Re: OA Mandates, Embargoes, and the "Fair Use" Button

From: J.F.Rowland_at_lboro.ac.uk <J.F.Rowland_at_LBORO.AC.UK>
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 09:54:48 +0100

Very briefly - the term 'fair use' (USA) or 'fair dealing' (UK) refers
to the limited situation in which a third party (usually a library)
provides a single copy of a document to an individual user for their
personal study or research. Such provision does not require the library
to obtain the copyright holder's permission. The library is limited to
providing only one paper from any one issue of a periodical, or an
excerpt from a book comprising no more than 10% of the book.

This is not quite the same thing as the provision by an author
him/herself of single copies of his/her own work to those who contact
him/her specifically requesting a copy. Publishers traditionally
provided offprints of papers to authors for this very purpose, showing
that they did not disapprove of such distribution. At least one
publisher that I am aware of now provides a PDF of each paper to its
author, as a substitute for the former offprints, so that (s)he can copy
it on to requesters, while at the same time forbidding the author to
mount the PDF on the Internet - thus indicating that one publisher, at
least, sees a difference between 'the distribution of offprints' and
'Green OA'.

Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University
Received on Mon Jun 18 2007 - 13:47:19 BST