It depends on your license agreement with the vendor. I
strongly
suspect that they retain the rights to "their"
PDF and would take
great exception to having it posted somewhere else. For
example,
I noticed a while ago that, although the University of
Virginia
has a number of publicly available PDFs of documents
available
for anyone to use, they very specifically deny people the
rights
to mount copies of these elsewhere, claiming that it does
not
serve their interest to have multiple copies of these
documents
existing.
My take on this would be that the PDF from a particular
vendor
represents their work product. As such you would not be
allowed
to simply make copies. By doing that you are actually
creating a
disincentive to people to purchase the particular product
(JSTOR,
whatever). I realize that it's just one, but if you had a
thousands of people doing this you, essentially, given the
nature
of Google, have essentially dismantled the product.
It's actually a very interesting question: Vendors
generally have
licenses and technology in place to prevent individual
institutions from disaggregating the product e.g. creating
local
archives of massive amounts of a particular database. I have
a
number of databases that record and have mechanisms to make
downloading lots of material impossible or very difficult.
What your mentioning is a kind of "distributed
disaggregation".
Individually, no one is violating their licenses, but the
collective effect is the same. I strongly suspect in future
you
will see publishers adding license language that prevents
participation in these kinds of schemes.
Quoting Liblicense-L Listowner <liblicen pantheon.yale.edu>:
> From another list ... of possible interest (and
response) to
> readers of liblicense-l? Ann Okerson
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 10:49:38 -0400
> From: Richard Griscom <griscompobox.upenn.edu>
> To: SPARC Institutional Repositories Discussion List
<SPARC-IRarl.org>
> Subject: [SPARC-IR] Posting vendors' PDFs
>
> The following question came up in a recent meeting of
the repository
> oversight group at Penn: Do vendors retain proprietary
rights over
> the PDF files they prepare for full-text databases? For
example, if
> we receive permission from Publisher Y to mount
Professor X's paper
> in our repository, may we use a PDF created by Project
Muse or JSTOR
> in lieu of scanning the article ourselves? Do these
vendors exercise
> rights over the use of the PDFs that they have
prepared?
>
> Best,
> Richard Griscom
>
> --
> Richard Griscom office
215/898-3450
> Head, Otto E. Albrecht Music Library and fax
215/898-0559
> Eugene Ormandy Music and Media Center griscompobox.upenn.edu
> University of Pennsylvania
> Van Pelt Library, 3420 Walnut Street, Philadelphia PA
19104-6206
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