Managing Your Intellectual Property

Today, Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX) reintroduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a bill to ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies.  The bill covers unclassified research funded by the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Transportation as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation.

Directors of ten university presses issued a statement supporting “the dissemination of scholarly research as broadly as possible.”  Represented were University Press of Florida, University of Akron Press, University Press of New England, Athabasca University Press, Wayne State University Press, University of Calgary Press, University of Michigan Press, Rockefeller University Press, Penn State University Press, and University of Massachusetts Press.

Further details are available in Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Salvatore Engel-DiMauro, professor of geography at the State University of New York at New Paltz, urged attendees at the recent annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors to seek out non-profit publishing options for their work, rather than those owned by corporations and run as for-profit businesses.

 His argument was that academics and universities shouldn’t provide a “product” for these corporations for free, which university libraries are then forced to buy back via subscriptions or licenses to often high-priced journals. Furthermore, open-access, non-profit options often broaden access to and use of their research. The full article appeared in Inside Higher Ed.

The University of California and the California Digital Library sent an open letter to many of the information providers they license content from, informing them of the need to work collaboratively with the UCs to create solutions to keep costs low given the state of California’s economy.

A recent New York Times article reports that Google recently signed a deal with the University of Michigan giving the library a say in the prices Google could charge for its digital collection of books.  The twenty-one institutions whose libraries lend books to Google for digitizing will eventually be allowed to object to pricing as well.

There is speculation that Google is doing this to quell criticism, especially within in the library community,  of the settlement, which requires academic libraries to subscribe to a site license in order to access digitized books from the world’s largest research libraries.  Many critics are taking a wait-and-see approach regarding the actual costs of access, while others say that this latest agreement does not respond to major complaints regarding orphan works and worries that the settlement does not protect the privacy of readers of Google’s digital library.   Google defends its actions by saying that its digitization project offers widespread access to millions of books that are largely hidden in the stacks of university libraries.

The University of Oregon’s Department of Romance Languages voted unanimously Wednesday to institute an Open Access Mandate, making it the first humanities department to do this.  The announcement of the mandate states all tenure-track faculty submit postprints to the University of Oregon’s institutional repository Scholar’s Bank and that all URLS of self-archived postprints be included in review and promotion materials.  In addition, Romance Languages faculty are to grant to the university a Creative Commons “Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United State” license.

Amazon unveiled the new Kindle DX May 6, designed with a larger screen for newspapers and textbooks.  The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Case Western University is evaluating Kindles preloaded with course materials.  The university cites the high cost of textbooks and the need to find alternatives for students.

Princeton, one of several other universities involved in pilot projects, is looking into the Kindle to save paper on campus.  Currently, twelve textbook publishers offer more than 6,300 titles.

American Public Media’s Radio show Marketplace takes a look at the cost of publicly funded research and its impact on taxpayers, researchers, and the business models of publishers.  The focus is on the NIH Public Access Policy and the Fair Copyright in Research Act, the proposed law in the U.S. Congress to overturn it.

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the antitrust implications of the Google Book settlement with authors.  Further details are available in a New York Times article.

 Separately, the judge overseeing the settlement has extended the deadline for authors to opt out of the agreement until September 4, 2009.  This gives authors and copyright holders more time to review the settlement and decide whether to participate.

The University Senate at the University of Maryland voted down an open-access resolution late last week.   The resolution had been brought to the senate by the faculty affairs committee.

More details are available in the university’s student newspaper.