BANGOR (AP) – As academic and scholarly journals move toward publishing in paperless formats, university professors are finding it difficult to maneuver through copyright laws that restrict how their work can be used.

Such electronic barriers have proven frustrating to many professors, who say readers are often restricted from printing a single page of their work and sometimes asked to pay additional fees for anything more than an abstract.

“You have situations throughout the country … where faculty members who write articles can’t assign them to their classes to read because the library can’t afford to buy the journal,” said James Campbell, a graduate student at the University Maine’s Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering.

Campbell is one of the organizers of a conference this weekend in Bangor focusing on helping creators of scholarly work provide open access and eliminate a variety of means by which their works are restricted.

Because of an increase in the cost of scholarly journals, libraries have been forced to cut both paper and electronic subscriptions, Campbell said. As a result, digital copyright owners can control how digital materials are used.

For example, under the “fair use” provision of U.S. copyright law, many users of copyrighted material do not require permission from the copyright owners. The provision can be overridden by digital licensing restrictions.

“It’s now a complex situation for controlling the intellectual ownership of your own works,” said Harlan Onsrud, a UMaine professor of Spatial Information Science and Engineering.

Onsrud said one way to provide open access is for scholars to post works on their own Web pages before submitting them to publishers. Authors can also choose to publish their works in free open access journals, Onsrud said.

Scholars, artists, and writers will be encouraged at the conference not to hand over their copyright to a publisher, but instead to think about whether people are going to be able to see and use their work.

AP-ES-11-18-04 1059EST