Two new online tools are available to help authors and instructors evaluate the fair use status of material they want to use in publishing or teaching: the Fair Use Evaluator and Exemptions for Instructors tool. Both are provided free of charge by the American Library Association.
Recent articles in The New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education draw attention to the gain in popularity and business of commercial Web sites offering textbook rental. A number of campuses in the University of Wisconsin system also offer textbook rental to their students.
According to The New York Times, the U.S. Department of Justice has opened an official investigation into whether the Google Books agreement between the Internet giant and authors/publishers violates antitrust laws.
The text of the department’s notification letter is available on John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily blog.
“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.
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.
