Colleges to Get Consolidated Copyright Fee

A nonprofit firm that provides licenses and permission to reuse published material has recently announced an initiative that allows academic institutions to pay a single annual fee to access copyrighted material.

Although the sources available under the system are limited, according to June 22 press release from the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), nearly 200 publishers have already included their publications in the program, including John Wiley & Sons, The New York Times, and Oxford University Press.

The new system could potentially relieve the perennial burden of high coursepack prices faced by Harvard students at the beginning of semesters.

Although it's not clear whether the annual fee will decrease the price an institution pays for the participating copyright licenses themselves, it may cut the administrative costs involved in obtaining them.

Under the former "pay per use" method, academic institutions were required to request rights for each use of copyrighted material. If one annual fee covers many of those sources at once, the increased efficiency could be reflected by substantially lower prices.

According to Allan E. Powell, the general manager of the Harvard Coop, the high cost of coursepacks is primarily due to expensive copyright and licensing fees. He said the store's 15-20 percent markup on coursepacks is significantly lower than that of textbooks, particularly when the Coop's annual rebate is taken into account.

Powell also noted that the copyright and licensing issues related to Harvard coursepacks are primarily dealt with by XanEdu Custom Publishing, a national provider of coursepacks and custom textbooks, and not the Coop itself.

But even XanEdu doesn't have control over the frequently hefty licensing fees, although the company does ensure that college officials are informed of highly priced sources.

"We keep a constant eye out to make sure that there aren't too many ludicrous prices, and most of them are reasonable," said Sean Poza, the account executive for the Massachusetts-based customers of XanEdu. "But it all depends on what the publisher is throwing at us."

The costs of coursepacks continue to rise because license holders have control over their own licensing fees, Poza said.

It isn't rare for students students to spend hundreds of dollars for a semester's coursepacks. The $464.50 sourcebook that accompanied Spring 2004's Government 90qa, "Community in America" was met with so much student outcry that Malkin Professor of Public Policy Robert D. Putnam decided to print the coursepack elsewhere in addition to making it available online.

The Undergraduate Council even passed a resolution in March 2006 calling for regulation of coursepack costs. The resolution noted that expensive coursepacks can be a deterrent for students who may be interested in a course but can't afford the price tag that accompanies enrollment, and it urged the College to take measures that address the issue.

The Harvard University Library (HUL) officials in charge of licensing did not respond to requests for comment, but if Harvard adopts the initiative, it would be an additional course of action taken by HUL to make sources more easily accessible.

Since 2005, HUL and Google have been working on a project to digitize the University's library collection, further increasing the availability to users.

With the CCC's new system—and a growing number of sources moving from hard copies to comprehensive online databases such as LexisNexis and JSTOR—coursepacks may become a lighter load on students' backs as well as a lesser burden on already pinched wallets.

—Staff writer Asli A. Bashir can be reached at bashir@fas.harvard.edu.