Liability of Institutional Repository Managers?

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts about the legal liability of an institutional repository (IR) manager under two scenarios.

In both, a faculty member has deposited a copy of a publisher's PDF file for an article that he or she wrote in an IR. Unfortunately, the publisher explicitly does not permit this type of use.

So, what are the IR manager's liability if:

(1) There is no monitoring of IR e-print submissions.
Faculty can deposit any thing they like.

(2) The IR has been set up so that a representative of
the faculty member's department is charged with responsibility for screening (or not) submissions. The IR manager has no direct involvement.

Of course, an alternative IR management strategy that prevents
(1) or (2) from occurring is to impose IR-wide screening by
IR managers, who would consult the SHERPA Publisher Copyright Policies & Self-Archiving Web site and publisher Web sites to determine an article's status prior to deposit. From a legal point of view, smart idea or overkill?

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php

Best Regards,
Charles

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development, University of Houston, Library Administration, 114 University Libraries, Houston, TX 77204-2000. E-mail: cbailey[_at_]uh.edu. Voice: (713) 743-9804. Fax: (713) 743-9811. DigitalKoans: http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/ Open Access Bibliography: http://www.arl.org/pubscat/pubs/openaccess/ Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog: http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepw.htm Received on Fri May 27 2005 - 19:50:01 GMT