Managing Your Intellectual Property

Through the use of a Create Commons license Rockefeller University Press allows authors to retain the copyright to their intellectual property after a six month embargo.  The journals covered by this include: The Journal of Cell Biology, the Journal of Experimental Medicine, and the Journal of General Physiology.  A recent editorial in the Journal of Cell Biology Press give details of the decision.  Fulltext of the new copyright policy is avaialble here: http://www.jcb.org/misc/terms.shtml

CORRECTION:

Thanks to Mike Rossner, Executive Director of the Rockefeller University Press who corrected an error in this post:

“The new copyright policy of The Rockefeller University Press allows authors to retain the copyright to their published work at all times, without any embargo period. We have also released all of our content for re-use by third parties under a share-alike, attribution, non-commercial license, immediately after publication. The only embargo is that we restrict the creation of free mirror sites within the first 6 after publication.”

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.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the influential journal Science has rejoined JSTOR. The journal and the online archive of scholarly publications reached an agreement on January 3; the journal’s decision to withdraw last summer was criticized by librarians and others.

Open Humanities Press (OHP), an open access publisher of contemporary critical and cultural theory, will launch in 2008 as a consortium of leading open access journals in continental philosophy, cultural studies, new media, film, and literary criticism.  The editorial board includes a number of UC faculty as well as N. Katherine Hayles and Douglas Kellner from UCLA.

Editors from the Journal of Cell Biology and the Journal of Experimental Medicine and the executive director of the Rockefeller University Press have reported their inability to verify published impact factors  using data gathered and sold by Thomson Scientific (formerly the Institute of Scientific Information, or ISI).  Their concerns are expressed in an editorial in the December 17 issue of the Journal of Cell Biology.

The Association of Research Libraries has published a special issue of its bimonthly report on university publishing.  Contents include a condensed version of the Ithaka report, a study of US university presses and their role in scholarly publishing, along with reaction from a provostial perspective and short articles about library publishing programs.

The Association of Research Libraries has released a white paper, Educational Fair Use Today, in which by Jonathan Band, JD, discusses three recent appellate decisions concerning fair use that should give educators and librarians greater confidence and guidance for asserting this important privilege.  In all three decisions the courts permitted extensive copying and display in the commercial context because the uses involved repurposing and recontextualization. The reasoning in these opinions could have far-reaching implications in the educational environment.

The Association of Research Libraries has published The E-only Tipping Point for Journals: What’s Ahead in the Print-to-Electronic Transition Zone, a report examining issues associated with migrating from dual-format publishing toward electronic-only journal publication.  The work is based in large part on interviews conducted between June and August 2007 with two dozen academic librarians and journal publishers.