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See update below.

This is borderline off-topic (certainly not a research question), but the rather successful story of a similar question gives me hope.

The Bayreuther Mathematische Schriften were a periodical published by the University of Bayreuth from 1979 till 2011, and included research papers, lecture notes and theses. Its 80 volumes include a surprisingly large amount of (Rota-style) combinatorics (which otherwise is a rare topic in German mathematics), including papers by Dress, Thévenaz, Kohnert, Strehl and Sturmfels as well as a long set of lecture notes on Polya enumeration and representations of symmetric groups. Both German- and English-language works appear in the periodical.

By now, the volumes are neither being sold nor seem to be available on the internet, and only a few papers and some amount of theses (quite possibly in a non-final form) can be found on the internet. Hence I am wondering:

Have the Schriften ever been digitalized?

If yes: What is preventing their open publication? Who has the copyrights?

If no: Are good sources for digitalization available? Is this something that a library could do with a bit of crowdfunding?

About the last question: I am currently near a full archive and have made a bunch of scans of the parts relating to algebraic combinatorics for myself. However, the binding of the volumes often limits the quality of my scans, as it prevents fully opening the journals. I am also having the impression that the volumes here are not quite the originals; a number of pages are missing due to incorrect printing, and quality is suboptimal in many places.

My impression is that someone, somewhere should still be having the originals for most of the content (LaTeX for the later volumes, probably microfiche for the earlier ones). Does anyone know where to look?

UPDATE: According to inside sources, there is a license problem: The authors have not granted the Bayreuth University any digital distribution rights (probably the copyright agreement did not include such language). Thus, authors can post their own papers online (if you are an author, please do so!), but the university cannot unless it gets green light from the authors. This seems to be a general problem in Germany (or the EU?), where distribution rights are not understood to include digital media by default. This brings me to the next question:

How did other German/European publishers (Springer, e.g.) handle this issue? I'm pretty sure that copyright agreements in the 1970s did not include any language on digital distribution, yet Springer distributes its full back catalogue.

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Q1: Yes, the Bayreuther mathematische Schriften have been digitized by the Hathi Trust Digital Library.

Q2: The Hathi Trust Library states that "This item is not available online (Limited - search only) due to copyright restrictions." Since the publisher is Universität Bayreuth it is most likely that they hold the copyright.

Q3: No library will digitize and provide access to a publication that has copyright protection, but you can find a list of libraries that hold the volumes by following the links in the Hathi Trust database.

Incidentally, you mention that "the binding of the volumes often limits the quality of my scans, as it prevents fully opening the journals." Are you using a book scanner? I am a happy user of the CZUR book scanner, which corrects for the curved pages by postprocessing the image.

--- UPDATE ---

A brief addendum in response to the updated question:

In the United States copyright has been broadly defined to include reproduction by "any method now known or later developed" (see footnote 7 in Revising Copyright Law for the Information Age). I would be surprised if the definition would be more restrictive in Europe, and that is presumably why publishers just adapt their content to new reproduction methods, without having to once again secure permission from the original author.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks! This is a nice pointer; it sounds like a good idea to contact someone at U Bayreuth, since they are themselves not making money from these volumes anymore. $\endgroup$
    – darij grinberg
    Commented Aug 8, 2019 at 15:35
  • $\begingroup$ As for the scanners, I have access to one of these photo scanners here, but they require a very steady hand and even then, it's not useful if some of the text is concealed behind the binding. $\endgroup$
    – darij grinberg
    Commented Aug 8, 2019 at 15:36
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    $\begingroup$ our mileage may vary, indeed; I use a black piece of carton to hold the edges of the paper down, and I operate the scanner with a foot pedal; the scanner software automatically crops the black regions out of the scan. $\endgroup$
    – Carlo Beenakker
    Commented Aug 8, 2019 at 15:45
  • $\begingroup$ Foot pedal! That's really nice. How does your piece of carton look like? Is it an easy DIY? $\endgroup$
    – darij grinberg
    Commented Aug 8, 2019 at 16:12
  • $\begingroup$ the CZUR scanner comes with a black mat, on which I place the book opened, face up; the piece of black carton is a black sheet of paper that I wrapped around a box lid, to have a rigid black object with which I can apply pressure to keep the outer edges of the book down; I press the foot pedal and the scanner first projects a thin line of LED light onto the page, to assess the curvature; immediately afterwards it makes a photograph of the page; the software then superimposes the curved line on the image and deskews it until the line is straight. I can scan about 1 page per second in this way. $\endgroup$
    – Carlo Beenakker
    Commented Aug 8, 2019 at 16:55

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