Why is everyone talking about Rights Management? Clare Hodder explains...

Suddenly, it seems that Rights (Acquisition) Management has become a ‘thing’.

It is a topic at conferences, systems have been developed to support it and even new kinds of jobs are now dedicated to it. But why? Hasn’t the publishing industry always had to manage its rights? Aren’t rights fundamental to the very existence of publishers?

Well, yes, but it turns out that, by and large, we were somewhat relaxed about managing our rights when the world was based on paper, and digital (as with every other aspect of publishing) has made it all much more complex. In order to publish anything, we have always relied on an agreement with the person who created it (or those they had agreed could license it on their behalf), be that an author we commissioned, an in-house writer under an employment contract, or a photograph whose rights were secured via an image library.

Agreements were fairly standard and usually granted publishers a broad range of print based rights which would last for at least the edition’s lifetime, if not the full term of copyright. The likelihood of anyone straying too far from what was enshrined in these agreements was small, and the impact, if they did inadvertently exceed licensing terms, minimal. Consequently, most publishers did not worry too much about it, as long as they had an agreement with the main contributor, and had obtained (or got the author to obtain) permission for any 3rd party content, they had done their job, documents were filed, end of story.

However, as publishers have innovated in the digital space the range of rights they demand from rights holders has increased – seeking more rights, to cover more products, for longer periods of time. Rights holders have understandably responded cautiously, wanting to protect their revenue (and future earning potential), reputation and, importantly, control over how their content is being used. Publishers are not simply getting the rights they are asking for, or are getting them on more limited terms, and this poses some problems.

Add to that, the fact that all this innovation in the content that publishers are putting ‘out there’ means it is not just author contracts and a few permissions agreements to worry about, but you also have to get rights agreements with the person who shoots your video, records your pod-cast, the users who contribute user-generated content, the freelance writers who write your blogs, the software developer who created your app, and many, many more creators who have been engaged to deliver content. More rights in more content from more people = a bit of a headache!

How do you know who has given you what rights, for how long, and with what restrictions? You can no longer assume that everything you might want to do with the content is covered by the agreement you put in place several years ago, the big issue now is that you actually have to check. And you do actually have to check, you can’t bury your head under the duvet and hope it will all go away because ‘we’ve never had to do all this before’.

There is now a very real chance you will be sued if you get it wrong, or at least have to deal with a time-consuming settlement for an eye-watering amount of money. Suddenly, having the author manage some of those agreements or shoving everything in an archived, paper, editorial file doesn’t seem like such a good idea. It becomes necessary to think up front, before you even commission a project about what rights you will need to make the project viable and whether you are likely to be able to get them.

Time taken to acquire the rights and budget needed to pay for them needs to be factored into the process and the product needs to be monitored post release to ensure that all of the licences remain valid and re-clearance arranged (and paid for) where necessary. Documents and data about rights acquired need to be collated and stored and new workflows need to be established. And, so Rights Management as a ‘thing’ has emerged, with staff and systems and blog posts to boot, and it’s a ‘thing’ we all need to get to grips with, and quickly.

Clare Hodder, is a copyright and licensing specialist at Rights2 Consultancy. She will take part in the ALPSP and PLS webinar Effective Management of Rights on Monday 23rd January. Register now to secure your free place and find out more about how to manage rights management in your organization.

Are Your Rights in Order? 7 risks and 7 ways of avoiding them

Sarah Faulder

What is the cost of getting rights wrong? Sarah Faulder, Chief Executive of the Publishers Licensing Society chaired a session that offered advice on developing the correct rights acquisition strategy.

They recently worked with the other collecting bodies to re-negotiate what is paid to rights holders. The outcome from the valuation last year based on journals 76% to publishers, 23% to authors and 1% to visual artists. This will be reviewed in 2019 and it is hoped that it will be increased for publishers. However,  this is dependent on getting tighter documentation demonstrating rights. Faulder urged the publishers in the room to get into good practice now by ensuring you have the right rights as it will be key to a successful negotiation. They have also launched PLSclear: a new permission clearing service to help with the identification of rights holders. Rights are very important, but they come with obligations: to use and enforce them.

Obtaining appropriate rights, understanding the rights you have and fulfilling your obligations in respect of those rights for each of your content assets is vital. You should look at every aspect of your content and cover every copyright base. When you are acquiring rights you should think about what you might do further down the line.

Clare Hodder

The speakers considered how to ensure you have all the rights you need for your content, and provided guidance on the systems, support and training that is available.

Clare Hodder of Rights2 Consultancy and Natalina Bertoli from Bertoli Mitchell outlined seven commercial risks of poor rights management.

1. Lost income: good rights management practice results in increased revenues.
2. Stifling innovation: good rights management enables you to innovate and move swiftly to market with new products.
3. Hard to combat piracy: good rights management enables you to combat piracy and unauthorised use, protecting your business.
4. Infringement: means you mitigate the risk of infringing copyright, and dealing with costly legal bills
5. Reputational damage: good rights management enhances your reputation amongst the author community and your market
6. Erosion of copyright: good rights management means that publishers and users of our content can work with in an efficient copyright framework, without the threat of broadening exceptions to copyright which undermine business models
7. Increase costs and risks for mergers and acquisitions: good rights management enables mergers and acquisitions to be completed swiftly and at the right price.

The panel then discussed ways to avoid these risks. Put rights management at the heart of your business from the top down. It has to be recognised and you need to train all staff, not just editorial. You need systems and documentation. Rights management often gets sidelined. Risk of short term inconvenience not worth risk of lost income or rights. Don't leave it solely to those who have targets.

Natalina Bertoli

Should publishers invest in rights management? Absolutely. Often rights are low down on the scale of things to invest in. You can caution or scare with big numbers of what it might cost. But even for smaller publishers you can do a lot with very little. Have a centralised filing place and a very good naming convention. It is preferable to do it digitally, but you can still do this with filing cabinets! Have someone in the organization who has responsibility for it. And regularly check and remind this needs to do. Conduct regular audits on your systems and that systems are being adhered to.

In addition to every bit of content you should think about how the content might be used for in different ways. Big publishers might aim to get all rights from the beginning, but rights holder often push back. If you don't get what you wanted, you can go back to renegotiate or rethink what you can do. Don't proceed as if you had them! 

Recording what you have in terms of rights is key. Asset management systems are needed. What you need is information about the rights you have. Until we get to databases holding rights metadata you have to find a way to slice and dice content agreements so you can identify different aspects. If you have a relatively small list you could use Excel. If a little larger you could get someone to put an Access database together. It doesn't have to be an all singing and dancing rights.

When dealing with reversions (where a publisher or creator requests rights revert back to them) make sure you give them the same paper trail and structure as you would a new rights agreement. Be VERY explicit in your wording: title, authors, formats, etc. Use a template format so nothing is missed.

Often rights acquisition is delegated to a junior member of staff with limited experience. It is vital to build in training programmes on rights management to ensure this doesn't end up being a problem.

Sarah Faulder is Chief Executive of the Publishers Licensing Society. Natalina Bertoli is Owner of Bertoli Mitchell. Clare Hodder is co-founder of Rights2 consultancy. They spoke on the PLS Gold+ Sponsor session on rights management at the 2016 ALPSP Conference.

Are Your Rights in Order? Clare Hodder reflects on what happens if not...

Clare Hodder, one of the speakers on the Are Your Rights in Order? PLS sponsored session at the ALPSP Conference, is passionate about the right way - and wrong way - to do rights. We interviewed her in advance of the conference to find out just exactly what the problems are.

What are the cost of getting rights wrong?  

There are a few things...missing out on revenue from subsidiary rights, because you don't know what rights you have to licence, not being able to digitise your backlist because you don't know if you have the rights, not being able to enforce infringement action because you have no documentation to prove you are the rights holder (as in the Georgia State University case). And that's just the start.

In one instance, a publishing company had to pulp an entire first print run, because they realised too late in the day, that the licence they thought they had acquired for the picture on a book cover, didn't come with an image release from the people pictured. The people in the picture objected to the use of their image and insisted the book was pulped. The publisher had to foot the bill for destroying their stock, finding an alternative image and reprinting the book and of course valuable sales opportunities were missed and marketing effort wasted, due to the delay to publication.

Some rights holders, particularly photographers are getting really hot at looking for unauthorised uses of their work on-line. Publishers who have acquired licences for a certain number of years or to cover a certain number of copies have been finding themselves on the receiving end of lawsuits when they have exceeded those terms unknowingly. In most cases settlement is reached relatively quickly but its time-consuming and expensive - damages awarded for such infringement, particularly in the US courts are high.

What are the benefits of getting it right?

If you have comprehensive rights data on all of your assets, the world is your oyster. You can endlessly re-publish, slice and dice, and licence those assets in infinite combinations, broadening the reach of your content and generating lots of additional revenue. Without that data, you don't know what it is possible to sell or licence so you either miss out on those opportunities or become a copyright infringer - risking large financial and reputational penalties in so doing. It makes so much sense to put your rights in order first and set yourself up to fully exploit the content you have invested in.

Which of the 7 ways to avoid risks can you share in advance of the conference?

Make sure you have a rights acquisition policy that is widely known within your organization (and complied with!) getting the right rights in the first place saves you a whole world of pain later on! Guard against the raft of infringement claims now facing publishers by ensuring you can manage licence compliance. Adapt systems and processes to alert you when you are about to exceed licence terms and give you time to re-licence or remove content to avoid infringing.

Clare Hodder is a Rights Consultant with Rights2 consultancy. She has been working with the Publishers Licensing Society to develop PLSclear and delivering Straightforward Permissions and Rights Management workshops. Clare will take part in the Are Your Rights in Order? 7 risks and 7 ways of avoiding them at the ALPSP Conference 2016 at 2pm on Thursday 15 September.

Why Publishers Need to Know the Difference between Search and Text Mining

Haralambos “Babis” Marmanis CTO and VP, Engineering & Product Development at the Copyright Clearance Center looks at the concepts behind search and text mining and highlights why publishers need to understand the differences in order to make the best use of each.

As the author of works on search and the lead architect of a product which enables text mining of scientific journal articles, I am often asked about the difference between Search and Text Mining, and have observed that the two are sometimes conflated. Unless you work with technology every day, this confusion is certainly understandable. Knowing the differences, however, can open new business opportunities for publishers. Both functions deal with the application of algorithms to natural language text, and both need to cope with the fact that, as compared with “pure data,” text is messy. Text is unstructured, amorphous, and difficult to deal with algorithmically.

While the challenges associated with text are common to both search and text mining, the details with respect to inputs, analytical techniques, outputs, and use cases differ greatly. For years, publishers have been engaged in search engine optimization, designed to make their works more discoverable to users. As publishers are increasingly asked to enable text mining of their content, they enter into new territory – a territory that is different than that of public search engines. Thus, it is more important than ever to understand the difference between these two distinct mechanisms of processing content, so that optimal business and licensing strategies are chosen for each.

To begin with, let me describe the key concepts for each area. "Search" means the retrieval of documents based on certain search terms. Think, for example, of your usual web search on well-known search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. In search, the typical actions performed by a software system are index-based and designed for the retrieval of documents. The indexing process therefore aims to build a look-up table that organizes the documents based on the words they contain. The output is typically a hyper-link to text/information residing elsewhere, along with a small amount of text which describes what is to be found at the other end of the link. In these systems, no “net new” information is derived from the documents through the processes that are employed to create the search index. The purpose is to find the existing work so that its content can be used.

On the other hand, "text mining" is a less widely understood but well-developed field that deals with analyzing (not finding) text. That is, while text mining can sometimes look at meta-textual issues – for example, tracking the history of science by counting the instances of a specific phrase (e.g., “avian flu”) in articles – more often the goal is to extract expressed information that is useful for particular purposes, not just to find, link to, and retrieve documents that contain specific facts.

Text mining tools accomplish this by allowing computers to rapidly process thousands of articles and integrate a wealth of information. Some tools rely on parsing the text contained in the documents and apply simple algorithms that effectively count the words of interest. Other tools dig deeper and extract basic language structure and meaning (such as identifying noun phrases or genes) or even analyze the complete grammatical structure of millions of sentences in order to gain insights from the textual expression of the authors. By extracting facts along with authors’ interpretations and opinions over a broad corpus of text, this more sophisticated approach can deliver precise and comprehensive information, and in the commercial setting, provides more value than simple word counts.

Unlike with search, the output of text mining will vary depending on the use to which the researcher wishes to apply the results. In some contexts, the output is digital and designed for machines to process. In other examples, such as using text mining to drive marketing of products and services, the ultimate output will be human-readable text. In other words, even when text mining is performed, sometimes the user needs and receives the full article.

Although both search and text mining involve the parsing and lexical analysis of documents, there are important differences that should drive a publisher’s decisions about investments in text mining and search.

1. In text mining, the processing and analysis is often done on a project by project basis. Unlike the search functionality provided by search engines, the “how, why, and what” are infinitely variable, and it is difficult to accurately anticipate the inputs, processes, and outputs required. For example, depending on a text miner’s use case, the output may be facts, data, links, or full expression, as opposed to the simple links that are the output of search.
2. Search is about finding a set of relevant documents, each of which is considered independently by the algorithm; if applied to a single document the process will yield the same result for that document. On the other hand, text mining is mostly about discovering and using information that lives in the fabric of a corpus of documents. Change one document and the fabric of the corpus changes. Mining is usually (but not always) consumptive of the content. So, the “search” process is document-by-document specific, while the “mining” process involves sets of documents and how these documents relate to each other.
3. Lastly, the mining process aims at extracting “higher-order” information that involves first-, second-, and higher-order correlations that may occur among any combination of the terms, data, or expressions appearing in the corpus of documents that is processed.

In summary, search and text mining should be considered as two quite distinct processing mechanisms, with often different inputs and outputs. While publishers need to engage with both, by conflating them, one loses the unique opportunities and strengths that each provides. With search, it’s all about helping users find the specific content that they are looking for. Text mining goes well beyond search, to find multiple meanings in a publisher’s content in order to derive new value therefrom. Hence, one would expect that, just as the processes themselves differ, publishers’ licenses for the search and text mining processes will differ too.

What societies need to know about Creative Commons (CC) Licensing - free webinar

Want to know what a CC license is and what all the different types mean?
Which CC license is best for your journal’s authors and the future of your journal(s)?

What societies need to know about Creative Commons (CC) licensing
Tuesday, September 30th, 8-9am PDT/11am-12pm EDT/4-5pm BST

With new mandates being announced by funders globally for Open Access archiving of their funded research, societies need to understand what the different CC article licensing options mean, both for their journals’ and their members’ needs.  This webinar will provide society executives with an overview of what they need to know about CC licences. Do you know your CC BY from your CC BY-NC-ND?  What are the pros and cons of different CC licenses for society journals? What options should you give your authors?

With speakers from Creative Commons, Copyright Clearance Centre and Wiley.

To register your place, visit http://goto.copyright.com/LP=981

This webinar is organised by Wiley in conjunction with the Copyright Clearance Center

Text and Data Mining: rights holder licensing tools

Text and Data Mining: international perspectives, licensing and legal aspects was a Journals Publisher Forum seminar organised in conjunction with ALPSP, the Publishers Association and STM held last week in London. This is the last in a series of posts summarising discussions.

Sarah Faulder, Chief Executive of the Publishers Licensing Society announced they are developing PLS Clear – the PLS clearing house – a central window to handle license requests that will be a rights holder search and discovery service.

Text and data mining involves access to, and usage of, articles in bulk. Researchers need to track and contact potentially hundreds of publishers for permission to mine their text. The PLS service will connect researchers to rights owners for search and discovery.

Publishers already entrust licensing their secondary rights to PLS on a non-exclusive basis. As a result PLS has built arguably the most comprehensive database in the UK of publishers and their content (by ISBN/ISSN and, in due course, by DOI). This is a natural role for PLS and the network of Reproduction Rights Organizations all over the world.

They are testing a single discovery portal through which researchers can both find the appropriate publisher(s) and route their permissions requests to the relevant person in the publishing house. The plans are for a generic clearing house. The first application is text and data mining, but it will have wider usage over time.

Text and data mining presents a technical infrastructure problem first and foremost. Licensing is a necessary means of managing access to content where the scale of access increases risk of leakage and therefore piracy, and puts an unacceptable strain on publisher platforms not designed for systematic crawling and scraping.

Carlo Scollo Lavizzari is legal advisor to STM on copyright law, policy and legal affairs. Lavizzari outlined how structuring a license is easy. Leave rhetoric aside and look to business opportunities, it is about defining the terms, what are the sources, input of content, what does the user do with that content? Where is it stored, what is done with it, can it compete or not, etc. Consider the mechanical clause on delivery mechanisms. Should also deal with the end of project – always have an exit strategy! That is the legal skeleton of a legal license.

There are calls for cooperation between those who hold content in public domain, those who hold open access content, those who hold content that is subscribed to or purchased; those who already hold a lot of purchased contents; and researchers who might want to access/mine. The question they haven’t managed to get through with any community is how to combine open access environment and copyright protected license. It is an area where he believes that licensing can provide a solution, but still trying to tackle.

John Billington works in corporate products and services at Copyright Clearance Center, who’ve been working on their Text and Data Mining Pilot Service. They have developed a pilot service that provides licensed, compliant access and retrieval of full text XML and metadata from multiple scientific publishers for the purposes of text mining.

CCC’s role is to provide an authorized means to access and retrieve published content in a standard format. The initial pilot is focused on corporate users with an access, retrieval and licensing layer. Future markets may include corporate marketing users, or academic uses.

He reflected on how it has been challenging to extract full text from different publishers and convert to a normalized format that is usable in text mining technologies. There is a lack of federation and existing tools are still difficult. They are trying to provide a one-stop shop for users and publishers that incorporate standardization, license and business model and access method that works for both sides.

He noted that a researcher wouldn’t want to be limited to what the library is subscribed to. So the tool will show them the metadata for what they aren’t subscribed to. It will filter to help them understand what they have subscribed to or not. They intend to include a purchase mechanism for full text unsubscribed articles. You will be able to download results in normalized XML format. It currently has a web interface, but they are working on an API so they systematize it.

Ed Pentz from CrossRef closed the day by outlining their latest beta application Prospect. They work on the assumption that researchers aren’t doing search or discovery – researchers will know or will have used another tool. Their service relies on DOI Content Negotiation. They are now collecting ORCID IDs for researchers. In text and data mining it is important to have a unique ID for a researcher so you can see who is doing it. They are also including funding information.

DOI content negotiation can serve as a cross-publisher API for accessing full text for TDM purposes. To make use of hits, publishers merely need to register URIs to full-text. NISO is working on a fuller specification on some metadata. They are focusing on an interim solution to at least record URIs to well known licenses. They think it will also be possible to extend to handle embargoes.

He observed that there’s potential to coordinate across initiatives, but only once each organization has individually figured out during their own trial periods. CrossRef are testing the system over the summer and will then assess if it is workable as a production system.