Managing Your Intellectual Property

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.

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and the Association of College and Research Libraries have released interviews and analysis exploring the views of three major open-access publishers regarding the challenge of sustainability.  Podcasts and slides are available online.

See Swedish archaeology Martin Rundqvist’s perspective on Sage Publications’ requirement that he cede copyright to it in order to publish in the European Journal of Archaeology in an October 18 entry on the blog Aardvarchaeology.

The Max Planck Society (MPG) has terminated its licensing contract with the Springer publishing house.  Effective as of January 1, 2008, the termination cancels access to some twelve hundred scientific journals for the thousands of graduate students, researchers, scientists, and staff at its eighty research institutes.

The society based its decision on an analysis of user statistics and comparisons with other major publishing houses, which showed that Springer was charging twice the amount the MPG considered justifiable.

The MPG is one of the initiators of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the Humanities, the key demand of which is open access to the results of publicly funded research, which to date has been signed by more than 240 scientific organizations.

More details are available in an October 19 article in Heise Online.

An article in the October 10 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that librarians are sounding an alarm in the wake of the journal Science’s flight from the nonprofit archive JSTOR. Such moves, they say, may increase revenue for scholarly societies but will limit access to scholarly information.

An article in the September 11 Chronicle of Higher Education reports on criticism by university presses and research librarians of the Association of American Publishers’ (AAP) Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM) program.  PRISM attacks open-access means of scholarly publishing by equating them with “government inference in the scholarly communication process,” while critics contend that its rhetoric is inaccurate and that it does not reflect the viewpoints of all AAP members.

In a July 27 editorial, the Los Angeles Times supports a provision of a National Institutes of Health funding bill that stipulates “the results of the studies the government funds must be made freely available online within 12 months of their publication.”