Managing Your Intellectual Property

Now available online - Information and resources from the February 7 faculty lunch session “‘Don’t I Own My Own Work?’: Negotiating to Keep Your Copyright” that alert faculty about their rights as authors and suggest strategies for retaining copyright during the publication process.  An overview of UC policy on copyright ownership, examples of authors’ agreements, and strategies for negotiating them are outlined in a PowerPoint presentation.  A handout in PDF format with URLs of useful Web sites is also available.

The session is part of the yearlong series “Intellectual Property in the Digital Age:  The Rights Stuff for Teaching and Publishing.”  The final session in the series, “‘What Are My Rights?’: Software, Patents, and Open Source,” will be on Thursday, April 10.  For more information and to register online, go to the Faculty and the Collections Web site.

UCLA faculty members are invited to “‘Don’t I Own my Own Work?’: Negotiating to Keep Your Copyright” on Thursday, February 7, from noon to 1:30 p.m. This lunch session will offer suggestions on how to negotiate agreements with publishers in order to keep your rights to use and reuse your work as you wish. Admission is free, and lunch will be provided. Advance registration is required by Monday, February 4.

UC announced January 14 that the eScholarship Repository has surpassed the five million mark in full-text downloads of its open-access scholarly content since its 2002 creation.  The repository provides a full-spectrum publishing platform for pre-prints, post-prints, peer-reviewed articles, edited volumes, and peer-reviewed journals; contributions from UC academic departments and units now exceed twenty thousand papers and works.

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.

President Bush has signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central, where full texts of the articles will be publicly available no later than twelve months after publication in a journal.

Further information is available on the Alliance for Taxpayer Access Web page.

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.

With its revolutionary computing capabilities, massive data resources, and distributed human expertise, cyberinfrastructure offers the liberal arts new resources and new ways of working.  Academic Commons has published a special issue on this subject, featuring essays, interviews, and reviews by scholars, scientists, information technologists, and administrators.  The contents examine the challenges and opportunities cyberinfrastructure presents for the liberal arts and liberal arts colleges and suggest how academics can connect, use, and contribute to these new capabilities.

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.