Managing Your Intellectual Property

Open Book Alliance, a coalition of legal scholars, authors, publishers, librarians and technology companies has formed to ensure that, “any mass book digitization and publishing effort be open and competitive” and to oppose the Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement in its current form.

The Open Book Alliance, which includes Amazon.com, Yahoo!, Special Libraries Association, Microsoft, American Society of Journalists and Authors, and Internet Archive, see the settlement as a “scheme to monopolize the access, distribution and pricing of the largest digital database of books in the world.”

Two new online tools are available to help authors and instructors evaluate the fair use status of material they want to use in publishing or teaching:  the Fair Use Evaluator and Exemptions for Instructors tool. Both are provided free of charge by the American Library Association.

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.

Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library and a distinguished historian, comments on the proposed Google settlement in the New York Review of Books. The settlement, which is still subject to final approval by the courts, resolves the breach-of-copyright suit brought by authors and publishers against Google for Google Book Search, its mass book-digitization project.  Last fall, when the terms of the settlement were released, Harvard announced that it will not allow Google to scan any in-copyright books under its terms.

A Guide for the Perplexed, a report commissioned by the Association of Research Libraries and the American Library Association, summarizes the complex terms of the settlement.

The bill brought forth during last week’s congressional hearing regarding the NIH Public Access Mandate has been shelved until next year, reports Library Journal, but the copyright debate rages on.

The bill, focusing on publisher’s copyright, stated: “No Federal agency may, in connection with a funding agreement…impose or cause the imposition of any term or condition that requires the transfer or license to or for a Federal agency any right provided under [copyright law].”

The Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property heard testimony Thursday from Nobel Prize winners, open-access advocates, publishers of scholarly content and copyright lawyers regarding the pros and cons of the NIH Publc Access Mandate.  A bill was presented that would curtail the National Institutes of Health’s public-access policy.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed and Library Journal covered the hearing details.

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.