March 10, 2008
Elsevier Agrees to Let MIT Use Bits of Journal Articles Online
A major challenge for colleges that want to post lecture materials on the Web involves making sure they have permission to use the copyrighted images from journals and other sources that professors have put in their slides. Today the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it has reached a deal with Elsevier, one of the largest journal publishers, to allow a limited amount of material from its journals to be used in MIT’s OpenCourseWare project.
The publisher hasn’t exactly given away the store: The agreement allows the project to use up to three illustrations per journal article, and up to 100 words of text.
But that will save the OpenCourseWare staff members hours and hours of time, and allow them to include some material they might not have bothered to ask about in the past, says Steve E. Carson, external-relations director for the project. “This is not only a cost saver for us, but it also expands the range of things that we can publish,” he says.
Publishing 400 courses online each year involves tracking down permissions for about 6,000 copyrighted items, Mr. Carson says. (The project has one full-time and one part-time employee devoted to doing just that.)
What if you’re not at MIT?
Mark Seeley, vice president and general counsel at Elsevier, says the company has also agreed to a new policy on copyright, set up by the International Association of Scientific, Technical, & Medical Publishers, allowing any college to post small bits of journal material online. The policy doesn’t allow quite as much as the deal with MIT does, however.
Mr. Seeley says Elsevier made the agreement with MIT and agreed to the broader copyright policy because it was seeing an increasing number of requests from colleges to use small amounts of material form its journals. “I think our experience is that actually a lot of the request for permissions are relatively modest,” he says. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Monday March 10, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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One hundred words of an article for educational, nonprofit use doesn’t seem earth-shattering. Is it clear that this even exceeds fair use? I am left with the feeling that we’re being given free access to a public park by a shyster who, until now, was asking everyone for a fee.
— Ethan Benatan Mar 10, 05:54 PM #
The concerns regarding curtailment of are important ones. However, the agreement does not address fair use—it addresses what can be published using the Creative Commons open license that supports our publication. Anything we might publish using a fair use approach would be under “all rights reserved,” which would limit the opportunity for our site visitors to reuse the material. In addition, the agreement’s primary purpose is to allow us to publish images and charts under our open license, and will have only limited use for text excerpts.
Steve Carson
MIT OCW External Relations Director
scarson@mit.edu
— Steve Carson Mar 11, 11:37 AM #
Correction in the above: The concerns regarding curtailment of [fair use] are important ones.
SEC
— Steve Carson Mar 11, 11:38 AM #
Ethan; I’m a professor at a not-for-profit institution and I’d love to take advantage of your obviously encyclopedic understanding of Fair Use. Would you kindly consult for me on the subject. I only need about 8-10 hours of your time and, of course, I wouldn’t expect to pay you for your wisdom.
Okay?
— Rob Mar 11, 04:47 PM #
I edited a journal, originally published by Harcourt Brace and then, when Elsevier bought Harcourt, by Elsevier. Elsevier, which is notorious for the outrageous prices it charges for journals, is motivated by greed exclusively. It made well over £60,000 a year from the journal but kept trying to cut costs. It barred copy editing and even proofing because changes cost money. It judges quality by the number of hits—this to claim that its journals are widely read, in which case it can charge more. I do, then, doubt that the seeming selflessness of Elsevier in allowing MIT minimal usage of its materials is motivated by other than a calculation of eventual profit. Elsevier refused to allow authors of articles in the journal I edited to republish their own writings for free. The charges were astronomical. Academics who work for free or for little for Elsevier should know what the company is like.
— Robert Segal Mar 11, 08:07 PM #
Nobody would ever claim that Elsevier is being “selfless”. It’s a business after all and its management does what it considers to be in the best interests of the business and their shareholders.
Having said so, a company can only charge what the market is willing to pay. If the materials in that £60k journal weren’t worth it, they couldn’t charge that much because nobody would pay – just supply and demand at work.
The presumption that any company should do things for the public good (which a vast number of companies do, including Elsevier) is rooted in the notion that it’s good for the company’s image and that improves its financial viability. Sorry if it all sounds cynical, but at one level, it is.
— Rob Mar 12, 08:33 AM #
Okay, I get it now: OCW is published under a CC license and MIT needs permission to publish anything under CC if it includes items (however small) copyrighted by others.
So the point isn’t that MIT can now use and publish this material—which in fact they could all along under fair use—but rather that they can publish under CC, in a way that simplifies and promotes downstream reuse.
It’s a pity the article didn’t make this clear. But the real shame is that it is so difficult to exercise fair use rights that the scales get tipped towards license agreements. Even if every downstream use were legal, the only way it is practical is if MIT removes the burden of proving this from the the shoulders of the users. More kudos to MIT.
All of which is just another argument for overhauling copyright law. We should be able to “promote the progress of science and useful arts” without hamstringing education.
Thanks to Steve Carson and Rachel Bridgewater for clarifying discussions.
ps, for Rob #4: No, I won’t consult for free. But you don’t need my permission; please exercise your fair use rights on anything I publish!
— Ethan Benatan Mar 13, 01:49 AM #
I think it is not always clear what is and what isn’t fair use. As you know, it is a case-by-case determination made by a judge, based on the statutory principles and prior decisions. I think there is a lot of interest in working together to establish reasonable guidelines, and putting aside the question of what might or might not be fair in particular cases. In the STM association statement mentioned in the article, the preamble notes: “It is recognized that the short quotation of copyright works for non-commercial research purposes is a normal practice for scholarship and education. Further, such uses would often be privileged by a legal exception to local copyright laws or in any event would be likely to be a type of permission readily granted by the publisher. “
— Mark Seeley Mar 13, 04:07 PM #