Brown Bag Lecture: Copyright and You, Part Two

Tuesday, October 2, 2007
11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Kyle Morrow Room, 3rd Floor of Fondren Library, Rice University

Fondren Library, Rice University, and the Houston Academy of Medicine- Texas Medical Center Library invite faculty and students to a presentation by Joe Davidson, Associate General Counsel, Rice University.

Joe Davidson will provide a follow-up to the "Copyright and You (April 2007)" overview of U.S. copyright and how it might impact you as an author, researcher, and instructor. How does copyright affect how you use your own material? How do institutional copyright policies impact you? Explore issues of creative commons, retaining author rights, and fair use.

Come hear Joe's overview and participate in a discussion of how laws and policy impact research and teaching.

Beverages and box lunches (25, first come first choice) will be provided.

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This lecture is jointly sponsored by Fondren Library and the HAM-TMC Library, as part of an ongoing series of events examining the changes in scholarly communication and publishing.

For more information about the brown bag, contact Debra Kolah, dbailey@rice.edu, 713.348.2350.

August 20, 2007

Leading Financer of Biomedical Research Signs Up With Open-Access Publisher

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the second-biggest supporter of biomedical research in the United States, has signed up as a member with the open-access publisher BioMed Central. The agreement, which formalizes what the institute had essentially been doing in practice, means that it will pay for its scientists to publish in journals under the BioMed Central umbrella.

The Hughes institute announced in June that by next year it would require all of the scientists it supports to publish articles in journals that posted the material in public repositories within six months. The institute earlier this year reached agreements with Elsevier and with Wiley-Blackwell to pay charges for its scientists to publish in those companies' journals.

The institute is now negotiating with other publishers, said Avice Meehan, vice president for communications and public affairs. "The end goal is to ensure broad access to the discoveries made by our investigators," she said. "And we want to do that while ensuring that our investigators are more or less free to publish where they choose." --Richard Monastersky

Posted on Monday August 20, 2007

Copyright © 2007 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

From Stevan Harnad on the LibLicense emailing list:

The following re-posting from Peter Suber's OA News reconfirms that Elsevier is squarely on the side of the angels insofar as OA is concerned: Elsevier is and remains solidly Green on author self-archiving. So if there is any finger of blame to be pointed, it is to be pointed straight at the research community itself, not at Elsevier. If researchers desire Open Access, and fail to provide it by self-archiving their own articles, it is entirely their own fault, certainly not Elsevier's.

And if researchers' institutions and funders are aggrieved that their researchers are not providing OA, yet they have failed to mandate that they do so, there is again no one else to fault but themselves.

Read on. And then if you are a researcher and minded to complain about the absence of OA, please don't waste keystrokes demonizing publishers like Elsevier, or signing pious declarations, statements, manifestos, or boycott-threats: Direct your keystrokes instead toward the self-archiving of your own articles in your own Institutional Repository!

Elsevier restates its self-archiving policy

Ways to Use Journal Articles Published by Elsevier: A Practical Guide, Elsevier, Version 1.0, June 2007. (Thanks to Rea Devakos.) Elsevier compiled this guide for its journal editors, but it may also be useful for authors and readers.

Excerpt:

Elsevier believes it is important to communicate clearly about our policies regarding the use of articles we publish....However, this guide does not amend, replace or cancel any part of an existing license with Elsevier....

Authors publishing in Elsevier journals retain wide rights to continue to use their works to support scientific advancement, teaching and scholarly communication. An author can, without asking permission, do the following after publication of the author's article in an Elsevier-published journal:

Make copies (print or electronic) of the author's article for personal use or the author's own classroom teaching.

Make copies of the article and distribute them (including via email) to known research colleagues for their personal use but not for commercial purposes as described below [PS: omitted here].

Present the article at a meeting or conference and distribute copies of the article to attendees.

Allow the author's employer to use the article in full or in part for other intracompany use (e.g., training).

Retain patent and trademark rights and rights to any process or procedure described in the article.

Include the article in full or in part in a thesis or dissertation.

Use the article in full or in part in a printed compilation of the author's, such as collected writings and lecture notes.

Use the article in full or in part to prepare other derivative works, including expanding the article to book-length form, with each such work to include full acknowledgment of the article's original publication in the Elsevier journal.

Post, as described below, the article to certain websites or servers....

Web posting of articles

Elsevier understands researchers want widespread distribution of their work and supports authors by enabling such distribution within the context of orderly peer review and publication.

Most journals published by Elsevier will consider (for peer review and publication) papers already posted in pre-publication versions to the Web. Pre-publication posting is common practice in, for example, physics and mathematics. However, some Elsevier clinical and biomedical journals, including The Lancet and Cell Press journals, follow the guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and do not consider for publication papers that have already been posted publicly. Anyone with a question regarding pre-publication posting and subsequent submission of a paper to an Elsevier journal should consult that journal's instructions to authors or contact the editor.

An author can, without asking permission, do the following with the author's article that has been or will be published in an Elsevier journal:

Post a pre-print version of the article on Internet websites including electronic pre-print servers, and retain indefinitely this version on such servers or sites (unless prohibited in a specific Elsevier journal's instructions to authors).

Post a personal manuscript version of the article on the author's personal or institutional website or server, provided each such posting includes a link to the article's Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and includes a complete citation for the article. This means an author can update a personal manuscript version (e.g., in Word or TeX format) of the article to reflect changes made during the peer-review and editing process. Note such posting may not be for commercial purposes and may not be to any external, third-party website. Elsevier-published authors employed by corporations may post their revised personal manuscript versions of their final articles to their corporate intranets if they are secure and do not allow public access.

This policy permitting open posting of revised personal manuscript versions applies to authors publishing articles in any Elsevier journals, including The Lancet and Cell Press journals.

If an article has multiple authors, each author has the same posting rights.

To preserve the integrity of the official record of publication, the final published version of an article as it appears (in PDF or HTML) in an Elsevier journal will continue to be available only on an Elsevier site....

Peter Suber, OA News

London, July 18, 2007 - BioMed Central, the world's largest publisher of open access scientific research, today announced a new information portal calling attention to the developing world's need for open access to the scientific and medical literature. The Open Access and the Developing World portal highlights the most relevant peer-reviewed research from BioMed Central's open access journals and brings together the latest news and resources relating to open access and the developing world.

As part of the launch of the portal, BioMed Central is inviting researchers and others working in developing countries to share their stories about how open access to the online research literature is changing their work (See "Share your Story" below).

"Open access to the scientific and medical literature is a key way in which the developed world can help developing countries," said Matthew Cockerill, Publisher of BioMed Central. "In recent years, the funding for research on global health issues such as AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis has increased significantly thanks to support from philanthropic foundations. Open access is vital to ensure that the full use is made of the results of this research."

The research articles that will feature on the new portal includes publications from Malaria Journal, a leading BioMed Central journal which was recently ranked by Thomson Scientific as number one in the field of Tropical Medicine. Other BioMed Central journals which publish research highly relevant to developing countries include AIDS Research & Therapy, BMC Infectious Diseases, BMC Public Health and the International Journal for Equity in Health.

The portal also offers profiles of BioMed Central authors who work in developing countries, newsfeeds and a blog which will provide a regular round-up of news and resources relating to open access and the developing world.

"Working in a developing country I feel like I need to be one of those to take a lead in publishing much of my work in open-access journals," said Dr. Philip Hill, Clinical Epidemiologist at MRC Laboratories in Banjul, The Gambia. "I am very pleased that BioMed Central has provided this resource, which will be of particular benefit to researchers in developing countries."

Share Your Story

BioMed Central is inviting researchers and practitioners working in developing countries to send in a photograph or video relating to their work, along with a story explaining why open access to the scientific literature is important to them. The senders of the first 10 stories selected by BioMed Central to appear on the Share Your Story page will receive one of BioMed Central's "Open Access - Global Access" T-shirts. The sender of the best story received by 30 September 2007 will receive a contribution of $1000 towards computer equipment for the lab or project of their choice.

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For further information please contact Charlotte Webber at BioMed Central on +44 (0)20 7631 9980 or press@biomedcentral.com

For more information about the Open Access and the Developing Worl portal please visit http://www.biomedcentral.com/developingcountries/

Or for the related link, Share Your Story, please visit http://www.biomedcentral.com/developingcountries/stories/

About BioMed Central

BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com) is an independent online publishing house committed to providing immediate access without charge to the peer-reviewed biological and medical research it publishes. This commitment is based on the view that open access to research is essential to the rapid and efficient communication of science. In addition to open-access original research, BioMed Central also publishes reviews and other subscription-based content.

Washington, D.C. ­ June 28, 2007

Public access to NIH-funded research took a major step forward this week with Senate Appropriations Committee agreement to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to require that its funded research be made publicly available on the Internet.

This milestone was immediately praised by the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), a coalition of patient groups, researchers, consumers, and libraries that has long called for such a step.

"The momentum is real and Congress understands the public's interest," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an ATA founding member). "We congratulate Senators Tom Harkin and Arlen Specter for their bipartisan leadership on this issue."

"It is significant that Senate appropriators are determined to leverage the taxpayer investment in research by ensuring it can be broadly applied," added Joseph. "Two years after the well-intentioned voluntary NIH policy was introduced, too many researchers, students, small businesses, and people facing diseases still lack access to the publicly funded research they want and need. This is a big step in the right direction."

The Senate's 2008 appropriations bill specifically requires that NIH-funded researchers deposit in the National Library of Medicine¹s online archive an electronic copy of their peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication in a journal. Articles would become publicly available no later than 12 months after publication.

"Action by our Senators in supporting this change is especially welcomed by the patient community," said Colleen Zak, Executive Director of the Autosomal Recessive Polycystic Kidney Disease and Congenital Hepatic Fibrosis (ARPKD/CHF) Alliance. "Delivering on the NIH public access policy will create anticipated opportunities for accelerating research and finding cures."

Under the current NIH Public Access Policy, implemented in May 2005, investigators have deposited less than five percent of eligible manuscripts and, although a few publishers have also deposited articles stemming from NIH-funded research, the vast majority is not yet publicly available.

Congress has expressed concern about the voluntary policy's failure to meet its goals. However, this is the first time the Senate committee has proposed legislative action to correct the situation. The Senate measure is similar to one recently put forth by the House of Representatives Labor/HHS Appropriations Subcommittee.

The FY08 Senate Appropriations Bill is expected to go before the full Senate for a vote later this summer. The House Labor/HHS Appropriations measure will be considered by the full House Appropriations Committee in July.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is a coalition of patient, academic, research, and publishing organizations that support open public access to the results of federally funded research. The Alliance was formed in 2004 to urge that peer-reviewed articles stemming from taxpayer-funded research become fully accessible and available online at no extra cost to the American public. Details on the ATA may be found at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.

Jennifer McLennan
Director of Communications
SPARC
(The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition)
http://www.arl.org/sparc
(202) 296-2296 ext 121
jennifer@arl.org

For Immediate Release June 5, 2007

SPARC RECOGNIZES TED AND CARL BERGSTROM AS SPARC INNOVATORS

Father-son team named for pivotal work on journal pricing and assessing the value of scholarly information

Washington, DC - June 5, 2007 - SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has recognized Ted Bergstrom and Carl Bergstrom as the new SPARC Innovators. The father-son team advances the open sharing of scholarly information through original research and the creation of innovative tools that are used widely by the academic community to assess the value of research.

Ted and Carl are best known for their collaborations on Ted's journal pricing Web pages and, more recently, on the Eigenfactor.org Web site produced by Carl's research lab. Ted's journal pricing page, which offers data reporting price per article and price per citation for about 5,000 academic journals, has centralized pricing information so it can be explored and compared in ways that were previously impossible. The site has become a vital resource for researchers and librarians alike. Carl's Eigenfactor.org site offers a completely new and innovative approach to assessing the value of journals; it provides researchers, librarians and others a new mechanism to evaluate based on a diverse array of criteria.

Ted, an economist, holds the Aaron and Cherie Raznick Chair of Economics in the Economics Department at the University of California Santa Barbara. Carl, a theoretical and evolutionary biologist, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. To read in more detail about the Bergstroms' contributions to scholarly publishing, please see the SPARC Innovator Web page at http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator/

"It's clear that father and son place a high value on the open sharing of information, and they have devoted their careers to probing the notion of defining value in scholarship," said SPARC Director Heather Joseph. "Although they work in different fields, they come at the basic questions of fairness and access in ways that will impact scholarly communication for generations. It's entirely reasonable to believe that, together, they have the ability to change the way journals are measured and purchased."

"It is an honor to be recognized by SPARC, whose goals I share," Ted Bergstrom said. "And a great pleasure to share this honor with Carl, who has made our projects a lot of fun."

"I very much appreciate this honor, and I am particularly pleased to be sharing it with my father," said Carl Bergstrom. "I've deeply enjoyed working with him, and it means a great deal to me to know that others find our work to be useful and interesting."

The SPARC Innovator program recognizes advances in scholarly communication realized by an individual, institution, or group. Typically, these advances exemplify SPARC principles by challenging the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities, and the public. SPARC Innovators are featured on the SPARC Web site semi-annually and have included Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Institute; the University of California; and Herbert Van de Sompel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. SPARC Innovators are named by the SPARC staff in consultation with the SPARC Steering Committee.

Individuals can nominate their colleagues as potential SPARC Innovators at http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator/nominate.html

For further information or a list of previous SPARC Innovators, please see the SPARC Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc

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SPARC SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC's advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc

Jennifer McLennan Director of Communications SPARC (202) 296-2296 ext. 121 (202) 872-0884 Fax http://www.arl.org/sparc

For Immediate Release Thursday, May 17, 2007

Washington, DC and Cambridge, MA - Today, Science Commons and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) announce the release of new online tools to help authors exercise choice in retaining critical rights in their scholarly articles, including the rights to reuse their scholarly articles and to post them in online repositories.

The new tools include the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine, an online tool created by Science Commons to simplify the process of choosing and implementing an addendum to retain scholarly rights. By selecting from among four addenda offered, any author can fill in a form to generate and print a completed amendment that can be attached to a publisher's copyright assignment agreement to retain critical rights to reuse and offer their works online.

The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine will be offered through the Science Commons, SPARC, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Carnegie Mellon University Web sites, and it will be freely available to other institutions that wish to host it. It may be accessed on the Science Commons Web site at http://scholars.sciencecommons.org.

Also available for the first time is a new addendum from Science Commons and SPARC, named "Access-Reuse," that represents a collaboration to simplify choices for scholars by combining two existing addenda, the SPARC Author Addendum and the Science Commons Open Access-Creative Commons Addendum. This new addendum will ensure that authors not only retain the rights to reuse their own work and post them on online depositories, but also to grant a non-exclusive license, such as the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license, to the public to reuse and distribute the work. In addition, Science Commons will be offering two other addenda, called "Immediate Access" and "Delayed Access", representing alternative arrangements that authors can choose.

"The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine will enable authors to maximize the reach of their work," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. "It's a significant leap forward in making it easier for authors to effectively manage their publication rights."

In addition, MIT has contributed to this effort by including its MIT Copyright Agreement Amendment in the choices available through the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine. The MIT Copyright Amendment has been available since the spring of 2006 and allows authors to retain specific rights to deposit articles in MIT Libraries' DSpace repository, and to deposit any NIH-funded manuscripts on the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central database.

"The cumulative nature of scientific discovery makes it imperative that unnecessary barriers to the timely sharing of results of research should be eliminated wherever possible," said Ann Wolpert, Director of Libraries for MIT. "The MIT Libraries applauds Science Commons for its development of tools such as the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine, which enables authors of scholarly articles to ensure that they can later reuse their works and make them widely accessible to other researchers and the public. Timely and broad access to the scholarly literature and research results is key to the advancement of science, and we are pleased to participate in this important Science Commons initiative by offering MIT's Copyright Amendment for inclusion in the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine."

"Scientists in many fields believe that progress can best be achieved by sharing scientific information. Carnegie Mellon is delighted to be able to host the addendum generator to help faculty balance their rights as authors with those of their scholarly publishers," said Dr. David Yaron, Faculty Senate Library Committee Chair of Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University.

SPARC offers a suite of materials, including a full color brochure and poster, that introduce the topic of author rights on campuses and complement the new SPARC-Science Commons "Access-Reuse" addendum. See http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/.

"This is about authors' rights," said John Wilbanks, Vice President of Science Commons - a project of Creative Commons. "Right now, authors trade the most important rights - like the right to make copies of their own scholarly works - to traditional publishers. That trade has led to an imbalanced world of restricted access to knowledge, skyrocketing journal prices, and an inability to apply new technologies to the scholarly canon of knowledge. Our Scholar's Copyright project addresses this imbalance. Working with libraries and universities, we are providing the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine so that scholars can retain rights to make copies of their own writings available on the Web."

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Science Commons

Science Commons' goal is to encourage stakeholders to create areas of free access and inquiry using standardized licenses and other means; a 'Science Commons' built out of voluntary private agreements. A project of the non-profit copyright organization Creative Commons, Science Commons works to make sharing easier in scientific publication, licensing of research tools and materials, and databases. Science Commons is at http://science.creativecommons.org.

SPARC

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC's advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc/.

Press Release April 18, 2007

SHERPA Receives SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications, 2007

For more information, contact: David Prosser, david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk

CERN, Geneva, Switzerland - As part of OAI5 - the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication, held at the CERN Laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland, the SHERPA partnership as presented with the 2007 SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications.

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Europe initiated the Award in 2006 to recognise the work of an individual or group within Europe that has made significant advances in our understanding of the issues surrounding scholarly communications and/or in developing practical means to address the problems with the current systems. In making the Award to SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) the judging panel noted their advocacy for the adoption of institutional repositories and their development of a suite of tools in support of Open Access, including OpenDOAR (a world-wide directory of repositories hosting freely available peer-reviewed publications), JULIET (a listing of funding bodies' policies regarding deposit mandates) and RoMEO (listing publishers' copyright policies in relation to articles deposit).

SHERPA was nominated for the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications by Dr Judith Wusteman of University College Dublin.  'SHERPA is a trusted source of information,' said Dr Wusteman, and 'SHERPA's online services, namely OpenDOAR, JULIET and ROMEO, are its greatest contribution to Open Access and the development of institutional repositories.' Dr Wusteman noted that a 2006 study by the Johns Hopkins University identified SHERPA's OpenDOAR directory to be the best directory (out of 24 directories tested) of repositories worldwide.

Bill Hubbard, SHERPA Manager, said 'I am delighted to be able to accept this award on behalf of the SHERPA partnership and in particular on behalf of the SHERPA core team at the University of Nottingham. We would like to thank SPARC Europe for the honour of being chosen for this award for our advocacy activities and online services in the area of Open Access repositories. We are pleased that the community has found these to be valuable and are honoured by this recognition.

'We are proud of the services that we offer - RoMEO, JULIET and OpenDOAR - and hope that these will make a contribution to the success of Open Access. Our thanks to all those who have contributed or helped to build these and we look forward to continuing community contributions.'

This is the second time the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications has been made.  The first Award, in 2006, went to the Wellcome Trust for their groundbreaking work in scholarly communication.  It is planned that the 2008 Award will be made during the Fourth Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication, held at Lund, Sweden in April of next year.

SPARC Europe is an alliance of 110 research-led university libraries from 14 European countries. It is affiliated with SPARC  based in Washington, D.C., which represents over 200 institutions, mainly in North America. SPARC Europe and SPARC work to develop and promote new models of scholarly communication that increase the access to and utility of the research literature.

From Peter Suber's Open Access News Blog:

Peter Murray-Rust, Data-driven science - a scientist's view, a position paper for the NSF/JISC Repositories Workshop (Phoenix, April 17-19, 2007).  Excerpt:

...Our thesis is that the current scientific literature, were it to be presented in semantically accessible form, contains huge amounts of undiscovered science. However the apathy of the academic, scientific and information communities coupled with the indifference or even active hostility and greed of many publishers renders literature-data-driven science still inaccessible....

I use the neologism "hypopublication" ("hypo-" = "below", "low", or "insufficient") to emphasize the inadequacy of current publication protocols and the lack of hyperlinking or aggregatability. For example about 2 million chemical compounds are published each year (about half in patents) with insufficient semantics, metadata or hyperstructure. Vast effort is required to create useful data from these, and the current commercial processes seriously disadvantage the whole of science. It should now be possible to publish a fairly complete scientific record of an experiment, yet the current publication process continues to emphasize the "article" at the expense of the data. The article summarises the experiment and gives the essential impact factor (market indicator for tenure and funding) - the data are often missing or so emasculated as to be useless. It is the film review without access to the film.

Many scientific disciplines require publication - in textual form - of sufficient data for the experiment to be evaluated (though frequently not enough to allow replication). Some communities laudably insist on machine-parsable data including much bioscience (genomes, protein sequences and structures) and crystallography. Over the years they have managed to coerce the publishers to require authors to provide this information. If all communities did this, for all major kinds of data, then literature-driven science would become a reality. Note, however, that some publishers (such as ACS and Wiley) see such data as their property. Although "facts cannot be copyrighted", these publishers continue to insist on this and one senior representative recently told me that this was so they could "sell the data". To try to counter this I am promoting the concept of Open Data - including a mailing list offered by SPARC. The STM publishers have agreed that factual data is not copyrightable, but there is generally indifference in the academic and information communities to the importance of insisting on this.

It is important to stress that "Open Access" - as currently practised - does not promote Open Data. The Budapest and other declarations make it clear that Open Access involves free, unrestricted access to all the data for whatever legal purpose. In practice, however, publishers ban robotic indexing of sites, cut off subscribers whom they opine are downloading too much content, and continue to copyright facts. The politicisation and complexity of the Open Access struggle means that Open Data currently has little community recognition and support. Yet Open Data is the single most important problem in data-driven science....