Public domain serials: Renewal inventory complete!

Posted on June 15, 2018 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I’m pleased to announce an important milestone in the IMLS-funded project I’m leading to help open access to 20th century public domain serials.  We now have a complete, openly published inventory of all serials with active issue or contribution renewals made through 1977, based on listings in the Copyright Office’s Catalog of Copyright Entries.   For each serial in our inventory, we list the earliest issue’s renewal and the earliest contribution’s renewal made during that time period, if any.  In many cases, we also give additional copyright information, and link to freely readable online issues, tables of contents, and copyright permissions information.

The Copyright Office’s Copyright records catalog includes copyright renewals and other registrations filed from 1978 onward.  Since our inventory now runs all the way up to their catalog’s 1978 starting point, you can now find out if there were any copyright renewals filed for a serial you’re interested in by checking our inventory and the Copyright Office’s database.  (Prior to now, you might have needed to search through lots of volumes of the Catalog of Copyright Entries before making such a determination.  You can now do it much more quickly.)

We also now have renewal information for over 1,000 of these serials available as structured data, as described in a previous post.  These structured data files are available as individual JSON files (linked off of each serial listed in the inventory with a hyperlink), and also can be downloaded in bulk, along with our overall inventory listing, from our Online Books Page GitHub repository.  There are still some listings that are not yet available as structured data, but they’ll be converted over time, and all new listings will be made available as structured data.

Thanks to this structured data, we can now also offer a more consistent and easy-to-use inventory page.  In particular, all of the title links on the page now go to copyright information.   (Before, some links would go to copyright information and some would go to online copies of the serials themselves, making for a somewhat confusing user experience.  You can still get to online serials via the copyright information pages; if a linked title is shown with emphasis, its copyright information page includes a link to free online content available for that title.)

We’re now done, then, with compiling and publishing the data we said we would compile for our project.  But we’re not done with the project yet as a whole.  Here’s what’s still to come:

  • Suggested procedures for using the data we’ve compiled, along with other data, to quickly identify and check public domain serial content.  We’re drafting those procedures now, and hope to publish our draft after we’ve had some experts in copyright and digitization projects review it.  In the meantime, if you want to use the data we’ve compiled to clear copyrights for serials, keep the caveats we describe at the top of our inventory in mind.
  • Documentation for the JSON files we’re using for our copyright data.  The fields and format we’re using are still subject to change, but probably won’t change all that much from what they look like now.  (I might make them JSON-LD files eventually, but hope that I can do that in a backward-compatible way.)  In the meantime, feel free to contact me with questions about the fields I’m using in those files and what they mean.
  • Examples of public domain serials published after 1922 whose copyright status has been cleared with our recommended procedures and data, along with explanations on how we cleared them.

There are also ways you can help out with this project.  Along with the things you can do that we suggested in our earlier post, here are a few new things that we can now help with:

  • If you’re interested in a serial that published between 1923 and 1964 that’s not already in our list, tell us about it.  (You can use use this suggestion form.  All you need to put in it is the title, and whatever is needed to distinguish it from similarly-titled works.)  We can quickly add it to our inventory.  If we find any associated renewals in the Copyright Office’s database, we’ll note the first one.  If we don’t find any associated renewals, we’ll note that.  And if we can quickly find online public domain issues, we’ll link to them.
  • If you’re interested in compiling more comprehensive or details information about a particular serial, you can get in touch with us and we can work with you to get an enhanced JSON file created for it.  For an idea of what can be done, check our our information page for Amazing Stories and its associated JSON file.  We don’t have time ourselves to create these sort of comprehensive pages for all of the serials out there, but we’d love to work with people with the time, interest and skills to create such information pages for serials they’re interested in.

I’m excited about where we’ve gotten so far, and what can be done with this data.  I’d love to hear from you about what you’d like to do with it, and how you might like to extend it.

Posted in copyright, metadata, open access, serials, sharing | 3 Comments

Public Domain Day 2018: The 20-year alarm clock

Posted on January 1, 2018 by John Mark Ockerbloom

In Washington Irving’s classic story “Rip van Winkle“, the title character follows an archaically-dressed stranger into a mountain hideaway, falls asleep, and wakes up to find the world has moved on 20 years without him.  He’s alarmed at first, but eventually figures out what has happened, adapts, and settles into the social fabric of his much-changed town.

We in the US are experiencing a similar phenomenon this Public Domain Day.  It’s now been 20 years since a full year’s worth of published content entered the public domain, when 1922 copyrights expired at the start of 1998.  Later that year, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and the advance of the public domain has been stuck in the Warren G. Harding administration ever since.

Other countries are doing somewhat better.  Most European countries have by now regained the 20 years of public domain many of them lost when they complied with the EU Copyright Duration Directive, and they now get to freely share the works of creators who died in 1947– people like Baroness Orczy, Alfred North Whitehead, Pierre Bonnard, and Willa Cather.  (We in the US get any unpublished works by people in this group, but that’s all that’s entering the public domain here today.)  Countries like Canada that kept to the Berne Convention’s “life plus 50 years” terms are doing substantially better– today they get the works of creators who died in 1967, including Carson McCullers, Arthur Ransome, Woody Guthrie, René Magritte, and Dorothy Parker.  (The Public Domain Review’s Class of 2018 article has writeups of some these authors, and others.)

This time next year, though, the US may well get to join the party in a bigger way, and have all copyrighted 1923 publications finally enter the public domain.  It’s not a sure thing, though– lobbyists for the entertainment industry have long pressed Congress for longer copyright terms, and while there’s no bill I’m aware of that’s been introduced to do it next year, that doesn’t mean that one couldn’t be quickly rammed through.  So it’s a good time for you to let your elected representatives know that you value a robust public domain, and want no further copyright extensions.  (And if you’re hoping to elect someone new in 2018, let your candidates know this matters to you as well.)

There are other ways that those of us in the US can prepare Public Domain Wake-Up party next year.  Some of us are continuing to bring the “hidden public domain” to light over the next year.  Researchers with HathiTrust’s Copyright Review Management System have by now found over 300,000 books and other monographs that are non-obviously in the public domain.  (You may be able to help them!)  The project I’m leading to help identify public domain serial content past 1922 is also underway, and should be complete later this year.  (See an earlier post for some ways you can help with that if you like.)

Other folks are working on another set of works that libraries in the US can now share– certain works in the last 20 years of copyright, which as of today span a full 20 years of publication, from 1923 to 1942.  A provision in the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, codified in Section 108(h) of US copyright law, allows non-profit libraries and archives to digitally display and distribute such works when they are not being commercially exploited, and copies are not available at a reasonable price.  Libraries have not made much explicit use of this provision until recently, partly due to uncertainty about when and how it applies.  A preprint article by Elizabeth Townsend Gard aims to clear up this uncertainty and spur libraries to make these works more widely available.  I hope that this work is further developed and applied in the coming year.  (And I’m happy to consider works in these last 20 years of copyright for inclusion in The Online Books Page‘s listings, when the libraries that have digital copies make it clear that they’re following the section 108(h) guidelines.)

I also hope some folks take some time this year to take a good look at what we’ve digitized from 1922, and compare it to what was copyrighted that year in the US.  What portion of 1922’s creative output have we brought to light online?   What sorts of works, and what people, have we tended to miss?  Knowing where the gaps are can tell us what we might want to focus on bringing to light from 1923.  Some of that material can be posted online now; hopefully the rest can be posted starting next January.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that you don’t have to wait for copyrights to expire on their own to share work whose copyright you control.  You can open-license them any time you like (this post, along with many of my other works, is CC-BY licensed, for instance).  And you can let them go entirely if you like.  I tend to put my works into the public domain 14 years after publication, following the original copyright term of the US, if I see no need to extend it further.  Today I do that again, and with this post you can consider anything I published in 2003, whose copyright I still control, to have a CC0 dedication to the public domain.

Happy Public Domain Day to everyone who’s seeing new works in the public domain where they are.  And here’s to waking up to lots of new additions to the public domain in the US a year from now.

Posted in copyright, online books, open access, serials, sharing | 1 Comment

Adding more, and more structured, information about public domain serials

Posted on December 11, 2017 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I’ve been happy to hear from a number of people and institutions interested in the IMLS-funded project we now have underway to shed light on the hidden public domain of 20th century serials that I discussed in my last post.  I gave a short 6-minute presentation on the project at this fall’s Digital Library Federation Forum, and you can find my presentation slides and script on the Open Science Framework.   (You can download either a Powerpoint file or a PDF as you prefer; both have the slides and the notes.)

With the help of Alison Miner and Carly Sewell, I’m now starting to add data to the inventory of serials that is one of the deliverables of the project.  Right now, we’re putting up data from 1966 renewals, where serial contributions from 1938 and 1939 were renewed.  But there’s quite a bit more data in the pipeline, and I hope that we’ll have all of the 1930s covered by the end of this month, and then advance rapidly into the 1940s in the new year.  (Our goal is to get up to 1978’s renewals, which will finish off the 1940s and get to 1950, and from there on the Copyright Office’s online database can be consulted for serial renewals.  We’re aiming to have that completed sometime in the spring.)

I’ve heard from various people who are interested in clearing copyrights for their own serials digitization projects– as well as some projects that are doing it already, like the Hevelin Fanzines project that was also discussed at the DLF Forum.  As I mentioned in my previous post, we intend to publish suggested procedures for doing such copyright-clearing.  We’ll be preparing drafts of such procedures in the new year, and we’ll let interested folks know when such drafts are available for comments and suggestions.

We’re also happy to hear suggestions about other aspects of the project.  One suggestion we heard in an early presentation was the inventory should be shared as downloadable structured data, and not just as a big web page, so that it would be easier for people to repurpose and automatically analyze the data or various purposes.  That sounded like a good idea to me, and I got more excited about its possibilities when looking at all the work that people were doing with projects like the FictionMags project, ISFDB and similar projects, where volunteers have crowd-compiled detailed structured contents information for a large number of serials.

So the new data going into the inventory is going in as structured data files, and we’re also slowly refitting existing entries into such files.  That’s meant a bit of a slower startup than we’d originally planned, but we believe this work will pay dividends in the future.  Already it means that we can reuse the same data in multiple contexts– for instance, we can show first-renewal information for Adventure magazine on the Online Books Page issue listings, on a copyright information page, and in the big inventory page.  Updating the underlying structured data file can change what appears in all of these contexts.

Moreover, data structures are expandable.  When readers asked me to list Amazing Stories and Galaxy science fiction magazines on The Online Books Page, I had to determine which parts of their runs were public domain and thus could be listed without any further inquiries into permission.   I looked up copyright renewals for these magazines and then recorded renewal data in the same sorts of structured data files so it could be reused.  (Here, for instance, is the automatically generated copyright information page for Amazing Stories.)  I also added structured data fields that allowed the inclusion of name identifiers, in particular, Library of Congress Name Authorities, so that authors could be consistently identified, and then linked to other information about them, such as contact information for permissions.)  With these links, and with the links to full issue tables of contents compiled by other projects, it becomes easier to digitize nearly any story in the early years of the magazine, by checking to see whether there is still an active copyright on it, and by sending an inquiry for permissions if there is one.

To be clear: I’m not going to compile lists of all renewals for all the serials in my inventory.   That would take more time than I have– the scope of my 1-year grant only covers the first renewals for the serials that have them, up to 1950.  But if I can create more detailed renewal lists for Amazing Stories using the defined structure, then others who are interested could create similarly structured renewal lists for other serials.  And maybe those lists could be linked, shared or distributed from my inventory as well, if there’s interest.

So before I get much further into the project, I’d like to hear from folks who might be interested in using or compiling this sort of detailed renewal information.  Is this sort of structured information useful to you?  And if so, will the format and structure I’ve defined for the data files work?  Or should it change (something that’s easier to do now than later), or be augmented?

I didn’t find any pre-existing schema that covered detailed article-level copyright renewal data, so I decided to roll my own for starters.  There’s a variety of encoding schemes one could use for it, including XML, JSON, and the various RDF formats.  I figured JSON would be easiest for laypeople and librarians to understand and edit in its  native format, and it can be automatically translated into suitable XML or RDF schemes if desired.  But if you know of good reasons for preferring a different native format, or know of schemes I should reuse or extend instead of reinventing the wheel, I’d be interested in hearing about them.  (I’m especially interested if the format or schema is already in common use by the sorts of folks who compile serial contents information.)  Alternatively, if what I have now is as good a starting point as anything else, I’d be happy to know that, and could then take the time to write up formal documentation for it.

To see the existing files I have, you can go to the big inventory page and follow the “More details” links that you’ll see for certain serials in the list.  These lead to copyright information pages for the serials in question, which in turn have links to JSON files at the bottom of each page.  I also have most of the JSON files in a Github folder that’s part of my Online Books Page project repository.

If you work with this sort of metadata, or would like to, I’d love to hear from you.  If we get this right, I hope this data will spark all kinds of useful work opening access to a wide variety of 20th-century serial publications.

 

Posted in copyright, metadata, open access, science fiction, serials, sharing | Comments Off on Adding more, and more structured, information about public domain serials

New IMLS-funded project: Opening access to 20th century public domain serials

Posted on September 13, 2017 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I’m happy to report that over the next year, I and others at Penn will be working on a project that the Institute of Museum and Library Services has just funded to help open access to the vast public domain of 20th century serials.  We’ll be developing and demonstrating data sets and procedures to make it much easier to verify public domain status for content in scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and special interest periodicals published in the United States.  We hope that all kinds of libraries can take advantage of the resources we provide to make materials like this in their collections available online to all, and digitally preserve them for posterity.

As I’ve noted previously, US publications prior to 1964 had to have their copyrights renewed or they would enter the public domain, and most serial content from that era was not renewed.  Projects like HathiTrust and JSTOR have lots of public domain serial content digitized, but they generally don’t provide access to it past 1922, since it’s difficult to verify the status of the post-1922 volumes they have digitized.  HathiTrust’s Copyright Review Program has investigated and opened access to many post-1922 books, but to date has not moved into serials, where one needs to verify the public domain status not only of the serial itself, but of the individual contributions (articles, stories, etc.) in the serials.  To date, that’s been too complicated to do at scale for them and for many other projects.

We aim to make it simple and practical to do so for many serials.  Here’s how we plan to do it:

  • First, we’ll complete and openly publish online an inventory, long in the works, of all the serials that have an active issue or contribution copyright renewal filed with the US Copyright Office, and the dates of the first such renewals, up to when the Copyright Office’s online registration catalog picks up.
  • Second, with the help of legal experts, we’ll draft suggested procedures for using this inventory, along with other online resources, to quickly identify and check public domain serial content.  We plan to develop procedures along the lines of those described in Michigan’s Finding the Public Domain Toolkit, and to be similarly useful to libraries and other digitizers of serials.
  • Finally, we’ll demonstrate and publicize our procedures and data sets, by using them to copyright-clear and digitize some sample serial content, by publishing our resources and reports online, and by reaching out to librarians and others who can use them.

We’d love to have you join us in this work.  Here are some of the things you might do:

  • Help spread the word about this project.   I’ll be doing a brief presentation about it at the upcoming Digital Library Federation Forum in Pittsburgh, and will post my slides after the event.  I’m happy to talk about it further and answer questions there and anywhere else that’s practical.
  • Give us feedback.  What are the best ways for us to provide our inventories and procedures?  How can we make them easier to understand, use, and (as appropriate) automatically process and repurpose?  What kinds of serials deserve particular attention in our procedures and sample digitizations?  How can we best reach, and get contributions and suggestions from, the people and institutions that could put these resources to good use?
  • Try using the data and procedures, when we have them, to copyright-clear and digitize, public domain serial content you’d like to share with the world.  If you let us know what you’ve done, and how it went, we might be able to use what you tell us to improve what we provide; and we can also publicize your digitizations in places like The Online Books Page.
  • Help enhance the data we have.  Our basic inventory will list all the serials in the time period it covers that have renewals, and list the earliest active renewals.  But many of those serials also have public domain content after those first renewals.  We don’t have time ourselves to list all of those renewals ourselves for all the serials we list, but it’s possible for motivated folks to do so for material they’d like to digitize or see digitized.  I’m very interested in sharing or linking to any such lists that are made for particular serials.  (I hope to share an example list of this sort in an upcoming post.)

I’m excited about this project, and about the content that I hope this project will help make available to the world online.  If you find it of interest as well, I’d love to hear from you.

 

 

Posted in awards, citizen librarians, copyright, metadata, open access, serials, sharing | 2 Comments

Public Domain Day 2017: Keeping memory alive

Posted on January 1, 2017 by John Mark Ockerbloom

It’s a bit hard to believe, but there are now adults in the US who cannot remember a substantial Public Domain Day.  In their own lifetimes, copyrights for published works have never expired here.  But I remember when they expired regularly every New Years Day, up until 1998.  And I have hope that in two more years, if our government does not acquiesce to the entertainment industry and extend copyrights yet again, we’ll start seeing published works again regularly enter the public domain here.

There are other things that I don’t remember, or haven’t seen much of myself.  I wasn’t around for the demagogues who whipped up mobs to usher in fascism and persecution in 1930s Europe, nor for the world war that followed that, nor the beginnings of European integration that helped keep the peace afterwards.  I didn’t personally experience the struggles for civil rights and equality of the 1960s and early 1970s, not being born yet, or being too young to take part in them.  I’ve never been to Russia, Turkey, Hungary, or the Philippines, where recent hopes of democratic and liberal reforms have given way to more authoritarian regimes.  I’m not an expert in the science that shows the world dangerously warming in recent years, how humans have caused and will be affected by it, and what we need to do to stop it.

Yes, all of these things are mentioned in history books and various media, but they’re often discussed in superficial ways that don’t reflect the detailed memories and lessons of the people who experienced them firsthand, or who are experts in understanding the issue.  I think that’s part of why I see our societies now making many of the same sorts of mistakes that people who know of these things firsthand could help us avoid.   I think it’s also part of the shock of many of people I know watching the news of the past year.  They didn’t have the personal memories of how prosperous societies can regress just as easily as they can progress, or hadn’t previously noticed how marginalized people experience those societies very differently than our dominant narratives suggest.

Keeping memory alive, and making it known far and wide, is essential if we are going to solve the problems we have today, and avoid the kinds of mistakes and disasters we’ve had in the past.   The more easily we can duplicate and spread that memory, the more likely we are to keep it alive.  That’s why the Internet Archive is making a backup copy in Canada, just in case anything happens to its primary US copy.  That’s why people at Penn and elsewhere are trying to duplicate all the data the government has on climate and other issues before the administration changes, lest it become unavailable or harder to access in the future.  That’s why projects like Wikipedia go out of their way to allow their content to be copied and readily downloadable in bulk, so it can be read and shared in places where the Internet isn’t as reliable or as uncensored as it is in other places.

And that’s one reason why the public domain is so important, and why it’s so important that copyrighted works enter the public domain regularly, automatically, and in a timely fashion.  Copyrights are important to support the people who create works of art and knowledge, and to help ensure that they can introduce them to the world in the form and manner they intend.  But it’s also important that after “limited times” (to quote the US Constitution) the works enter the public domain, so they can be copied, disseminated, reinterpreted and reworked, and remembered, without restriction.  The easier it is to copy and disseminate, the easier it is to remember.

In 2017, we have works by authors who died in 1946 finally entering the public domain in Europe and many other countries.  That now allows us to freely copy the works of those who perished in World War II and shortly thereafter, but not the works of all those who survived and helped rebuild society afterwards.  (Though it at least finally frees works like 1895’s The Time Machine, written by a young H.G. Wells who would live until 1946.)  We’re also seeing works by authors who died in 1966 entering the public domain in Canada and some other countries, freeing the works of people like the anti-fascist poet Andre Breton, as well as C. S. Forester’s Captain Horatio Hornblower.  (You can read about more authors now in the public domain in “life plus 70 years” and “life plus 50 years” countries in the Public Domain Review’s annual roundup.)

In the US, once again, no published works are entering the public domain today on their own accord.  (Works published in 1960 would have, under the copyright law in effect at the time they were published.   Duke has an overview of some of those, as they have for previous years.)  But we may soon be seeing works regularly enter the public domain once again, and there’s still a lot of the present-day public domain that’s not as well-known as it should be.  So there’s a lot we can do now to support the public domain in 2017.  Here’s what I’m planning to do:

  • Keep government accountable for the public domain and sound copyright policy:  The Congress and administration we just elected in the US are the same people who will be in office when 1923’s copyrights are scheduled to finally expire, on January 1, 2019.  I intend to make sure those expire on schedule, by watching for any attempts to extend copyrights further and telling my elected officials to oppose them.  (This has had good effect in other countries recently,  Pushback against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for instance, has so far kept Canada from extending its copyrights another 20 years, as that treaty would have required them to do.)  I also intend to press the government to keep fair use strong, and to keep the Copyright Office administered by the Library of Congress, which will help it be responsive to both creators and consumers, and not just to the entertainment industry.
  • Bring to light the “hidden” public domain of the 20th century:  Many public domain works are now freely readable online, but most of them are from before 1923, when it’s easy to determine public domain status in the US.  HathiTrust has also made available many library books published between 1923 and 1963, whose copyrights have expired because they were never renewed as required.  But there are also a lot of unrenewed public domain newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, photographs, and art and music from this time period that’s in the public domain as well, as well as pamphlets, posters, and underground and amateur publications from as late as 1989 in the public domain.   Unpublished works are also still entering the public domain, including in the US, from authors who died in 1946 or earlier.  All of this material is a crucial part of the memory of the 20th century, especially for more marginalized groups of people, and it’s at more risk of being lost and forgotten than most library books are.  In 2017, I’ll be working on projects that should make it considerably easier for people to clear copyrights for periodical literature in particular,  and thus keep the memories in them alive.
  • Highlight public domain and other open content especially important to remember:  On my Online Books Page, I’ll keep an eye out for books and serials in the public domain that cover topics that seem especially important for people to remember in 2017.  I’ll add them to my catalog with appropriate descriptions and make them more easily findable from places like Google and Wikipedia.  I’ll also be looking for more recent open-licensed content on these topics.  You can help me out with this, by suggesting titles for me to add. Over the past few years, I’ve added thousands of works to my new listings that were suggested by readers, and I’m eager to hear what you think we should be remembering.
  • Add my own work to the public domain:  Like many creators, I’d rather have my work remembered than keep it locked up for 70 years after my death.  So I open-license much of what I put online.  (This post for instance, is licensed CC-BY, so you can copy it as you like as long as you clearly credit that I wrote it and originally published it here on Everybody’s Libraries, and note the CC-BY license.)  And after a suitable period of time, I go further and put my work into the public domain outright.   Today, for instance, I dedicate everything I wrote and published prior to 2003, and whose copyrights I control, to the public domain, via a CC0 dedication.  I’ve made similar declarations in past years as well, inspired by the initial 14-year term that was prescribed by the US’s original copyright law.

It’s especially important in times of uncertainty and danger that we keep our collective memory alive, to help us move forward wisely and joyfully.  The public domain preserves and promotes that memory, and I hope you’ll join me in supporting it in the coming year.

Posted in copyright, open access, preservation | 2 Comments

Forward to Libraries update, and some thoughts on sustainability and scale

Posted on October 3, 2016 by John Mark Ockerbloom

It’s been a while since I posted about Forward to Libraries, but if you’ve been following my Github repo, you may have noticed that it’s had a steady stream of updates and growth.  If making connections across library collections or between libraries and Wikipedia interests you, the service is more comprehensive and wide-ranging than ever.  Here’s an update:

Number of libraries

We now support forwarding to over 1,000 library systems worldwide, running dozens of off-the-shelf and custom-developed catalog and discovery systems.  I’ve expanded coverage in all 50 states, Canada, the UK, and Australia, and have also added links to more countries in all inhabited continents.  (Because the system currently focuses on Library of Congress headings, it works best with Anglo-American catalogs, but it yields acceptable results in some other catalogs as well, like the big Norway research library union catalog I just added today.)  While major research libraries and big-city public libraries are well-represented, I’ve also been trying to add HBCUs, community colleges, rural library networks, and other sometimes-overlooked communities.  And I respond quickly to requests from users to add their libraries.

Wikipedia coverage

Forward to Libraries can be used to make links between library collections, and to and from my millions-strong Online Books Page listings.  But it’s also known for its interoperation with Wikipedia, where it knows how to link between over half a million distinct Library of Congress name and subject headings and their corresponding English language Wikipedia articles.  The majority of these mappings are name mappings provided by OCLC’s VIAF, which in its most recent data dump includes over 485,000 VIAF identifiers that include both a Library of Congress Name Authorities identifier and an English Wikipedia article link.  An additional 50,000 or so topical, demographic, and geographical LC subject headings are also mapped.  These mappings derive from exact matches, algorithmic matching for certain kinds of heading similarities, and a manually curated mappings file that has grown over time to include more than 22,000 correspondences.

What you can do with this data

If you’re browsing a topic or an author’s works on the Online Books Page, you can follow links to searches for the same topic or author in any of the 1000+ libraries currently in my dataset.  (If your library’s not one of them, just ask me to add it.)  If the topic or the author is covered in one of the 500,000 corresponding Wikipedia articles the system knows of, you’ll also be offered a link to the relevant article.

If you’re browsing certain Wikipedia articles, you’ll also find links from them back to library searches in your favorite of those 1000+ library systems (or any other of those systems you wish to search).  Right now those links use templates that must be manually placed, so there are only about 2500 Wikipedia articles with those links, but any Wikipedia editor can add the templates to additional articles.  (A bot could potentially add more quickly, but that would require some negotiation with the Wikipedia community that I haven’t undertaken to date.)  If you’re involved in a Wikipedia-library collaboration project (like this one), you may want to add one of these templates when editing articles on topics that are likely to have relevant source materials in multiple libraries.  (The most common template used is the Library Resources Box, generally added to the External Links or Further Reading section of an article.)

If you’re interested in offering a similar library or Wikipedia linking service from your own catalog or discovery system, I’d be interested in hearing from you.  You can either point to my forwarding service (using a standard linking syntax) or implement your own forwarder based on my code and data on Github.  Right now it requires some effort and expertise to implement either method, but I’m happy to work with interested libraries or developers to make forwarding easier to implement.

Scaling and sustaining the service

The Forward to Libraries service still runs largely as a 1-person part-time project.  (The Wikipedia templates are largely placed by others, and the service fundamentally depends on regularly updated data sets from OCLC, the Library of Congress, and Wikipedia, but I maintain the code and coordinate the central referral database myself.)

Part-time, 1-person projects raise some common questions:  “Will they be sustained?”  and “Can they scale?”  I wasn’t sure myself of the answers to those questions when I started developing this service.  Fortunately, I went ahead and introduced it anyway, and three-going-on-four years later, I’m happy to say that the basic service *is* in fact more sustainable and scalable than I’d thought it might be.   The code is fairly simple, and doesn’t require a lot of updating to keep running.  The main scale issues for the basic service have to do with the number of library systems and the number of topic mappings in the system, and those are both manageable.

The number of libraries turns out to be the more challenging factor to manage.  Libraries change their catalogs and discovery systems on a regular basis, and when they do, search links that worked for their old catalogs often don’t work for the new ones.  I have an automated tool that I run occasionally to flag libraries that return an error code to my search links; it’s not very sophisticated, but it does alert me to many libraries whose profiles I need to update, without my having to check all of them manually.  (If you find any libraries where forwarding is no longer working, you can also use the suggestion form to alert me to the problem.)  The more pressing scaling problem at the moment is the user experience: right now, when you’re asked to choose a library, the program shows a list of links to all 1000+ libraries currently in the system.  That can be a bit much to handle, especially for users whose data is metered.  Updating the library choice form to only show local libraries after the user selects the state, province or country they’re in will cut down on the data sent to the user; that may cost the user an extra click, but the tradeoff seems worth it at this point.

The number of topic mappings, on the other hand, has been easier to manage than I’d thought.  VIAF publishes updated data files for names about once a month, and I can run a script over it to automatically update my service’s name heading mappings when a new file comes out. Likewise, Wikipedia is now providing twice-a-month dump files of its English language encyclopedia.  I can download one of Wikipedia’s files in a couple of hours, and then run a script that flags any topical articles I map to that have gone away, changed their title, or redirected to other articles.  I can then change my mappings file accordingly in under an hour. Library of Congress subject headings change as well, but they don’t change very fast.  New and changed topical headings are published online about once a month, and one can generally add or change mappings from one of their updates within a few hours.  I spend a few spare-time hours each month adding mappings for older subject headings, so if the current rate of LCSH growth holds, in theory I could cover *all* LCSH topical headings in my manual mappings file after some number of years.  In practice, I don’t have to do this, especially as topical mappings also start to get collaboratively managed in places like Wikidata.  (I’m not currently working with their data set, but hope to do so in the future.)

Broadening the service

While I can maintain and gradually grow the basic service with my current resources, broadening it would require more.  Not every library, particularly outside the US, uses Library of Congress Subject Headings, so it would be nice to offer mappings to more subject ontologies and languages.  Similarly, not everyone likes to work with Wikipedia (often with good reason), and it’d be nice to support links to and from alternative knowledge bases as well.  The basic architecture of Forward to Libraries is capable of handling multiple library and web-based ontologies, but additional coding and data maintenance would be required.  There are also various ways to build on the service to engage more deeply with libraries and current topics of interest; I’ve explored some ideas along these lines, but haven’t had the time to implement them.

Things continuing as they are, though, I should be able to maintain and grow the basic Forward to Libraries service for quite some time to come.  I’m thankful to the people and the data providers that have made this service possible. And if you’re interested in doing more with it, or helping develop it in new directions, I’d be very glad to talk with you.

Posted in data, discovery, libraries, metadata, wikipedia | Comments Off on Forward to Libraries update, and some thoughts on sustainability and scale

The value of catalogs in the linked data era: Two recent talks

Posted on September 12, 2016 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I’ve recently uploaded two talks I gave this year to my Selected Works site.  I presented “How Not to Waste Catalogers’ Time: Making the most of subject headings” at the Code4lib 16 conference in Philadelphia in March.  “How to Read 100 Million Publications: VIVO and Comprehensive Open Publication Databases” was a talk I gave at VIVO 2016 last month.  The versions I’ve deposited in Selected Works are PDF files that include both slides and notes, so you can see both what I showed, and (approximately) what I said during the presentations.

The talks can be seen as two complementary takes on the question “What’s the value of the catalog, and cataloging, in today’s networked environment?”  In “How to Read 100 Million Publications” I highlight the value of an open, comprehensive database of the scholarly record that goes down to the article level.  Such a database would be quite large (on the order of 100 million records, as the title suggests), and considerably finer-grain that present-day library-run catalogs, which typically catalog at the title level, and only add a little bit of volume information at the holdings level.  But as I describe in the talk, 100-million-record-scale databases are now routinely maintained, and regularly replicated, online, and even a “just the facts” database of who published what articles where could be very helpful in promoting preservation, open access, corpus analysis, research networking systems, and a variety of other applications.  It would not need to be built from scratch– the data required for such a database already largely exists online, though all too often in fragmentary or proprietary collections.  But a number of these could be brought together and opened up, without requiring much additional cataloging labor.  Shared-effort collaborations, like those that support databases like GOKb and SHARE, as well as more crowd-sourced projects like FictionMags or Wikipedia, could support the scale needed.

While “How to Read 100 Million Publications” proposes something new we could do with library catalogs, “How Not to Waste Catalogers’ Time” urges developers to pay close attention to what catalogers have already been doing with them– particularly the often-overlooked semantic richness of their subject cataloging.  At the VIVO conference I saw a demo of a BIBFRAME application where a book’s subjects were represented by an ordered set of FAST properties.  That’s easy enough to model as RDF linked data, but it omits the subject ordering that can improve relevance ranking, and lets readers distinguish the relative importance of subjects in a particular work.  It also doesn’t accommodate the detailed on-the-fly subject categories that coordinated subdivisions allow.  It’s possible to accommodate both of these in linked data, but it requires more complicated data models, and most catalogs don’t take full advantage of their semantic strengths.  My talk shows some examples of systems that can take advantage of them (as well as the strengths of FAST and Wikipedia terminology).  Whether or not we implement such systems broadly, I hope we continue to support ordered, coordinated subject headings in the underlying data of the next-generation catalogs we build.  It’s easy enough to automatically map from such data to FAST term sets, for discovery systems that work best with those, but you can’t reliably and automatically go back the other way and keep the original degree of precision.

In short, I want us to build catalogs that let catalogers and readers do more with metadata, rather than less.  I hope that these two talks suggest some ways we can do that, and I’d love to hear from folks who have more ideas, suggestions, or questions.

 

Posted in discovery, metadata, open access, sharing, subjects | Comments Off on The value of catalogs in the linked data era: Two recent talks

Mid-20th century newspapers: Minding the copyrights

Posted on July 15, 2016 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I was pleased to read last week that the National Digital Newspaper Program, which has sponsored the digitization of over 1 million historically significant newspaper pages , has announced that it has expanded its scope to include content published up to 1963, as long as public domain status can be established.   I’m excited about this initiative, which will surface content of historic interest that’s in many readers’ living memory. I’ve advocated opening access to serials up to 1963 for a long time, and have worked on various efforts to surface information about serial copyright renewals (like this one), to make it easier to find public domain serial content that can be made freely readable online.  (In the US, renewal became automatic for copyrights secured after 1963, making it difficult to republish most newspapers after that date.  Up till then, though, there’s a lot that can be put online.)

Copyright in contributions

Clearing copyright for newspapers after 1922 can be challenging, however.  Relatively few newspapers renewed copyrights for entire issues– as I noted 10 years ago, none outside of New York City did before the end of World War II. But newspapers often aggregate lots of content from lots of sources, and determining the copyright status of those various pieces of content is necessary as well, as far as I can tell.  While section 201(c) of copyright law normally gives copyright holders of a collective work, such as a magazine or newspaper, the right to republish contributions as part of that work, people digitizing a newspaper that didn’t renew its own copyright aren’t usually copyright holders for that newspaper.  (I’m not a lawyer, though– if any legal experts want to argue that digitizing libraries get similar republication rights as the newspaper copyright holders, feel free to comment.)

Text contributions

As I mentioned in my last post, we at Penn are currently going through the Catalog of Copyright Entries to survey which periodicals have contributions with copyright renewals, and when those renewals started.  (My previous post discussed this in the context of journals, but the survey covers newspapers as well.)  Most of the contributions in the section we’re surveying are text, and we’ve now comprehensively surveyed up to 1932.  In the process, we’ve found a number of newspapers that had copyright-renewed text contributions, even when they did not have copyright-renewed issues.  The renewed contributions are most commonly serialized fiction (which was more commonly run in newspapers decades ago than it is now).  Occasionally we’ll see a special nonfiction feature by a well-known author renewed.  I have not yet seen any contribution renewals for straight news stories, though, and most newspapers published in the 1920s and early 1930s have not made any appearance in our renewal survey to date.  I’ll post an update if I see this pattern changing; but right now, if digitizers are uncertain about the status of a particular story or feature article in a newspaper, searching for its title and author in the Catalog of Copyright Entries should suffice to clear it.

Photographs and advertisements

Newspapers contain more than text, though.  They also include photos, as well as other graphical elements, which often appear in advertisements.   It turns out, however, that the renewal rate for images is very low, and the renewal rate for “commercial prints”, which include advertisements, is even lower.  There isn’t yet a searchable text file or database for these types of copyright renewals (though I’m hoping one can online before long, with help from Distributed Proofreaders), and in any case, images typically don’t have unambiguous titles one can use for searching.  However, most news photographs were published just after they were taken, and therefore they have a known copyright year and specific years in which a renewal, if any, should have been filed.  It’s possible to go through the complete artwork and commercial prints of any given year, get an overview of all the renewed photos and ads that exist, and look for matches.  (It’s a little cumbersome, but doable, with page images of the Catalog of Copyright Entries; it will be easier once there are searchable, classified transcriptions of these pages.)

Fair use arguments may also be relevant.  Even in the rare case where an advertisement was copyright-renewed, or includes copyright-renewed elements (like a copyrighted character), an ad in the context of an old newspaper largely serves an informative purpose, and presenting it there online doesn’t typically take away from the market for that advertisement.  As far as I can tell, what market exists for ads mostly involves relicensing them for new purposes such as nostalgia merchandise.  For that matter, most licensed reuses of photographs I’m aware of involve the use of high-resolution original prints and negatives, not the lower-quality copies that appear on newsprint (and that could be made even lower-grade for purposes of free display in a noncommercial research collection, if necessary).   I don’t know if NDNP is planning to accommodate fair use arguments along with public domain documentation, but they’re worth considering.

Syndicated and reprinted content: A thornier problem

Many newspapers contain not only original content, but also content that originated elsewhere.  This type of content comes in many forms: wire-service stories and photos, ads, and syndicated cartoons and columns.  I don’t yet see much cause for concern about wire news stories; typically they originate in a specific newspaper, and would normally need to be renewed with reference to that newspaper.  And at least as far as 1932, I haven’t yet seen any straight news stories renewed.   Likewise, I suspect wire photos and national ads can be cleared much like single-newspaper photos and ads can be.

But I think syndicated content may be more of a sticky issue.  Syndicated comics and features grew increasingly popular in newspapers in the 20th century, and there’s still a market for some content that goes back a long way.  For instance, the first contribution renewal for the Elizabethan Star, dated September 8, 1930, is the very first Blondie comic strip.  That strip soon became wildly popular, published by thousands of newspapers across the country.  It still enjoys a robust market, with its official website noting it runs in over 2000 newspapers today.  Moreover, its syndicator, King Features, also published weekly periodicals of its own, with issues as far back as 1933 renewed.  (As far as I can tell, it published these for copyright purposes, as very few libraries have them, but according to WorldCat an issue “binds together one copy of each comic, puzzle, or column distributed by the syndicate in a given week”.  Renew that, and you renew everything in it.)  King Features remains one of the largest syndicators in the world.  Most major newspapers, then, include at least some copyrighted (and possibly still marketable) material at least as far back as the early 1930s.

Selective presentation of serial content

The most problematic content of these old newspapers from a copyright point of view, though, is probably the least interesting content from a researcher’s point of view.  Most people who want to look at a particular locale’s newspaper want to see the local content: the news its journalists reported, the editorials it ran, the ads local businesses and readers bought.  The material that came from elsewhere, and ran identically in hundreds of other newspapers, is of less research interest.  Why not omit that, then, while still showing all the local content?

This should be feasible given current law and technology.  We know from the Google and Hathitrust cases that fair use allows completely copyrighted volumes to be digitized and used for certain purposes like search, as long as users aren’t generally shown the full text.  And while projects like HathiTrust and Chronicling America now typically show all the pages they scan, commonly used digitized newspaper software can either highlight or blank out not only specific pages but even the specific sections of a page in which a particular article or image appears.

This gives us a path forward for providing access to newspapers up to 1963 (or whatever date the paper started being renewed in its entirety).  Specifically, a library digitization project can digitize and index all the pages, but then only expose the portions of the issues it’s comfortable showing given its copyright knowledge.  It can summarize the parts it’s omitting, so that other libraries (or other trusted collaborators) can research the parts it wasn’t able to clear on its own.  Sections could then be opened up as researchers across the Internet found evidence to clear up their status.   Taken as a whole, it’s a big job, but projects like the Copyright Review Management System show how distributed copyright clearance can be feasibly done at scale.

Moreover, if we can establish a workable clearance and selective display process for US newspapers, it will probably also work for most other serials published in the US.  Most of them, whether magazines, scholarly journals,  conference proceedings, newsletters, or trade publications, are no more complicated in their sources and structures than newspapers are, and they’re often much simpler.   So I look forward to seeing how this expansion in scope up to 1963 works out for the National Digital Newspaper Program.   And I hope we can use their example and experience to open access to a wider variety of serials as well.

 

 

Posted in copyright, open access, serials | Comments Off on Mid-20th century newspapers: Minding the copyrights

Sharing journals freely online

Posted on May 25, 2016 by John Mark Ockerbloom

What are all the research journals that anyone can read freely online?  The answer is harder to determine than you might think.  Most research library catalogs can be searched for online serials (here’s what Penn Libraries gives access to, for instance), but it’s often hard for unaffiliated readers to determine what they can get access to, and what will throw up a paywall when they try following a link.

Current research

The best-known listing of current free research journals has been the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a comprehensive listing of free-to-read research journals in all areas of scholarship. Given the ease with which anyone can throw up a web site and call it a “journal” regardless of its quality or its viability, some have worried that the directory might be a little too comprehensive to be useful.  A couple of years ago, though, DOAJ instituted more stringent criteria for what it accepts, and it recently weeded its listings of journals that did not reapply under its new criteria, or did not meet its requirements.   This week I am pleased to welcome over 8,000 of its journals to the extended-shelves listings of The Online Books Page.  The catalog entries are automatically derived from the data DOAJ provides; I’m also happy to create curated entries with more detailed cataloging on readers’ request.

Historic research

Scholarly journals go back centuries.  Many of these journals (and other periodicals) remain of interest to current scholars, whether they’re interested in the history of science and culture, the state of the natural world prior to recent environmental changes, or analyses and source documents that remain directly relevant to current scholarship.  Many older serials are also included in The Online Books Page’s extended shelves courtesy of HathiTrust, which currently offers over 130,000 serial records with at least some free-to-read content.  Many of these records are not for research journals, of course, and those that are can sometimes be fragmentary or hard to navigate.  I’m also happy to create organized, curated records for journals offered by HathiTrust and others at readers’ request.

It’s important work to organize and publicize these records, because many of these journals that go back a long way don’t make their content freely available in the first place one might look.  Recently I indexed five journals founded over a century ago that are still used enough to be included in Harvard’s 250 most popular works: Isis, The Journal of Comparative Neurology, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, The Journal of Roman Studies, and The Philosophical Review.  All five had public domain content offered at their official journal site, or JSTOR, behind paywalls (with fees for access ranging from $10 to $42 per article) that was available for free elsewhere online.  I’d much rather have readers find the free content than be stymied by a paywall.  So I’m compiling free links for these and other journals with public domain runs, whether they can be found at Hathitrust, JSTOR (which does make some early journal content, including from some of these journals, freely available), or other sites.

For many of these journals, the public domain extends as late as the 1960s due to non-renewal of copyright, so I’m also tracking when copyright renewals actually start for these journals.  I’ve done a complete inventory of serials published until 1950 that renewed their own copyrights up to 1977.  Some scholarly journals are in this list, but most are not, and many that are did not renew copyrights for many years beyond 1922.  (For the five journals mentioned above, for instance, the first copyright-renewed issues were published in 1941, 1964, 1959, 1964, and 1964 respectively– 1964 being the first year for which renewals were automatic.)

Even so, major projects like HathiTrust and JSTOR have generally stopped opening journal content at 1922, partly out of a concern for the complexity of serial copyright research.  In particular, contributions to serials could have their own copyright renewals separate from renewals for the serials themselves.  Could this keep some unrenewed serials out of the public domain?  To answer this question, I’ve also started surveying information on contribution renewals, and adding information on those renewals to my inventory.  Having recently completed this survey for all 1920s serials, I can report that so far individual contributions to scholarly journals were almost never copyright-renewed on their own.  (Individual short stories, and articles for general-interest popular magazines, often were, but not articles intended for scientific or scholarly audiences.)  I’ll post an update if the situation changes in the 1930s or later. So far, though, it’s looking like, at least for research journals, serial digitization projects can start opening issues past 1922 with little risk.  There are some review requirements, but they’re comparable in complexity to the Copyright Review Management System that HathiTrust has used to successfully open access to hundreds of thousands of post-1922 public domain book volumes.

Recent research

Let’s not forget that a lot more recent research is also available freely online, often from journal publishers themselves.  DOAJ only tracks journals that make their content open access immediately, but there are also many journals that make their content freely readable online a few months or years after initial publication.  This content can then be found in repositories like PubMedCentral (see the journals noted as “Full” in the “participation” column), publishing platforms like Highwire Press (see the journals with entries in the “free back issues” column), or individual publishers’ programs such as Elsevier’s Open Archives.

Why are publishers leaving money on the table by making old but copyrighted content freely available instead of charging for it?  Often it’s because it’s what’s makes their supporters– scholars and their funders– happy.  NIH, which runs PubMedCentral, already mandates open access to research it funds, and many of the journals that fully participate in PubMedCentral’s free issue program are largely filled with NIH-backed research.  Similarly, I suspect that the high proportion of math journals in Elsevier’s Open Archives selection has something to do with the high proportion of mathematicians in the Cost of Knowledge protest against Elsevier.  When researchers, and their affiliated organizations, make their voices heard, publishers listen.

I’m happy to include listings for  significant free runs of significant research journals on The Online Books Page as well, whether they’re open access from the get-go or after a delay.  I won’t list journals that only make the occasional paid-for article available through a “hybrid” program, or those that only have sporadic “free sample” issues.  But if a journal you value has at least a continuous year’s worth of full-sized, complete issues permanently freely available, please let me know about it and I’ll be glad to check it out.

Sharing journal information

I’m not simply trying to build up my own website, though– I want to spread this information around, so that people can easily find free research journal content wherever they go.  Right now, I have a Dublin Core OAI feed for all curated Online Books Page listings as well as a monthly dump of my raw data file, both CC0-licensed.  But I think I could do more to get free journal information to libraries and other interested parties.  I don’t have MARC records for my listings at the moment, but I suspect that holdings information– what issues of which journals are freely available, and from whom– is more useful for me to provide than bibliographic descriptions of the journals (which can already be obtained from various other sources).  Would a KBART file, published online or made available to initiatives like the Global Open Knowledgebase, be useful?  Or would something else work better to get this free journal information more widely known and used?

Issues and volumes vs. articles

Of course, many articles are made available online individually as well, as many journal publishers allow.  I don’t have the resources at this point to track articles at an individual level, but there are a growing number of other efforts that do, whether they’re proprietary but comprehensive search platforms like Google Scholar and Web of Science, disciplinary repositories like ArXiV and SSRN, institutional repositories and their aggregators like SHARE and BASE, or outright bootleg sites like Sci-Hub.  We know from them that it’s possible to index and provide access to the scholarly knowledge exchange at a global scale, but doing it accurately, openly, comprehensively, sustainably, and ethically is a bigger challenge.   I think it’s a challenge that the academic community can solve if we make it a priority.  We created the research; let’s also make it easy for the world to access it, learn from it, and put it to work.  Let’s make open access to research articles the norm, not the exception.

And as part of that, if you’d like to help me highlight and share information on free, authorized sources for online journal content, please alert me to relevant journals, make suggestions in the comments here, or get in touch with me offline.

Posted in citizen librarians, copyright, discovery, libraries, open access, serials, sharing | 2 Comments

Public Domain Day 2016: Freezes and thaws

Posted on January 1, 2016 by John Mark Ockerbloom

For most of the past 55 years, the public domain in the United States has gone through a series of partial or complete freezes.  We’ve gotten used to them by now.  A thaw is coming soon, though, if there are no further changes in US copyright terms.  But right now, our government is trying to export freezes abroad, and is on the brink of succeeding.   And our own thaw is not yet a sure thing.

The freezes began in 1962, when Congress extended the length of copyright renewal terms in anticipation of an overhaul of copyright law.  Copyrights from 1906 that had been expiring over the course of that year stopped expiring.  The first extension was for a little over 3 years, but Congress kept passing new extensions before the old extensions ran out, until the 1976 Copyright Act established new, longer terms for copyright.  The 1906 copyrights that were frozen in 1962 would not enter the public domain until the start of 1982.

The freeze of the public domain in the 1960s and 1970s wasn’t complete.  Unrenewed copyrights continued to expire after 28 years, and works published without a copyright notice entered the public domain right away.  In 1982, all the traditional routes to the public domain were open again: age, non-renewal, publication without notice, and so on.  But that would only last about 7 years.   In 1989, the non-notice route was frozen out: from then on, anything published, or even written down, was automatically copyrighted, whether the author intended that or not.  In 1992, the non-renewal route was frozen out: copyrights would automatically run a full term whether or not the author or their heirs applied for a renewal.  In 1996, many non-US works were removed from the public domain, and returned to copyright, as if they had always been published with notice and renewals.  And finally in 1998, copyright expiration due to sheer age was also frozen out.  Due to a copyright extension passed that year, no more old published works would enter the public domain for another 20 years.  The freeze of the public domain became virtually complete at that point, with the trailing edge of copyrights stuck at the end of 1922.  It’s still there today.

But a thaw is in sight.  Just 3 years from now, in 2019, works published in 1923 that are still under copyright are scheduled to finally enter the public domain in the US.  Assuming we manage to stop any further copyright extensions, we’ll see another year’s worth of copyrights enter the public domain every January 1 from then on– just as happens in many other countries around the world.  Today, in most of Europe, and other countries that follow life+70 years terms, works by authors who died in 1945 (including everyone who died in World War II) finally enter the public domain.  In Canada, and other countries that follow the life+50 years terms of the Berne Convention, works by authors who died in 1965 enter the public domain.  The Public Domain Review shows some of the more famous people in these groups, and there are many more documented at Wikipedia.

But this may be the last year for a long while that people in Canada, and some other countries, see new works enter the public domain.  This past year, trade representatives from Canada, the US, and various other countries approved the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement that includes a requirement pushed by the US to extend copyrights to life+70 years.  Those extensions would take place as soon as the TPP is ratified by a sufficient number of governments. In Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia, Brunei, and Vietnam, that would mean a 20-year freeze in the public domain, potentially coming into effect just before the US’s 20-year near-total freeze is scheduled to end.

Supporters of the public domain should not take either the pending freezes or the pending thaws for granted.  When the TPP was agreed on this past October, the leaders of the US and Canadian governments  were strong TPP supporters.  But the government of Canada has changed since then, and it looks like the US government might not put TPP to a vote until after the 2016 elections.  Canada’s new government, and some of the leading US candidates, seem to be more on the fence about TPP than their predecessors.  Organized public action could well shift their stance, in either direction.

While we’re awaiting a thaw in the US, we can still map out and digitize more of the public domain we have.  HathiTrust has been doing a wonderful job opening access to hundreds of thousands of post-1922 public domain books via its copyright review activities.   But other categories of unrenewed copyrights are not yet as well lit up.  For instance, Duke’s summary of the 1959 copyrights that could have been expiring today mentions 3 scholarly journals– Nature, Science, and JAMA, whose 1959 articles are behind paywalls at their publishers’ sites.  But it turns out that none of those journals renewed copyrights for their 1959 issues — the first issue to be renewed of any of them was the January 9, 1960 issue of JAMA — so we can digitize and open access to much of that content without waiting for the publishers to do so.

In the next three years, I’d love to see digital projects in the US make the post-1922 public domain as visible and comprehensive online as the pre-1923 public domain is now.  And then, if we ensure the thaw comes on schedule in the US, and we stave off freezes elsewhere, I hope we can quickly make another full year’s worth of public domain available every New Year’s Day.  Maybe once we get used to that happening in the US, we’ll be less likely to allow the public domain to freeze up again.
Happy Public Domain Day!  May we all soon have ample reason to celebrate it every year, all around the world.

 

Posted in copyright, online books, open access, serials | 1 Comment