According to this article by Library Journal, library staff are facing the worst burnout recorded in higher education. Librarians today are overworked with little help, and managing a multitude of copyright permissions with individual publishers is another challenging job librarians are regularly tasked with. These one-off permissions are usually obtained for E-Reserve and LMS postings across multiple publishers with varying terms and conditions and tracked and revisited several times a year to maintain compliance.
CCC’s Annual Copyright License for Higher Education, or for short, the ACLHE is a licensing solution that can alleviate the administrative burden of managing copyright compliance for the use of published text materials at their institution. In this blog we’ll take a quick look at what the ACLHE offers and how it can be a tool utilized by understaffed academic libraries.
What Is the ACLHE?
The ACLHE is a campus-wide, comprehensive license that permits faculty, researchers, staff and students to reuse and share copyrighted content across an institution including distance education programs and satellite campuses of U.S.-based institutions. The license provides the broad coverage needed to share excerpts of books, journals, newspapers and more from a repertory of more than 1,700 publishers and helps minimize copyright infringement risk to your institution. The license can also help you complement your high value publisher subscriptions with a broad set of reuse rights.
“Faculty are very happy that we got the Annual Copyright License for Higher Education from CCC because it opens up the ability for them to use far more content than they had previously been able to use” said Lori Christianson, Director of the Electronic Campus, Cummings Graduate Institute. “There were times in the past when I had to tell an instructor that they couldn’t use an article because the copyright permission was expensive. Getting the license has enabled us to improve the quality of the materials that we offer to students because there’s no longer a barrier.
It’s more than just copyright permission for higher ed – the ACLHE leverages publisher subscriptions by providing a broad set of reuse rights.
Time Saved is Money Saved
While the primary benefit of the ACLHE is copyright compliance, the license can also save time and money by requiring fewer individual permissions requests and fewer invoices to manage for library staff.
The ACLHE does this by providing a streamlined copyright compliance workflow for permissions, alleviating the administrative burden of understaffed college and university libraries. While copyright licensing and respecting the intellectual property of others is extremely important, the ACLHE allows you to focus your time on more critical and pressing tasks while still maintaining copyright compliance across the institution.
A Tiered Cost Structure
A key benefit of the ACLHE is that it can be a cost-saving alternative for schools and universities. The ACLHE allows educators to post unlimited content on e-reserves and LMS’ without additional cost, meaning institutions that adopt the ACLHE no longer need to have e-reserves permissions spending caps in place (e.g., no more than $50 permissions costs per course), greatly expanding the number of articles and excerpts that can be posted for courses and research. This benefits everyone: students, faculty, and librarians.
Regarding cost to the college or university, the license utilizes a tiered pricing structure based on the size of the student body of the school. While the license has been adopted by some of the largest research institutions in the U.S., smaller schools and colleges benefit from the tiered pricing structure of the ACLHE as they have a lower number of students, which usually results in a lower total cost. Coupled with the fact that smaller institutions usually have smaller library staff, the ACLHE is often a very attractive solution.
A Solution for Your Campus
The ACLHE offers universities of all sizes a license to share and reuse copyrighted content for higher education. For resource-constrained libraries, the ACLHE provides an efficient licensing workflow, allowing library staff to remove e-reserves permissions limits, and may even help smaller colleges save money in the long run.
If you’d like to learn more about the ACLHE, visit our page here for an overview of the license and its features. Additionally, you can reach out to solutions@copyright.com to speak with a sales representative and schedule a demo to learn more about the license one-on-one.