Managing Your Intellectual Property

On October 23 the U.S. Senate approved an appropriations bill that includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to strengthen its public access policy by requiring rather than requesting participation by researchers. The bill will now be reconciled with the House version, which contains a similar provision.

Further details are available on the Alliance for Taxpayer Access Web site. 

See Swedish archaeology Martin Rundqvist’s perspective on Sage Publications’ requirement that he cede copyright to it in order to publish in the European Journal of Archaeology in an October 18 entry on the blog Aardvarchaeology.

The Max Planck Society (MPG) has terminated its licensing contract with the Springer publishing house.  Effective as of January 1, 2008, the termination cancels access to some twelve hundred scientific journals for the thousands of graduate students, researchers, scientists, and staff at its eighty research institutes.

The society based its decision on an analysis of user statistics and comparisons with other major publishing houses, which showed that Springer was charging twice the amount the MPG considered justifiable.

The MPG is one of the initiators of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the Humanities, the key demand of which is open access to the results of publicly funded research, which to date has been signed by more than 240 scientific organizations.

More details are available in an October 19 article in Heise Online.

UC Provost Rory Hume sent a letter to US Senators Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer expressing UC’s support for language in a Senate bill that would strengthen the public access policy of the National Institutes of Health.

An article in the October 10 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that librarians are sounding an alarm in the wake of the journal Science’s flight from the nonprofit archive JSTOR. Such moves, they say, may increase revenue for scholarly societies but will limit access to scholarly information.