Managing Your Intellectual Property

On the heels of the open-access policy approval by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Law School announced yesterday that their faculty unanimously voted to make all faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free.

In the announcement the Dean Elena Kagan states: “Our decision to embrace ‘open access’ means that people everywhere can benefit from the ideas generated here at the Law School.”

More on this at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bloomberg, and the Harvard Crimson.

Through the use of a Create Commons license Rockefeller University Press allows authors to retain the copyright to their intellectual property after a six month embargo.  The journals covered by this include: The Journal of Cell Biology, the Journal of Experimental Medicine, and the Journal of General Physiology.  A recent editorial in the Journal of Cell Biology Press give details of the decision.  Fulltext of the new copyright policy is avaialble here: http://www.jcb.org/misc/terms.shtml

CORRECTION:

Thanks to Mike Rossner, Executive Director of the Rockefeller University Press who corrected an error in this post:

“The new copyright policy of The Rockefeller University Press allows authors to retain the copyright to their published work at all times, without any embargo period. We have also released all of our content for re-use by third parties under a share-alike, attribution, non-commercial license, immediately after publication. The only embargo is that we restrict the creation of free mirror sites within the first 6 after publication.”