RLI 280 E-Book Licensing and Research Libraries—Negotiating Principles and Price in an Emerging Market 15 SEPTEMBER 2012 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A QUARTERLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC Interlibrary Loan The “ARL E-Book Requirements” include specific language for its principle regarding interlibrary loan: Licensee may fulfill requests from other institutions, a practice commonly called Interlibrary Loan. Participating Member Institution agrees to fulfill such requests in compliance with Section 108 of the United States Copyright Law (17 USC §108, “Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction by libraries and archives”), as well as the Copyright Act of Canada. Libraries are authorized to interlibrary loan the e-book for a short-term loan. The loan constitutes one of the libraries’ simultaneous users. Interlibrary loan is not restricted to other libraries within the same country. This language does not specify whole book, single-file lending but the resulting agreement allowed interlibrary loan at the chapter level, with no limits on the number of chapters that could be loaned. The publishers favored chapter-by-chapter downloading both as a license and technical response to whole- book downloads. To allow whole-book lending, a technical short-term lending option is currently in development for 2013. Text Mining A principle for text mining, which is of interest to researchers who wish to analyze a full corpus of material, is also included in the “ARL E-Book Requirements”: Authorized users are permitted to engage in text processing, which is any kind of analysis of natural language text. This may include but not be limited to a process by which information may be derived from text by identifying patterns and trends within natural language through text categorization, statistical pattern recognition, concept or sentiment extraction, and the association of natural language with indexing terms. Technology may not be used to hinder any rights granted under this section or any other section of this agreement. ARL listed this as desirable rather than required since technical capabilities by content providers might not be available at the time licenses were being negotiated. The agent was encouraged, however, to negotiate for those rights when possible. The resulting agreement allows text mining with prior notification so that arrangements can be made to prevent system crashes, modify abuse-monitoring system warnings and potential disabling features, and adjust usage statistic counts. Author Rights ARL is encouraging authors to retain their own content rights and included in the “ARL E-Book Requirements” a license clause originally developed for journal articles: