Re: Institutional subscription question

[Kevin L Smith <kevin.l.smith@duke.edu>]

This is certainly something that faculty suggest from time to 
time, but I personally have always resisted the idea.  It is not 
that I think there are legal or contractual problems with it, 
just practical ones.

As far as copyright law goes, the doctrine of first sale (17 
U.S.C. 109) certainly applies to allow faculty members to donate 
the particular copies of a journal they have purchased to any 
organization they wish.  There might, of course, be contractual 
obligations on the purchaser of a subscription, but my experience 
as a subscriber is that I have never had to agree to any kind of 
contract that governed the transaction; it has always been a 
simple sale of goods.  I would be very reluctant to surrender 
first sale or its equivalent in any kind of individual purchase.

The practical problem with this suggestion is on the library end, 
where serials management would become just about impossible. 
There would be no regular schedule for receipt and no mechanism 
for claiming missing issues, to name just two immediate problems. 
No librarian wants to explain to patrons that we don't know when 
the next issue of journal X will arrive because we are dependant 
on the memory, and the reading habits, of professor Y.  And what 
happens when Professor Y changes jobs?

By the way, I was at a copyright conference quite a few years ago 
where all the law school professors in the room, when they heard 
how much libraries pay for journal subscriptions, loudly began to 
suggest this "work around."  Clearly they did not see any legal 
impediment to the plan.

It was the librarians (as it often is) who explained why it was a 
practical necessity for us to "play by the rules," even when 
those rules seem to make scholarship increasingly difficult.

Kevin L. Smith, J.D.
Scholarly Communications Officer
Perkins Library, Duke University
Durham, NC  27708
kevin.l.smith@duke.edu
http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/