Transforming Scholarly Communication Symposium
Originally posted by Charles Bailey:
Schedule
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
Elizabeth D. Rockwell Pavilion, 2nd floor, M. D. Anderson Library
1-2 pm: Dr. Ray English will discuss the scholarly communication crisis.
2-3 pm: Dr. Corynne McSherry (J.D.) will analyze copyright issues in the digital age.
3-4 pm: Dr. Peter Suber will examine the open access movement.
4-4:30 pm: The speaker panel will take questions from the audience.
Thursday, October 5, 2006
Room 10G, basement, M. D. Anderson Library
9-11 am: Dr. Peter Suber will meet with interested individuals to discuss open access issues in more depth.
Speakers
Dr. Ray English has been Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries at Oberlin College since 1990. Dr. English has led the Association of College & Research Libraries Scholarly Communications Program from its inception. He has been a member of the steering committee of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) since its inception and currently serves as its chair. Dr. English edited the scholarly communications column for College & Research Libraries News from 2002 to 2006. Dr. English was recently named Academic Research Librarian of the Year by the Association of College and Research Libraries.
Dr. Corynne McSherry is a Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit, membership-supported civil liberties organization working to protect consumer interests, innovation, and free expression in the digital world. Prior to joining EFF, Corynne was a civil litigator at Bingham McCutchen, LLP. While in law school earning her J.D., she published Who Owns Academic Work?: Battling for Control of Intellectual Property (Harvard University Press, 2001).
Dr. Peter Suber is a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Senior Researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and the Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge. He is the author of the Open Access News Weblog and the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. He was the principal drafter of the "Budapest Open Access Initiative," and he sits on the Steering Committee of the Scientific Information Working Group of the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society and the Publishing Working Group of Science Commons.
Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material
Based on their year-long study, Drs. William Fisher and William McGeveran report in their article (The digital learning challenge: Obstacles to educational uses of copyrighted material in the digital age) that the current copyright law is not conducive to digital uses of copyrighted materials in the educational setting. They identify four major obstacles:
- Unclear or inadequate copyright law relating to crucial provisions such as fair use and educational use
- Extensive adoption of “digital rights management” technology to lock up content
- Practical difficulties obtaining rights to use content when licenses are necessary
- Undue caution by gatekeepers such as publishers or educational administrators
They conclude that the situation can be remedied by initiatives such as "legal reform, technological improvements in the rights clearance process, educator agreement on best practices, and increased use of open access distribution."
Food for thought for professors and university administrators?
Access to Cultural Commonwealth
The Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences, part of the American Council of Learned Societies, has published a report named Our Cultural Commonwealth. It discusses the significance of cyberinfrastructure and digital scholarship for Humanities and Social Sciences. It also makes eight recommendations, one of which is to "develop public and institutional policies that foster openness and access":
Open access is critical to constructing and deploying meaningful cyberinfrastructure, and it will be important for the humanities and social sciences to engage in active dialogue and then to lobby effectively concerning legislative and policy developments in this area. […]
The Commission also strongly encourages the funders of research in the humanities and social sciences to require from applicants a plan for sharing and preserving data generated using grant funding, and we urge universities with commercial digitization partners to address long-term ownership and access issues when creating those partnerships. We also call upon university counsels, boards of trustees, and provosts to provide aggressive support for the principles of fair use and open access, and to promote awareness and use of Creative Commons licenses. We call upon senior academic leaders to ensure that their own practices (as producers of intellectual property and as editors of journals) and the practices of university presses, libraries, and museums, support fair use and open access. And finally, the Commission calls upon scholarly societies and universities to advocate that Congress redress imbalances in intellectual property law that currently prevent or inhibit preservation, discourage scholarship, and restrain research and creativity.
As scholars in Humanities and Social Sciences, have you taken advantage of open access and Creative Commons licenses to enhance the accessibility of your works? To learn more about how to utilize the cyberinfrastructure for timely and effective dissemination of scholarly information, please visit the Transforming Scholarly Communication Web site.
Resignation of Journal Editorial Board
The editorial board of the mathematical journal, Topology, has issued a letter to announce all its members’ resignation. The decision stemmed from the members’ concerns over the publisher’s pricing policies.
This is a fine example of how scholars can influence publishers’ business practices and help enhance scholarly communication. To find out what else scholars can do, visit this page of the Transforming Scholarly Communication Web site.
Author Rights
Scholarly authors now can find useful information about their rights from a new Web page created by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). The information is also available from a brochure. In addition, SPARC provides the podcast of the forum, "Authors and Authority: Perspectives and Negotiating Licenses and Copyright," which was held in January 2006 at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting.
More Universities Support Public Access Act
The provosts of 23 universities have shown their support to the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) by signing an open letter issued by the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA). They argue:
Public access to publicly funded research facilitates the open discussion needed to accelerate research, share knowledge, improve treatment of diseases, and increase human understanding. Your [Senator John Cornyn’s] bill is a crucial step in realizing this goal and we look forward to working with you to secure the bill’s passage.
One week ago, there was another open letter from 25 universities that supported FRPAA.
Nature Journals Open Access?
Originally posted by Sara Ranger:
Nature Publishing Group recently announced that articles from both their academic and society journals will be freely accessible. Anything published in one of their academic journals prior to 2003 will be available beginning in January of 2007. The society journals which open access one year after publication will continue to do so. According to NPG, this will help them solve the problem of providing perpetual access for customers who buy access to electronic journals and then cancel their subscriptions.
Nature publications are heavily used, even years after publication, so this seems like a step that will benefit many researchers and students.
Ten Lessons Learned from Open Access Policies
The August issue, and also the 100th, of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN) is now online. Peter Suber lists five open access policies and discusses the lessons learned from them:
- Lesson 1. The policy should require OA, not merely request it.
- Lesson 2. The mandate should apply to the final version of the author’s manuscript, incorporating all changes introduced by the peer review process.
- Lesson 3. Without compromising their own interests, funders should help publishers.
- Lesson 4. The policy should apply primarily to work published in peer-reviewed journals.
- Lesson 5. The policy should allow grantees to use grant funds, or to apply for supplementary funds, to pay the publication fees at OA or OA-hybrid journals that charge fees.
- Lesson 6. The policy should let authors choose which OA repository to use, provided it meets certain conditions of OA, interoperability, and long-term preservation.
- Lesson 7. The policy should apply to articles that result from research funded in whole or in part by the funder’s grant.
- Lesson 8. The policy should adopt the dual deposit/release strategy.
- Lesson 9. With or without sanctions, the mandate should be enforceable.
- Lesson 10. The legal basis of the funder’s dissemination of these texts should either be a government license (for public funders) or the funding contract with the grantee (for public or private funders) . The policy should not rely, directly or indirectly, on publisher consent.
Free Access to Online Health Science Research Archive
Britain will launch its equivalent of the U.S. PubMed Central, according to this press release:
Scientists will be able to access a vast collection of biomedical research at the touch of a button thanks to a major new initiative that aims to promote the free transfer of ideas in a bid to speed up scientific discovery. Based on a model currently used in the United States, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) will provide free access to an online digital archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences.
Research communities worldwide have increasingly recognized the significance of free and easy access to scholarly literatures. Have you pitched in?
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, Version 63
Version 63 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over 2,730 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.
