By John Timmer
June 30, 2009 7:12 PM CT

The head of the Oxford University Press says that while the Google book settlement is imperfect, it may be the best way to prevent nearly a century's worth of knowledge from effectively vanishing. The settlement between Google and book copyright holders has been examined by everyone from librarians to the US Department of Justice.

Most of the issues identified by outside parties have focused on two issues: the market power it cedes to Google, and the ability of the public to access the knowledge that is contained in out-of-print works. The latest organization to weigh on the settlement is Oxford University Press, which occupies an interesting position, as it's both a publisher of copyrighted works and has a mission of disseminating knowledge.

As such, the position taken by the head of its US division is quite nuanced: the deal is flawed, but may be essential for maintaining the public's access to knowledge. Tim Barton, the head of OUP USA, discussed his views on the settlement in an essay that appeared at The Chronicle of Higher Education. He starts it off with a telling anecdote: a professor at Columbia, when grading an essay assignment, found that most of the class cited a work that had been published in 1900, which had largely been forgotten since.

Why so many citations? It was in Google Book Search. More recent and relevant work isn't. Given that his company's mission includes the dissemination of knowledge within the academic world and beyond, it's not surprising that Barton views this as indicative of a serious problem. If a relevant academic publication is effectively invisible to the OUP's target audience, then the Press isn't doing its job.