Open Access Week Letter Supports GSU, Blasts CCC
The strongly-worded “Open Letter in Observance of Open Access Week 2013” re-affirms the importance fair use and open access to education, while at the same time calling out the Copyright Clearance Center for deceptive marketing tactics and continued financial support of the copyright infringement lawsuit against Georgia State University.
The letter, co-signed by the directors of 5 major library consortia representing 62 research libraries across the U.S., asserts, “it is crucial that our libraries and universities, and the faculty and students they serve, have access to balanced information about open access publishing, the fair use of copyrighted materials, and emerging forms of scholarly communication. We believe that it is vital that content creators, content users, and libraries work together to find common ground to ensure that copyright ‘promote[s] progress in science and the useful arts’ [U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8] while at the same time providing reasonable compensation for the intellectual efforts expended to create that content.”
The letter goes on to imply that open access efforts are made more difficult by companies like the Copyright Clearance Center, revealing that, “although founded in 1978 as a non-profit tax exempt organization, CCC was stripped of its federal tax exempt designation in 1982. The U.S. Tax Court ruled the CCC had no ‘interests of any substance beyond the creation of a device to protect their copyright ownership and collect license fees.'”
For more information about open access and fair use, please contact the Georgia State University library at scholarworks@gsu.edu.