a corresponding expansion of fair use rights is one way to maintain the appropriate balance between incentives for creators and access for the public. In an effort to better understand and realize the benefits of fair use, ARL is conducting, in collaboration with the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at the American University (AU) Washington College of Law and the AU Center for Social Media, a three-stage project to help academic and research libraries better employ fair use. This initiative is possible due to the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The recently completed research phase of the project captures how practioners in the academic and research library community interpret and employ fair use in key areas of practice, including support for teaching, and learning support for faculty and student scholarship preservation exhibition and public outreach and serving disabled communities. In the current phase, the project team is convening a series of round-table discussions with academic and research librarians that will serve as the basis for a code of best practices in fair use for academic and research libraries. The third and final stage will involve extensive outreach to and collaboration with academic and research librarians, and others in academic leadership, to promote a better understanding of fair use and adoption of the code. Butler’s article summarizes the project’s Stage One findings from a series of interviews with academic and research librarians to determine how they are using fair use and related exemptions in the Copyright Act to meet library mission. Open and Public Access Policies The Internet can accelerate discovery, enable new strategies to address complex research challenges, and democratize access. To take advantage of these opportunities and to further their mission of creating, preserving, and disseminating knowledge, many academic and research institutions are taking steps to capture the benefits of open and public access policies by developing campus policies for the timely, free, and online dissemination of institutional research outputs. As noted by David E. Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic Affairs, Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, “our member universities have a special mission of outreach and engagement with their communities ensuring that the research they produce is widely available to the public at no additional costs to them is a true expression of that mission.”3 These institutional policies build on the growing adoption—by funding agencies, RLI 273 4 Three Key Public Policies for Research Libraries ( C O N T I N U E D ) DECEMBER 2010 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC
Previous Page Next Page