Currently viewing the category: "Scholarly Publishing"

When is “exclusive” really not?

On August 19, 2011 By

In our previous post we talked about the relatively easy fair use call involved in the Brownmark Films case decided by the district court in Wisconsin.  Before the court even got to that issue, however, it had to decide a procedural issue that has potential ramifications for scholarly publishing.  Who can grant an [...]

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What does scholarly communications mean to you?

On August 12, 2011 By

Recently I had a somewhat unusual question from a library student who is working in a library where part of her assignment is to look for grant funding opportunities related to developing a scholarly communications program.  After telling me that the whole concept of scholarly communications was somewhat bewildering, the student asked me what search [...]

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Brilliant!

On July 15, 2011 By

Two wonderful resources for academics thinking about public access and open access came to my attention recently, and I want to share them as widely as possible.

The first is this video of a short speech given to the 40th LIBER Annual conference in Barcelona by Neelie Kroes , the European Commissioner for the [...]

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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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COPE, Renewed

On June 30, 2011 By

Duke University announced its COPE fund in October of 2010.  COPE, which abbreviates the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity, is a movement for colleges and universities, mostly through their libraries, to provide financial support, usually reimbursement, for the article processing fees that some open access journals charge.  The basic idea is to see to [...]

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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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Retractions and the risk of moral panic

On April 15, 2011 By

Several people sent me a link to this story from the Chronicle of Higher Education reporting on a study that finds that biomedical researchers continue to cite and rely on published articles even after the papers have been retracted.  My initial reaction was what I presume it was supposed to be – “Gee, that’s [...]

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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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GBS and GSU: two cases, going forward

On March 23, 2011 By

The last week has seen two important decisions in copyright cases with significant interest for higher education.  The first, of course, is the rejection of the amended settlement in the Google Books case; that decision has gotten lots of attention, so instead of rehashing it I want to suggest what I think [...]

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