Electronic legal deposit and Mendeley news

It seems like a long time since I posted last, but a couple of recent news items deserve a mention.

First of all, UK electronic legal deposit is finally a reality, with recent regulations having come into force on 6 April 2013. More information is available on the British Library's website here. The Library also this video overview of what this means.

Possibly one of the strongest arguments for the vital role of libraries in preserving digital as well as printed information seemed to me to be highlighted by the recent news of acquisition of the free reference management tool Mendeley by the publishing giant Elsevier. Andy Tattersall of Sheffield's School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) recently carried out this fascinating brief interview with Victor Henning, co-founder of Mendeley, which is published in full on the ScHARR library blog.

Legal deposit regulations and Intellectual Property review

In a previous post I mentioned the recent Consultation on the Draft Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-print Publications) Regulations 2011. The Government published its response last week, which was welcomed by the legal deposit libraries.

I've also been looking at the Independent Review of IP and Growth: Submissions Received webpage, which now includes all the consultation responses due to be published. From that site, I've just been reading the British Library's Response from the British Library to the Independent Review of Intellectual Property and Growth.

British Library, copyright and legal deposit

Last Friday I was at the British Library in London, which gives me an excuse to post this photo I took. (Complete with a nice spring sky, in contrast to today's foggy and gloomy Sheffield...)

The British Library has recently published Growing Knowledge: The British Library's Strategy 2011-2015 its strategy document for the next four years. This provides a useful insight into the key priority areas which the library has identified, and adds detail to the 2020 Vision document, which was published last year.

I've also been having a look at some of the submissions published so far on the Independent Review of IP and Growth website. So far, this just seems to be a selection of the submissions recieved (the consultation deadline was 4 March), but the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) contribution is interesting - discussing copyright issues surrounding orphan works, digitisation projects, open educational resources and the advantages of open access publishing. It also refers to a British Library document Driving UK Research: Is Copyright a Help or a Hindrance? detailing researchers' personal experiences of copyright issues.

Between 1709 and 1911, copyright was linked to the requirement for the deposit of copies of every published work with a selection of "copyright" libraries. Although these functions (copyright and legal deposit) have now been separated in legislation, the requirement to provide copies of every work published in the UK to each of the 6 legal deposit libraries (the British Library, National Library of Wales, National Library of Scotland, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College, Dublin) remains. Another consultation has recently considered the implementation of extended legal deposit provisions to cover non-print materials, building on legislation originally passed in 2003. There's some useful information about this on the Consultation on the Draft Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-print Publications) Regulations 2011 website.