http://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/text/accesspolicy.html

For what it’s worth, the availabilty statement on BASP is our default and most restrictive statement. We prefer more open statements of availability but we have not yet had a chance to work through all the conditions with the BASP board. We are hoping to attach Creative Commons licenses to all our content in the near future — but that involves a fair amount of education of editors and authors and we do not want to delay releasing our journals. We’ve found, working with societies, that making such polccy decisions can be quite protracted, perhaps because of the culture of the societies but more often because of the infrequent meeting schedule of the governing bodies who decide such matters.

One final note about the format of the online edition. The decision to use page images is a conversion decision (for the most part we were working with paper originals — there were electronic source files only for the past few years) that is mostly based on economics. Scanning is much cheaper than transcription and encoding, particularly in the case of BASP where we would have had to give particular attention to encoding non-Roman characters. I’m not sure it would have been possible to afford to put BASP online for free if we created electronic text. The possibilty always exists, of course, of upgrading the OCR through manaul review and correction, if funding can be located or we can locate willing volunteers (know any??).

The text access policy you mention above is a residual of our all to generic help pages. We try scrubbing it out, we try soaking it out, but back it comes. Apologies for that.

Maria Bonn, Director, Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library