Resource sharing in the electronic era: potentials and paradoxes - Networked Scholarly Publishing

Library Trends, Spring, 1995 by Gay N. Dannelly

To take the possibility of "chilling" publishing a little further, a major concern of collection managers is that, through the use of standard bibliographic sources, automated collection analysis mechanisms, and comparative collection evaluations, we are cloning our collections.

If libraries are not very careful, they will continue to lose the variety and health of the national collection in the desire to keep up with" peer libraries. It is clear that every library has to have a certain "core" of materials to support ongoing programs, reference needs, and specific areas of research, and that these primary collections may be relatively constant across institutions of a particular size and type. However, the nation's intellectual heritage is represented not only by these primary collections, but also, and in some cases, most importantly, in the more individual and perhaps fringe areas that seldom overlap but provide sources of great importance for present and future scholarship. And let us not forget that all scholarly work does not take place in the academic setting.

As libraries concern themselves with the retention of unique materials, they must also face the changing nature of communication and its affect on what Atkinson (1990) has called the "mutability of the historical record." Librarians are all aware of the "recalled" published works in both monographs and serials. The electronic work is even more volatile. When and how does an electronic work become fixed for retention in the library's "published" collection? How might it be changed and who can change it? Where does the historical and edited record reside? Again, there is no reason to assume that the producers of information, in any format, can be expected to be a permanent source of that information.

Another peculiarity of electronic publishing is the set of requirements that publishers are placing on titles; restrictions that would seldom, if ever, have been placed on printed materials. It is normal for a publisher to try to limit the access to an electronic product to the students, staff, and faculty of a college or university. This is a nearly unenforceable rule for tax-supported and depository libraries. Clearly, publishers must protect their profits in order to satisfy stockholders and continue publishing, but librarians and publishers must begin to work together to establish workable and realistic means to achieve this end.

Copyright is a paradox in itself. Fair use is continually reinterpreted through legal decisions, and the electronic environment only makes the situation more complex. Copyright statements now exclude any transfer of material to another format, including specific mention of any electronic medium. The role of fair use has not yet been clarified in this new environment and again forces librarians to evaluate the role of licensing, leasing, and copyright limitations impinging on the electronic scholarly record. Resources used to support distance education, a rapidly growing sector in continuing and adult education, will undoubtedly provide opportunities to test this in the near future. As Sabosik (1991) has stated, the changing technologies of electronic transmission of information "are reducing the physical boundaries to information and are changing the role of the publisher and the library intermediaries in the chain of scholarly communication" (p. 60). These changes are not limited solely to the scholarly publication scene. As networking has become more common and less expensive, and as the information highway becomes a primary means of access to electronic information, the library and the publisher, not to mention the vendor, will take on new roles that are not yet defined and whose legal ramifications are as yet unknown and can only be anticipated in a most general way.