Monday 29 June 2015

CLA launches new Second Extract Permissions Service

A couple of weeks ago this blogger received a media release that somehow slipped to the bottom to his pile of unattended emails and remained there till he found it again today. The title "CLA launches new time-saving permissions service for universities: New Second Extract Permissions Service available now" pretty well gives the game away. Anyway, the release reads, in relevant part, as follows:
CLA (The Copyright Licensing Agency [in the UK]) is launching a new service to allow universities to buy rights instantly online. This is the first time that universities have been able to purchase additional rights from CLA immediately and it is expected to save them thousands of hours each year on administration.

The new ‘Second Extract Permissions Service’ enables universities to buy rights instantly when they need to copy more than is allowed under the CLA Higher Education Licence.

A university with the licence can currently copy a limited extract from a published work - for example a single chapter or 5% of the whole text. Until now, if a university wanted to use more content they would contact the publisher or another agent to purchase permission, which can be a time-consuming process. The new Second Extract Permissions Service will speed up the process and reduce administration costs.

Over 100 major publishers are signed up to the service - representing the majority of the millions of pages copied each year in higher education.
Some universities are using a beta version but all are invited to pre-register now online ahead of an August rollout at http://he.cla.co.uk/second-extract.

This blogger has taken a brief look at the service and would be interested to hear from those who are either expecting to use it or to derive income from it. His favourite bit is the line that reads "the service is optional and there is no charge if you don’t use it".

1 comment:

Alex Fenlon said...

We here at University of Birmingham expect to use it in the future as it should be easier to obtain permissions over and above the licence
allowances. The UK has something like the CCC at copyright.com.

It is good that this is free, although there is a service charge per 2nd extract obtained/ licensed, and no additional charges are made to the licensees until/unless it is used.