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I completely agree with Charles: The quintessence of the functionality and legality of the email-eprint-request Button is that it is author-governed: Authors are sending one individual copy of their own refereed drafts to individual eprint requesters for research purposes, just as they used to send one individual copy of their own reprints to individual reprint requesters for research purposes by post for decades. This is not like an interlibrary loan request: Libraries are 3rd-party clients, not 1st-party authors. So although the motivation is a good one, I am afraid that the idea of centralized, automated "fair-use" by a 3rd-party service is simply not viable. Nor is it necessary: The Almost-OA Button has other virtues, besides being legal, almost-immediate, fulfilling researcher needs almost as well as immediate OA, and enabling institutions to adopt a blanket deposit mandate, without exceptions, regardless of publisher embargoes on OA (by allowing access to embargoed deposits to be set as Closed Access and letting the Button do the work during the embargo). In addition to all that, the Button brings into strong relief, for authors as well as users worldwide, the fact that the only difference between Almost-OA and OA is a keystroke, and that the extra delay and inconvenience imposed by the Almost-OA Button is something to eradicate as soon as possible, as simply a gratuitous impediment to research progress. And eradicated it will be, under the growing pressure from the increasingly palpable benefits of universal deposit mandates and the OA (63%) and almost-OA (37%) that they vouchsafe. So just mandate deposit, implement the Button, and let nature take care of the rest. Stevan Harnad On 27-Mar-09, at 8:35 AM, c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk wrote: Ah, not quite so straightforward. it's one thing for an individual researcher to respond to a request of a reprint from another researcher. it's quite another thing to offer a generic service to all. I think publishers would be deeply suspicious of such a service, which I would regard as high risk legally. Charles Professor Charles Oppenheim Head Department of Information Science Loughborough University Loughborough Leics LE11 3TU Tel 01509-223065 Fax 01509 223053 e mail c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk ____________________________________________________________________________ From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of J.W.T.Smith Sent: 27 March 2009 12:09 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Central 'Request a copy' address? Hi, In EPrints, when there is a contact address for a repository item, an external user sees a ?request a copy? button. I was thinking of adding a generic ?request? address to all the items that have no contact address so requests for these items would come to a central service. If I have understood Charles Oppenheim?s advice on Copyright we could supply a copy of the paper to the requestor free of charge without infringing Copyright (assuming they say it is for private non-commercial use). Has anyone done this (or similar)? Is it Copyright OK? Regards, John Smith, KAR (Kent Academic Repository) Admin.