Copyright Resources and Current Issues

Adrian K. Ho and Charles W. Bailey, Jr. have come together to provide us with this marvelous resource regarding open access.

From the Introduction: "This webliography presents a wide range of electronic resources related to the open access movement that are freely available on the Internet as of April 2005.

In basic terms, the goal of the open access movement is to make scholarly articles freely available in digital form worldwide with minimal restrictions on their use (e.g., proper attribution of authorship). In reality, it's more complex than this because of differences of opinion about what open access should or shouldn't try to achieve. Some advocates say free access to scholarly articles is enough, minimal restrictions are not needed. Others say that the basic goal is correct, but permanent archiving is also required. Still others say why stop at scholarly articles, make all types of scholarly literature freely available in digital form. Such doctrinal differences are normal and healthy in such an important and dynamic movement."

http://www.digital-scholarship.org/cwb/oaw.htm

Posted by Lorre Smith at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access posted the entire letter to the U.S. Congress regarding the NIH open access policy, signed by 26 Nobel Prize winners.

In case you might wish to use some of the language/ideas when you contact your Senator:
http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/bof.html

The ATA has an update regarding the Senate vote:
http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/nih/2007senatecalltoaction.html

Posted by Lorre Smith at 09:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

SPARC has been a long time leader in the effort to make scholarly communication as widely distributed as possible. They tirelessly provide educational experiences, they organize information and they support open access publishing in many ways. SPARC has kept their Create Change site spruced up with new ideas, and have been continually expanding as they learn from experience in shaping and observing the emerging open access movement.

http://www.createchange.org/

Their Stay Informed page includes an excellent list of resources for keeping up with the changing face of scholarly communication.

Posted by Lorre Smith at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I've been presenting sessions on author rights to scholarly authors, I have been gathering resources from here and there on the net. I was pleasantly surprised to see the launch announcement for this site as I was catching up with emails. It appears to manufacture an attractive addendum for the specific citation, which assures that the items is identified in the text of the addendum.

"The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine will help you generate a PDF form that you can attach to a journal publisher's copyright agreement to ensure that you retain certain rights."

The page also contains a link to the MIT author's addendum, another favorite of mine.

http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/

Posted by Lorre Smith at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mr. Hirtle quite usefully reviews five author addenda that are designed for authors at the point of negotiating copyright with publishers. I'm planning on using it for my classes on copyright for authors and recommend it.

"Author Addenda:An Examination of Five Alternatives" by Peter B. Hirtle
Cornell University Library

D-Lib Magazine November 2006 Volume 12 Number 11

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november06/hirtle/11hirtle.html

Posted by Lorre Smith at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since I teach a session for scholarly authors regarding negotiating copyright with publishers, I find and collect forms such as these.

I like this MIT one for its brief instructions on the first page, helping authors just that much more.

I especially appreciate this clause:

a. The Author shall, without limitation, have the non-exclusive right to use, reproduce, distribute, create derivative works including update, perform, and display publicly, the Article in electronic, digital or print form in connection with the Author’s teaching, conference presentations, lectures, other scholarly works, and for all of Author’s academic and professional activities.

because scholarly authors seldom realize they are giving away these rights when they sign fully copyright over to the publisher.

http://libraries.mit.edu/about/scholarly/copyright-form.html

Posted by Lorre Smith at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was captivated by this website and perspective it provides. I hope you find it edifying.

From the main page: " WELCOME TO COPY SOUTH We are told that we live in the ‘digital revolution’ era and that we can communicate across the globe as we never could before. In fact, restrictive copyright laws still act as a serious barrier to sharing and learning from each other. This is particularly true in countries of the South where three quarters of the population live. "

http://www.copysouth.org/

Posted by Lorre Smith at 09:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"AAP PR Campaign against Open Access and Public Access to Federally Funded Research" is an undated brief, produced in early 2007. It provides talking points for campus discussions of scholarly communication, open access and public access to federally funded research.

http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/aapprissuebrief.pdf

Posted by Lorre Smith at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

BASE - Bielefeld Academic Search Engine

On today's version of the page they describe themselves as having: 5,316,448 Pages of 400 Content Providers

From their "about" page:

In comparison to commercial search engines, BASE is distinguished for the following features:

* Intellectually selected resources
* Only document servers that comply with the specific requirements of scientific quality and relevance are included
* A data resources inventory provides transparency in the searches
* Searches full text plus meta data (depending on the resource)
* Discloses web resources of the "Deep Web", which are ignored by commercial search engines or get lost in the vast quantity of hits.
* The display of search results includes precise bibliographic data (if provided in the resource)
* Several options for sorting the result list
* "Refine your search result" options (authors, resources, document type, language etc.)

Try it - you might like it!
http://www.base-search.net/index.php?i=b&l=en

Posted by Lorre Smith at 06:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Directory of Open Access Repositories

They describe it best themselves on their home page:

"OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories."

http://www.opendoar.org/

Posted by Lorre Smith at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a paper by Michael Carroll, and is one of many on copyright by him available through the site. By clicking on the author link at the top of the page it's easy to see what else is available for download via the SSRN site.

Although he is arguing for open access to legal scholarship, he has written something that can serve as an interesting and worthwhile perspective in the open access movement.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=918298

Posted by Lorre Smith at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material in the Digital Age"

Abstract: This foundational white paper reports on a year-long study by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, examining the relationship between copyright law and education. In particular, we wanted to explore whether innovative educational uses of digital technology were hampered by the restrictions of copyright. We found that provisions of copyright law concerning the educational use of copyrighted material, as well as the business and institutional structures shaped by that law, are among the most important obstacles to realizing the potential of digital technology in education.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=923465

Posted by Lorre Smith at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This page has a self-description that says it best:

"Developed at MIT, this amendment is a tool authors can use to retain rights when assigning copyright to a publisher. It will enable authors to continue using their publications in their academic work at MIT, to deposit them into the MIT Libraries' DSpace repository, and to deposit any NIH-funded manuscripts on the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central database."

http://libraries.mit.edu/about/scholarly/copyright-form.html

Posted by Lorre Smith at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the Create Change website, this page gives much of the story on what any individual scholarly author can do to get the ball rolling.

As researcher and author
As editor
As reviewer
As society member
As teacher
As faculty member

It provides step by step ideas on how to use the current structure of the web to make schoarly resources available as a public good without prohibitive price or copyright barriers.

http://www.createchange.org/changeandyou.html

Posted by Lorre Smith at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Instead of trying to paraphrase, I'm quoting the site:
"The Open Access Law Program (OAL Program) consists of a set of resources to promote open access in legal publishing. These resources include:

* Open Access Law Journal Principles. The OAL Program encourages law journals to commit to a set of OAL Journal Principles. These Principles require that a journal 1) take only a limited term license, 2) provide a citable copy of the final version of the article, and 3) provide public access to the journal's standard publishing contract. In return, the author promises to attribute first publication to the journal. Here is a list of journals adopting the Principles.

* Open Access Law Author Pledge. For authors wishing to commit publicly to open access ideals, we have established an OAL Author Pledge. This pledge commits authors to only publish law review articles in journals that adhere to a minimum OAL commitment. Here is a list of authors who have signed the Pledge.

* Open Access Model Publishing Agreement. The OAL Program also provides a Model Agreement that embodies the OAL Journal Principles in a fair and nuetral contract that is easy for both authors and law reviews to adopt. It also provides for an easy mechanism for authors and journals to adopt Creative Commons licenses to make their work more easily available."

Continue reading "Science Commons: Open Access Law Program" »

Posted by Lorre Smith at 01:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Once again, the Creative Commons provides a valuable resource for authors who wish to negotiate with publishers over copyright.

http://sciencecommons.org/literature/authoraddendafaq

Posted by Lorre Smith at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was browsing my copyright bookmarks and came accross a blog on Open Access Law that appears to be defunct, however way down on the right side there was a link to the publication agreement for the MSLR, which I think is an interesting example, and worth a glance. It might provide wording for those of you who are wondering what to do when it comes to getting your copyright agreement negotiations off the ground with your publisher.

Michigan State Law Review Publication Agreement
http://www.openaccesslaw.org/contracts/Mich%20St%20L%20Rev%20Agmt.pdf

Posted by Lorre Smith at 04:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)