Copyright free: Penn University libraries’ Deep Backfile project

A team of Penn Libraries staff has been analyzing an accumulated history of periodicals in the collection—journals, magazines, newspapers, academic journals, comic books—to determine which are no longer restricted by copyright and are therefore available for free and unrestricted use. The Penn Libraries have more than 8.6 million volumes. Many of them did not maintain their copyrights but need to be researched to confirm that. All told, the Deep Backfile project is researching more than 10,000 such serials.