Giving new life to out-of-print books: when publishers' and libraries' interests meet

The Library of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles (EUB), the University’s publishing imprint, have recently agreed to collaborate to provide free online access to recent outof-print books published by EUB. The e-books are available on the Digithèque website, a collection of digital copies of printed books created by the Library. This initiative is valuable for the scientific community and the general public who can freely access the books online, for the authors whose books have been digitized and widely disseminated, and for the publisher whose collections become more visible on the Internet, thereby generating more traffic on its website and potentially increasing sales of its other books. Around 20 books have been made available online so far. This article describes the context of the agreement, how the collaboration operates, the options of file conversion vs. book scanning, issues relating to copyright and users’ rights, how access is provided to the digital copies, and future collaborative projects of the Library and EUB. Introduction Universities have the great advantage that they bring together all the different types of actors involved in the scholarly publication process: authors, reviewers, publishers, libraries, readers. When they join together and think about their common interests, this can lead to improvements in access to publications for the whole scientific community. This is what happened at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), when the library and Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles (EUB), the University’s publishing imprint, decided to collaborate to provide online access to recent out-of-print books. EUB publishes research monographs and university textbooks by authors from the European Union; it publishes in some 20 domains, including law, economics, political science, philosophy, history and geography. The publications are organized in 18 collections, each one dealing with some specific subject areas – social and cultural anthropology, philosophy and society, spirituality and free thinking, etc. Most collections are directed by a professor of the ULB; each book manuscript is normally submitted to at least two referees. Around 20 books are published annually, and these are sold through both specialist and general bookshops. The publishing costs are defrayed by a combination of sales revenue, public funding and subsidy by the university. EUB is a very small operation (three full-time employees), which has not yet turned to electronic publishing. However, at the end of 2005 the ULB Library started digitizing ancient books from its collections and providing free online access to the digital copies through its Digithèque (digital library) website. The books selected for scanning by the library date from the late 19th century and early 20th century; are in bad condition but still very much used or of high intellectual value; and are out of copyright and out of print. Books are considered out of copyright if their authors have been dead at least 70 years; they can reasonably be considered out of print by checking specialized databases, like Electre, and online libraries. The objective of the Digithèque is to make digital copies widely available, while preserving the original printed books. In order to meet the demand of the scientific community for continued access to more recent books which are out of print, and relying on the existing technological expertise of the digital library service, si c_ 00 28 99 85 , v er si on 1 24 J un 2 00 8 Author manuscript, published in "Learned Publishing 21, 3 (2008) 187-192"