Exemptions to Copyright Protection
The U.S. Copyright Office has issued rulings that encompass six exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:
Under one of the six exemptions, all of which will expire after three years, professors of film and media studies can circumvent the access-control technology of DVD’s in their libraries to use clips of films more easily in class.
The details of the exemptions are stipulated in the Federal Register published on November 27th.
P.S.: Click here for a summary of the six exemptions.
New Directory of Digital Repositories
A new directory of digital repositories, Openarchives.eu, has become available. It enables users to locate digital repositories/archives of scholarly outputs around the globe. To search the contents in a specific repository, click the Digital Objects tab, key in the search term(s), and specify the service provider (i.e., the subject area). Currently, 1,083 repositories/archives are indexed by the directory.
There are two other directories of digital repositories: Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). OpenDOAR also offers a feature that helps users search the contents in the indexed repositories.
These online directories no doubt expedite faculty’s and graduate students’ literature research. Have you taken advantage of them?
“Licence to Publish” to Retain Author Rights
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the U.K. and the SURF Foundation in the Netherlands have jointly prepared a model agreement that helps scholarly authors manage rights over their publications. The availability of this "Licence to Publish" echoes the creation of author addenda in the U.S., which helps scholarly authors retain their rights and take advantage of the Internet to enhance the accessibility of their research outcomes. The key points of the Licence to Publish are:
- copyright in the published work remains with the author
- the author grants the publisher a licence to publish the work
- the licence takes effect as soon as the publisher has indicated that it wishes to publish the work
- once the article has been published, the author can make it publicly accessible - in the form in which it was published by the publisher - by making it available as part of a digital scientific collection (a ‘repository’)
- if the publisher so requests, the start of such public accessibility can be delayed for a maximum of six months
For information about author rights, visit this page from SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).
International Conference on Open Repositories
The Second International Conference on Open Repositories will be held on January 23-26, 2007 in San Antonio, Texas. It will address the technical and management issues of digital repositories.
Analysis of Author Addenda
In his article (Author addenda: An examination of five alternatives), Peter Hirtle discusses the need for the author addendum and compares five available alternatives. He analyzes the addenda and concludes:
Of the addenda analyzed, SC1, the Scholar’s Copyright OpenAccess-CreativeCommons 1.0 Addendum, provides the greatest benefit to authors. In the absence of data on acceptance by publishers, authors may wish to submit it to the publishers along with the publisher’s copyright transfer agreement.
This article will be beneficial to scholars who seek to understand which author addendum best suits their needs. For information about an author’s rights over his/her scholarly works, visit the Author Rights page from SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).
Deconstructing Arguments against Improved Public Access
An article (Deconstructing the arguments against improved public access) published in the November 2006 issue of the newsletter of the American Society for Cell Biology points out some common misunderstandings of the advocacy for improved public access to research findings. It will be of interest to scholars who wish to become better informed participants of the concerned discussions.
Presentations on Improving Access to Publicly Funded Research
The proceedings of the forum, Improving Access to Publicly Funded Research: Policy Issues and Practical Strategies, have been published online. The presentations made at the forum include:
- Improving access to improve research
- View of a scientist
- View of an academic leader
- Improving access to publicly funded research: What’s in it for the institution? Can we make a case?
Transforming Scholarly Communication Symposium Videos
The videos of the three presentations at the Transforming Scholarly Communication Symposium are now available online:
- Crisis in scholarly communication by Dr. Ray English
- Copyright in cyberspace by Dr. Corynne McSherry
- What is open access by Dr. Peter Suber
Also available are the speakers’ PowerPoint presentations and handout:
- Dr. Ray English’s presentation of the crisis in scholarly communication
- Dr. Ray English’s handout about the crisis in scholarly communication
- Dr. Corynne McSherry’s presentation of copyright in cyberspace
- Dr. Peter Suber’s presentation of open access
P.S.: The second part of the Transforming Scholarly Communication Symposium was a discussion with Dr. Peter Suber of open access issues. Here are some of Dr. Suber’s thoughts:
- There was an increasing momentum for open access in the past five years. However, the degree of success varied with discipline.
- Universities are slow to act, but they have gradually realized the advantages of open access.
- Publishers are disintermediable because scholarly publishing can be accomplished without them. Now they are experimenting with open access by rolling out hybrid journals (a publishing business model in which the access is enabled by either the reader’s subscription or the author’s publication fee). Traditionalists will take note of publishers’ moves.
- For most of the scientific journals, the peak of usage is the first few weeks after publication.
- Open data can be queried and manipulated. Let the reader query and play with the data. Interoperable datasets can lead to meta-analysis.
Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics
European particle physics funding agencies have decided to establish a consortium (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, SCOAP3) to explore how to expedite scientific communication by means of open access. The press release from the European Organization for Nuclear Research reports that:
This new concept in publishing [open access] will broaden opportunities for researchers and funding agencies in achieving greater benefit from unrestricted distribution of the results of their publicly funded research.
"DESY fully supports open access publishing in particle physics and we would like to see it realized within a short time scale. It is of great importance that we are actively and constructively involved in these ongoing discussions aiming to establish a sponsoring consortium," stated Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Research Director at Germany’s DESY laboratory. His remarks were echoed by Francois le Diberder, from the French national institute for particle and nuclear physics (CNRS/IN2P3): "CNRS, and IN2P3, fully support the SCOAP initiative and will proactively participate in its inception and operation".
Month of OA Mandates
In the November issue of SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN), Dr. Peter Suber provides an overview of the open access mandates brought up in October 2006:
We’ve never had a month like October 2006. Depending on how you count, more OA mandates came into being in October 2006 than in all previous months combined. I count six adopted mandates, two proposed mandates, two adopted near-mandates, and one adopted mandate limited to data. That comes to eleven actions in five countries (UK, Austria, Canada, the US, and China).
He also discusses the publication of no-fee open-access journals and the top stories in the previous month.
