[Eril-l] Mass downloads

Thu Sep 23 05:35:18 PDT 2021

Dear all,

Thank you very much for all comments on and off-list.

We have quite a similar procedure as most of you: If it is an obviously excessive download we also inform our IT specialists and they try to identify the user who made the mass downloads. For data privacy reasons we don't have contact with them directly but it's the IT team who tells them that there are some limits to be observed when downloading PDF-documents. Simultaneously we inform the publisher that actions have been taken.

What bothers us and our IT specialists more is when we should admonish users when it's not obvious that there has been an excessive download of documents. There we started to do the same as Aaron mentioned – we now try to contact also the vendor in order to find out their definition of excessive downloads. Hopefully with the effect that they adjust their thresholds so that not each intensive but presumably manual download will be treated as mass download.

Another important point in your replies is that there are legal ways to make data mining or other mass downloads. I have rarely to do with those requests, but when I was involved the vendors usually were very cooperative.

Best regards,

igor
--------------------------------------------------------------
Universität Bern
Universitätsbibliothek Bern
Digitale Dienste & Open Science

Igor Hammer
I+D-Spezialist

Hochschulstrasse 6
3012 Bern
Schweiz
Tel. +41 31 684 95 89
igor.hammer at unibe.ch<mailto:igor.hammer at unibe.ch>
https://www.unibe.ch/ub
(Mo, Di, Do ganztags + Fr Vormittag)

Von: domason1 <domason1 at aim.com>
Gesendet: Dienstag, 21. September 2021 23:41
An: Hammer, Igor Peter (UB) <igor.hammer at unibe.ch>; eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Betreff: RE: [Eril-l] Mass downloads

Igor--

I worked in a large global corporation where this happened twice. A part of the company's awareness campaign was the mandatory annual ethics course where we were asked to bring such issues to the attention of IT. Once the vendor provided us with the offending IP address at the time of infringement, we would send this over to IT security to investigate and identify the user. One time they turned over the corporate ID of the person for us to contact and the other time they contacted the offender themselves. Both times the corporate ethics and guidelines were brought to the attention of the offender and the offender's manager. One of those times it was the math department found testing on large data sets and was legitimate work business. So, for that department we informed them that this could not be done on vendor's content. Therefore, we provided them with internal content that they could use for their big data science research.

Thanks much!!!

--
Dorothy Mason

-------- Original message --------
From: igor.hammer at unibe.ch<mailto:igor.hammer at unibe.ch>
Date: 9/21/21 10:58 AM (GMT-05:00)
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: [Eril-l] Mass downloads

Hello,

We sometimes receive e-mails from publishers who tell us that somebody inside our IP-range has downloaded too many documents from their website so that they decided to block the ip-address in question for some time.

If you receive similar e-mails – how do you react to them? On one hand we understand that the publishers want to protect their stock from mass downloads on a grand scale. But on the other hand the limits given by some publishers seem to me to be quite arbitrary and I don't always see on what grounds they base their decision. This makes it quite difficult for us to communicate to our customers as the same behaviour that may be no problem for one publisher might cause an ip-block from another publisher.

Best,

Igor

--------------------------------------------------------------
Universität Bern
Universitätsbibliothek Bern
Digitale Dienste & Open Science

Igor Hammer
I+D-Spezialist

Hochschulstrasse 6
3012 Bern
Schweiz
Tel. +41 31 684 95 89
igor.hammer at unibe.ch<mailto:igor.hammer at unibe.ch>
https://www.unibe.ch/ub
(Mo, Di, Do ganztags + Fr Vormittag)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.eril-l.org/pipermail/eril-l-eril-l.org/attachments/20210923/bd029009/attachment.html>