University libraries look to reduce licensing costs | Inside Higher Ed

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-08-09

Summary:

"College students likely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars extra per year on buying rights for digital versions of readings to which they have free access. Some college and university libraries have been attempting to rein in the duplicative charges, which stem from journal articles and other assigned readings that students are told to buy for class even though the material is freely available to them through library holdings. Stanford University, for instance, found that more than $100,000 was being spent, mostly by students, on course materials that could be found in the 1,200 databases the university spends millions of dollars to make available. This is because faculty and students are often unaware of what is already available. 'The hurdles to knowing what we have are high,' said Catherine Tierney, Stanford’s associate university librarian for technical services, 'so that the T.A.s or the department admins or the faculty person herself doesn’t even know what we have. So it’s inadvertent double-spending on this.' Tierney said the Stanford analyzed its own records from July 2010 to June 2011. About 60 percent of the course materials the university sought to license from the Copyright Clearance Center for student coursepacks was already among Stanford’s library holdings. Around the same time, the university was developing an in-house software program to automate copyright clearance. The product, known as the Stanford Intellectual Property Exchange, was an effort to 'massively reduce legal transaction costs for intellectual property exchanges.' The university has since turned the effort into a spinoff, known as SIPX. The company announced last week it had received $4 million in a new round of venture capital that includes money from Stanford. The company is seeking to expand through a series of university-level agreements across the country, said CEO Bob Weinschenk. Its customers already include Empire State College of the State University of New York, a pilot project at the University of Illinois and, of course, Stanford. It is also trying to work with institutions that offer massive open online courses through Coursera and edX. It allows faculty to compile digital reading lists. It can check to see what readings are freely available, which would prevent the sort of inadvertent double-spending that Stanford found. It will also automate the purchase of individual texts from a variety of publishers that do require new licenses to use in class ..."

Link:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/07/university-libraries-look-reduce-licensing-costs

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.licensing oa.comment oa.universities oa.copyright oa.libraries oa.students oa.tools oa.librarians oa.prices oa.fees oa.studies oa.stanford.u oa.colleges oa.sipx oa.hei oa.libre

Date tagged:

08/09/2013, 12:25

Date published:

08/09/2013, 08:25