Managing Your Intellectual Property

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.

On February 12 the Harvard faculty approved a policy whereby “Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles.”  Further information is available in an article by the Chronicle of Higher Education and in an article by the Harvard Crimson.

Now available online - Information and resources from the February 7 faculty lunch session “‘Don’t I Own My Own Work?’: Negotiating to Keep Your Copyright” that alert faculty about their rights as authors and suggest strategies for retaining copyright during the publication process.  An overview of UC policy on copyright ownership, examples of authors’ agreements, and strategies for negotiating them are outlined in a PowerPoint presentation.  A handout in PDF format with URLs of useful Web sites is also available.

The session is part of the yearlong series “Intellectual Property in the Digital Age:  The Rights Stuff for Teaching and Publishing.”  The final session in the series, “‘What Are My Rights?’: Software, Patents, and Open Source,” will be on Thursday, April 10.  For more information and to register online, go to the Faculty and the Collections Web site.

UCLA faculty members are invited to “‘Don’t I Own my Own Work?’: Negotiating to Keep Your Copyright” on Thursday, February 7, from noon to 1:30 p.m. This lunch session will offer suggestions on how to negotiate agreements with publishers in order to keep your rights to use and reuse your work as you wish. Admission is free, and lunch will be provided. Advance registration is required by Monday, February 4.

The Association of Research Libraries has released a white paper, Educational Fair Use Today, in which by Jonathan Band, JD, discusses three recent appellate decisions concerning fair use that should give educators and librarians greater confidence and guidance for asserting this important privilege.  In all three decisions the courts permitted extensive copying and display in the commercial context because the uses involved repurposing and recontextualization. The reasoning in these opinions could have far-reaching implications in the educational environment.

See Swedish archaeology Martin Rundqvist’s perspective on Sage Publications’ requirement that he cede copyright to it in order to publish in the European Journal of Archaeology in an October 18 entry on the blog Aardvarchaeology.

UC Provost Rory Hume sent a letter to US Senators Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer expressing UC’s support for language in a Senate bill that would strengthen the public access policy of the National Institutes of Health.