Managing Your Intellectual Property

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.

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.