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Describes the history, purpose and membership of the Lis‐Copyseek e‐mail discussion list. Reports on an analysis of the year 2000 Lis‐Copyseek archives that was performed to gain an understanding of the copyright questions faced by libraries. Concludes that traffic on the list has increased considerably since the list’s inception. The majority of concerns relate to copyright in the print environment, in particular the regulations concerning short loan collections and course packs. Provides examples of questions and topics libraries are discussing on the list. Recommends that further copyright assistance be provided to libraries trying to work within current regulations.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how the open access policy environment has developed since the Rights Metadata for Open Archiving Project’s call in 2003 for universities and academics to assert joint copyright ownership of scholarly works and investigate whether UK universities are moving towards a joint copyright ownership.

The paper analyses 81 UK university copyright policies to understand what proportion make a claim over: IP ownership of all outputs; the copyright in scholarly works; re-using scholarly works in specific ways; and approaches to moral rights. Results are cross-tabulated by policy age and mission group.

Universities have not asserted their interest in scholarly works through joint ownership, leaving research funders and publishers to set open access policy. The paper finds an increased proportion of universities assert a generic claim to all IP (87 per cent) relative to earlier studies. In total, 74 per cent of policies relinquished rights in scholarly works in favour of academic staff; 20 per cent of policies share ownership of scholarly works through licensing; 28 per cent of policies assert the right to re-use scholarly works in some way; and 32 per cent of policies seek to protect moral rights. Policies that “share” ownership of scholarly works are more recent. The UK Scholarly Communication Licence (UK-SCL) should have an impact on this area. The reliance on individual academics to enforce a copyright policy or not to opt-out of the UK-SCL could be problematic. The paper concludes that open access may still be best served by joint ownership of scholarly works.

This the first large-scale analysis of UK university policy positions towards scholarly works. The paper discovers for the first time a move towards “shared” ownership of scholarly works in copyright policies.

Outlines the copyright clearance difficulties faced by librarians in the development of the Electronic Library and states the need for an electronic copyright management system (ECMS) to log the clearance process and to protect electronic documents. Reports the absence of a suitably priced commercially available ECMS for the academic sector and describes the design process for the eLib project ACORN's Rights Management system entitled CLEAR (Copyright Licensed Electronic Access to Readings) based on Microsoft Access. Describes the functionality of the CLEAR database and concludes that it might provide a template for other institutions in the design of subsequent ECMSs.

Reports on a comparative cost‐benefit analysis of the paper short loan collection and the ACORN electronic short loan collection at Loughborough University. Describes the tasks associated with the creation and maintenance of each collection; analyses those tasks for related costs, drawing particularly on the experiences of Project ACORN; and then compares the advantages of each collection type. Concludes that although the electronic collection is currently more expensive to maintain, the benefits of electronic access to high demand material could be seen to justify those costs, and that in time ‐ as technologies improve and associated costs decrease ‐ it is likely that electronic collections will provide a cost‐effective value‐added service for libraries and their users.

Reports the findings of a BLRIC‐funded research project, which set out to identify and evaluate current and recent co‐operative preservation activities, and produce guidelines which will help librarians and archivists to engage in successful co‐operative preservation activity.

This is the final study in a series of six emanating from the UK JISC‐funded RoMEO Project (rights metadata for open‐archiving), which investigated the intellectual property rights issues relating to academic author self‐archiving of research papers. It reports the results of a survey of 542 academic authors, showing the level of protection required for their open access research papers. It then describes the selection of an appropriate means of expressing those rights through metadata and the resulting choice of Creative Commons licences. Finally, it outlines proposals for communicating rights metadata via the Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI‐PMH).

This paper is the fifth in a series of studies emanating from the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)‐funded RoMEO Project (rights metadata for open‐archiving). The paper reports the results of two surveys of OAI data providers (DPs) and service providers (SPs) with regards to the rights issues they face. It finds that very few DPs have rights agreements with depositing authors and that there is no standard approach to the creation of rights metadata. The paper considers the rights protection afforded individual and collections of metadata records under UK law and contrasts this with DPs' and SPs' views on the rights status of metadata and how they wish to protect it. The majority of DPs and SPs believe that a standard way of describing both the rights status of documents and of metadata would be useful.

States the problem of incorporating distance learning (DL) library services without additional funding. Describes the work of a distance learning working group at Loughborough University Library. Activities included an analysis of the characteristics of DL courses and students at Loughborough; a comparison of library services to on‐ and off‐campus students; a survey of DL students and academics; and a benchmarking exercise comparing DL library services at Loughborough with those at local and peer group institutions. Key outcomes of the research are presented. Details the suggested methods of funding the working group’s recommendations.