Awaiting Copyright Clearance

The Awaiting Copyright Clearance Set gathers all the requests with the Pending Approval status. These requests triggered the Borrowing Copyright Rules set up at your library and need to be approved, marked as not needing payment, purchased, or cancelled. 

The first step to processing copyright is to determine if the item should be processed or cancelled. Staff should use the same criteria for determining if an item needs copyright payment as they did in other Resource Sharing systems such as ILLiad. The most common determiners are to look for duplicates, requests for more than ten percent of a book or journal, and requests that fall within the CONTU Rule of 5.

Duplicates

Look for duplicate requests by the same patron. These will likely be rare because Rapido prevents patrons from requesting duplicate requests in quick succession, but if a duplicate slips through for the same patron, cancel one request and process the other.

Some libraries like to check for duplicate requests for the same patron over the course of a year. To do this, copy the article title from the request and select Analytics from the far left Alma toolbar. Search for Rapido Request Search and search the article title for duplicates. 

Requests For More than 10 Percent Of A Book

If a request for a scan of an entire book, or multiple book chapters in a single request, appears in the Awaiting Copyright Clearance Set the request can be cancelled with a message saying the request violates copyright rules. To cancel the request, click the ellipsis (...) and select Cancel. Select a reason for cancelling the request or add a custom message. If you find you often add the same custom messages a new cancelation reason can be added to your configuration. 

Rule of Five

The CONTU Rule of Five is used to determine if a library should pay copyright according to the CONTU Guidelines. The rule says libraries should pay copyright on articles or book chapters if:

• The article was published within the last five years.
• The library has received at least five articles or book chapters from this book or journal that were published within the last five years. The first five articles do not require copyright payment. 

In essence you get five recently published articles from a journal per year for free and the rest should be paid for under the Rule of Five. The Rule of Five is preconfigured in Rapido, so any article or book chapter that appears in the Awaiting Copyright Clearance Set has already triggered the rule. The rule can be edited in configuration if your library follows different copyright guidelines. 

Once you have determined a request needs copyright payment you have several options on how to pay copyright. The easiest and most convenient way to pay copyright is to purchase the article from a document supplier through a Cloud App in Alma. There are currently two available apps: the Article Galaxy Add-On and the Get It Now Add-On. Currently, most CSU campuses use the Article Galaxy Add-On and none currently use the Get It Now Add-On. Regardless of the add-on you use, your library will need to make an account. The workflows between the two systems are nearly identical, but this course will focus on the Article Galaxy Add-On.

Go to the Awaiting Copyright Clearance Set and look at the request to determine if it is indeed an item you need to purchase or pay copyright on using your libraries copyright policies (such as CONTU). If you need to pay copyright, select the Cloud App Center icon (four squares making a large square) and the Article Galaxy Add-On app. The app will instantly search all the requests on the page and display the price for a PDF copy. If you want to purchase a PDF click Request PDF $XX.XX. If you refresh or reload the webpage the request will disappear because the app will automatically update the request status to Request Sent to Partner.

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Reprints Desk will process the request and send it to Rapido where it will automatically be delivered to the patron the same way articles are delivered from other libraries. There is no need for further processing. An invoice will be sent to the email attached to the Reprints Desk account each month for payment. 

Another option for copyright payment is to mark an item as needing payment to add to a report to send to a copyright clearinghouse such as the Copyright Clearance Center or Reprints Desk for payment. These requests will be marked as needing payment but prices are not available through Alma and Rapido. It is recommended to purchase the article if possible to pay copyright immediately with a known price for easier tracking. Some articles will not be available through the apps at this time and will need to go through this process.

If a request needs copyright payment, but isn't available through the Article Galaxy Add-On app, you can mark it as needing copyright payment by clicking a request to open the right hand information panel and scroll to the Request Attributes section. Click the check box next to Agree to Copyright Terms to mark the request as needing copyright payment in the future. 

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Sometimes a request will sneak into the Awaiting Copyright Clearance Set that doesn't need a copyright payment. Maybe the request is for an article published more than five years ago, or maybe its an article from a journal you subscribe to, regardless of why the request doesn't need copyright payment the workflow is the same. To push a request through without marking it for copyright payment click the request to open the right hand information panel and scroll to the Request Attributes section. Click the pencil to expand the options and select No Copyright Restriction from the drop down menu and then select Save. The request will now be sent to a Lending Library for processing.

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The other two options are Copyright Approved and Copyright Not Approved. Selecting Copyright Approved will mark the request as needing payment in the future and Copyright Not Approved will keep the request in the Awaiting Copyright Clearance Set for processing. 

To see the Copyright Report go to Alma > Analytics > Reports > Rapido Copyright Dashboard. This report has three tabs of information for you to use. The first tab is the Articles Unpaid tab. This tab lets you view all the articles that have the Copyright Approved status, were successfully filled, and were not purchased through a vendor. These would be items you still need to pay by submitting the report to Reprints Desk or purchasing each article through the Copyright Clearance Center.

The second tab is very similar to the first tab. This is the Book Chapters Unpaid tab. These are items where the amount or scans from the book triggered the CONTU guidelines. Since students or faculty have been requesting scans of the books on this list it may be a good idea to purchase a copy for your library.

The third tab is the Purchased Items tab. This tab shows all the requests that were purchased through a cloud app such as the Article Galaxy Add-On or the Get It Now Add-On. Copyright for these items have already been paid, so this is more of an informational report. This shows the price for each article and the total amount spent so far this calendar year.

The final tab is the Purchased Monthly Totals tab. This tab shows the total approved copyright per month, total approved with your vendors, and total combined. Along with this information in tables, a graph was added to this page to show the totals visually. All three items on this tab are also available as Dashboard Widgets for easy tracking when you sign in to Alma.