On 25 Jan 2006, at 14:41, Pat Galloway wrote:
> Our practice, as we are beginning to develop a departmental
> repository for our administration records, faculty materials, and
> student portfolios, is to consider the material, the law
> (especially for student materials), and the will of the creator:
> one size does not usually fit all, even for the same creator, and
> as we are using DSpace we are able to license every item separately
> if necessary, and if the creator is depositing directly they can
> make that decision separately themselves. We are working on
> recommendations for generic sources and genres, but anticipate that
> the landscape will be somewhat complex. This has actually always
> been potentially true for paper archives, but the difficulty of
> access made the problem less visible than it should have been.
We have taken the view that the "license" (such as it is) cannot hope
to be legally correct, but should obtain some sort of buy-in from the
depositor on the function of the repository (e.g. that they are
making their documents and/or records available for view and that
they shouldn't take this step unless they are confident that they
should do so.)
We discussed the text with our University's IPR exploitatiion unit,
who after a momentary panic about Open Access, declared it to be an
excellent example of the message that they wanted to get across to
academics - ie think twice before you make anything public. Since
most academics have done that thinking and calculation well before
they get to the deposit stage (do I really want to publish or not?)
then the "license" as such isn't a problem for anyone.
--
Les Carr
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