On 1 July 2016, the British Library, one of the world’s largest research libraries, terminated its international non-commercial document delivery service that had been meeting the needs of researchers around the world for five decades.

EIFL investigated what happened when the service changed from one backed by a copyright exception to a publisher-approved licensing arrangement, revealing the data behind the demise of the licensed service. The data illustrates how licensing, far from delivering greater resources to professionals and scholars, has failed them, reinforcing the argument that such services should be regulated by copyright law, not by licence.

Read more here (14 pages pdf) or a two-page summary (pdf).

Read the EIFL blog documenting the decline of the document delivery service