My unofficial principles of licensing

Posted on by

Tonight’s class session focused in large measure on the topic of licensing and the role it plays in selecting and acquiring electronic resources for libraries. As part of that discussion, and as a result also of the assigned readings, I came up with four unofficial principles or truths for licensing in libraries:

  • Licenses represent a restriction of copyright law.
  • Licenses intrinsically favor publishers/vendors over libraries.
  • Just about everything in a license is negotiable.
  • (I can’t remember, frankly, if this was the fourth one or not.) Licenses are ubiquitous.

Thinking about this a bit further, I suppose there could also be a fifth principle about licensing and libraries: librarians as a whole do not pay close enough attention to licenses.

Nothing startlingly brilliant or new about these observations, of course, but I thought it worthwhile to note them here.

  • http://tscott.typepad.com <![CDATA[T Scott]]>

    Point three means that points one and two are not absolute. And as we overcome point five, we are in an increasingly better position to push back and make licenses work in our favor. In my little corner of libraryland — academic medical libraries — I think we’re pretty good about handling licenses and have been for some years. Not every librarian has to be an expert license negotiator any more than every librarian has to be an excellent cataloger — but we all need to understand the principles and issues.

  • http://www.familymanlibrarian.com/ <![CDATA[Steve]]>

    T. Scott,

    I can understand your point (about point #3 trumping the others); I hadn’t thought that out fully, I guess. :-)

    I still think #1 and #2 as general informal principles hold true, though. In other words, the advent of licensing as a whole has had the effect of restricting copyright. Also for those licenses (the vast majority, in my experience) that are provided by the vendor, the balance of power (for lack of a better way of putting it) definitely favors the publisher or vendor. In a way that could be thought of as similar to the Google Print Program and its insistence on the onus for opting out being on the publisher side. My point is that vendor-supplied licenses generally put the onus on librarians, not on the vendor.

    These informal principles were pronounced in the context of introducing licensing to graduate library students, almost all of whom have no experience in evaluating licenses of any sort. Although medical librarians, I’m sure, have had to become savvy in this area for a while, I would still assert that there is a vast group of libraries and librarians who still do not look carefully enough at them and who possess imperfect processes for handling them, too.

    Thanks for commenting!