All posts by Kevin Smith, J.D.

Authors' Rights, Scholarly Publishing

Why I joined the Authors Alliance

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A new organization for authors, called the Authors Alliance, is launching today (May 21) with a reception in San Francisco at the headquarters of the Internet Archive.  I cannot attend, but a couple of weeks ago I responded to an invitation and became a founding member of the Alliance; I also made a small financial contribution to help the group get off the ground.  This seemed like an obvious move to me.  Why shouldn’t academic authors, as well as the multitude of others who write for reasons not directly linked to commercial sales, have an organization that represents their interests?  Surely the idea of (mostly) academic authors organizing to further their own interests is not controversial.

But after I joined the Authors Alliance, a colleague sent me a link to an amazing, apparently distraught blog post on the website of the Authors Guild that seems to be warning AG members about the dangers posed by the Authors Alliance.  Although the author of the post, a successful author of biographies named T.J. Stiles, affects a tone of calm, his misinformation and efforts to sound contemptuous make it very clear that the Alliance is perceived as a threat by the AG.  Which, of course, is an additional argument for signing up.

Throughout his post, Stiles talks about the Alliance as an organization for people who want to “give away” their work.  He sarcastically suggests that,

If you think, in our digital age, that the biggest problem facing authors is how hard it is to give your work away for free, it’s for you. If you think you’ve got too much power over people who copy and distribute your work without your permission, by all means sign up.

This, of course, is a profound misunderstanding of the situation of academic authors.  Under the current system, academic authors are almost always required to give away their work for free to publishers, who then sell it at a profit.  Stiles, who worked for years for Oxford University Press, ought to know this.  The “power over people who copy and distribute your work” is all held by these publishers, who become the copyright holders once academic authors sign transfer agreements as a condition of publication.  One reason for joining the Authors Alliance is precisely so that academic authors can retain more control and give away less.

In his desperation to say bad things about this new organization, which has yet to take any positions or actions as a group, Stiles is even willing to contradict himself.  He refers to the Alliance as “an astroturf organization. It was not organized by authors, nor is it governed by them. The four directors are Berkeley academics.”  But in other places he acknowledges the obvious fact that academics are authors; they are just supported by a different financial model than that to which the Authors Guild myopically clings.  Make no mistake; the Authors Alliance is organized and governed by authors in order to represent the interests of authors.

Stiles goes on to assert some of the putative stances the Alliance might take, although he acknowledges that it is too early to know for sure.  Instead, he just extrapolates based on gross exaggerations of some of the academic arguments made by Alliance board members, especially Professor Pam Samuelson.  For example, based on arguments for a digital first sale right, he makes the absurd claim that the Alliance would want a world where “anyone could become a publisher of your book,” based on the idea that resale would always involve copying.  Stiles carefully ignores the fact that all such discussions, to my knowledge at least, advocate for a “forward and delete” regime that would replicate the physical first sale right that has been part of U.S. copyright law for over a century.  Likewise Stiles claims that members of the Alliance board have advocated for “allowing potentially unlimited copying for educational uses.”  If so, I have never heard them.  What I have heard, and advocate for, is a fair use right — again part of our law for more than 170 years — that works for education in those cases where it does not threaten the commercial sales of the works.  That, in fact, is exactly what Judge Chin evoked when he ruled against the AG in their lawsuits against the Google Books project.

Stiles’ essay is an exercise in fear-mongering and, when he begins to cite the salaries paid to some of its academic founders, a rather petulant envy.  Since he has spent a lot of space offering fictionalized reasons that one might join the Authors Alliance, let me close by citing two that were specifically important to me when I decided to join.

First, it has the potential to be far more representative of authors as a whole than the Authors Guild is.  It is the AG that is really a niche organization, representing, according to public documents, about 8,000 members.  There are, of course, vastly more authors than that in the U.S; indeed, there is a larger number of potential academic authors than that total just within a 30-mile radius of where I sit as I write this, because of the four large universities in the Research Triangle.  The Authors Guild sees itself as representing a single type of author — those who wish to sell their books through commercial outlets and who have had success doing so.  This is a very small percentage of authors.  The remaining group are not bad authors, or all amateurs, as Stiles implies; they are just authors who making their living based on different business models.

Which brings me to my second reason for joining the Authors Alliance; it can represent a much more diverse perspective on the business and technology of authorship.  The truth is that the Authors Guild is apparently irredeemably wedded to a single business model, which is itself tied to the technology of print.  That business model depends, even in its digital forms, on making the book (or article) a scarce object and then limiting its readership to those who pay to obtain a (costly) copy.  This model only developed with the printing press, and as other options “come online” its relevance is fading.  Limiting readership, while necessary to the print-based approach to authorship, is not something that actually appeals to many authors.  Most people, I would think, write so that lots of people will read their work.  If other ways can be found to reimburse their effort while still supporting a wide readership, that is all to the good.

Of course, for most of our history writers have been supported in other ways.  Shakespeare and Dante were supported by patrons.  Many authors today are supported by a similar kind of patronage, from foundations, agencies or, indeed, universities.  Stiles himself, as the winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, which carries a cash award with it, is not unfamiliar with a certain kind of patronage support.  So when he says that one should not join the Authors Alliance if “you earn a living as a writer, or hope to” he is being incredibly myopic.  And when he goes on to cite the salaries of some of the academic authors who are founding the Alliance he exposes his hypocrisy and envy.  These academic founders of the Alliance DO make their livings as writers, and their substantial salaries are testimony to their skill at it.  Authorship is a requirement of the jobs that pay them those salaries, and they are repeatedly evaluated on the basis of their writings, as well as other factors, in order to be sure they are providing value for money.

The point is that there are many ways in which writers are supported in their endeavors, and even more various are the reasons that people become writers.  The Authors Guild is focused on a single reason and a single business model, and it is sinking into irrelevance because of that limited vision.  Stiles’ essay reflects the desperation of the AG as much as its quixotic campaign of lawsuits does.  So why join the Authors Alliance?  Because academic authors need a representative body that can look beyond a single model to embrace new technologies and business models that are both new and, sometimes, old.  Because we need a representative group that has the vision and flexibility to be relevant and influential well into the 21st century.

Copyright Issues and Legislation, Licensing, Scholarly Publishing

Superrights for textbooks?

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This past week there have been a lot of angry blog posts about the new “Connected Casebook” plan from Aspen Publishers (Wolters Kluwer Legal Education) that would attempt to deprive students of their rights under the First Sale doctrine in U.S. law to resell the books that they buy.  Aspen publishes case books — the textbooks made up largely of court decisions that are fundamental to the teaching in U.S. law schools.  With this new program they are “offering” students allegedly perpetual access to an online version of the book with digital tools, but attempting to require that the print version of the book be returned after the class is over, even if it is marked up and annotated.  The idea, of course, is to undercut the secondary market for print textbooks so that each student will have to pay $200+ for a new book package.

Many folks have already critically examined the plan, so I will just offer some links to those earlier posts — from law professors Josh Blackman and James Grimmelmann, from the Electronic Freedom Foundation and from the Washington Post.  It is worth noting that Professor Grimmelmann began a petition that includes a pledge from law professors not to assign Aspen casebooks.

Since these blog posts were posted, Wolters Kluwer has responded with a letter in which they clarify their intentions, stating that the Connected Casebook program will be an option for students, but that they will still be able to elect to buy a traditional print textbook in which they will have the right of first sale, meaning that they can resell the book once the class is over.

In spite of this plethora of words about the issue, I have several comments I want to make.

First, just a reminder that these attempts to undermine the right of first sale are an effort from publishers to gain a sort of “super” property right.  No other property owner expects to be able to sell their product and still be able to prevent the purchaser from making a resale.  To see the absurdity of this, imagine if Ford tried to shut down the market for used cars by including such a restriction in a purchase contract; it would be a quick way to go out of business.  If Aspen really cannot survive in a market where resale is an option — this has been the case in the U.S. for its entire history, as well as in the rest of the world for a long time — it is probably time for them to shut off the lights and go home.

At least I suppose we should be grateful that Aspen says this will be only an option, not the sole way in which textbooks can be obtained.  They are saying that the digital bells and whistles that they will offer with the Connected Casebook program are carrots intended to lure students into surrendering their first sale rights, not sticks that will coerce them.  In that light, it is interesting to consider if it will work.  Studies suggest that the included digital links and things associated with many textbooks do not get used very much.  I wonder if the price will be the same for the traditional textbook, with a resale option included, and the “Connected” casebook, which has outlining tools and allegedly lifetime access to the digital edition, but requires the renunciation of first sale rights?  As Professor Grimmelmann points out, “we know from sad experience that gerbils have better life expectancy than DRM platforms,” so lifetime access is really not very likely.  In any case, case books become outdated really quickly, and the large secondary market (that Aspen wants to curtail) indicates that students are not very interested in lifetime access.

Perhaps this new program should be a teaching moment for law professors.  Licensing and contract law are relevant to nearly every legal subject, after all, so any class in which an Aspen Casebook is assigned might begin with an opportunity for students to reflect on the decision they are asked to make and to explain their ultimate choice.  The interplay of price, features, expectations and rights would make for interesting reflections, and students could begin to try to decide if the restriction requiring return of the book is actually enforceable.

Enforceability does seem like a issue here.  The basic idea is to have students buy a package — print book and digital access — then use the license for the latter to curtail rights in the former.  But our courts have looked very unfavorably on licenses that attempt to curtail first sale, in cases as old as Bobbs-Merril v. Straus (1908) and as recent as Kirtsaeng v. Wiley (2012).  It is true that the Ninth Circuit recently did enforce a license restriction on first sale imposed on software CD-ROMs, but in that case (which seems dubious given the two Supreme Court precedents mentioned above) at least the license was for the same, singular product.  I am pretty confident that courts would be more skeptical of the Aspen license, which attempts to negate a long standing public right in a format that is not traditionally governed by licensing terms at all through the licensing of a different format.  A court challenge to this would be very interesting and would raise the issue, as the EFF notes, of what the boundaries of a sale really are.  Certainly if the scheme were ever imposed as the only option for obtaining these textbooks, it would cry out for an action on the part of law students seeking declaratory judgment on the issue of enforceability.

The biggest takeaway from this controversy should be a reminder of the opportunity to create open educational resources that can avoid all of these silly and desperate efforts from publishers to maintain control even after the sale of a book.  No field is more amenable to open textbooks than law, after all, where the large majority of the content, the cases themselves, are in the public domain.  The licensing problems for online casebooks are greatly reduced, and there are consequently already some excellent examples of open online law texts, including Grimmelmann on Internet law and Herbert Hovenkamp (himself the author of an Aspen casebook) on Innovation and Competition Policy.  I would love to see many of the over 300 law professors who have signed Grimmelmann’s petition commit to creating open online case books in their own fields of expertise.  If that happened, the problem would go away very quickly, and the cost of a legal education would be significantly reduced.

We need to remember that this model for textbook “sales” is likely to spread.  The various strategies that publishers have used to try to undermine the secondary market for textbooks are various and ongoing, as the recent Kirtsaeng v. Wiley case illustrates.  Although it is never put this way, this is part of an overall sense from academic publishers that they are entitled to a larger share of the money that students spend on education.  These strategies would always have the effect of making education more expensive, so we need to remain vigilant for the next such effort and resist it on behalf of the students we serve.

 

Copyright Issues and Legislation, Fair Use

On Copyright and negligence

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Last week I received the April 2014 issue of Against the Grain, which, to be honest, is not a publication I read at all regularly.  But I do sometimes skim it for copyright articles, and today my eye was caught by an op-ed piece from Mark Herring of Winthrop University about the Google Books decision.

Although its title asks a simple and moderate question — “Is the Google Books Decision an Unqualified Good?” — the article itself is quite extreme in its point of view and for the most part does not engage with the actual decision.  Instead it is a hyperbolic diatribe about why we should all be afraid of Google; it ends with the assertion that “In a sense, we all work for Google now, free of charge.”  I have no clue what that means, but it is pretty clearly an exaggeration.  Nevertheless, there are a couple of points made in this op-ed that are prevalent enough to be worth discussing.

By the way, normally I would provide a link to any article I discuss here, particularly when I do so in a critical way.  I want readers to have a way to evaluate the whole debate, not just my side of it.  But in this instance, the op-ed does not appear to be on the ATG website.  So anyone who wants to see both sides, as it were, is encouraged to track down a copy of the April issue of ATG.

I want to start with Dean Herring’s second reservation about what he calls the “Google Book Theft.”  He complains that there is “no evidence, no empirical evidence, that shows any additional exposure of any authors’ works improves royalties” and calls Google Books “cruel” for “taking away from academics any chance to improve [their] anemic bottom lines.”  Of course, it is easy to see the shift in this paragraph when I put the two sentences together — from no “evidence of improvement” Herring moves immediately to “taking away any chance” of improvement, a leap not justified by logic.  But I am more interested in looking at the decision for what it actually is, a legal opinion at the end of the first stage of a court case.  In that context, should we have expected either Google or the judge to have presented evidence of an improvement in royalties?

The point I want to emphasize is that copyright infringement is a “tort” — a civil (non-criminal) wrong for which courts can provide a remedy.  In structure, a copyright infringement case is not very different from other kinds of tort litigation.  For one thing, there must be a finding of harm.  In copyright infringement cases the harm is often presumed — if a plaintiff shows that their copyright has been infringed, the court will usually presume, subject to rebuttal, that there has been harm.  But a judge is entitled to look at a particular set of circumstances, as Judge Chin did, and decide that he can find no harm.  Some harm is a necessary element of most torts and is explicit as well in the fair use argument (under the market harm factor).  So it is asking the wrong question to require evidence of an improvement in royalties; all the court needed to conclude in order to stay within the framework of legal analysis was that the likelihood was more on the side of such improvement than harm.

To put this another way, the burden of showing harm falls on the plaintiff.

This general framework of tort litigation is also important when we look at another argument Dean Herring makes, that after this case fair use could apply to anything.  He writes, “Determining what fair use is now is anyone’s guess.  Everything is, the way I read it.”  It is a fairly common strategy of those who favor stronger and stronger copyright protection to take the line that copyright, and fair use especially, is too difficult and must be avoided because of its uncertainty.  This hand-wringing about how the court has now abandoned all structure or logic in making a fair use finding is really just another version of that argument, in my opinion.  But fair use remains today what it was before Judge Chin’s ruling, an “equitable rule of reason” that requires courts to examine the specific circumstances of a challenged use and determine, based on those particular facts, if the use was fair.  It is not a bright-line rule, but that does not mean it is random, unpredictable or unusable.

Here is where I want to return to tort litigation, and suggest an analogy I heard a few weeks ago from Peter Jaszi, who teaches copyright law at American University.  He reminded his audience that we have lots of laws that depend on courts determining what is reasonable.  It is very common in contract law, for instance.  But Professor Jaszi focused on a different area of tort law for his analogy for fair use — the law of negligence.  For a driver, for instance, to avoid being guilty of negligence she must exercise “due care,” which is defined as the standard of care that a “reasonably prudent” person would exercise in the same situation.  Arguably, this standard for non-negligent driving is even more nebulous than fair use (where we are given factors to assess the facts).  Yet all of us continue to drive, and I dare say most of us think we know what is an appropriate level of care when we do so.  Most of us, anyway, are not paralyzed with fear because the basic rule about legal driving is so uncertain and subjective.  Nor should we be about fair use.  And, of course, neither “fair use” nor “due care” results in a free-for-all, they just give the courts the discretion to look at specific facts and try to render justice.

The best thing that Professor Jaszi said during his discussion of this parallel, and the thing I have come all this rhetorical distance to repeat, involves how we learn what it means to exercise due care as drivers.  The simple answer is that we talk to other people, and we watch how other people drive.  Over time we develop a flexible but fairly accurate sense of what we should and should not do in a particular situation, even if we have not seen the particular circumstances before.  We do not require rigid rules that anticipate every eventuality in order to dare to get in the car each day; we have internalized that nebulous standard of due care and we carry it with us on each trip.  Sometimes we make mistakes, but most of the time we do just fine.  And here is a model for how we should think about fair use. We learn what it is by talking with others about situations we encounter frequently.  We think through the factors in new circumstances as they arise.  We read how courts have applied those factors in defining ways.  And we become good fair users — fair fair users, if you will — just as we become good drivers.

Fair use is neither an empty notion nor a license to do anything, and one case, not even the Google Books case, cannot make it so.  It remains a flexible tool that is a necessary part of the copyright structure, and one which careful and sensible people can learn to use with care and discernment.

 

Authors' Rights, Copyright Issues and Legislation, Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing, Uncategorized

Publishing ironies

Would Karl Marx have waived his copyright on principle?  I don’t know for sure, but I rather doubt it.  Marx was not entirely in sympathy with Proudhon’s famous assertion that “property is theft,” and in any case probably expected to make at least part of his living off from his intellectual property.  Nevertheless, there is something rather odd about a left-wing press asserting its own copyright to prevent the digital distribution of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels.  Marx’s interests are not being protected, of course; his works have been in the public domain for many years.  But Lawrence & Wishart Publishing wants to protect its own income from this property by asserting a copyright in new material that is contained in the volumes, including notes, introductions and original translations, and it has demanded that the Marxists Internet Archive remove digital copies of the works.

It is interesting to consider who is being hurt by the distribution and by the take down demand.  The distribution, as I say, does no harm to Marx or his descendants, since the copyright has already expired.  The party harmed, of course, is the publisher, which can continue to collect revenue from public domain works, and is entitled to enforce exclusivity if, as in this case, there is new material that is currently protected by copyright.

So we have the irony of Marxist literature being protected by that most capitalist of business structures, a monopoly, and a left-wing press asserting that monopoly to limit dissemination of Marxist ideas.

Does the take down demand harm anyone?  Much of this literature is available in other forms on the Internet, owing to its public domain status.  Potential readers will presumably be harmed, to a degree, because English versions of some more obscure works by Marx and Engels will become unavailable if the translations in the Collected Works were the first of their kind.  But I can’t help thinking that the folks who are really harmed by this decision are the contemporary scholars who contributed to the volumes published by Lawrence and Wishart.  Perhaps they thought that by contributing to a collected works project they had the opportunity to offer a definitive interpretation of some particular essay or letter.  Perhaps they hoped to make an impact on their chosen field of study.  But those opportunities are greatly reduced now.  Potential readers will find the works they are looking for in other editions that remain available in the Archive, or they will not find them at all.  They will look to other scholars to help them understand those works, scholars whose writings are more accessible.

While I cannot dispute the right of Lawrence and Wishart to demand exclusivity, it is a clear reminder about how poorly the traditional system of publishing, based on state-enforced exclusivity, serves scholars in an age when there are so many opportunities in the digital environment to reach a much larger audience.  I suspect that the price of the Collected Works set is high, and the publisher is quite obscure (a colleague here just shrugged when I mentioned the name), so its distribution will be quite limited.  It is a sad illustration of how traditional publishing that relies on subscriptions for digital material is inextricably mired in the print model, trying desperately to reproduce the scarcity of print resources in defiance of the abundance possible in the digital environment.  The losers in that effort are the scholars whose ability to impact their field is deliberately reduced by this effort — beyond their control — to preserve exclusivity and scarcity.

“Beyond their control” leads directly to the other irony from the publishing industry that I want to share in this post.  A colleague recently sent me a PDF of the preliminary program for the conference being held in Boston next month of the Society for Scholarly Publishing.  It was the description of the very first seminar that caught both her eye and mine:

Seminar 1: Open Access Mandates and Open Access “Mandates:” How Much Control Should Scholars Have over Their Work?Many universities now mandate that faculty authors deposit their work in Open Access university repositories.  Others are developing this expectation, but not yet mandating participation.  This seminar will review various mandatory and non-mandatory OA deposit policies, the implementation of different policies, and the responses of faculty members to them.  Panelists will discuss the degree to which academic institutions ought to determine the disposition of publications originating on their campus.

It is hard to believe that the SSP could print this session description with a straight face.  Surely they know that the law deliberately gives scholars a great deal of control over their work, in the form of copyright.  Scholars exercise that control in a variety of ways, including when they vote to adopt an open access policy, as many have done.  So where is the threat to scholar’s control over their own works?  Perhaps at the point where they are required to relinquish their copyright as a condition of publication.  If the SSP were really concerned about scholars having control over their own writings, the panel for this session would be discussing how to modify copyright transfer policies so that scholarly publishers would stop demanding that faculty authors give up all of their rights.

The SSP has carefully written the session description to make it sound like open access policies are imposed on faculty against their will.  But every policy I am aware of was adopted by the faculty themselves, usually after extensive discussions.  And the majority of policies have liberal waiver provisions, so that faculty who do not wish to grant a license for open access do not have to do so.  On the other hand, publishers almost never provide a similar way for authors to opt out of mandatory copyright transfer, other than paying a significant fee for an author-pays OA option, which offers authors a chance to buy what they already own.  Perhaps this concern about authorial control could be channeled into a discussion about the new models of scholarly publishing that are developing that do not require copyright transfer and that seek alternate ways to finance the improved access so many university faculties are indicating they want.

There is a lot to talk about here, especially in terms of authorial control.  Consulting the authors whose material is published in the Collected Works of Marx and Engels might have engendered discussion of a solution to the issue about the Marxists Archive other than simply demanding removal.  Maybe those authors should have resisted the demand to transfer copyright wholesale to Lawrence and Wishart in the first place. But publishers continue to think in terms of total control over the works they publish; that is the real threat to authors and that is the problem that the SSP ought to be addressing.

Copyright Information Notes, Public Domain

Of songs and chairs, or why do we need a public domain

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I recently received an email from an author asking me if I would write a post about why we need a public domain.  Specifically, the questioner asked me why some things pass into the public domain while others do not; his example was that if you write a song, it eventually becomes PD, but if you make a chair you can keep it forever and “continue to draw enjoyment from it.”

It is understandable that the public domain is a source of annoyance and bewilderment to many creators.  Their creations often seem like their children, and the expiration of copyright like an act of snatching those children away.  My correspondent suggested that more people do not challenge the public domain “because everyone likes free.”  But as I hope to suggest in this public answer to the question, the public domain is not free at all; it is purchased at the price of the copyright monopoly. The two things are different sides of the same coin.  Were it not for the state-granted exclusive rights in copyright, there would be no need for the public domain.  And we can imagine such a social arrangement; I just do not believe that most creators would think of it as an improvement.

We can begin with a deceptively simple question: Why is a chair different from a song?  There are two reasons that matter here, I think.  The first is that the song is intangible, which means that it is, in economic terms, “non-rivalrous.” and non-exclusive.  That is a fancy way of saying that multiple people can possess an intangible good at the same time.  George Bernard Shaw is credited with having expressed this truth succinctly:

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple.  But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchanges these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

Obviously I can sing a favorite song without depriving anyone else of that pleasure, just as books can be printed in multiple copies so that many people can enjoy the same work without disturbing each others’ enjoyment.  Only one person can sit in a chair at the same time, however (usually, at least).

The other difference is that a chair, as a piece of tangible property, is bought and sold on a basically unregulated market.  The chair maker sells her creation to whomever she can find, and once she does so, she surrenders control of it entirely.  If another carpenter wants to copy it, he can do so and try to sell his copies.  If he charges less, the competition will benefit chair buyers but not chair makers, since it will probably drive prices down.  That is simply the chance one takes in a free market.

The market for intangible goods is not a free market, however.  It is controlled by a state-granted monopoly called copyright. That is, the state gives a copyright holder rights that makers of other types of goods do not get.  The most obvious one is protection against copying.  The chair maker takes her chances in an open market, but the song writer benefits from a protected market that virtually eliminates competition for the goods he wants to sell.  No one is allowed to make copies of his song and sell it for less, or to perform it in public without his permission, and those prohibitions are enforced by our courts.  The reason for this is the fear that if intangible property were subject to a free market, it would be too easy to make copies of songs or books or movies and sell them for less, just as carpenters are allowed to do.  This would be good for consumers, of course, because it would lower prices, but it is felt that it would so reduce the incentive for creators to create that we would suffer a shortage of poems and songs and films.  Thus we give extra rights — rights that come with a social cost — to people who create intangible goods, and we call those rights “copyright.”

There is a clear relationship between these extra rights we give to copyright holders, that other creators and sellers of goods do not have, and the need for a public domain.  Imagine for a minute that we gave similar protection against copying to chair makers.  Eventually the ability to make a new chair would evaporate, since all of the possible designs that could serve the chair function would have been done by others, and all new chairs would be infringing.  How could we solve this problem?  By declaring that after a certain period of time — a period long enough for the chair maker to profit from his creation — older chairs would become free for others to imitate.  This “public domain” for chairs would be required to keep up the supply of places to sit, if we decided to grant a state-enforced monopoly in chair design similar to copyright.

So the public domain is a required part of a system that allows creators to have monopoly control.  It reduces the social cost of the monopoly by allowing less expensive editions of books or songs after that period during which an author or songwriter has the opportunity to make a profit.  Remember that a chair maker can profit only once, when she sells the chair she has made.  She must keep making chairs if she is to sustain a living.  An author, on the other hand is allowed to profit exclusively during his entire lifetime for writing just one book, and even to pass that exclusive right to make a profit on to his children and, probably, grandchildren (based on a copyright term of life of the author plus seventy years).  This obviously has a social cost; would J.D. Salenger have written more great novels if he had not been able to make a fortune over the 6o years of his life after Catcher in the Rye from sales of just that one book?

The most onerous cost of the copyright monopoly would be this potential reduction in new creativity.  The creation of new works depends in so many cases on building upon things that have gone before.  Shakespeare copied freely from earlier sources, just as George Harrison copied, albeit unconsciously, when he wrote “My Sweet Lord.”  New intellectual property is always created “standing on the shoulders of giants,” and the public domain is a way to ensure that the copyright monopoly does not become a check on new creation rather than the incentive it is supposed to be.  This is why the Constitution, in the clause that authorizes Congress to grant a copyright monopoly, stipulates that that monopoly be “for a limited time.”  The public domain is a required part of the social and legal system of copyright protection.

As I said at the beginning, it is possible to imagine an alternative social system.  Suppose we decided that we wanted neither exclusive rights (the copyright monopoly) nor the public domain. Instead, as a society we decided that authors and songwriters should be on the same footing as carpenters and everyone else who created tangible goods; all should compete on an equal footing in a free market.  In the short term, this might be good for consumers.  Songwriters would have to sell their songs once for the most money they could get, since their ability to make continuing profits over time would diminish.  Companies and consumers would then be free to either share the song freely or undercut the sale price of competitors, so it would be easier and cheaper to obtain music, and the threat of litigation over sharing would vanish.  In the long term term, it is hard to say whether this would be beneficial or harmful.  The conventional wisdom is that creators would stop creating because they could not make a living.  But maybe they would become more like carpenters, depending for continuing income on continuous creation.  If that happened, society would benefit from more creation instead of less.  As for the public domain, without the exclusive rights in copyright, society would not suffer the same costs and therefore would not need the same bargain that results in the public domain.  And creators would be in the same situation, again, as chair makers; they could enjoy their creation in perpetuity, as long as they decided not to sell it.  But, like the chair, once the song was sold it would be beyond the creators control forever.

I doubt that this scenario appeals to many creators.  But I hope it helps illustrate why copyright and the public domain are inseparable concepts; they go together, as the old song says, like love and marriage.

Copyright Issues and Legislation, Fair Use, international IP

Nimmer on infringement 2.0

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I was reminded once again of Mark Twain’s comment — “Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet” — as I listened to Professor David Nimmer deliver the annual Frey Lecture in Intellectual Property at the Duke Law School this week.  As the person now responsible for revising and updating the seminal treatise Nimmer on Copyright, which was begun by his father over fifty years ago, Professor Nimmer has the monumental task of trying to make U.S. copyright law and jurisprudence coherent by creating a framework that makes it all (or most of it) make sense.  Judging from his lecture, it is a task he embraces with grace, humor and aplomb.

The title of Nimmer’s lecture was “Infringement 2.0,” and his overall framework involved the changing role of copyright and infringement in the current environment, where copyright protects every scrap of original expression, whether the creator needs or wants that protection, and where copying and widespread distribution can be accomplished with the click of a mouse.  I want to try to outline several points from the lecture that seemed especially interesting to me (fully recognizing that I alone am responsible for any misrepresentations of Prof. Nimmer’s meaning).

Nimmer began with a more qualified definition of infringement that we tend to think about normally, in my opinion — the unauthorized wholesale copying of works of high authorship.  Not just unauthorized copying, but wholesale copying of works of high authorship.  This definition seems to suggest that courts should not spend time worrying about copyrights in family photos and other ephemera; Nimmer even raised the question of whether we should protect pornography, although he immediately recognized the First Amendment issues that such a stance would raise.

With this qualified definition of infringement as a starting place, Nimmer took us on a tour of some recent copyright rulings.  What I found really interesting was his suggestion that courts are using fair use, in the digital environment to approximate the qualified definition of infringement that he suggested.  Two examples will have to suffice.  In the case involving the anti-plagiarism software Turnitin (A.V. v. iParadigms), the Fourth Circuit rejected an infringement claim based on the copying of entire student papers that are submitted to the service and stored to be used for comparison against later submissions.  The Court reached this result by finding that Turnitin’s use was a fair use, and Nimmer suggested that this use did not meet his qualified definition of an infringement because it did not copy works of “high authorship.”  More significantly, perhaps, Nimmer also approved of the District Court decision in last year’s Google Books case that Google’s scanning of millions of titles was a fair use.  In his framework, Google’s scanning did not amount to “wholesale” copying; even though entire works are scanned in to the database, users see only “snippets,” and those very short excerpts serve important social purposes.

Whatever one may think of the individual cases, this was a fascinating approach.  The copyright law says that what is fair use is not, therefore, infringement, so it makes perfect sense, for one sufficiently learned and bold, to try to understand fair use jurisprudence by looking at the limits on infringement that are thus defined by implication.

Another topic Nimmer addressed at length was the doctrine of first sale, and he was highly critical of the Ninth Circuit decision in Vernor v. Autodesk, which found that Mr. Vernor committed copyright infringement when he resold legal copies of CAD DVDs in apparent violation of licensing terms.   The Ninth Circuit spent a lot of time examining those license terms, but Nimmer suggested that they were asking the wrong question.  The proper question here, he suggested, was not “was this a sale or a licensing transaction,” as the Court assumed, but rather “who was the legitimate owner of the material substrate that made up this copy?”  He pointed out that in both the foundational Supreme Court case about first sale, from 1908, and in last year’s decision in the Kirtsaeng case, the Court was dealing with legal copies where an attempt had been made, through a license, to restrict downstream resale of those copies.  In both cases the Supreme Court ignored those attempts at licensing and allowed the legitimate owner of the material copies to resell the works on whatever terms he could negotiate.  Based on those precedents, Nimmer suggested that the Ninth Circuit erred when it found that Vernor had infringed copyright with his resale, based on provisions in the purported license.

Another place where Nimmer suggested a radical way to rethink the copyright environment was on the international front.  He asserted that the foundational principles of international copyright agreements — the prohibition of formalities and so-called “national treatment” — simply do not make sense in the Internet age, where potential copyright infringements nearly always cross national borders, and copyright owners are often impossible to locate.  He suggested that this out-dated approach be replaced by something the U.N. and the W.I.P.O could do very well — a searchable, worldwide registry for copyright owners that Nimmer called a “panopticon.”  His idea is that if a copyright owner has registered his or her work in the panopticon, they would be entitled to significant remedies for any act of infringement that is found.  If they do not register, however, a action for infringement could only result in an award based on actual losses, not the much more substantial “statutory damages” that are often available.

This idea is nothing if not ambitious, but its foundations are commonsensical.  If copyright protection is going to be completely automatic, and no notice on individual works is required, it is unfair to insist that users must have authorization for their uses if the rights holders have done nothing at all to make their claims known or to facilitate asking for permission.  Lots of other property rights regimes have notice or registration rules (think of buying a house or a car) and those rules are in place to protect the owner.  Why not a similar regime for international copyright, with an incentive, in terms of potential recovery available, for participation?

Finally, I want to end with Nimmer’s prediction about the prospect of a new copyright act in the United States.  It seemed that he does believe that Congress will seriously undertake such a thoroughgoing revision of the law, and he suggested a betting pool on when the new copyright act would pass.  For himself, he wanted to reserve a date in May of 2029.  So we have that to look forward to.

 

Authors' Rights, Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing

Attacking academic values

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A new thing started happening here at Duke this week; we began getting inquiries from some faculty authors about how to obtain a formal waiver of our faculty open access policy.  We have had that policy in place for over three years, but for the first time a single publisher — the Nature Publishing Group — is telling all authors at Duke that they must obtain a waiver of the policy before their accepted articles can be published.  It is not clear why NPG suddenly requires these waivers after publishing many articles in the past three years by Duke authors, while the policy was in force and without waivers.

Indeed, the waivers are essentially meaningless because of the way Duke has implemented its open access policy.  When the policy was adopted unanimously by our Academic Council in March 2010, the statement in favor of openness was pretty clear, but so was the instruction that implementing the policy not become a burden to our faculty authors.  So throughout the ensuing years we have tried to ensure that all archiving of published work in our repository be done in compliance with any publisher policies to which our authors have agreed.  NPG allows authors to archive final submitted manuscripts after a six month delay, so that is what we would do, whether or not the author sought a policy waiver.  But suddenly that is not good enough; Nature wants a formal waiver even though it will have no practical effect.  The demand seems to be an effort to punish authors at institutions that adopt open access policies.

There are some comical aspects to this sudden requirement for waivers.  As I said, it seems to have taken NPG three years to figure out that Duke has an open access policy, even though we have made no secret of the fact.  Even more oddly, the e-mail that our faculty authors are getting from NPG lists nine schools from whose faculty such waivers are being required; apparently it was only four schools until recently.  But there are over thirty institutions with faculty-adopted OA policies in the U.S. alone.  Some of the largest schools and the oldest policies have not yet showed up on Nature’s radar; one wonders how they can be so unaware of the scholarly landscape on which their business depends.  NPG looks silly and poorly-informed, frankly, in the eyes of the academic authors I have spoken to.

In addition to making NPG look foolish, this belated demand for waivers has had positive effects for open access on our campus.  For one thing, it simply reminds our authors about the policy and gives us a chance to talk to them about it.  We explain why Nature’s demand is irrelevant and grant the waivers as a matter of course, while reminding each author that they can still voluntarily archive their work in compliance with the rights they have retained (which is the same situation as without the waiver).  I suspect that this move by NPG will actually increase the self-archiving of Nature articles in our repository.

Another effect of these new demands is that open access and the unreasonable demands of some commercial publishers has gotten back on the radar of our senior administrators.  Our policy allows the Provost to designate someone to grant waivers, and, in figuring our who that would be, we had a robust conversation that focused on how this demand is an attack on the right of our faculty to determine academic policy.

This last point is why I have moved, in the past few days, from laughing at the bumbling way NPG seems to be fighting its battle against OA policies to a sense of real outrage.  This effort to punish faculty who have voted for an internal and perfectly legal open access policy is nothing less than an attack on one of the core principles of academic freedom, faculty governance.  NPG thinks it has the right to tell faculties what policies are good for them and which are not, and to punish those who disagree.

As my sense of outrage grew, I began to explore the NPG website.  Initially I was looking to see if authors were told about the waiver requirement upfront.  As far as I can tell, they are not, in spite of rhetoric about transparency in the “information for authors” page.  The need for a waiver is not even mentioned on the  checklist that is supposed to guide authors through the publication process.  It seems that this requirement is communicated to authors only after their papers have been accepted.  I suspect that NPG is ashamed of their stratagem, and in my opinion they should be.  But as I looked at NPG policies, and especially its License to Publish, my concern for our authors grew much deeper.

Two concerns make me think that authors need to be carefully warned before they publish in an NPG journal.

First, because this contract is a license and tells authors that they retain copyright, it may give authors a false sense that they are keeping something valuable.  But a careful reading shows that the retention of copyright under this license is essentially a sham.  The license is exclusive and irrevocable, and it encompasses all of the rights granted under copyright.  It lasts for as long as copyright itself last.  In short, authors are left with nothing at all, except the limited set of rights that are granted back to authors by the agreement.  This is not much different than publishing with other journals that admit up front that they require a transfer of copyright; my concern is that this one is dressed up as a license, so authors may not realize that they are being just as completely shorn of their rights as they are by other publishers.

My bigger concern, however, is found in clause 7 of the NPG “license,” which reads in its entirety:

The Author(s) hereby waive or agree not to assert (where such waiver is not
possible at law) any and all moral rights they may now or in the future hold
in connection with the Contribution and the Supplementary Information.
I don’t think most publishers require authors to waive moral rights (I have actually added them in to a publication contract), and insisting on doing so is a serious threat to core academic values.  Moral rights are recognized by most countries of the world (including the UK, where NPG has its corporate offices) and usually include two basic rights — the right of attribution and the right to preserve the integrity of one’s work.  The United States is something of an outlier in that we do not have a formal recognition of moral rights in our copyright law, although we always assert that these values are protected by other laws.  But my point here is to wonder why NPG requires all of its authors to waive their right of attribution.  This is not an incidental matter; the clause is carefully structured to attempt to get authors even from the countries that do not allow the waiver of moral rights — they are considered that important —  still to promise not to assert those rights (whether or not that would be enforceable in those countries).  Nature actively does not want its authors to be able to insist that their names always be associated with their work.  Why?  Does NPG imagine reusing articles it is given to publish in other ways, without providing proper attribution?  If this seems like a remote possibility, it remains the only conceivable reason that NPG would insert this bizarre clause.
So this week I discovered two ways in which Nature Publishing Group is actively attacking core academic values.  First, by trying to interfere in academic policy decisions made through independent faculty governance processes.  Second, by trying to exempt themselves from the core principle of scholarship that scholars should get credit for the work they do.  Authors publish with Nature because they believe that the brand enhances their reputation.  But by giving NPG the ability to disassociate their work from their name, that value of the Nature brand is lost.  Why would any author agree to that?
Starting with those silly demands for a waiver of the open access policy, I discovered a much deeper threat being posed to our faculty authors.  With each waiver request I now have to have a conversation with all authors who publish with NPG.  I will use those conversations as an opportunity to encourage self-archiving.  But I now know that I also must warn authors that by signing the NPG license they are giving up the most precious thing they have — the right to get credit for their work.  I hope many of our authors will reconsider signing that license unaltered.  Since NPG has singled us out, I will now be singling out NPG for its especially egregious attack on fundamental academic values.

 

Copyright Issues and Legislation, Scholarly Publishing

More than meets the eye

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When I first saw the story about the conflict between the Social Science History Association (SSHA) and Duke University Press (DUP), I thought I had best not comment about it. But since then a number of my colleagues have gotten in touch with me and also made comments about the case that miss some essential elements, in my opinion. So I decided I will express my opinion about the dispute thus far, which is that there is probably no good outcome to this case.

Let me start by saying, however, that even though I work for Duke and specialize in copyright issues, I have absolutely no involvement in this case and no “insider” information. As Will Rogers said, “all I know is what I read in the papers.” What I say here is my own opinion based on those reports and nothing more.

The basic facts are easy to restate.  The SSHA has informed DUP that it wants to end its long-standing association and look for a different publisher for its flagship journal, Social Science History.  The Press, however, asserts that language in their original contract means that the SSHA can stop participating in the journal, but cannot remove it from the control of DUP.

The first point I would make about this dispute is that it involves a specific piece of contract language that is probably unusual.  For that reason I think some of the comments about how this case might determine the future for lots of other society journals are exaggerated.  My guess is that this case will eventually be resolved through an interpretation of that specific language and thus, even if there is a court decision instead of a settlement, it will not have too much of a ripple effect.

Most of the comments I have seen (from librarians and academics) have assumed that Duke University Press is the bad guy here, trying to wrest control of a scholarly journal out of the hands of scholars.  While I do not intend to mount a defense of DUP here, I do want to suggest that there is more to this case than a good v. evil argument about academic freedom.  This is a business disagreement, and regardless of which side wins, in my opinion, it will probably not be a good outcome for scholarship.

To understand a lawsuit, it is always a good practice to ask why the plaintiff decided to file the litigation in the first place.  A commenter on the Chronicle story linked above suggests that it is hard to understand in this case, since he believes the results could not justify the costs.  But surely the SSHA thought it was worthwhile, and a little deeper reflection suggests why.  In their statement, the SSHA explains that they wanted to “assess the open market” to find out what Social Science History is “worth.”  That should tell us pretty clearly that the SSHA wants to shop the journal around to the big commercial publishers in order to get a big payout to the Association.  Other societies have done it before, and it seems clear that the SSHA wants to cash in on its journal.  So the reason the lawsuit is worth the expense is that the SSHA has expectations of perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit if they can sell their “brand name” journal to Wiley or Sage.

By the way, this is why the society would not be satisfied to simply walk away and start up a new journal to compete with a continuing Social Science History published by DUP, as that same commentator suggests.  As I said, this is a business dispute, and the key asset at issue is the brand of the journal, its “goodwill” as it is called in economic valuations.  Presumably no large commercial press would be willing to pay big money for a new start-up that the SSHA might launch if it lost control over Social Science History.  The marketing and the value for a new purchaser depends on that well-established title being on the auction block.

So what will be the result if the SSHA wins this lawsuit or gets control over the title in a settlement?  I think the inevitable result will be a sale to a large commercial publisher and subsequently much higher subscription rates for libraries and other subscribers.  In previous cases where a society has sold its journal or journals to a big publishers, we have seen prices increase by as much as three or four hundred percent, especially if the journal has had a fairly moderate price to begin with (I have no idea about the current subscription price for Social Science History).  Nor do I think that a win by the SSHA would necessarily be a win for academic freedom or for keeping scholarship in the hands of scholars.  If the journal is sold to a large publisher, experience suggests that the scholars who make up the society will have less control over it than they did before and that the quality of the journal will decline.  But lots of money will potentially flow into the SSHA coffers.

What happens if, on the other hand, Duke University Press wins the case or otherwise retains control over the journal?  In my opinion, DUP has taken the stand that it has in large part to defend the value of its journal list against the loss of one of its premier titles.  So if they win, at least their journal package will not lose value.  But this is still probably not a good outcome, since the journal will be divorced from its roots and from the scholarly community that has made it a valuable brand in the first place.  As several people have suggested, DUP might have a hard time finding top scholars in the field who would be willing to edit the journal or review for it if it is severed from its connection to their scholarly society.  So while its value for DUP would be preserved initially, I think a decline in quality and in value over time is inevitable.

This is why I find it impossible to root for either side in this dispute (even though I usually root for Duke teams).  To me, this case is an object lesson in why scholarship should not be treated as a commodity around which commercial value, and the disputes that accompany such value, accrues.  The radical distinction between the “gift economy” in which individual scholars work, giving away their most precious intellectual assets to publishers without remuneration for the sake of the scholarly mission, and the commercial economy in which publishers work, and to which some societies aspire, was never more clear.  Whoever wins this case, the scholars who donate their labor as authors, editors and reviewers for this journal will be the long-term losers.  And the only way to change that situation is to radically rethink they way scholarship is supported and disseminated.  We need new business models, focused on open access and better ways to support the scholarly mission, while all this dispute offers us is a fight over the way the same old traditional pie of subscription money is sliced.

Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing, Technologies, Uncategorized

Walking the talk

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All of the presentations at the SPARC Open Access meeting this week were excellent.  But there was one that was really special; an early career researcher named Erin McKiernan who brought everyone in the room to their feet to applaud her commitment to open access.  We are sometimes told that only established scholars who enjoy the security of tenure can “afford” to embrace more open ways to disseminate their work.  But Dr. McKiernan explained to us both the “why” and the “how” of a deep commitment to OA on the part of a younger scholar who is not willing to embrace traditional, toll-access publishing or to surrender her goals of advancing scholarship and having an academic career.

Erin McKiernan is a Ph.D from the University of Arizona who is now working as a scientist and teacher in Latin America.  Her unique experience informs her perspective on why young scholars should embrace open access.  Dr. McKiernan is a researcher in medical science at the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico and teaches (or has taught) at a couple of institutions in Latin America.  For her, the issue is that open access is fundamental to her ability to do her job; she told us that the research library available to her and her colleagues has subscriptions to only 139 journals, far fewer that most U.S. researchers expect to be able to consult.  Twenty-two of that number are only available in print format, because electronic access is too expensive.  This group includes key titles like Nature and Cell.  A number of other titles that U.S. researchers take for granted as core to their work — she mentioned Nature Medicine and PNAS — are entirely unavailable because of cost.  So in an age when digital communications ought to, at the very least, facilitate access to information needed to improve health and treat patients, the cost of these journals is, in Dr. McKiernan’s words, “impeding my colleagues’ ability to save lives.”  She made clear that some of these journals are so expensive that the choice is often between a couple of added subscriptions or the salary of a researcher.

This situation ought to be intolerable, and for Dr. McKiernan it is.  She outlined for us a personal pledge that ought to sound quite familiar.  First, she will not write, edit or review for a closed-access journal. Second, she will blog about her scientific research and post preprints of her articles so that her work is both transparent and accessible.  Finally, she told us that if a colleague chose to publish a paper on which she was a joint author in a closed-access journal, she would remove her name from that work.  This is a comprehensive and passionately-felt commitment to do science in the open and to make it accessible to everyone who could benefit from it — clinicians, patients and the general public as well as other scholars.

Listening to Dr. McKiernan, I was reminded of a former colleague who liked to say that he “would rather do my job than keep my job.”  But, realistically, Dr. McKiernan wants to have a career as a teacher and research scientist.  So she directly addressed the concerns we often hear that this kind of commitment to open access is a threat to promotion and tenure in the world of academia.  We know, of course, that some parts of this assertion are based on false impressions and bad information, such as the claim that open access journals are not peer-reviewed or that such peer-review is necessarily less rigorous than in traditional subscription journals.  This is patently false and really makes little sense — why should good peer-review be tied to a particular business model?  Dr. McKiernan pointed out that peer-review is a problem, but not just for open access journals.  We have all seen the stories about growing retraction rates and gibberish articles.  But these negative perceptions about OA persist, and Dr. McKiernan offered concrete suggestions for early-career researchers who want to work in the open and also get appropriate credit for their work.  Her list of ideas was as follows (with some annotations that I have added):

1. Make a list of open access publication options in your particular field.  Chances are you will be surprised by the range of possibilities.

2.  Discuss access issues with your collaborators up front, before the research is done and the articles written.

3. Write funds for article processing charges for Gold open access journals into all of your grant applications.

4. Document your altmetrics.

5. Blog about your science, and in language that is comprehensible to non-scientists.  Doing this can ultimately increase the impact of your work and can even lead sometimes to press coverage and to better press coverage.

6. Be active on social media.  This is the way academic reputations are built today, so ignoring the opportunities presented is unwise.

7. If for some reason you do publish a closed-access article, remember that you still have Green open access options available; you can self-archive a copy of your article in a disciplinary or institutional repository.  Dr. McKiernan mentioned that she uses FigShare for her publications.

The most exciting thing about Erin McKiernan’s presentation was that it demolished, for many of us, the perception of open access as a risky choice for younger academics.  After listening to her expression of such a heartfelt commitment — and particularly the pictures of the people for whom she does her work, which puts a more human face on the cost of placing subscription barriers on scholarship — I began to realize that, in reality, OA is the only choice.

 

 

 

 

Copyright in the Classroom, Libraries, Scholarly Publishing, Technologies

Please propose to us

Later this year, the first in a new series of Scholarly Communication Institutes will be held here in the Research Triangle and we are looking for proposals from diverse and creative teams of people who are interested in projects that have the potential to reshape scholarly communications.

Last year the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded a three-year project to continue the long-running Scholarly Communications Institute which has previously been held at the University of Virginia.  Starting in November, the new SCI will be hosted by Duke in close collaborations with UNC Chapel Hill, NC State University, North Carolina Central University and the Triangle Research Libraries Network.  This new iteration of the SCI will benefit, we believe, from the extraordinary depth and diversity of resources related to innovation in scholarly communications here in the Triangle, and it will also take on a new format, in which participants will have a major role in setting the agenda each year.

Starting this year — starting right now! — the SCI invites applications from working groups of 3 – 8 people that are organized around a project or problem that concerns scholarly communications.  These working groups can and should be diverse, consisting of scholars, librarians, publishers, technologists and folks from outside academia (journalist? museums? non-profits?).  We hope that proposals will be very creative about connections, and include people that would like to work together even if they have not previously been able to do so.

The SCI Advisory panel will select 3 to 5 of these working group proposals and cover the costs for those teams to travel to the Triangle and spend four days together  in Chapel Hill in a setting that is part retreat, part seminar, part development sprint and part un-conference.  We want these groups to work together and to interact.  The groups will, we hope, jump-start their own projects and “cross-pollinate” ideas that will advance and challenge each others projects and discussions.

The theme for the 2014 SCI is Scholarship and the Crowd.  It will be held November 9-13 at the Rizzo Center in Chapel Hill, NC.  Proposals are due by March 24.

The goal of the SCI is not to schedule breakthroughs but create conditions that favor them.  The Working Groups selected will set the agenda and define the deliverables.  The Institute will offer the space , the environment and the network of peers to foster creative thinking, with the hope of both advancing the specific projects and also developing ideas and perspectives that can give those projects a broader potential to influence the landscape of publishing, digital humanities and other topics related to scholarly communications.

If you or someone you know might be interested in developing a proposal for this first Triangle-based SCI, you will find the call for proposals and an FAQ at trianglesci.org.