Managing Your Intellectual Property

An open letter signed by forty-one Nobel Prize winners in support of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) was sent to the U.S. Congress earlier this week. 

An excerpt:  “Passage of FRPAA will make it easier for scientists worldwide to better and more swiftly address the complex scientific challenges that we face today and expand shared knowledge across disciplines to accelerate breakthrough and spur innovation.”

The Science and Technology Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, which has oversight of non-defense federal civilian research and development, has convened a scholarly publishing roundtable charged with developing recommendations for government policies that promote public access to the results of federally funded research.  The roundtable, which consists of representatives from university, publisher, librarian, and research communities, released an initial status report this week.

The first international Open Access Week, meant to raise awareness of issues and benefits surrounding open access, begins today.

The UCLA Library is sponsoring a week of events for faculty, students, administrators, and librarians.

An open letter was released today, signed by presidents of fifty-seven liberal arts colleges, supporting the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009.  Further details are available in an article in Inside Higher Ed.

Flat World Knowledge, a company which provides alternatives to high cost textbooks stated in their press release they are providing textbooks to over 38,000 students on 350 college campuses this fall, up from 1,000 students at 30 campuses this time last year.

CALPIRG and students groups across the country are campaigning to make faculty aware of the need to reduce the costs of course materials.

Open Humanities Press, in conjunction with the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office, has announced the forthcoming open-access series in critical and cultural theory: New Metaphysics, Critical Climate Change, Global Conversations, Unidentified Theoretical Objects, and Liquid Books. Edited by senior members of the press’s editorial board, all will be available in full-text digital editions as well as reasonably priced paperbacks.

“The University of Kansas has become the nation’s first public university to adopt an ‘open access’ policy that makes its faculty’s scholarly journal articles available for free online,” according to a press release the university issued June 26. The policy was initiated by the KU faculty and approved by the chancellor.

 The articles will be available through the digital repository KU ScholarWorks.

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.