Managing Your Intellectual Property

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.

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 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.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, President Obama has nominated Martha Kanter, chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District in Santa Clara County, as undersecretary of education. In this position she would oversee national postsecondary education policy, federal student aid, and other areas.

Kanter has supported efforts to encourage colleges to share noncopyrighted books and course materials on the Internet.

The faculty at MIT recently approved a university-wide open-access policy that grants the university “nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination.”  The articles will be made available to the public in an open-access repository.

Representative John Conyers (D-MI) has reintroduced legislation before the Judiciary Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives that would amend federal copyright law to prohibit federal agencies from requiring articles resulting from research projects they fund to be made publicly accessible via open access outlets.  This legislation is in response to the National Institutes of Health’s public access policy.

Among the organizations opposed to the legislation are the American Association of Universities and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, which sent a joint letter to committee members. If you would like to send a message to your representative, visit the House Judiciary Committee Web page for a list of members and links to their Web sites.

What does the new National Institutes of Health (NIH) public access policy mean for NIH-funded researchers at UCLA, and how can UCLA librarians help them comply? Find out more at a session on Wednesday, February 25, led by members of the Library’s Scholarly Communication Steering Committee.

The program will take place from noon to 1:30 p.m.  Attendance is limited to UCLA faculty, researchers, and administrators. Admission is free, and lunch will be provided. Advance reservations are required.

UC’s California Digital Library has completed successful negotiations with Springer to launch a pilot open access arrangement as part of its 2008 Springer journals license. This will allow all articles by UC-affiliated authors to be issued under Springer’s “Open Choice” model without additional author fees. The articles will be accessible via SpringerLink and will be published under the terms of a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial license. Planning is also underway for automatic deposit of these articles into the UC eScholarship Repository.

Faculty members are encouraged to continue to negotiate the terms of all author agreements to enable them to retain educational use rights so that they can use their own scholarship on course Web sites, in course reserves, and in course packs.  The UCLA Library will present a lunchtime workshop for faculty on negotiating to keep their copyright on Wednesday, February 25; admission is free, but advance registration is required.

Library Journal reported the results of a recent survey conducted by the publisher SAGE showing that attitudes are changing among scholarly societies regarding open access.  Though still concerned about how it will impact revenue, respondents were optimistic about its potential benefits, including increasing readership of journals.

The journal RNA Biology has begun requiring authors whose work will appear in a new section of the journal to also submit an accompanying abstract that will be published on Wikipedia.  The goal is to encourage creating and updating public data on RNA families.  Further information is available on NatureNews.