Works unavailable on the market: Czech experience of the digital content availability via the internet in the "Covid times"

Czech libraries have been digitizing historical and modern library collections since the mid-1990s. Approximately 4 million pages are digitized every single year. In 2017 the amendment to the Copyright Act of Czech Republic was approved that allowed the National Library of the Czech Republic to conclude license agreements valid for all Czech libraries to publish so called works unavailable on the market on the internet. Subsequently in 2019, a five-year license agreement was concluded to guarantee free access to the books published in the Czech Republic by the end of 2007 and periodicals published by 2010. The payment of for this access licenses is paid from the state budget through the National Library of the Czech Republic, which allows to use these services to all libraries and their registered users to read the displayed documents. During the COVID pandemic situation, when libraries and bookstores were closed, even the full opening of the digital libraries was agreed including the latest publications. The service was freely available to the university students, teachers and researchers. Publishers received adequate financial compensation from the state budget to support such an important service. This paper is aimed to introduce the experience with all the process aspects, especially contractual security and the negotiations with collective copyright holders and publishers. The technical solutions is running on the basis of the Kramerius system, which is developed in the close cooperation of the Library of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the National Library of the Czech Republic and the Moravian Regional Library