Managing Your Intellectual Property

The UC Libraries have licensed a substantial collection of e-textbooks, which are available for use by faculty and students free of charge.  The full list, divided into broad subject areas, is available online, as are lists of e-book titles not classified as textbooks.

Each chapter is available as a PDF file, which can be downloaded, printed, or transferred to a PDA or Kindle. Whether in the textbook category or not, all of the titles can be used in electronic course reserves, on course Web sites, in course management systems, and for many other educational purposes.

PhD Comics examines the process of publishing articles in scientific journals in an amusing but accurate series of strips.  Check out the one on the rivalry between the journals Nature and Science.

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.