The Project

Ascomycete.org offers its members access to a digital library. It is an essential part of the dissemination of knowledge about the Ascomycota, making accessible to  many books and publications often difficult to access, even exhausted. Our aim is to facilitate research work in the field of systematics.
Our goal is to reference the mycological literature already available in other digital libraries but also to offer our own documents.

Legislative constraints

The digitization of publications can not be made freely. Indeed, there are laws and international conventions governing the principle of intellectual property. Scientific publications, like all creative works, fall into this field. The authors are protected in various ways (commercial rights, moral rights, etc.) and also publishers. Only publications entered the public domain are outside the scope protection and can theoretically be used by anyone.
In practice, a publication enters the public domain in France, only 70 years after the death of the author (generally). In some countries, this period is shortened (50 years) and sometimes extended up to 100 years!
Any use of a publication in the interval following the death of the author (or authors in the case of collaborative publications) and prior to the entry into the public domain should be a release of rights or 'explicit permission from copyright holders.

For more information: Copyright (Wikipedia)

Which policy is conducted by Ascomycete.org?

Contrary to other organizations, our association respects the effective legislation. It is working on a policy of obtaining authorizations from the authors or their copyright holders to digitize freely and distribute on its website publications within the scope of intellectual property. This allows authors (or their legal successors) to preserve their rights.
Similar action is being conducted to the publishers with the desire not to infringe their economic interests. An authorization agreement is signed with the publisher to set the rules between the two parties. Once again, publishers are maintained in their rights. To facilitate communication with foreign organizations, the agreement has been translated into English, German, Spanish and Italian.

How can I help the association in this domain?

Your help can be declined in two ways:
1)If you are an author yourself, you can allow Ascomycete.org to digitize and distribute your publications. An authorization form can be downloaded in the section Documents. Just complete it and return it to us. We take care to make procedures with the publishers.
2) If you have old books, articles, etc. and you have a scanner available, you can help us digitize these publications. A scanning protocol has been established and provides a satisfactory quality for the purposes of consultation. Here too, we take care of the formalities for obtaining permissions, you simply provide us a list of documents you want to process.