Plans for free digital content for legal deposit libraries is scrapped

The Government has abandoned its plans to force publishers to place a copy of paid-for online content in legal deposit libraries (LDLs) for the public to access free of charge.

Proposed new regulations governing what digital content should be made available to LDLs, which includes the British Library, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the university libraries of Oxford and Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin, would have forced publishers to give them a free copy of every work they published.

However it was decided that the costs to publishers of making paid-for content available to everyone under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act outweighed the public benefit that the free archiving would bring.

However the Department of Culture, Media and Sport said it would continue to push forward with regulating offline content under the Regulations.