Canadian theses titles will be removed from the U.S. owned web site Contentville.com until further notice. The temporary reprieve for graduate students follows consultations last month with CAUT, the National Graduate Council, the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies, the Canadian Graduate Council, the National Graduate Council, the Conseil national des cycles supérieurs de la Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries.

At a meeting on Sept. 15, the National Library asked representatives from the groups to choose between a blanket removal and an opt-out option whereby students would have to request that their titles be removed from the for-profit site. CAUT and the student groups voted for a blanket removal of all Canadian academic work.

The library initially intended to ask Contentville to proceed with the opt-out option. But Joel Duff, chair of the National Graduate Council of the Canadian Federation of Students, said the opt-out plan was comparable to "the negative billing option that sparked public outrage against the cable companies a few years ago."

Following the consensus reached at the meeting, the National Library and Contentville agreed to remove the theses from the web site.

"This is an interim measure," said David Balatti, director of bibliographic services at the National Library, "as we have embarked on a series of national consultations with the groups affected to review the program as a whole. Contentville has been consulted and agrees with this course of action."

CAUT president Tom Booth welcomed the decision, but also urged the library to establish a public, not-for-profit and cost-recovery program for the distribution of theses and dissertations.

"This is an important victory," he said. "But we think that to avoid this situation from arising again, the National Library needs to bring the theses program back in-house. That's the best way in our view of ensuring the widest and most accessible availability of this scholarly work."

The current controversy arose in July when authors were surprised to discover their Canadian theses were being sold at between $30 and $60 U.S. without their consent on the e-commerce site of Contentville.com, an American company owned in part by NBC, CBS and Microsoft Corporation.

Representatives of the library were unaware that Canadian titles were being sold on the site, but after further investigation it was discovered that UMI Dissertations Publishing, the contractor hired to process, catalogue and make available theses and dissertations, had in turn subcontracted the use of these titles to Contentville.

Balatti said the library's agreement with UMI does give Contentville the legal right to reproduce graduate student work because all masters and PhD students must sign a non-exclusive licensing agreement which grants the National Library and UMI the right to "reproduce, loan, distribute or sell copies of my thesis in microform, paper or electronic formats."

"We may need to do a better job of informing students about the implications of the non-exclusive agreement, because they may not have understood the contract they signed," Balatti said.

However, authors say that although they were happy to sign over rights to the library, they never intended their scholarly work to be sold for a profit on an American web site.

Following a storm of protest over the summer, the library agreed to consult with CAUT and other groups to find a resolution to the situation.