Managing Your Intellectual Property

The American Association of University Presses issued a press release in support of  a lawsuit filed in April.  The association’s press release states that faculty and universities sometimes blatently distribute large portions of books and journals electronically without permission.  These actions cause significant problems for non-profit presses, which depend on this income.

A New York Times article reports today that Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications, with the backing of the Association of American Publishers, filed a complaint this week alleging “systematic, widespread and unauthorized copying and distribution of a vast amount of copyrighted works” by Georgia State University through digital course packs, course management systems and other online systems. 

The suit asks Georgia State University to bring an end to their practices but is not asking for monetary damages.

BioOne has worked closely for more than a year with a team of lawyers to create a new type of license allowing authors to retain copyright while granting publishers a time-limited exclusive right of first publication and a perpetual, non-exclusive license to publish, distribute, and sublicense.

In response to NIH’s Public Access Policy and other institutional and subject repository deposit mandates, the license allows authors to deposit their work in digital repositories directly.

This license will be used by BioOne publications but is being offered to the academic publishing community as a model license in the current environment.  BioOne provides resources to academic publishers looking to use this new model license.

On this Friday’s National Public Radio show “Science Friday”, host Ira Flatow will interview former National Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus to discuss the NIH Public Access Policy which went into effect this week.  Varmus is a founder of the Public Library of Science and a proponent of open access to research

The UCLA IRB Policy 42 allows for registration of public use datasets and publicly available data depositories to eliminate the need for obtaining a Certification for Exemption of Review.

This means that any data available from the following pre-approved public use data sets can now be freely used with no paperwork or certifications required:

The ISSR Data Archive<http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/da/> will assist in getting other public use data sets registered; please send your suggestions or requests for further information to Libbie Stephenson, Archivist (libbie@ucla.edu).  Check out the IRB Policy 42 periodically as more data sets may soon be registered.

Due to copyright law not changing at the pace of the new digital environment, the Section 108 Study Group recently issued their full report recommending changes to the law to reflect changes in tehnologies such as a digital preservation, online sharing and websiet archiving.  The Library of Congress convened the Section 108 Study Group, comprised of academics, librarians and publishers, in 2005 to evaluate Section 108, the law governing copyright exceptions in libraries.