Google and its partners have proposed revisions to the original Google Book settlement to the federal judge overseeing the deal. The judge is now expected to schedule a hearing at which arguments for and against the revised settlement can be heard.
The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the antitrust implications of the Google Book settlement with authors. Further details are available in a New York Times article.
Separately, the judge overseeing the settlement has extended the deadline for authors to opt out of the agreement until September 4, 2009. This gives authors and copyright holders more time to review the settlement and decide whether to participate.
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.
Ben Grillot researched 12 publishers’ agreements to determine how well they meet the requirements of the NIH Public Access Policy which allows for NIH-funded research to be deposited in PubMed Central and made publicly available after 12 months.
The Association of Research Libraries published his results in “PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights: Agreements between 12 Publishers and the Authors Subject to the NIH Public Access Policy”.
The press release states: “Grillot concludes that the significant variability in publisher agreements requires authors with NIH funding to closely examine publisher agreements and the rights granted and retained when deciding where to publish their research. His analysis of these 12 agreements will help authors determine what to look for in an agreement and what questions to ask before signing”.
The University of California and UCLA both submitted comments supporting the NIH Public Access Policy, detailing the campuses’ efforts, and suggesting improvements to the process.
The UCLA letter, signed by Vice Chancellor for Research Roberto Peccei, Vice Provost of Intellectual Property and Industrial Relations and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Kathryn Atchison, and University Librarian Gary E. Strong, described their collaborative efforts “targeted at faculty, librarians, and staff aimed to inform, educate, and assist researchers and to support the broadest possible dissemination of their work.” In addition, the letter explains, “the Library has taken the lead in providing individual assistance to authors who have questions about the submission process.”
In addition, UC Provost and Executive Vice President Wyatt Hume submitted a letter on behalf of the university detailing UC-wide efforts.
If you have general questions about the policy or how you can ensure you are compliant, email the Library for assistance at nih@library.ucla.edu.
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.”
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.
Following a public hearing on March 20, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is seeking further public comments on the implementation of its public access policy. Comments are being accepted until May 31, 2008, on the following:
The policy requires that final, peer-reviewed articles resulting from NIH-funded research be submitted to that National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central, where they will be made publicly accessible no later than twelve months following publication. Members of the public, including UCLA University Librarian Gary E. Strong, submitted more than four hundred comments to the March 20 hearing, with sixty percent supporting the policy as is and fifteen percent requesting that the twelve-month delay be shortened.
A two-minute Author’s Rights Video gives scholars an overview of their rights and which ones are taken away when transferring copyright to publishers. It offers three steps to effective rights management:
The video has been created by the Association of Research Libraries. If you have questions about author agreements and how to retain rights to your scholarly work, contact the appropriate subject specialist.
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