and enclosuresas appropriate.

A General information

Name

School

Campus Extension Date

B Course details

Course title

Unit / Module title

Unit author

C Enclosed with this form

• Two copies of the original material Yes No

• Two copies of the adapted/redrawn,*figures/illustrations/diagrams/tables

*(delete as appropriate)

Yes No

• A copy of the © page of the material requested Yes No

D Previous use of material to be cleared

Is the material to be cleared acknowledged to a differentsource than the text in which it appears?

Yes No

If yes, the material will be acknowledged in the source you have found it in; pleaseenclose a photocopy of this acknowledgement.



E Details of material to be cleared

For Printed Materials

BooksBook title

Chapter No/Title

Author

Edition/Date

Pages

JournalsJournal title

Article title

Author

Vol/Issue No

Pages

Book or JournalPublisher &address

For quotations only

Number of words

For illustration(s) onlyIllustration/Figure no/Table no and Title

Will the material bed ?

Yes No

(please attach two copies of the original and two copies of any redrawing)



For other materialsSource

Format

Please give detailsof the specificelements to becleared

F Usage of materialPlease give details of what clearance is required

No of copies per year, over years

Handover date to production (a minimum of 6 weeks should beallowed for copyright clearance)

Will material to be cleared be reproduced in printed form? Yes No

Will material to be cleared be produced in any other form? Yes No

If yes, in what form will it be? eg CD ROM, Web etc

G Distribution and RightsPlease arrange copyright clearance for the following distribution

Internal MarketsUniversity staff and students( )

students overseas

For students overseas please state countries

External MarketsUK Europe World

excl USAWorld



Learning Centre

Copyright Clearance Application Form (CCS2)CLA Rapid Clearance Service (CLARCS)



Email:Tel:

Copyright Clearance Service staff will be pleased to discuss your needs and assist in the completionof this form. Please use this form to clear materials constituting a study/course pack.

A study/course pack is taken to mean materials which:• are copied and distributed at one time, bound or assembled as a course pack to be used in

support of a moduleor• are copied at intervals during the duration of the module, and which are intended ultimately to

build into a course pack or compilation to be used in support of a module.

This form only covers clearing rights for making print copies of paper materials as detailed by theCLA (Copyright Licensing Agency) Licence. Further information is available on the CopyrightClearance Service Web Site or in the ‘Guide to Services: Copyright’ leaflet.


Name

School


B Course details

Course title

Unit / Module title

Unit author

C Usage of material

• Given to students on campus Yes No

• Sent to distance learning students in the UK Yes No

• Sent to distance learning students in other countries Yes No

Please state which countries



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Learning Centre

Copyright Clearance Application Form Notes

The information requested on the Copyright Clearance Application Form will help us to deal speedilywith the questions that will be asked by the copyright holders.These notes have been prepared to help you fill in the form but please do not hesitate to contact theCopyright Clearance Service (ext.) if you need any help, or if you wish to make an appointment forus to help you with your copyright applications.Please allow a minimum of six weeks for obtaining clearance.

C. Enclosed with this form

• It is vital that copies of the material to be cleared are enclosed with your application form.

• In the case of adaptations it is necessary to compare the original source with the adaptation tojudge whether or not it has been sufficiently redrawn to make clearance unnecessary. Also,if clearance is required, the rights holder may wish to approve the adaptation.

• The copyright line on the original material identifies who to approach for permission.

D. Previous use of material to be cleared

• The material you wish to use might not always belong to the publisher/author of thebook/journal/newspaper in which it appears. It could be taken from another source. If that isthe case we need to contact the copyright owner of the original source and in order to do thiswe need the appropriate copyright details.

• The best way of providing them is for you to supply a photocopy of the copyrightacknowledgement made to the original in the publication now doing the quoting.Acknowledgements may appear by the illustration or quotation or be included in a compiled listof acknowledgements at the beginning or end of the publication.

E. Details of material to be cleared

Please supply as much detail as possible.

• If you are quoting for the purposes of criticism or review please supply the number of words ofeach extract you are quoting.

F. Distribution and rights

Please supply as much detail as possible indicating :

• What clearance is required at the present time.

• What might be required at a future date; this saves making a second application at a later date, and if fees are involved it will assist you in your financial planning.



Learning Centre

Copyright Clearance Application Form (CCS3)Digitisation (HERON)



Email:Tel:

Copyright Clearance Service staff will be pleased to discuss your needs and assistin the completion of this form.

Please allow a minimum of twelve weeks for clearance and digitisation, andsupply details as requested. Insufficient information can delay your application.

Only students on the course detailed below can be referred to the electroniccopies of the items cleared.


Name

School


B Course details

Course title

Unit / Module title

Unit author

C Student numbers

Number of students taking the module

D Dates required

From

To

Please take into consideration exam/resit times.Clearance is normally obtained for a twelve month period.



E Details of material to be cleared1

Title (Book/Journal)

Title of Article (Journal)

Author (Book/Article)

PublisherYear ISSN/ISBN

Books - Chapter & Pages Journals - Vol, No, PagesTotal No of Pages

2Title (Book/Journal)












E Details of material to be cleared (cont)4


















E Details of material to be cleared (cont)7


















Copyright Clearance Application Form

Return to: Office UseDate received:

Copyright Clearance Service

The information requested on this form will help the Copyright Clearance Service answer any questions asked bycopyright holders.Please include with this form a photocopy of the original material and the copyright line of the publication (e.g. in abook, the copyright and publisher details are usually found on one of the first pages inside), and a photocopy of thematerial as you intend to use it.

If you need help in completing the form or wish to further discuss your needs, please contact the Copyright ClearanceService on extension XXXX, or via email.

Please allow a minimum of six weeks for clearance.

A. General Information

Name

School/Faculty

Contact address

Course title

Module title & description (e.g. number of students registered on module)



B. Use of Material to be Cleared

Please tick one or more box, to show how you intend to present the material:

Course Pack for distributionin class

Course Pack for distributionat a cost

Course pack for sale throughbookshop

Distance Learning Pack

Electronic reproduction

Diagrams/photos/tables etc

Details:

Distribution:

Internal Staff Students Both

External UK Europe World

No. ofCopies

Electronic Rights -where applicable (leave blank if only making paper-to-paper copies).

It is recommended that all material is cleared and digitised through HERON (Higher Education Resources On-demand).Requests can be submitted to HERON via the Copyright Clearance Service using this form.

Access: Secure Network Open access

Security: details of any control mechanisms in place e.g. password

Location: e.g. on CD-ROM, WebCT, Faculty homepages, Internet etc



Users (tick most applicable):Either: Pre-defined group of students for pre-defined course.

If so, number of students on course

or:

No pre-defined group of students –the item is recommended to any member of University

(the choice will affect the pricing model)

Illustrations(check whether the material includes any photos, graphics or other illustrations. Are they necessary? –clearing such items is a lengthy process and your request may be delayed as a result).

Text only/text onlyrequired

Illustrationsrequired on page numbers __________________________________________

Format (only applicable if not using HERON)(how the work is to be reproduced electronically e.g. PDF, HTML etc)

Usage dates: (essential information)

Start date: End date:

Read-only? Y/N

Deadline date:

Attach any additional information that will be useful for the rights holders.



C. Illustrations etc.

Use this section to give details of any separate illustrations/photographs/diagrams/charts/tables.Clearance is not usually needed if any of the above are part of a whole chapter/article for which you are already seekingclearance, except in the case of newspaper articles.

ISBN/ISSN____________________________________ Date of Publication ____________________Book/Journal Title in full _____________________________________________________________Newspaper ________________________________________ Vol./Issue No._____________________Author(s)/Editor(s)__________________________________________________________________Publisher__________________________________________________________________________Page no(s) _______________If the material is reprinted, please give details of original source______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Please provide a photocopy of the material.Do you intend to adapt the material? No Yes -if so please provide a copy of adaptation

ISBN/ISSN____________________________________ Date of Publication ____________________Book/Journal Title in full _____________________________________________________________Newspaper ________________________________________ Vol./Issue No._____________________Author(s)/Editor(s)__________________________________________________________________Publisher__________________________________________________________________________Page no(s) _______________If the material is reprinted, please give details of original source______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Please provide a photocopy of the material.Do you intend to adapt the material? No Yes -if so please provide a copy of adaptation

ISBN/ISSN____________________________________ Date of Publication ____________________Book/Journal Title in full _____________________________________________________________Newspaper ________________________________________ Vol./Issue No._____________________Author(s)/Editor(s)___________________________________________________________________Publisher___________________________________________________________________________Page no(s) _______________If the material is reprinted, please give details of original source______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Please provide a photocopy of the material.Do you intend to adapt the material? No Yes -if so please provide a copy of adaptation

(if you have further illustrations to clear, please photocopy (or copy & paste) additional copies of this page)



D. Articles/Chapters for Course Packs/Electronic copyright clearance

Use this section to give details about the material for which you need copyright clearance.Please enclose photocopies of the material where possible.

ISBN/ISSN _____________________________________________________________________________________Book/Journal Title in full________________________________________________________________________________________________

Publisher ________________________________________________________________________________________

Vol/Issue no. ______________________ Year ____________________

Author(s)/Editor(s) ________________________________________________________________________________

Chapter/Article title:________________________________________________________________________________________________

Author of chapter/article, if different from above________________________________________________________________________________________________

Page numbers _________________________________


Publisher ________________________________________________________________________________________

Vol/Issue no. ______________________ Year ____________________

Author(s)/Editor(s) ________________________________________________________________________________



Page numbers _________________________________


Publisher ________________________________________________________________________________________

Vol/Issue no. ______________________ Year ____________________

Author(s)/Editor(s) ________________________________________________________________________________



Page numbers _________________________________



ISBN/ISSN _____________________________________________________________________________________

Book/Journal Title in full________________________________________________________________________________________________

Publisher ________________________________________________________________________________________

Vol/Issue no. ______________________ Year ____________________

Author(s)/Editor(s) ________________________________________________________________________________



Page numbers _________________________________

ISBN/ISSN _____________________________________________________________________________________


Publisher ________________________________________________________________________________________

Vol/Issue no. ______________________ Year ____________________

Author(s)/Editor(s) ________________________________________________________________________________



Page numbers _________________________________

ISBN/ISSN _____________________________________________________________________________________


Publisher ________________________________________________________________________________________

Vol/Issue no. ______________________ Year ____________________

Author(s)/Editor(s)________________________________________________________________________________________________



Page numbers _________________________________

To request permission to reproduce copyright material, complete the form below. Please allow a minimum of four weeks for clearance to be obtained. * Fields marked with a red asterisk are compulsory.

Details of material to be cleared:

* Title of book / journal

Author / editor of book

ISSN / ISBN

Date of Publication

Publisher

Volume / part number

* Page numbers

Author and title of chapter / article

* Format [e.g. Photocopy; Acetate; Electronic]

Please type the details here


lssf

lssf

lssf

lssf

lssf

lssf

lssf

lssf

lssf


lssf

If material to be cleared is acknowledged to a different source, please give details

lssf


lssf

lssf

lssf

Information Service: Comment Form

lssf

Page 1 of 2

lssf


lssf


lssf

93

lssf

lssf

lssf

Application for Copyright Clearance

lssf

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* Number of copies[For electronic format, enter number of students on course]

* What will the copies be used for?[e.g. Short loan collection; Course pack; Web]

Requested by:

Name

* School or Department

Telephone

Email

* Title of Course or Module

* Course Start Date

* Course End Date

Submit Information

Clear

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Please note: Photocopies obtained on Inter Library Loan are for personal use only. Photocopies required for library or classroom use should be obtained from a copyright cleared service. Please ask Resource Centre staff for assistance.

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Information Service: Comment Form

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COPYRIGHT APPLICATION FORM COURSE NO.

A GENERAL INFORMATIONOFFICE USE ONLY

Your Ref: Date Received Entered By Rights Ref Component Ref

AdministeringFaculty Code:

URGENT

INSUFFICIENT DETAILS OR MISSING ENCLOSURES MAY LEAD TO THE RETURN OF THIS FORMAND WILL CAUSE DELAY. PLEASE COMPLETE IN BLOCK CAPITALS THROUGHOUT.

Course Title

From Ext. Date Sent

B COURSE COMPONENT DETAILSComponent Description Component Author

Component Title

Co-published? Yes Name of co-publisher

No

C CLEARANCE DETAILSIn which format(s) will the material be reproduced? (Please tick appropriate boxes)

Hardcopy ! Staff and Students ! UK ! World excl. USA ! World ! OtherCD ROM ! Staff and Students ! UK ! World excl. USA ! World ! OtherInternet ! Staff and Students ! UK ! World excl. USA ! World ! OtherCDI ! Staff and Students ! UK ! World excl. USA ! World ! OtherOther network systems ! Staff and Students ! UK ! World excl. USA ! World ! Other

No. of print copies per year x No. of years = Total No. of copies to be printed

Handover date to Editor Mailing date to students

Handover date to Print Production Budgeted date for payment

D ENCLOSURES REQUIREDPlease indicate which enclosures are included with this application

! Two copies of the original material! Two copies of the line of the original source! Two copies of the proposed redrawn and original diagrams/figures/tables! Copies of any correspondence with holders! Two copies of the acknowledgement page if the material requested is from a secondary source

E DETAILS OF MATERIAL TO BE CLEARED Your Ref:



If the material is acknowledged to a different source please give details of source. (Please enclose a photocopy of theoriginal acknowledgement)

Is the holder the author ofthis course component?

Yes No Is the material froman OU Set Book?

Yes No

Publisher name and address FOR OFFICE USE ONLYPublisher / Author UniqueIdentifier

Original copyright date and publisher if different from above. (Please enclose two photocopies of the line onbook)

Book / Journal / Newspaper title (delete as applicable)

Author / Editor and Address of Book / Journal (delete as applicable)

Edition / Volume / Issue / Date ISBN No.

Chapter No. / Title or Article Title (delete as applicable)

Author / Editor of Chapter / Article and address (delete as applicable)

Page reference in source No. of words (if text)

% of original book/article

Your Ref:



PLEASE ENSURE THAT CLEARANCE IS REQUESTED ONCE ONLY EITHER THROUGH RIGHTSDEPARTMENT OR MEDIA LIBRARIAN. PLEASE NOTE THAT THE MEDIA LIBRARIAN CLEARSSTAND ALONE PHOTOGRAPHS AND ARTWORK AND THE RIGHTS DEPARTMENT CLEARSTHOSE INCLUDED WITH TEXTSEE GUIDANCE NOTES.

F FOR PHOTOGRAPHS/FIGURES/TABLES/CARTOONS/GRAPHS ETC.

Photograph / Figure / Table / Cartoon /Graph etc. Number / Title in original text(delete as applicable)

Photograph / Figure / Table / Cartoon /Graph etc. Number / Title in OU text(delete as applicable)

Will material be redrawn? Yes No Always attach 2 copies of the original and 2copies of any proposed redrawing

G REQUEST FOR ORIGINAL ARTWORK

Do you require the Rights Departmentto request any of the following?

Black andWhite Prints

Black and White Slides

Bromides

Colour Prints Colour Slides

H ADDITIONAL INFORMATION



Course Pack Copyright Clearance - Request Form

Name of Department:..........................................................................................................

Course Title + Course A/C Code: .......................................................................................

Name of Course Leader: ......................................................................................................

Contact for enquiries (ie. Course Administrator / Dept. Secretary):..........................................................

Tel. ext.:………….………….. E-mail address..................................................................

Course Pack Item Details

Item 1: ISBN/ISSN: ................................................................................................................

Book/Journal Title (in full): ................................................................................................

...…………………………………………………………………………………………..

Publisher:.............................................................................................................................

Volume/Issue no. (for journals):………………… No. of articles: .....................................

No. of pages to copy: ………………………… No. of copies of each page: ................

Item 2: ISBN / ISSN: .........................................................................................................


.............................................................................................................................................

Publisher:.............................................................................................................................


No. of pages to copy: ………………………… No. of copies of each page..................

Item 3: ISBN / ISSN: .........................................................................................................


.............................................................................................................................................

Publisher: ............................................................................................................................


No. of pages to copy: ………………………… No. of copies of each page:.................

Item 4: ISBN /ISSN: ..........................................................................................................


.............................................................................................................................................

Publisher:.............................................................................................................................


No. of pages to copy: ………………………… No. of copies of each page: .................

Application for copyright clearance Request no 913

ISBN/ISSN

Author/Title

Date

Volume/Pages

Extract

Publisher

Copies 0

Department

Requested by

Module no.

Date Requested

Reply Received

Fee

Paid

Payment authorised by

Comments

Format

Course title

Reference

Purpose

Course start date Course end date

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APPENDIX 4: SAMPLE FORMS FROM A CLEARANCE MANAGEMENT DATABASE

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APPENDIX 5: SAMPLE PERMISSION REQUEST LETTERS


Contact nameRights and Permissions Dept.Publisher nameAddress 1Address 2Address 3OX2 8EJ

07 February 2002Our Ref:

Please find set out below details of materials we would like to publish within the following XXXX Universitycourse (and in appropriate formats for the reading impaired).Course codeProposed print run: Publishing date:________________________________________________________________________________________Type of work: See belowTitle:

Edition, volume, date:Author/Editor(s):Chapter or article:Author/Editor:Publisher(s):Page No(s): No. of words in extract: Illustrations: Original references:

Original Titles:

________________________________________________________________________________________Please note:

We would be grateful if you would complete the following permission and return it to us duly signed, deletingany rights you are unable to grant.

If you have any queries, please contact (details)

We request the following non-exclusive rights, in English

1. World PRINT2. World publishing rights in all electronic media in a secure format.

Signed _____________________________________

Date signed _____________________________________

Company/Publisher (if applicable) ________________________________________________________________________

We do not hold the rights. Please apply to _______________________________________________________________



Date

Address

Direct TelDirect Fax

Dear Sir / Madam

Request for permission to reproduce copyright material

We are writing to you, as the copyright holder, to request clearance as detailed on the attacheddocument.

We hope you will be able to grant us permission to use this material, for which fullacknowledgement will be made. If you do not control the rights to the material we would bemost grateful for the name and address of the copyright holder concerned. If you are a jointcopyright holder we would be grateful for details of the other interested parties.

In anticipation, we appreciate your co-operation in making this material available and would askyou to kindly return the attached document duly signed.

Yours faithfully

Copyright Clearance Service

Enc



Learning CentreCopyright Application

Our reference:LLR\C\02xxx

Source:Title of publication

Details of material to be cleared:Full details eg author and title of journal article, vol, no, year, pages

Distribution plans:We are requesting permission to reproduce the document detailed above(give details of how we intend to use the item).

Format in which the material will be reproduced:Print

Number of copies:We wish to make xx copies.

To be completed by the copyright holder

Permission:Permission is hereby granted for use of the material as outlined above.

Name:

Title:

Company:

Date:

Signed:

Conditions of use:

Fees:



Your Ref:

Our Ref: XXXXX

Date:

The PublisherRights and PermissionThe StreetThe TownThe County Post Code

Dear Sir or Madam:

The School of XXXXX at XXXXXX University is currently planning course material for the moduleXXXXX to be offered XXXX.

The delivery of this module will involve the distribution of a course pack to each student, which will beused for educational purposes only.We hope to be able to include photocopied material from a variety of sources in these packs.

We would like permission to reproduce the following:Author: (Name)Publication: (Book title)Chapter (Chapter Number and Title)Page No(s) (Pages)No of Words (Number)

We wish to distribute the publication in the world market.

The proposed print run will be approximately XXXXX copies.

I enclose a photocopy of the material to be used.

We hope that you will be able to grant us permission for use this material for which full acknowledgementwill be made.

If you do not control the rights to the material mentioned above, I would be most grateful for the nameand address of the copyright holder concerned.

If there is a charge for the use of this material, please indicate the amount and I will inform the courseleaders accordingly.

We appreciate your co-operation in making this material available, and would ask you to kindly return thecomplete document duly signed.(Please quote our reference number in all correspondence).

Yours sincerely

Copyright Clearance and Licensing Officertel/faxfaxemail

I hereby grant permission for use of the material as outlined (ref: XXXXX)

Signed _____________________________________ Title ______________________________

Company/Publisher ___________________________ Date ______________________________

Any conditions:



Permissions Department

*Publisher

*Address

*City

*Postcode

*Country

*Date

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am writing on behalf of the * Department at XXXX University, who wish to photocopy the following

extract for use by students on the * course running from * to * .

We are unable to copy this extract under the terms of our photocopying licence as it exceeds the

permitted limits. We would therefore be grateful for your permission to reproduce these pages.

Author/Title:

ISBN:

Pages:

No. of copies:

Please reply to the Copyright Unit at the above address.

Yours sincerely

Publisher’s reply:

1. Permission granted for no charge

2. Permission granted subject to a fee of .........................................................

3. Permission cannot be granted because ........................................................

Signature ............................................... Date ......................................



To: Permissions Department -

From: (Copyright Librarian)

Date:

Dear

I am writing on behalf of XXXX to request permission to copy…

The extract is required for inclusion in a student course pack produced by the

__________Department at XXXX. The full item details are:

ISBN / ISSN:

Title:

Author:

Publisher:

Specific extract: (pp. )

Number of pages to copy:

Initially I contacted the Copyright Licensing Agency (UK) for copyright clearance, but they do

not have a mandate to authorise copying from this publication, and suggested sending a direct

request to the publisher.

Please let me know if permission is granted and, if so, give details of any specific

acknowledgements required and costs. The copies are to be used for teaching and research only

and the Department would only require a maximum of ___ copies.

As this is quite an urgent request I would be grateful for a response by e-mail or fax. My contact

details are shown below.

Yours sincerely,

APPENDIX 6: SAMPLE “SIGN OFF” FORMS FOR INTERNAL CUSTOMERS


Copyright Clearance____________________________________________________________________________________

Course Code: Component title:

Course Team Ref.: Rights Ref. No.Assist ID:

From: To:____________________________________________________________________________________

Copyright has been cleared for the following:Title:Author(s)/Editor(s):Chapter or Article:Illustrations as follows:Original References:Original Titles:____________________________________________________________________________________

Clearance subject to the following

____________________________________________________________________________________

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TEXT FOR EDITOR:

____________________________________________________________________________________

Cleared: 07 February 2002

NIL COST CLEARANCE Publisher/author: Copyright Clearance Centre

APPENDIX 6: SAMPLE “SIGN OFF” FORMS FOR INTERNAL CUSTOMERS


Memo to:

From: (Copyright Librarian)

Re: Copyright Clearance - Authorisation

Date:

Dear

I am writing to confirm that the CLA have authorised copyright clearance for the *** coursepack and you are now free to send the items to Reprographics for duplication. The CLA’sauthorisation number for this pack is © ***** and it should be written on the first page of each ofthe extracts before they are photocopied.

The CLA also state that the following information should be prominently displayed on the coverof the course pack:1. The authorisation number, preceded by the copyright symbol: © *****2. The academic year when the pack was created3. The statement: “This is copyright material and may not be copied or otherwise reproduced

without the prior consent of the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd. or the copyright holder.This material is not licensed for resale or further copying.”

The price of the copyright clearance has been confirmed as £***+VAT (£ ***inc. ) An itemisedlist is attached for your records.

When you have collated your pack, please make an additional copy to send to me so that I cankeep the readings on file in the event of a CLA inspection.

Yours sincerely,

BIBLIOGRAPHY


Bibliography

[Advert for Copyright Librarian, Information Services, Institute of Education] Library andInformation Appointments, 2(25), 3 December 1999.

[Adverts for jobs with clearance responsibilities] Library and Information Appointments, 3(20),22 September, 2000. Pp470, 472, and 474.

ACORN (Access to Course Readings via Networks) Project, URL: http://acorn.lboro.ac.uk/

ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) Model Grant of Licence forJournal Authors, URL: http://www.alpsp.org.uk/grantli.pdf

BLDSC Homepage http://www.bl.uk/services/bsds/dsc/

Calvert, H.G. The impact of electronic journals and aggregate databases on interlibrary loan: acase study at Ball State University Libraries. New World Library , 2000, 101(1153), 28-31.

Carmel, E. and E. Collins. Impact of copyright management on multimedia markets. Telematicsand Informatics, 14(1) (1997) 97-109.

CHEW (The Copyright in Higher Education Working Group) URL:http://www.law.warwick.ac.uk/ncle/Copyright/

CLARCS (The Copyright Licensing Agency Rapid Clearance Service) URL:http://www.cla.co.uk/www/clarcs.html

Clearing the way: copyright clearance in UK libraries URL:http://www.lboro.ac.uk/library/clearing.html

Commission of the European Communities. Amended proposal for a European Parliament andCouncil Directive on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in theInformation Society. CE COM(1999)0250

Copyright Guidelines for the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme, Bristol : TLTP,1994

Copyright Licensing Agency. A year of growth : the Copyright Licensing Agency : a review1999. CLA : London, 1999.

Cornish, G.P. Copyright : interpreting the law for libraries, archives and information services.3rd ed. London : Library Association Publishing,1999.

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, URL: http://purl.oclc.org/dc/

eLib Projects, URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/projects/

ERCOMS, URL: http://www.iielr.dmu.ac.uk/Projects/ERCOMS/

Gadd, Elizabeth, Goodman, Richard, and Muir, Adrienne. CLEAR Design: developing anelectronic copyright management system for Project ACORN. The Electronic Library, 1998,16(4), 253-9.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


Gadd, Elizabeth. Then and now: the changing process of copyright clearance with the advent ofthe electronic era, Copyright and New Media Law newsletter 1 (1) (1997) 6-9 .

Gadd, Elizabeth. 'Copyright Clearance for the Digital Library : a practical guide', LearnedPublishing, 1997, 10 (3), 255-259

Guernsey, Lisa. Books by the chapter or verse arrive on the internet this fall. New York Timeson the web. July 18, 2000. URLhttp://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/biztech/articles/18book.html

Hampson, Andrew, Digitisation in the Hybrid Library. [Unpublished paper presented at theJUGL Digitisation in Practice Seminar, OU Conference Centre, London, 2001.]

HERON (Higher Education Resources ON-demand) Project. URL:http://www.stir.ac.uk/infoserv/heron/

Hewett, Elizabeth. The Impact of the Electronic Delivery of Learning Materials in UK HigherEducation. November 1999. URL: http://builder.bham.ac.uk/reports/html/stakeholder.asp BuilderProject.

IMS Metadata Scheme, URL: http://www.imsproject.org/metadata/

LISU, the Library and Information Statistics Unit. URL:http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/lisu/lisuhp.html

McCracken. Richard and Madeleine Gilbart. Buying and clearing rights: print, broadcast andmultimedia. London : Blueprint, 1995.

Norman, S. Copyright in further and higher education libraries. 4th ed., London, LibraryAssociation,1999.

Okerson, Ann. Copyright or contract? Library Journal 122(14) (1997) 136-137,139.

Oppenheim, C, H. Rosenblatt, and R. Wall (eds), The Aslib guide to copyright. (London, Aslib,2000)

Patel, K. Copyright laws causing chaos. Times Higher Education Supplement.6 November 1998.

Patel, K. Libraries unite over copyright. Times Higher Education Supplement. 26 May 2000.

Patel, K. Team finds way round copyright. Times Higher Education Supplement. 25 February2000

Shepherd, Peter. The Higher Education Copying Accord. [Paper given at the CLA HigherEducation Consultation Day, 6 July 2000]. URL http://www.cla.co.uk/www/heca.htm

The Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1996. SI 1996 No. 3032

Weedon, Ralph. Policy approaches to copyright in HEIs : a study for the JSC Committee forAwareness, Liaison and Training (JCALT). Glasgow : Centre for Educational Systems, 2000.

LISU Mission Statement and Strategic Aims Mission statement

LISU aims to be the authoritative national centre for the collection and dissemination of statistical data to support the management of UK library and information services (LIS), and to be the major UK provider of expert advice on the effective use of such data.

Strategic aims

1. To provide data for the advocacy of LIS with government and the media. 2. To increase the understanding and use of statistics by LIS managers. 3. To maintain over time databases for key LIS sectors, and to make data available in

print and/or electronic formats. 4. To encourage benchmarking in LIS, and to provide benchmarking services. 5. To provide on request objective advice to LIS managers, linked to interpretation of

local data. 6. To underpin UK research into LIS, through the databases and through advice in

statistical analysis. 7. To undertake research into the development and use of valid data for the sector. 8. To make constructive use of data across the different LIS sectors.

Library and Information Statistics Unit Loughborough University Loughborough Leicestershire LE11 3TU Telephone +44 (0)1509 223071 Fax +44 (0)1509 223072 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/lisu/lisuhp.html

Department of Information Science Project Head Prof Charles Oppenheim LISU Director Dr J Eric Davies

clearing the way: copyright clearance in uk libraries for this study was facilitated by lizzie’s...

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