In today's world, every day we generate billons of digital files. In fact, the intellectual output of more and more of our top researchers and academics across the nation is born in digital form. Yet, what are we doing to capture those files and make sure that the basis of our current thinking will be preserved for generations? Who is to say that the research data you are gathering for your current project will be available ten years from now when you or a colleague would like to pick it back up again and examine some other angle of your thesis? Who can guarantee that the presentation you gave at a most recent conference will be accessible so that a colleague or student might be inspired by your discoveries sometime into the future?

Years from now, in the absence of paper, how might future generations view the same work of today's famous thinkers? In a scholarly context, the question becomes even more urgent. What will become of the products of your research and teaching, which are now, more often than not, digital?

In 2003, Hewlett-Packard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers set out on a joint venture to solve some of the digital storage dilemmas facing research institutions. Known as DSpace, the software platform "captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and redistributes an organization's research data."1 DSpace quickly became a place where the "MIT faculty (could) deposit their digital assets."2 At the same time, teams of researchers at the University of Virginia and Cornell were developing the Fedora project with similar aims.3 Library information systems provider Ex Libris was also working on their product, DigiTool.4

More importantly, at the time the first software platforms were being developed, the concept that institutions needed to permanently and securely store their intellectual capital in one central, easily accessible digital "location" began to take hold. Today, these digital storehouses are known as institutional repositories (IRs). Their missions are basic--preserve the intellectual output created by faculty and students so that it can be freely and readily accessed by current and future scholars. According to the Registry of Open Access Repositories, of the 221 registered repositories in the US, 126 are digital repositories based at institutions. This includes MIT's DSpace@MIT (which now contains dozens of research materials of MIT faculty, researchers, departments, labs, and centers and over 14,000 theses), Cornell's eCommons@Cornell, Georgia Tech's SMARTech; and the University of Kansas' KU ScholarWorks, among dozens of others nationwide.5

The contents of these IRs are vast and varied--often they include pre-prints or post-prints of published papers, research data, conference presentations, public performances and exhibitions, theses and dissertations, and other multi-media work. Their potential impact on scholarly communications and how research is being done is just now beginning
to emerge.

Ann Green and Myron Gutmann in their paper, "Building Partnerships Among Social Science Researchers: Institution-based Repositories and Domain Specific Data Archives," point out that repositories benefit researchers in all phases of the research lifecycle and more than just through the housing of "eprints" of published work that may exist only in paper form. Institutional Repositories "seek to provide safe harbors for a more inclusive interpretation of the intellectual output of local faculty-driven research and teaching, by including pre- and post-prints, working papers, research reports, datasets, course materials, personal image collections, among other types of content." 6

"It's not enough anymore to just publish in a research journal," said Steve Harnad in his recent interview with Times reporter Matt Baker.7 Harnad is Professor of Cognitive Science at Southampton University and his department of electronics and computer science was the first in the world to adopt a non-commercial self-archiving mandate. He goes on to add that "authors who have put their work in a repository have twice as many citations as those who don’t self-archive." 8

"A rich part of the knowledge process…This is the future of where we’re heading in research," adds Dr. Ceasar L. McDowell, who uses MIT’s institutional repository DSpace@MIT as a way to share, organize, and distribute data for his work in the Center for Reflective Community Practice.9

Secondarily, institutional repositories serve as meaningful markers of an institution’s academic quality. They help showcase the work of faculty and students and provide tangible examples of work being accomplished. "Where this increased visibility reflects a high quality of scholarship," noted Richard K. Johnson, Enterprise Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), "this demonstration of value can translate into tangible benefits including funding--from both public and private sources--that derives in part form an institution’s status and reputation." 10

Some faculty have been slow to embrace self-archiving or their institutional repository. "One reason for this cautious approach," writes Baker in his interview with Paul Ayris, Director of Library Services at University College London, "is the misconception that open access means lack of peer-review."

"This is not true," Ayris explains. "Academics see peer-review as the gold standard of academic excellence, and there is no wish to lose it. Papers in open-access journals can be peer-reviewed just as rigorously as materials in commercial subscription journals. Where publishers’ copyright policies allow, that published peer-reviewed literature is deposited in open-access repositories." 11

Although the rise of repositories has prompted some to see the digital tool as a threat to the traditional revenue streams of publishing, an important point to note is that institutional and other digital repositories don't necessarily compete with scholarly journals. They house more than just the types of materials published by societies and publishing houses, which is what many argue makes IRs so innovative and important to scholarly exchange.
When faculty do participate in institutional repositories, the increase in visibility can be profound. In May of this year, Brunel University reported 17,000 downloads in three months from Bura (Brunel University Research Archive). "It’s a great way of showcasing work to the public and other researchers. We encourage everyone to self-archive," says Geoff Rodgers, Dean of Brunel University's Graduate School.12

"The repository also fits with the Libraries’ strategic agenda to provide broad access to scholarly content and preserve that content for future generations of scholars," notes Dean Catherine Murray-Rust.

The Libraries hopes that the DR will revolutionize the storing and accessibility of CSU’s intellectual output. For faculty, the digital repository provides world-wide distribution of their works and enhances their visibility. “Because the DR is open-access, work will more broadly appear in Google and other Internet search engines,” notes Dawn Bastian, Coordinator of Digital Repositories at CSU.

The DR also offers a platform for housing an entire body of work in one central location. "The repository will preserve content from a variety of sources including peer-reviewed scholarly works that are commercially published but not archived," adds Bastian. This is an important part of making sure born-digital materials are preserved and accessible into the future.

Brian Ott, Associate Professor for Speech Communication at CSU, has already taken advantage of the Libraries' call for materials during this early implementation of the DR and has submitted several of his research materials for posting. "Dramatic changes in the production, format, and flow of information--fueled by the rapid development and proliferation of IT--suggest that ideas, insights, and scholarship will increasingly be stored, distributed, and circulated electronically in the global village of the 21st century," notes Ott. "I want my work to be easily available internationally. I believe the repository will help facilitate and sustain a new era of international collaboration and global academic networks."

For students the digital repository offers exposure for their work. It especially addresses the requests the Libraries has had to support electronic theses and dissertations. With a DR, students can share their work with prospective employers with one click of the mouse and the DR will provide a platform for accessing their research long after graduation.

For the CSU community, the digital repository showcases the works of the faculty, other researchers, and students in an open, global environment that makes it easy for researchers and other interested parties (such as organizations that fund research or have partnerships with CSU) to find CSU works. "As a vehicle that tangibly demonstrates the quality of CSU's work, the implications for raising support, both private and public, for CSU research may be profound," notes Murray-Rust.

The DR will be maintained by CSU Libraries and accessible via the World Wide Web. The Libraries will provide a full-range of self-archiving services for faculty and students interested in posting their materials so that they are not burdened with the process. Formats such as Word documents, PDF files, images, and PowerPoint will initially be accepted by the Libraries for posting; other formats will be accepted in the future, including audio, video, datasets, and others. Libraries staff are working to implement the DR and populate it for demonstration purposes by the end of the fall semester. The Libraries hopes to make the DR fully accessible and open for deposit during Spring 2008, at which time it plans to also launch a pilot electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) submission program. As file formats change, the Libraries will provide long-term storage and accessibility solutions. For all content deposited, the Libraries will maintain a persistent URL (one that will never disappear or become defunct) and the files and metadata associated with it, provide secure storage and backup of materials, and monitor format changes and migrate to succeeding format(s) when necessary and possible.

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (http://www.arl.org/sparc/), has developed
one tool to assist authors in keeping key rights to the articles that they publish. Their Author Rights brochure details the Author Addendum, a legal instrument that authors may use to modify their publication agreements with publishers.

The Author Rights Addendum can be downloaded as one element of the informative Author Rights pages made available by SPARC, an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system.

1. Introducing DSpace. (2002-2007) MIT Libraries & Hewlett-Packard Company. Retrieved on October 11, 2007 from http://www.dspace.org/introduction/index.html.
2. DSpace: Preserving Digital Data for the Ages. (2003) HP Labs News. Retreived on October 10, 2007 from http://hpl.hp.com/news/2003/july_sept/dspace.html.
3. Fedora: About/History. (2005-2007) Fedora Project. Retrieved on October 10, 2007 from http://www.fedora.info/about/history.shtml.
4. DigiTool at Leiden University: Oldest Dutch University Buys Youngest Ex Libris Product. (2007) ExLibris LTD. Retrieved on October 11, 2007from http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/newsdetails.htm?nid=50.
5. Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). (2005-2007) Tom Brody, University of South Hampton, UK. Retrieved on October 11, 2007 from http://roar.eprints.org/.
6. Green, A. and M. Gutmann. (2007) “Intuitional Repositories: Building Partnerships among social science researchers, institution-based repositories and domain specific data archives.” International Digital Library Perspectives. 23.1: p.35-53.
7. Baker, M. (2007) “Out in the open, it’ll net a high return.” The Times Higher Education Supplement. 1792: p. 23.
8. Ibid, p23.
9. DSpace: Faculty Profiles: Dr. Ceasar L. McDowell. (2002-2006) MIT Libraries & Hewlett-Packard. Retrieved on October 11, 2007 from http://libraries.mit.edu/dspace-mit/about/mcdowell.html.
10. Johnson, R.K. (2002). “Institutional Repositories: Partnering with Faculty to Enhance Scholarly Communication.” D-Lib Magazine. 8.11: p. 1-7.
11. Baker, M. p. 23.
12. Ibid. p. 23.

In addition to providing a digital storehouse for materials, the Libraries anticipates that it may eventually offer services through collaborative partnerships such as conference production processes, digital collections building, audio/video capture of lecture series speakers, symposia, and instructor lectures, technical support of virtual forums and communities, scanning and conversion of resources to digital form, and more.

“When we get diverse scholars exchanging ideas it enhances and enriches everyone’s work,” says Professor Ott. “The greatest barrier to effective collaboration right now is a lack of easy searchability and access. To be able to easily locate the corpus of a scholar’s work will greatly improve the academic conversation on issues of pressing social and political significance.”

CSU’s Digital Repository is offering one way of capturing scholarly materials that are increasingly ephemeral in a digital age, and providing such guaranteed access to a local, national, and global community of users.

Dawn Bastian, Digital Repositories Coordinator
Dawn.Bastian@Colostate.edu | 970.491.1849

Or Contact your College or Department Liaison Librarian
http://lib.colostate.edu/collegeliaisons

Know Your CopyrightsTM created by ARL provides a guide for educators using copyrighted works in academic settings.

The law as it stands seems also to be limiting the histories that can be told. When professors Cathy Davidson and Ada Norris sought to document the life of Yankton Nakota writer and activist Zitkala-Ša, their publisher would not even consider use of any works that fell outside of 1922, fearing the time and expense it might take to clear copyright claims.14

The law as it stands seems also to be limiting the music that can be played. Dr. Susan Pickett, Catharine Chism Professor of Music at Whitman College writes, “I have been dealing with the problem of orphaned copyrighted works during my 15 years of research about women composers. Frankly, I can see why some people just blatantly break the law: there are so many barriers and dead ends and catch-22s that it’s frustrating beyond words even to the most law-abiding person…There needs to be an international registry of people who have legal rights over music so that it’s easier to find out whom to contact for permission” (Duke Law School, 2005, p.2).15

Something about regulating the exchange of information isn’t working, or isn't working as efficiently as it should be. In an information age, knowledge is at our fingertips. Yet, Congress continues to enact laws that restrict access. They will continue to do this unless more people engage in the shaping of knowledge in the digital environment.

13. Blumenstyk, G. (2007) "Study Shows Patents Don’t Hurt Science." Chronicle of Higher Education. 53(21).p. 31.
14. Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. (2005). Orphan Works Analysis and Proposal: Submission to the Copyright Office March 2005. Retrieved March 16, 2007 from http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/pdf/cspdproposal.pdf.
15. Ibid.

Almost as fast we develop information sharing technology, laws pop up to govern that technology. Copyright law is constantly shifting. In his book, Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig paints a bleak picture of how we are migrating away from a free culture that understands and values creativity and knowledge--where the best minds of the present exist because they can collaborate and build upon the creative giants of the past--toward a permission culture that seeks to define and limit the uses of culture and its future creators. In his book, Lessig outlines the ways in which the reach of copyright law has steadily expanded.

Over the last forty years, Congress has extended existing copyrights eleven times. One such addition, the Sonny Bony Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (CTEA), extended copyright effectively to 95 years.9 The law extends back to any work published after 1923 and prevents that work from passing into the public domain.
Legally, when a work passes into the public domain this means that the author is still given credit for the work, but that the work can be copied and reproduced without the specific permission of the copyright holder. As previously mentioned, in the 1800s this introduced consumer competition into the print publishing market, and the result was that copies of works such as Shakespeare's plays could be acquired for much less money. Therefore, works in the public domain were accessible to many more people and many more people could be enriched by them. Extending copyright to 95 years greatly alters this equation, especially in the context of the Internet. For example, one could scan the Complete Poems by Charlotte Bronte (whose works are in the public domain) and make her work freely available online to anyone with an Internet connection. (Bronte would, of course, need to be given credit for her work.) However, one could not create the same type of Website using poems by William Carlos Williams, whose work is not in the public domain.

More importantly, when a work enters into the public domain, it commonly frees others to make creative or derivative works from it. Imagine, for example, if Shakespeare's works were not in the public domain. Would the copyright holder have approved Arthur Laurent's West Side Story or Craig Pearce's 1996 film Romeo and Juliet? Copyright was originally intended to expire so that published works would enter into our body of knowledge and could be creatively used by anyone. However, the CTEA restricts those rights to a single copyright holder and requires that individuals who wish to use that work track down the copyright holder and get their permission to use it--nearly 100 years after the work was produced. Why?

Arguably, the CTEA provides important benefits to those whose works are still commercially viable. The law has enabled copyright holders who retain the rights to profitable works to make money off of them. For example, Disney still owns Mickey Mouse, and Robert Frost's estate still owns the rights to his collection, New Hampshire. However, what about works that are no longer commercially viable? What about works that are orphaned or have gone out of print? What about works that could and should be shared with the masses? What about works that other creative minds wish to use as springboards?

Copyright requires no registration. There is no system of tracking copyright ownership. Therefore, if someone wanted to digitize these abandoned works to make them available again to the public they would first have to track down the copyright holder, which takes a tremendous amount of time and considerable effort. In 1930, 10,047 books were published. In 2000, 174 of those books were still in print.10 Unless it is stored in optimal conditions, the average shelf life of a book is 50-60 years. Legally, a library must go to extensive lengths to prove that it is not violating copyright to "save" copies of these works. Most often, the library can make a print photocopy, but that too that will degrade overtime. It cannot, however, make a digital copy that could be more readily stored and used.
The situation is perhaps more dire for film. The Museum of Modern Art houses 13,000 American films, over half of them are orphaned11 and they are degrading as you read. Under the CTEA, they cannot be digitized or restored without permission, despite the fact that no one is claiming them. One hundred years from now, when and if their copyright expires, they will already be lost. Likewise, if someone wanted to recreate a work in a new medium, such as making a book into a Web site or film, finding the copyright holder of an out-of-print work presents a daunting and sometimes impossible task. This begs the questions: In an effort to protect icons, what elements of our culture are being lost? What future creativity is being hampered?

Copyright as applied in the digital environment has also come to restrict the use of material far beyond the restrictions enforced in print. Traditional copyright protects only the first sale, meaning that once you’ve bought a book, CD, newspaper, magazine, etc. you are free to read it one hundred times, give it to a friend who can then give it to another friend, sell it at a used media store, or donate it to a library.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 changed all that. The act was aimed at enforcing copyright in the digital environment. However, the restrictions enacted by that law and the technology needed to enforce those restrictions severely limits our rights to digital materials that we’ve paid for--much more so than copyright law for print materials.

The DMCA effectively rendered behavior that was previously legal suddenly illegal. Under the DMCA, we cannot share purchased materials peer to peer (even if it’s to a single friend, just like you would have done with that printed book). Access to materials can be restricted by digital publishing technology so that individuals can no longer read a book as many times as we want as we could have with a printed book. And forget about selling those items at a used media store or donating them to a library.

In other words, if you purchase a printed book, you can give it to a friend. If you purchase and download an Ebook and give that to a friend, you are committing an act of piracy. When a library purchases a print magazine, anyone could walk into the library and read it. When a library purchases rights to an online journal, the license may restrict access to only those who are formally affiliated with the institution that signed the contract and is paying for access. If you purchase a CD, you can sell it at any used music store and collect the profits. You could not do the same with the MP3 files of the same CD, even if you were to delete them completely from your computer.12
The DMCA is recognizably an industry reaction to the fact that items in a digital environment can be shared much more readily. An Ebook could be sent to 100 people by email, much like a music file could be sent to 10,000. These acts have been rendered illegal. Yet in doing so, we have allowed the passage of a law that exponentially expands other’s control over how we use knowledge and ideas that we have bought and paid for. Is there a better balance that might be struck?

7. University of Nottingham. (2006) Sherpa RoMEO Publisher Copyright Policies & Self-Archiving. Retrieved February 28, 2007 from http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php.
8. Ibid, retrieved March 12, 2007.
9. Lessig, p. 134-135.
10 Lessig, p. 222.
11. Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. (2005). Access to Orphan Films: Submission to the Copyright Office. Retrieved March 16, 2007 from http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/pdf/cspdorphanfilm.pdf.
12. The UCLA Institute for Cyberspace Law and Policy. (2006). The Digital Milenium Copyright Act. Retrieved March 8, 2007 from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm .

But, by giving publisher’s the rights to disseminate your work, does this exclude you from exercising your own right to share your work with students and colleagues with the ease and convenience of the digital environment? Can you send the link of your work to a listserv of your colleagues? Can you reproduce a copy of your work to share with your class? Can you post your work on a personal, departmental, or university Web site? What if your library doesn’t own the journal you’ve published in? What if your colleagues’ libraries don’t own the journal you’re published in? If, a few years from now, the journal in which you’ve published goes under, what happens to your work?

6. Cartoon Credit: www.cartoonstock.com

By implementing the Statute of Anne in 1709, British Parliament tried to limit the monopoly power of booksellers and limited copyright to fourteen years duration, with a possible renewal by the author for an additional fourteen years. Copyright was also extended by twenty-one years for works that were then already in circulation. As the twenty-one year extension neared its end, a copyright war of sorts ensued. Known as the "Battle of the Book Sellers," London publishers sought to retain their copyright in perpetuity. The publishers presented their struggle in terms of protecting the author's rights to proprietary ownership of their work. They argued that authors should have the right not only to own, but also to sell their rights to their work in perpetuity, thus protecting the publisher’s rights to copy in perpetuity. The argument was fraught with personal tragedies where "pirates" stole works from upstanding businessmen.4

In the end, the Statute of Anne prevailed and copyright terms were limited to a set amount of time, after which works would transfer into the public domain. This meant that an author would always be regarded as the creator, but publishers small and largecould make copies of that work as long as they could afford the printing press technology.

For the consumer, the expiration of copyright drastically reduced the cost of books, especially popular ones. In essence, the copyright limits greatly broadened the pool of those gaining access to knowledge. The decision broke the monopoly power of the booksellers, but also struck a balance between an author"s rights (and by extension a publisher’s rights) to profit from their creation while recognizing that knowledge is a public good. By offering a limited monopoly, publishers could profit for a time and then the works became public, more affordable, and more likely to benefit society as a whole.

In America, the Constitution gave "Congress the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." In order "to prevent the concentrated power of publishers," the framers of the Constitution supported "a structure that kept copyrights away from publishers and kept them short," at least for the first two hundred or so years (Lessig, 2004, p.130-131).5

3. Halbert, D. Intellectual Property in the Information Age. Connecticut and London: Quorum Books, 1999.
4. Ibid, p. 5-7.
5. Lessig, L. Free Culture. New York: Penguin Press, 2004

The assertion is not that this behavior is bad or should be judged harshly; instead, the question is why do we do this? Why do authors take such little interest in the rights to their own intellectual property? And in today’s online environment, when publishing lacks some of the traditional barriers and the environment more readily supports the dissemination of information, what is the effect of this behavior? Should we be doing something different with the rights to our own work?

1. Carter, H., C. Snyder and A. Imre. (2007) “Library Faculty Publishing and Intellectual Property Issues: A Survey of Attitudes and Awareness.” Libraries and the Academy. 7.1: p. 65-79.
2. Cartoon Credit: ESA European Space Agency (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Intellectual_Property_Rights/SEMPF825WVD_
1.html)