Managing Your Intellectual Property

On the heels of the open-access policy approved by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Law School announced yesterday that its faculty unanimously voted to make all faculty members’ 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.”

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.

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.

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:

• Recommendations for alternative implementation approaches to those already reflected in the policy;
• Recommendations for monitoring and ensuring compliance with the policy;
• Additional policy-related information, training, or communications that would be helpful.

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:

1. Scrutinize the publication agreement
2. Negotiate with the publisher
3. Retain the rights you need

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.

In the Ted Talk “Goodbye Textbooks; Hello Open-Source Learning, Richard Baraniuk, engineering professor at Rice University, discusses Connexions, an open-source system to share teaching material and learning objects with educators around the world.

Connexions uses Creative Commons licensing, which enables authors, scientists, artists, and educators to manage their intellectual property by marking it to allow others to use, reuse, or modify their works.

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.