0.2 The grub street project: imagining futures in scholarly editing  (Page 5/14)

The above is not meant to be a criticism of our librarians: they are protecting the interests of their patrons, and rightly so (though perhaps, due to pressure from vendor agreements, leaning more to limiting access than to freedom of information in this regard). Nor is this a criticism of ESTC, which has generously made the catalogue available online, or the TCP, which was initiated with the laudable goal of eventually allowing libraries to release the resulting textfile to the public domain. These are commendable initiatives. As Mark Sandler, Collection Development Officer at the University of Michigan University, explained in 2003:

as co-owners of the text-file, a partner library has the right to open its servers to nonauthenticated users to permit access to the text files. By contract, five years after the completion of production, partners can freely distribute some or all of the texts to neighboring high school students, state residents, or world-wide. Since ProQuest owns the EEBO page images, those will not be freely available, but the texts are useful in themselves and public domain access has been protected through the TCP licensing agreements. ^{Mark Sandler, “The Early English Books Online—Text Creation Partnership,” The Charleston Advisor (2003): 49. (External Link) .}

Neither this explanation nor the current TCP website is entirely clear, however, about how this will work, particularly, how many text files can be accessed, downloaded, and published elsewhere by individual users. According to Aaron McCollough, TCP Project Outreach Librarian, “The first 25,000 encoded texts are set to become free in January of 2015. If we are able to raise enough revenue to encode the rest of the collection (roughly 44,000 unique items), then the entire EEBO archive (as TCP text) would become free in 2020.” ^{(External Link) .} Work such as this has tremendous potential for new modes of digital scholarship and public access to that scholarship, and if it is the case that the entire dataset is “free” in five years’ time, there are many reasons to be excited, and many more reasons to start planning how they might best be integrated into digital projects so that the many projects currently online, and those created in the future, could attract readers, interact with one another, and forge new communities of scholarship and general interest.

It is also important to recognize a potential impediment to conducting digital research and publication on individual projects, specifically, that user licenses have shifted expectations and rights that we have come to expect as readers and writers. As Howard P. Knopf has noted, regarding so-called “use” rights,

If I buy a book, I need neither further permission nor further payment to read it, or to quote or copy short or insubstantial excerpts from it, for any reason, or even longer portions, if such copying amounts to “fair dealing.” I can resell my copy of the book, lend it, rent it, put it on reserve in the library, copy chunks of it for interlibrary loan, and, generally get my money’s worth from it and share it with others without further worry. If my law firm buys a copy, everyone can share it. Since the time of Gutenberg, this is how the world has gotten smarter.

Now, if someone puts that book into electronic format, all of a sudden everyone gets excited and worried and wants to create new rights and limit old uses.… it seems that publishers are trying to move users into electronic media with high initial acquisition and/or high per-use costs, with little or no cost savings over traditional paper versions and, in some instances, an overall cost premium. Make no mistake. A use right is the dream of any intellectual property monopolist, and it is a quantum change from intellectual property law as we have known it until now. It is not merely a preservation of previously held rights. ^{Howard P. Knopf, “Debating Database Protection in Canada: Is 'Ultra' Copyright Required?” Canadian Intellectual Property Review (1999): 310–12. (External Link) .}