…this is our future if publishers prevail. We may have to adhere to a strict and highly conservative interpretation of old guidelines drawn up by – you guessed it – publishers, who back in 1976 were troubled by that disruptive new technology, the Xerox machine. If they call the shots, we will have to create a bureaucracy to enforce copyright compliance or face litigation. We will have to reserve interlibrary loan for journal articles only for rare instances and in a manner controlled by “rightsholders” - which, by design, are publishers, not the authors. Where would we get the lines to staff compliance mechanisms? And the money to pay permissions for everything we use in teaching and research, every time we use it? Out of our existing budgets.The ones that keep getting smaller.

I’m not responsible for ILL at my library, so I don’t know what sort of rules apply to filling requests right now, but this sounds absolutely horrible.

The principles that the STM publishers propose would have several novel effects.  First, they would forbid ILL across national borders without specific permission (paid, of course) from the publisher.  Second, they would make digital delivery entirely the province of the publishers (for a fee, undoubtedly).  Libraries would not be able to e-mail a journal article to a patron, even though nothing in the current law forbids such a practice.  Third, it would impose a vague standard of “due diligence” — language not found in the law — on all document delivery for “private, non-commercial use.”  Presumably this is the thin end of a wedge to attack all private research use for which permission fees are not paid.  It is important to understand that such a standard would give the United States the most restrictive copyright law in the world, and it would do so without the intervention of Congress.

And if the restriction on emailing a request to a patron weren’t enough, they want people to PHYSICALLY COME TO THE LIBRARY TO PICK UP A PRINT COPY of an article they want.  No, seriously.  It’s in there.  Go look for yourself (hint: number 5): http://www.stm-assoc.org/industry-news/stm-statement-on-document-delivery/

…I don’t even have words for how utterly ridiculous this is.

(Source: twitter.com)