Managing Your Intellectual Property

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 & Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Kathryn Atchison, and University Librarian Gary E. Strong, stated 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, Provost and Executive Vice President Wyatt Hume submitted a letter on behalf of the University of California detailing UC-wide efforts.

If you have any general questions about the policy or how you can ensure you are compliant, email the Library for assistance at nih@library.ucla.edu.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) maintains a list of journal titles whose publishers will submit final published articles to PubMed Central (PMC) for authors in accordance with the NIH Public Access Policy. This will make complying with the new policy easier for NIH-funded researchers who publish in these journals.

Last week, six journals were added to the growing list of more than 350.  The new titles are Biotechnology for Biofuels, HPB Surgery, International Archives of Medicine, Journal of Chiropractic Education, Marine Drugs, and Molecular Cytogenetics.

Thanks to Open Access News for the update.

The Chronicle of Higher Education announced the debut of the Open Humanities Press, an international open-access press for the humanities.  The press is beginning with seven established journals:

• Cosmos and History
• Culture Machine
• Fibreculture
• Film-Philosophy
• International Journal of Zizek Studies
• Parrhesia
• Vectors

Open Humanities Press describes itself as “A grassroots response to the crisis in scholarly publishing in the humanities … an international open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide.”

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.

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.

On this Friday’s National Public Radio show “Science Friday”, host Ira Flatow will interview former National Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus to discuss the NIH Public Access Policy which went into effect this week.  Varmus is a founder of the Public Library of Science and a proponent of open access to research

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.

On behalf of UCLA and all UC campuses, the California Digital Library (CDL) officially gave support to SCOAP3, a new approach to open-access publishing in high energy physics. An international consortium, SCOAP3 funds the peer-review process through members’ contributions, which they are able to redirect from subscriptions to journals in high energy physics. CDL joins a growing number of supporting institutions in Europe.