This page describes how to answer the questions in the form that appears when you select "Contact us" to submit information about a serial's copyright renewals or free online issues. This page describes the long form that appears on some of the Deep Backfile pages for serials that do not yet have information available. You may see a shorter form appear if there is already information submitted for the serial, or if you are coming from a Deep Backfile page that doesn't yet support the longer form.
When you're filling in the blanks, don't press the enter or return key until you're done. Many web browsers will attempt to submit the form if you do that. You can move from field to field by pressing the tab key, or by clicking on the field you want to fill in next. (If you accidentally submit the form too early by pressing on the enter or return key, you can use the Back button on your browser to go back to the form, and then re-submit it when you're done filling it in.)
You may need to spend a while on each question the first few times you fill out the form. Consult this guide often as you start out. As you become more familiar with the questions and the steps, you may find the process goes quicker.
This will usually already be filled in for you. If it is not, or if the title is incorrect, fill in the title of the serial, complete with initial articles. (That is, if the title is "The Bucknell Review", enter that, not "Bucknell Review" or "Bucknell Review, The".) There must be something entered as a title for the form to be accepted.
This will usually already be filled in for you. If it is not, you can fill it in if you know an ISSN for the serial, but you don't have to. Some serials have more than one ISSN; we only need one of them, and you should not enter more than one. If for some reason you want to verify the ISSN supplied for a serial title, you can enter it into the ISSN portal, but there is generally no need to do this.
If you can easily find out the main country of publication for this serial, answer this question. (We may include a link to a relevant catalog search with this question. Sometimes the catalog search turns up no results. If that happens, you can try searching on the ISSN or title in Worldcat yourself.) If the serial is published in the United States, select "US"; if it's published elsewhere, select "Some other country". If you can't easily tell, just leave the answer on the "I can't tell" option.
If you didn't answer "Some other country" for the previous question, skip this question. If you did answer "Some other country", enter here the name of the main country where the serial appears to be published.
If you didn't answer "Some other country" above, skip this question. If you did answer "Some other country", enter any information that might indicate that the serial was also being regularly distributed in the United States. The catalog record you found might, for instance, include a US place of publication along with the foreign publication; if so, note that here. If you have access to any of the actual content of the serial, look for (and report) any mention of things like US postal registration, US distribution agents, or advertisements of subscription rates for the US or in US dollars. These things may be mentioned in or near the table of contents or masthead for a particular serial.
Serials with active renewals before 1950 (and some with renewals after that) should be mentioned on our first renewals page. Listings are alphabetical by title. You can also use your browser's search function to quickly find occurrences of keywords from the serial's title.
Search on all the titles you know for this serial. If you find it mentioned there, answer "Yes", and skip down to the "Let us know about free online issues" section. If you do not find it there, answer "No", and go on to the next question.
If you answered "Yes" for the previous question, or you know that the serial ended before 1950, you can skip this question. Otherwise, search for this serial in the online Copyright Public Records System (also known as the CPRS).
Enter the name of the serial in the "Search for" box at publicrecords.copyright.gov. The pull-down menu to the left of the search can be left alone as saying "Keyword", or set to "Title". You should omit any such articles at the start of the periodical's title, and put quotes around the title to make it search the title as a phrase. For example, to search for renewals associated with The American Historical Review, enter
"american historical review"
You should also search for any variant titles you know of for the serial. (You might find some listed under "Other Title" in the serial's catalog record. But if you don't find or know of any such titles, don't worry about it.) In some cases, it might be better to and enter keywords from the serial's title or claimant in the box with "AND" between each word. (Without the "AND" keywords, you might also get records that only include some of the words you're looking for.) For example,
communications AND computing AND machinery AND association
should return records associated with titles like "Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery" as well as "Association for Computing Machinery. Communications". It will also turn up records for any title containing "Communications" (such as "Communications of the A C M") where the Assocation for Computing Machinery is mentioned in the record.
(You can also try the system's Advanced Search to be more precise in your search specifications. Be aware, though, that it's easy in Advanced Search to over-constrain your search in ways that aren't obvious, and thereby miss relevant records you might need to see. So don't rely solely on Advanced Search until you're very familiar with the system and how it works.)The catalog will display listings of records that match your search criteria in batches of 10. For some common words and titles, more than 50,000 records may match your search criteria, but the system will cut off results after the first 50,000. If your searches get cut off like this, and you're searching specifically for renewals filed after 1977 (which is what this guide mainly instructs you to do), you can limit your results to those renewals by putting a checkmark in a box labeled "Renewals (RE)" under "Registration Class". (You'll normally see that box in the right column of the search results page. In the Advanced Search page, you may also see it below the search text boxes, in a big box on the left headed "Registration Filters.")
If that does not give the results you expect, or you aren't confident you're searching correctly, leave the answer to this question blank (on the default "-" answer) and move on to the "Are you able to tell if this serial has copyright notices?" question.
Search results will be displayed in a table that may include columns for "Title", "Full Title", "Copyright Number", and "Date". (In some cases, the "Title" column may be omitted.) The records may include original registrations, renewals, ownership transfers, and other types of registration. Renewal records will have Copyright Numbers that start with "RE0". It may be useful to sort results by date. (In the pull-down menu near the "Resort results by:" instruction, select "Date (ascending)".) When results are sorted by date, renewals will often appear first. Renewals may be filed under the year of the issue, or under the year of the renewal (which will generally be 27 or 28 years after the year of the issue).
If you find a renewal record associated with this serial, answer "Yes" to this question, and enter the year of the earliest issue with a renewal as the answer for the next question. (Note that for renewals filed under the year of the renewal, the issue year may be 27 or 28 years earlier. Clicking on the link for the renewal record should display a longer renewal record that usually includes the year of the issue involved in the renewal.)
If you did not find a renewal associated with this serial after searching thoroughly for one (including under variant serial titles, if applicable), answer "No" to this question.
If for some reason you were unable to complete a search, or we've said you could skip this question for your serial, leave the answer blank (on the default "-" answer).
Renewals became automatic after 1992, so you generally do not need to look beyond that year, if you've sorted results by date.
If you didn't answer "Yes" for the previous question, leave this answer blank. Otherwise, enter the year of the earliest issue you found with a renewal in the Copyright Public Records System, when you were searching it as described above.
If you don't have access to copies of issues of this serial between 1930 and 1988, or the issues you have access to don't have all of their pages, skip this question (leaving the answer as the default "I can't tell" choice). Otherwise, look through the latest issues you have access to that are dated before 1989. Look for the word "Copyright", the abbreviation "Copr.", or the © symbol. (Copyright notices recognized by the US must have one of those three things, along with a date and the name of the copyright claimant; the Copyright Office's Circular 3 has more details.)
In serials, copyright notices generally go on the "masthead" page, or the title page (if any) or the page after that, or the table of contents page, or the cover (front or back), or an early page that prominently identifies the periodical and the issue.
If you find any of these copyright indicators on the items you are researching, select the answer "It has copyright notices". If you've looked thoroughly through relevant issues, and not found any, select the answer "It does not have copyright notices". If you're not sure, leave the answer "I can't tell" and go on to the next question.
We are specifically looking for copyright notices put on the issues by the publisher. Later statements about copyright made by others (such as HathiTrust's "protected by copyright law" statements alongside items that it has not verified are in the public domain) should not be considered copyright notices for this question.
There's a text space below this question where you can write down anything else that you think might be important for people researching copyright on this serial to know. (You can also use this space to report any difficulties you encountered, or ask questions that the Deep Backfile project maintainers can see.)
We're primarily looking for copyright information on serials at this point, but if you know that some or all of this serial can be read freely online (without a subscription or other payment) you can note it in the space below, and we can let the world know about it as well. We provide some sample searches that might be useful for locating such content. You can end up searching online for a long while sometimes, so if you're doing this as part of your job, ask your supervisor about how much time you should spend looking for free content, as compared to doing copyright research.
We're primarily looking for complete issues that are permanently freely available. Content that is only temporarily free should not be entered here. Neither, for now, should be content that is only available after logging in to a system, such as content available for "borrowing" on the Internet Archive. Some publication websites also make some of their current articles free temporarily, but not persistently. (For example, a newspaper site might have some of today's news free to read, but have older articles behind a paywall.) You can let us know about those sites if you like, but they're not primarily what we're interested in.
If you find relevant content, enter its URL (starting with "https" or "http") in the space provided. You can usually copy and paste this from a browser window. You can also add any further comments or questions that you might have about this content.
Especially if you are working on this form as part of your job, you should fill in your name and email address in the provided spaces, and check the box below them labeled "Check this box to save your contact info in a cookie". You then won't have to re-enter this information when you come back to this form again, as long as you use the same browser and it accepts (and doesn't erase) cookies.
Press the "Submit this suggestion" button at the bottom of the form to submit your answer. You will then see a page acknowledging your submission. From here, select the "return to the ... Deep backfile page" link, which may include the name of table you were looking at before, to go back to that table, and research another serial. (The word "Pending" will then most likely appear in the row for the serial you just researched, if it's in that table.) You can also select the "Research another serial" link, though that will take you to a blank form with no serial information entered.
You may see a "Status of all submissions via this form" line at the bottom of these pages. That will show the number of submissions from all users (not just you) that we have yet to incorporate into our Deep Backfile knowledge base, and the age of the oldest submission we haven't gotten to yet.
We may write back to you if you left your email address and we have questions about the information you entered, or we just want to thank you for your work.
If you have questions or problems about this form, you can contact John Mark Ockerbloom, Deep Backfile project lead, at ockerblo (at) upenn.edu. If you had problems or questions related to one of the serials you were researching, you can use one of the free-response areas (such as the one under "Is there anything else we should know or record about this serial's copyrights?" or the one under "Let us know about free online content") to leave comments or questions.