I won't reiterate the points made in earlier debates: as Charles says
succinctly in his reply, the short answer is no.
However, I will share my experience at Aberystwyth in my previous role.
We used the button where the publisher agreed to this, for one item. It
received a great deal of spam and the author complained. We therefore
switched the item from his LDAP user to the administrator by changing
the database entry, so that we received the email instead and could
monitor it. In two years or so of using the button on this item, we only
ever received one genuine request that we forwarded to the author. I
have no idea whether he then approved the request, or how serious a
request it was, as we had no further response. I may add that the author
had other papers in the repository that extremely high monthly access
statistics, by way of comparison.
The problem would be greater where a member of staff had left the
institution. The the email contact address, however the button may work
on a particular platform in practice (DSpace using LDAP accounts at
present), would then be redundant, as would the button except in the
rare case that details would be updated for a defunct account. One
possible answer is to rely on OpenID but there is still no guarantee
that a particular OpenID would remain valid, any more than an email
address. Overall, it brings the practical usefulness of the button into
considerable doubt.
I gather from Les' comment that the Eprints button works rather better
because it can be associated with multiple email addresses and does not
rely on the LDAP mechanism, but it is quite possible that several
authors might move on or change email addresses, so the problem is
merely reduced.
Does anyone have statistics for the actual use of the button, i.e.
number of requests as a percentage of total access, number of requests
agreed and refused by the author etc, for a particular repository? It
would be very interesting to see whether our experience was unusual or
typical. I would not like to advocate the button until it is shown that
people really use it, laying aside the possible legal intricacies
mentioned on earlier occasions.
Thanks,
Talat
J.W.T.Smith wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> In EPrints, when there is a contact address for a repository item, an
> external user sees a ‘request a copy’ button.
>
> I was thinking of adding a generic ‘request’ address to all the items
> that have no contact address so requests for these items would come to
> a central service. If I have understood Charles Oppenheim’s advice on
> Copyright we could supply a copy of the paper to the requestor free of
> charge without infringing Copyright (assuming they say it is for
> private non-commercial use).
>
> Has anyone done this (or similar)? Is it Copyright OK?
>
> Regards,
>
> John Smith,
>
> KAR (Kent Academic Repository) Admin.
>
--
Dr Talat Chaudhri
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