Currently viewing the category: "Authors’ Rights"

Who do you work for, faculty author?

On January 25, 2012 By

In two recent blog posts, one describing the original dilemma and one his decision about it, Professor Steven Shaviro discusses his experiences trying to publish an essay in a collection that was being prepared by Oxford University Press.  He balked at the contract he was offered, and ultimately decided not to publish in [...]

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Breaking technology

On January 5, 2012 By

In the past few weeks I have seen several news reports and other actions that seem to form a pattern, where the traditional publishing industry has set out to break digital technologies in order to preserve their traditional business models.

Of course, the most radical effort to break the Internet so that it does not [...]

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Really, what has Princeton done?

On September 30, 2011 By

When it was announced that the faculty at Princeton University had unanimously adopted an open access policy for scholarly articles they authored, it was great news for the open access community, but it was also the cause of some overheated rhetoric.  Since the operative language of the Princeton policy differs very little from that [...]

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An open letter to J.R. Salamanca

On September 16, 2011 By

Dear Mr. Salamanca,

Earlier this week, only days after it filed its ill-advised lawsuit against the HathiTrust and five of Hathi’s partner universities, the Authors Guild gleefully announced that they had been able to find, with relative ease, the author of one of the books on Hathi’s initial list of orphan works.  You, of course, [...]

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Careless language and poor analogies

On July 21, 2011 By

One of Will Rogers’ best known aphorism is “I only know what I read in the papers.”  In line with Rogers’ irony, if all one knows about the Aaron Swartz case is what one reads in the blogosphere, one knows very little indeed, and much of it wrong.

Swartz has been indicted on several [...]

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What a mess!

On July 7, 2011 By

Recently my intern Dave Hansen (another lawyer) and I have been looking at the new author self-archiving policies promulgated by the American Chemical Society and Elsevier.  It would be more accurate to say that these policies are anti-archiving; in spite of persistent rhetoric about how committed these publishers are to access to scholarship, the clear [...]

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Open access, copyright wars and the Trojan horse

On June 15, 2011 By

On our recent trip to Turkey, I happened to be wearing a SPARC open access t-shirt on the day we visited the site of ancient Troy, and my wife took a picture of me holding a model of the Trojan horse with the t-shirt.  How one views the Trojan horse, of course, is a [...]

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Double talk

On April 21, 2011 By

For almost two years now a small group of lawyers and repository managers in the U.S. have been discussing and drafting model language that libraries can use to insert in vendor contracts with publishers that will ensure the self-archiving rights of faculty at the specific institution who publish in the journals that are part of [...]

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There’s more to life than copyright

On April 7, 2011 By

It is a hard lesson for me to learn, but there are other issues related to scholarly communications besides copyright.  Today’s news has focused attention on free speech issues for academics.  Now we have talked about free speech as it is impacted by copyright, and some interesting examples of how copyright can be welded to [...]

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Patent reform, publication and repositories

On March 11, 2011 By

Patent reform has been percolating in Congress for quite a few years now, and I have to admit to being caught off-guard when I saw the announcement that a comprehensive reform package had passed in the U.S. Senate by an overwhelming majority.  This story about the bill (which has not been passed in [...]

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