What we do

The end of the fiscal year offers a good opportunity to summarize the activities of the Scholarly Communications Office over its first 13 months (June 6, 2006 – June 30, 2007).

A major part of our activity is consulting with faculty, staff and students about specific issues. There have been 222 such consultations in the past year — 90 (40.5%) with library and systems staff or other University administrators, 81 (36.5%) with faculty, 45 (20%) with students and 6 (3%) with others, usually external library patrons referred to the office from the Reference department.

Just over 50% of these consultations were about copyright issues; of those 112 conversations, 49 dealt with fair use and the other 58 addressed the full variety of remaining copyright questions, including the application of the educational exceptions, international copyrights, and when material is in the public domain. Another 20% of the consultations involved licensing issues and questions about how licensed content can be used. Concerns about publication agreements and the protection of author’s rights accounted for another 16% of the consultations this past year. Finally, 14% addressed miscellaneous topics, with the most common being questions about University policy or national legislation.

The Scholarly Communications Office also offers educational programs for a wide variety of groups. In 06-07 we presented 28 such programs; 7 were primarily directed to faculty, 6 to library staff and 12 to students. The remaining 3 were given for off-campus audiences. Presentations for students included forums for the Responsible Conduct of Research program at Duke as well as classes in which the Scholarly Communications Officer was invited to speak.

Anyone who would like to discuss a specific issue, or is interested in attending or arranging an educational program, is encouraged to call the Scholarly Communications Office at 919-668-4451 or to send an e-mail to kevin.l.smith@duke.edu.