1,720,959 research outputs found
Copyright & Risk: Scoping the Wellcome Digital Library Project
Get PDFCopyright & Risk: Scoping the Wellcome Digital Library is a comprehensive case study which aims to assess the merits of the risk-managed approach to copyright clearance adopted by the Wellcome Library (WL) in the course of their pilot digitisation project Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics.
Whilst the WL clearly identifies as a library, as a collecting institution it extends from books and periodicals to include archives and manuscripts, art, the moving image and sound associated with the biomedical sciences and the medical humanities.[1] In this case study we consider the digitisation of both library (books) and archive material as part of the Codebreakers project, although our principal interest lies with the archive digitisation strand.
This report assesses the merits of the WL’s approach to copyright compliance by:
Introducing the WL and the Codebreakers mass digitisation project
Outlining the copyright challenges presented by the mass-digitisation effort
Discussing the risk management methods used by the WL in determining which rights should be cleared
Examining the results of the risk-managed copyright clearance process
As a result of this analysis, the research aims to:
Compare the Wellcome experience on Codebreakers to rights clearance exercises attempted by other cultural heritage institutions
Provide policy makers with useful data and insights to inform the debate on copyright exceptions for cultural heritage institutions
Discuss the relevance of this approach for other UK archive institutions
Prior to the preparation of this case study, CREATe published a working paper in March 2013[2], reviewing current and proposed changes to UK copyright law, and specifically exceptions provided for libraries and archives. This was further extended by a review of available literature on the digitisation of archival and library collections for publication online, contextualized with specific examples.
Existing literature reveals that rights clearance procedures impose prohibitive burdens on cultural institutions, through the cost of staff time and training in both diligent search and the process of contacting rightsholders.[3] It also indicates that in most cases, the results of rights clearance processes are unsatisfactory: either copyright holders cannot be identified and traced; or those who are contacted, do not respond to permission requests. Archives, in contrast to libraries, have the added complication of dealing with larger and more varied collections of material, the majority of which has been created for non-commercial purposes; this material is often unpublished at the point of deposit with the archive, and typically includes higher proportions of orphan works (when compared with traditional library collections).[4]
Documented examples of archival rights clearance projects are scarce, and where studies do exist, they have generally been conducted at a large-scale level, and do not contain sufficient detail to enable in-depth analysis of the rights clearance process.[5] Anna Vuopala’s excellent Orphan Works study[6] includes examples of rights clearance projects at 19 institutions, and focuses almost exclusively on the time and cost required to clear rights, which is extremely useful, but leaves out other valuable details about the right clearance process: for example, the number of rightsholders’ contact details found; the refusal rates and reasons given for refusal at each institution; and the number of rightsholders who do not respond to permission requests.
In general, there is a lack of detailed evidence concerning rights clearance in archival digitisation, and especially in relation to projects that employ risk-management strategies in a sector which is known to be highly risk averse. The WL was chosen as an appropriate subject for this case study given the scale of their digitisation aims, and their use of a risk managed approach to copyright compliance.
Codebreakers, as a digitisation project, was never designed to facilitate a study of the process of rights clearance – by the time data collection for the Copyright and Risk Project began, Codebreakers was entering its final stages, with the official launch of the project website taking place in February 2013. As a result, semi-structured interviews were chosen as the most effective method of obtaining data about the project. Interviews were conducted with key project staff at the WL as well as with staff from five partner archives involved in delivering the Codebreakers project.
The semi-structured format of the interviews was chosen for its flexibility; a list of questions was chosen, but given the length of the interviews, it was possible to divert from these questions and follow up on unexpected lines of enquiry raised by the interview subjects. Also, by working from a set list of questions, it was still possible to collate the answers to specific questions, thereby producing some quantifiable data. The questions were generated through a discussion of the aims of the project, and through consultation of other similar projects: specifically Jean Dryden’s doctoral research on the practices of Canadian repositories when making their archival material available online.[7]
The interviews covered five specific areas: the respondents’ role within their place of work; their role working on the Codebreakers project; the rights clearance challenges posed by the project; the development of policies and practices over the timeframe of the project; and finally, the respondents’ own views and experience of copyright, divorced from an institutional perspective.
Using this method of enquiry, respondents were asked about policies and practices mandated by the institutions they work for, but also for their own opinions as professionals, built up though work experience, education and training. By encouraging the respondents to reflect on their own experience, it was also possible to use the ‘snowball’ technique to tease out pointers to documentation and other resources used by the respondents, not only in relation to this project, but to their experience working on others as well.
Once completed, the interviews were transcribed to provide usable data. The transcriptions were used for a variety of purposes. Responses to specific questions were logged to give quantifiable results. Where respondents gave specific examples of practices, or policy changes, these are used as evidence in the text of this report. As a result of interviewing respondents at the Wellcome, project documentation was also made available for inclusion in this case study. This material takes two forms: policy documents which were circulated and updated as the project took place; and an internal report produced towards the end of the project, which includes a variety of statistics and more general lessons learned. The documentation has been discussed in the text of the report and examples of specific documents are available in the Appendix.
This combination of anecdotal evidence, combined with results and project documentation, has allowed us to trace the processes by which the WL has used risk management to achieve their digitisation objectives.
[1] The Wellcome Library Collection Development Policy is available athttp://wellcomelibrary.org/content/documents/policy-documents/collection-development-policy.pdf [Accessed: 5 Dec 2013]
[2] Deazley, R., and Stobo, V. (2013) Archives and Copyright: Risk and Reform. Working Paper. CREATe / University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.
[3] Ibid
[4] For any work, created by an author who died before 1 January 1969, which was unpublished as of 1 August 1989 (when the CDPA 1988 came into force), the duration of copyright will last until 31 December 2039. CDPA, Schedule 1, s.12(4).
[5] Vuopala, A., “Assessment of the Orphan works issue and Costs for Rights Clearance” (May 2010), available at: and Korn, N., (2009) “In from the Cold” JISC & The Collections Trust, available at: [Accessed: 1 Sep 2013]
[6] Vuopala, A., (2010) – See page 39, and the example of the National Archives ‘Moving Here’ project. 45 rightsholders refused permission, but information regarding the reasons for refusal is not available. As to the rightsholders who could not be identified in relation to 385 documents – it is not made clear whether contact details could not be found for these individuals, or if they were but did not respond to permission requests.
[7] Dryden, J., “Copyright issues in the selection of archival material for internet access” (2008) Archival Science 123-4
Archives and Copyright: Developing an Agenda for Reform
Get PDFThe Symposium “Archives and Copyright: Developing an Agenda for Reform” was held at the Wellcome Trust on 27 September 2013. It was organised by Ronan Deazley and Victoria Stobo in collaboration with the Wellcome Library, and represents the culmination of an RCUK-funded research project concerned with the manner in which the copyright regime both enables and inhibits the work of heritage institutions, and in particular archives.
A web resource offers short videos of the presentations at the Symposium, full transcripts, an introductory essay and a bibliography, as well as other project-related outputs (available at: www.create.ac.uk/archivesandcopyright).
This document is the authoritative, paginated and citable version of the Symposium proceedings (available for download at: http://www.create.ac.uk/publications/archives-and-copyright-developing-an-agenda-for-reform).
The Symposium and the production of the web resource have been generously supported by the Wellcome Trust, the UK Archives and Records Association, the British and Irish Law Education and Technology Association (BILETA), and CREATe, the RCUK-funded Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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