Managing Your Intellectual Property

The faculty at MIT recently approved a university-wide open-access policy that grants the university “nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination.”  The articles will be made available to the public in an open-access repository.

A recent study released by the Publishing Research Consortium shows that publishers allow authors to do more than authors think with their own articles. The paper examines the results of two major surveys to provide an analysis of what authors say they want, what they think their agreements allow, and what publishers’ agreements actually allow.

The UC Libraries have purchased nearly every Springer ebook published in English and German from 2005 to 2009. The nearly 20,000 books fall into the following broad subject areas: architecture and design; behavioral science; biomedical and life sciences; business and economics; chemistry and materials science; computer science; earth and environmental science; engineering; humanities, social sciences, and law; mathematics and statistics; medicine; physics and astronomy; and professional and applied computing.

Each book chapter is available as a PDF file without digital rights management, which means that they can be used as electronic course reserves, on course Web sites, in course management systems, and for many other educational purposes. The files can be downloaded, printed, and transferred to a PDA or Kindle. The titles are being added to the UCLA Library Catalog and Melvyl; in the meantime, users can search or browse them from the publisher’s Web site.

Representative John Conyers (D-MI) has reintroduced legislation before the Judiciary Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives that would amend federal copyright law to prohibit federal agencies from requiring articles resulting from research projects they fund to be made publicly accessible via open access outlets.  This legislation is in response to the National Institutes of Health’s public access policy.

Among the organizations opposed to the legislation are the American Association of Universities and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, which sent a joint letter to committee members. If you would like to send a message to your representative, visit the House Judiciary Committee Web page for a list of members and links to their Web sites.