SCOPE

Scottish Collaborative On-demand Publishing Enterprise (SCOPE)

Introduction and Background

SCOPE (the Scottish Collaborative On-demand Publishing Enterprise) has its roots in the Follett Report of 1993. This report was commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Councils of Britain, and following its recommendations, the Councils set up the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib). The main aim of eLib is to 'engage the Higher Education community in developing and shaping the implementatio n of the electronic library'. Just under 60 projects have received funding from eLib, grouped together in 11 different programme areas.

In 1995 the University of Stirling, in partnership with Napier University (Edinburgh), won a grant to develop an on-demand publishing service, which would benefit undergraduates throughout Scotland. The consortium consists of twelve Scottish universities and one Higher Education college. Each of these consortium member institutions has a SCOPE representative drawn from its library staff whose role is to promote SCOPE within the institution and to collect and assess the suitability of reading lists for pro vision of SCOPE's services.

Aims

The main aim of SCOPE is to allow students better access to key reading materials. To this end, SCOPE has developed an electronic resource bank of digitised book chapters and journal articles which lecturers have selected as key reading for their cour ses. These materials are distributed to the students in the form of pre-published course packs, or via the internet, allowing students to identify and print out their own selection of texts over their university's computer network.

Progress

SCOPE's two main objectives are to produce a model contract for use in copyright negotiation, and to produce a secure electronic authentication system for delivering documents over the internet.

In the first year of production, course packs were produced by negotiating with individual rights holders (publishers, authors and their estates) and the Copyright Licensing Agency; by the second year SCOPE was negotiating wholly with the rights holders, and a model contract was in use which was generally acceptable to rights holders. During the third year, negotiations have continued with publishers, leading to modifications in the contract. Currently, 73% of all rights holders who are licensing material s to SCOPE are using the contract. The most recent version of the contract can be seen on SCOPE's home page.

Development of the online service has been ongoing since the project started, with a clearance, authentication, delivery and reporting system ('Cactus') being written in-house, and plug-ins (which provide a security feature) provided by an external contra ctor. Authorised users log onto theSCOPE service via the internet. The service displays course reading lists, from which users can select the items they wish to access. These items are retrieved from SC OPE's Online Resource Bank and delivered via a modified version of Acrobat Exchange v.3. Authorised users can view the full text of documents free of charge, but printing incurs a charge to cover the copyright fee. Online delivery of materials commenc ed in Autumn 1997. Due to copyright restrictions, unauthorised users can only see the bibliographic details of reading lists, not the full text documents. A demonstration of the system from the point of view of an authorised user is provided through the SCOPE home page.

Current Position

To date, SCOPE has produced (or is in the process of producing) materials for eight institutions. This year course materials are being delivered online for twelve courses; eight courses are using packs. These include a course workbook which has been a dopted by another institution outwith the consortium member institutions, and two course-specific textbooks.

Production

Provision of SCOPE services is initiated with the help of institutions' library representatives and the SCOPE Liaison Officer, and by lecturers, who pass reading lists to their library representative for preliminary assessment of completeness of bibli ographic details and the suitability of the extract. For example, SCOPE does not aim to be a substitute for textbook sales, so requests for more than 30% of a book are not passed to publishers. The list is then passed to SCOPE for more thorough checking.

If the materials are suitable and SCOPE services are appropriate to the course, then the rights holders are traced and approached for permission to reproduce the material. Even if the rights holders can be traced easily, publishers often take up to 6 week s to process requests, so the clearance process can take at least two months.

Since the project started, there has been a general increase in the speed at which publishers are dealing with SCOPE's permission requests. This increased mobilisation from publishers in the field of electronic rights, is partly caused by pressure from eL ib projects, and also due to increased acceptance of SCOPE's model contract.

Once permission is granted, the hard copy must be passed to the Technical Unit at Napier University (Edinburgh) where it is scanned, digitised, reformatted and proof read in preparation for printing, or mounting on the server. If a pack is to be produced, copyright on all items must be cleared before the reformatted pages are sent to a printer for printing and distribution. Therefore production of a pack can be delayed by difficulties arising from one item. If materials are required for online distributio n, then items can be mounted on the server as their copyright is cleared.

Most packs have been distributed via campus bookshops, although one consortium member institution has distributed internally via the relevant department. Whilst internal distribution worked well, and meant that the price of the pack did not include any bo okseller's mark up, the department have stated that this method would not be possible if more courses were involved, due to lack of resources.

If materials are to be accessed online then authorised users can retrieve them from any computer on campus with the appropriate software and hardware. To ensure that the integrity of the system is not compromised, SCOPE uses five security features.

To gain access to the documents held, students must access the resource bank from a computer with the correct IP address (i.e. it is located at one of the consortium member institutions).
Students must have an authorised name and password. They can only print one copy of each item. This discourages sharing of passwords.
Once students have accessed the document, they cannot edit it in any way - cut/copy/paste are disabled, as is 'screen dumping'.
Documents are encrypted as an additional safeguard.
Printed documents are watermarked with the user's name, institution and date, so the source of any illegal copies can be identified. This information is also printed in the footer.

Benefits of SCOPE

Benefits of the system vary according to how the SCOPE materials are used by the lecturers. The more that the materials are incorporated into the course, the more benefit can be derived from the service: where SCOPE materials are well integrated, they have been heavily used; where they have been provided as background reading there has been less use and the perceived value has been lower.

The overriding benefit of SCOPE to teaching and learning is that lecturers and students can be certain of gaining access to the key texts. To date, this factor has been of most benefit where SCOPE materials are closely integrated into the course. For ex ample, one lecturer stated that: 'The purpose of these core readings was to provide all.. students on the programme with an opportunity to study the same data... as part of their preparation.' This ties in with comments from other lecturers, such as: 'we were able to focus on the specific materials we wanted, instead of having to compromise'. SCOPE materials were also used as introductory reading - designed to be relevant to, but not sufficient for, assessment exercises and examinations.

Students found that having guaranteed access to the material gave them increased confidence in approaching the subject (particularly if they were new to it), whilst introducing them to a 'wide range of material by different authors'.

All SCOPE usage should ease pressure on the library in terms of demand for multiple copies of key texts. SCOPE services are particularly suitable in the current educational climate where modular teaching results in many students requiring simultaneous acc ess to the same limited number of library books.

Access Issues

Method of delivery has been split approximately 50/50 between packs and the online resource bank. The format chosen is decided by the lecturer, since local circumstances will dictate whether using packs or the online resource bank is more suitable.

The main advantage of the pack is that it is a tangible resource which requires no special equipment, and as such is very convenient for students to use. However, unless the entire contents are incorporated as part of the course, students do not perceive it as being of good value for money. In addition, the cost of producing packs is accrued up front, and if sales are not high enough then someone must carry the loss.

The online resource bank has the advantage that students only print materials which they consider directly relevant; charges are lower and related to use because they are only incurred for the material printed; the material is always available on screen ( as opposed to a pack which may be sold out, or a book which may be out on loan); and the text is searchable, so students can quickly find particular section of the text. However, the resource bank does require specific computer equipment, and access may be limited by the number of machines and their location (ie. machines in the library will only be accessible during the hours that the library is open).

A further limitation is that copyright restrictions currently confine use of packs to students located within the UK and use of the resource bank to machines on campus. It is expected that this situation will change in the near future, but it is currentl y a severe disadvantage which prevents non-traditional students (e.g. part time and distance learners) from taking advantage of the resource. The problem is not simply technical (caused by the IP address restriction), but is also affected by the fact tha t publishers rarely hold world-wide rights to material, therefore to provide material from a UK publisher's edition to a student elsewhere may infringe another publisher's copyright.

Payment Issues

Two direct costs arise from the use of SCOPE services: the copyright fees and printing costs. Each institution decides how, and from whom these costs are recovered. When the project first started it was envisaged that students would be paying all the direct costs for SCOPE materials, irrespective of format. Thus the library could redistribute funds if demand for multiple copies was be reduced enough to require fewer purchases. However, it has emerged that while staff are happy for students to pay all the costs for packs, they are unwilling pass copyright fees for material printed from the resource bank to students (although they are willing to pass on printing costs either by direct charging or by requiring students to supply their own paper). This re luctance has been expressed by both lecturers and librarians, and is particularly strong in the library where provision of information has historically been free.

The problem of who pays the copyright fees is likely to increase in the UK as students start paying their own tuition fees. This will further increase student poverty, and also give weight to the argument that the institution should provide essential mate rials (such as course readings) free to students.

To date, only one institution has expressed willingness to pass both printing and copyright costs on to the students who use the resource bank. All other universities have subsidised the copyright fees, either through the department or through the library . The resource bank has a reporting system which would allow individual students to be charged for what they had printed, but no institutions have requested this service. This method is also affected by the institution's capability to process and recover small sums of money from students.

Future Developments

The main developments currently taking place are:

Rationalisation of contracts with publishers to bring the contracts that were signed early in the project into line with the current contracts.
The current 'pay per use' system for the online resource bank is not an economical method in the long term: it is administratively cumbersome and does not allow those paying the copyright fees to forecast spending. In the future an up-front fee system based on potential use is likely to be introduced - some rights holders already charge on this basis.
Cross platform solutions are being developed to allow Cactus (SCOPE's authentication system) to be run from PCs and Unix servers, as well as from Macs.
The Electronic Libraries Programme has called for proposals to set up a national (UK) service which will facilitate the sharing of digital materials and attempt to reduce blockages in copyright clearance.

Helen Pickering
SCOPE, University of Stirling