Managing Your Intellectual Property

On behalf of UCLA and all UC campuses, the California Digital Library (CDL) officially gave support to SCOAP3, a new approach to open-access publishing in high energy physics. An international consortium, SCOAP3 funds the peer-review process through members’ contributions, which they are able to redirect from subscriptions to journals in high energy physics. CDL joins a growing number of supporting institutions in Europe.

In a February 18 editorial, the Los Angeles Times applauds the recent decision by Harvard’s faculty to place their scholarly articles in a freely accessible online repository.

On February 12 the Harvard faculty approved a policy whereby “Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles.”  Further information is available in an article by the Chronicle of Higher Education and in an article by the Harvard Crimson.

Now available online - Information and resources from the February 7 faculty lunch session “‘Don’t I Own My Own Work?’: Negotiating to Keep Your Copyright” that alert faculty about their rights as authors and suggest strategies for retaining copyright during the publication process.  An overview of UC policy on copyright ownership, examples of authors’ agreements, and strategies for negotiating them are outlined in a PowerPoint presentation.  A handout in PDF format with URLs of useful Web sites is also available.

The session is part of the yearlong series “Intellectual Property in the Digital Age:  The Rights Stuff for Teaching and Publishing.”  The final session in the series, “‘What Are My Rights?’: Software, Patents, and Open Source,” will be on Thursday, April 10.  For more information and to register online, go to the Faculty and the Collections Web site.