The bill specifically covers unclassified research funded by agencies including:
Department of Agriculture
Department of Commerce
Department of Defense
Department of Education
Department of Energy
Department of Health and Human Services
Department of Homeland Security
Department of Transportation
Environmental Protection Agency
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
National Science Foundation
S. 1373 reflects the growing trend among funding agencies and college and university campuses to leverage their investment in the conduct of research by maximizing the dissemination of results. It follows the successful path forged by the NIH Public Access Policy, as well as by private funders like the Wellcome Trust, and universities such as Harvard and MIT.
The Library has requested that our Washington government relations liaison contact our representatives in support of this bill.
If you would like to voice your opinion on this bill to our representatives, an easy way to do so has been provided at the Alliance for Taxpayer Access website:
http://www.congressweb.com/cweb4/index.cfm?orgcode=sparc
You may use one of their pre-written forms, or compose your own.
Detailed information about the Federal Research Public Access Act is available at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/Release09-0625.html.
Or read the text of the bill, online.
This memo was clipped from a longer message received from:
Heather Joseph
Spokesperson for the Alliance for Taxpayer Access and Executive Director of SPARC
Telephone: (202) 296-2296
Email: heather [at] arl [dot] org
"The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital.
Within two years, press officials expect well over 50 of the 60-plus monographs that the press publishes each year -- currently in book form -- to be released only in digital editions. Readers will still be able to use print-on-demand systems to produce versions that can be held in their hands, but the press will consider the digital monograph the norm. Many university presses are experimenting with digital publishing, but the Michigan announcement may be the most dramatic to date by a major university press.
The shift by Michigan comes at a time that university presses are struggling. With libraries' budgets constrained, many presses have for years been struggling to sell significant numbers of monographs -- which many junior professors need to publish to earn tenure -- and those difficulties have only been exacerbated by the economic downturn. The University of Missouri Press and the State University of New York Press both have announced layoffs in recent months, while Utah State University Press is facing the possibility of a complete elimination of university support.
Michigan officials say that their move reflects a belief that it's time to stop trying to make the old economics of scholarly publishing work. ...
While Pochoda [director of the Michigan press] acknowledged that Michigan risks offending a few authors and readers not ready for the switch, he said there is a huge upside to making the move now.
Because digital publishing is so much less expensive -- with savings both in printing and distribution -- the press expects to be able to publish more books, and to distribute them electronically to a much broader audience. Michigan officials said that they don't plan to cut the budget of the press -- but to devote resources to peer review and other costs of publishing that won't change with the new model. Significantly, they said, the press would no longer have to reject books deemed worthy from a scholarly perspective, but viewed as unable to sell.
"We will certainly be able to publish books that would not have survived economic tests," said Pochoda. "And we'll be able to give all of our books much broader distribution." ...
Teresa A. Sullivan, Michigan's provost, ... said she would like to move to the idea that a university press should be judged by its contribution to scholarship, not "profit or loss," which has become too central as the economics of print publishing have deteriorated. ...
In terms of pricing, Sullivan said that Michigan planned to develop site licenses so that libraries could gain access to all of the press's books over the course of a year for a flat rate. While details aren't firm, the idea is to be "so reasonable that maybe every public library could acquire it.""
... read the rest of the Inside Higher Ed article for e-book experiments at other university presses.
ps... More: The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that the U of Michigan Press will become a unit of the University Library. Read more (U of Illinois access link).
]]>The /MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers/ (Modern Language Association) has been updated. A couple of the changes show the sea-change scholarship is undergoing:
* "no longer recognizes print as the default medium, and suggests
that the medium of publication should be included in each works
cited entry "
* "the MLA has ceased to recommend inclusion of URLs in citing
Web-based works "
In addition, much of the Handbook is now only available online, and thus only available to individuals who have paid for a copy of the Handbook:
The latest edition of the standard style guide for language and literary study is thinner than the last (and considerably less shiny) – thinner because it is the first to be complemented by a Web component. The password-protected Web site includes the full (and searchable) text of the handbook, plus 200 online-only examples, and a series of 30-plus-step narratives taking undergraduates through the process of writing a paper, complete with model papers available in PDF form and professors' sample comments.]]>
The basis theses of the NIH mandate is that research publications that were supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health -- we have many researchers on this campus who are so supported -- must be made freely available to all within year of publication. The thought is that the citizens paid for the research so they should have access to it!
The publishers are saying that this infringes on their copyrights, but the mandate requires the authors to make available THEIR version of their work; that is, the version before they hand over copyrights to the publishers (which we're encouraging them NOT to do, but that's another story!)
Read on for more information as well as a recommendation that we contact our congressmen about this proposed legislation.
Katie Newman
U of Illinois Biotechnology Librarian
----------------
From: Jennifer McLennan
Subject: [SPARC-ADVOCACY] CALL TO ACTION: Ask your Representative to oppose the H.R. 801 The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act
Last week, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee (Rep. John Conyers, D-MI) re-introduced a bill that would reverse the NIH Public Access Policy and make it impossible for other federal agencies to put similar policies into place. The legislation is H.R. 801: the “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act” ( http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.111hr801).
All supporters of public access – researchers, libraries, campus administrators, patient advocates, publishers, and others – are asked to please contact your Representative no later than February 28, 2009 to express your support for public access to taxpayer-funded research and ask that he or she oppose H.R.801. Draft letter text is included below. As always, it’s important to let us know what action you’re able to take, via http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/log.html.
H.R. 801 is designed to amend current copyright law and create a new category of copyrighted works (Section 201, Title 17). In effect, it would:
1. Prohibit all U.S. federal agencies from conditioning funding agreements to require that works resulting from federal support be made publicly available if those works are either: a) funded in part by sources other than a U.S. agency, or b) the result of "meaningful added value" to the work from an entity that is not party to the agreement.
2. Prohibit U.S. agencies from obtaining a license to publicly distribute, perform, or display such work by, for example, placing it on the Internet.
3. Stifle access to a broad range of federally funded works, overturning the crucially important NIH Public Access Policy and preventing other agencies from implementing similar policies.
4. Because it is so broadly framed, the proposed bill would require an overhaul of the well-established procurement rules in effect for all federal agencies, and could disrupt day-to-day procurement practices across the federal government.
5. Repeal the longstanding "federal purpose" doctrine, under which all federal agencies that fund the creation of a copyrighted work reserve the "royalty-free, nonexclusive right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work" for any federal purpose. This will severely limit the ability of U.S. federal agencies to use works that they have funded to support and fulfill agency missions and to communicate with and educate the public.
Because of the NIH Public Access Policy, millions of Americans now have access to vital health care information through the PubMed Central database. Under the current policy, nearly 3,000 new biomedical manuscripts are deposited for public accessibility each month. H.R.801 would prohibit the deposit of these manuscripts, seriously impeding the ability of researchers, physicians, health care professionals, and families to access and use this critical health-related information in a timely manner.
All supporters of public access -- researchers, libraries, campus administrators, patient advocates, publishers, and others -- are asked to contact their Representatives to let them know you support public access to federally funded research and oppose H.R. 801. Again, the proposed legislation would effectively reverse the NIH Public Access Policy, as well as make it impossible for other federal agencies to put similar policies into place.
Thank you for your support and continued persistence in supporting this policy. You know the difference constituent voices can make on Capitol Hill.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact Heather or myself anytime.
All best,
Jennifer
--------------------------
Jennifer McLennan
Director of Communications
SPARC
(The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition)
http://www.arl.org/sparc
(202) 296-2296 ext 121
jennifer@arl.org
Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.
-------------------------
Draft letter text:
Dear Representative;
On behalf of [your organization], I strongly urge you to oppose H.R. 801, “the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act,” introduced to the House Judiciary Committee on February 3, 2009. This bill would amend the U.S. Copyright Code, prohibiting federal agencies from requiring as a condition of funding agreements public access to the products of the research they fund. This will significantly inhibit our ability to advance scientific discovery and to stimulate innovation in all scientific disciplines.
Most critically, H.R. 801 would reverse the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy, prohibit American taxpayers from accessing the results of the crucial biomedical research funded by their taxpayer dollars, and stifle critical advancements in life-saving research and scientific discovery.
Because of the NIH Public Access Policy, millions of Americans now have access to vital health care information from the NIH’s PubMed Central database. Under the current policy, nearly 3,000 new biomedical manuscripts are deposited for public accessibility each month. H.R.801 would prohibit the deposit of these manuscripts, seriously impeding the ability of researchers, physicians, health care professionals, and families to access and use this critical health-related information in a timely manner.
H.R. 801 affects not only the results of biomedical research produced by the NIH, but also scientific research coming from all other federal agencies. Access to critical information on energy, the environment, climate change, and hundreds of other areas that directly impact the lives and well being of the public would be unfairly limited by this proposed legislation.
[Why you support taxpayer access and the NIH policy].
The NIH and other agencies must be allowed to ensure timely, public access to the results of research funded with taxpayer dollars. Please oppose H.R.801.
Sincerely,
(name)
[END LETTER TEXT]
A bill aimed at limiting the open-access publishing policy adopted by the National Institutes of Health has been re-introduced in the US House of Representatives by Rep. John Conyers (D – Mich.), after the same legislation expired at the end of the 110th Congress.
The law would effectively overturn the policy NIH put into effect last year mandating that all NIH-funded investigators must submit electronic versions of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central within a year after they are officially published.
Read the rest of the article...
See also Peter Suber's early comments about this development...
From the piece:
The first paper scheduled is "A Survey of Nematode SmY RNAs"1; its corresponding Wikipedia summary can be found here.The goal is to encourage more scientists who work on RNA to get involved in creating and updating public data on RNA families, while being rewarded by the traditional method of a citable publication, says Sean Eddy, a computational biologist at the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia, and a co-author of the nematode article.
... The RNA wiki is a subset of a broader project, the WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology, which has marshalled hundreds of scientists to improve the content of biology articles in Wikipedia. It, in turn, is collaborating with the Novartis Research Foundation on GeneWiki, an effort to create Wikipedia articles describing every human gene. Beyond Wikipedia itself, scientists are also increasingly using wiki technology to get scientists to help curate other biological databases (see Nature 455, 22–25; 2008).
It should be noted that RNA Biology is a subscription-based journal. Access to articles in the journal are made freely available to all after a one year embargo. The University of Illinois does not yet have a subscription to this journal.
]]>Societies that contract with HighWire Press to provide online access to their journals are free to specify the terms of access to their journals, including the embargo period for their journals. An increasing number of societies, recognizing the scholarly mission of their society, have chosen to -- at their own expense -- have their complete back files digitized and made freely accessible. Often these free articles are available not only through the HighWire Press site, but are also being deposited into PubMed Central.
The HighWire Press home page provides the current statisitics for the number of articles and the number of openly-accessible articles -- as of this moment, 5,008,753 full text articles from over 140 scholarly publishers; 2,013,535 articles are freely accessible by all.
HighWire Press maintains a page where the embargo period for their journals is listed -- http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl. There are nearly 50 journals that are completely free. Of the over 1100 journals served through HighWire, it appears that at least 255 have some free access to their back files content. The embargo period for those that offer free back file access to their journals is usually 12 months, but can be as short as 2 months or as long as 5 years.
]]>From the press release:
The agreement promises to benefit readers and researchers, and enhance the ability of authors and publishers to distribute their content in digital form, by significantly expanding online access to works through Google Book Search, an ambitious effort to make millions of books searchable via the Web. The agreement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright owners, provides an efficient means for them to control how their intellectual property is accessed online and enables them to receive compensation for online access to their works.
If approved by the court, the agreement would provide:
* More Access to Out-of-Print Books – Generating greater exposure for millions of in-copyright works, including hard-to-find out-of-print books, by enabling readers in the U.S. to search these works and preview them online;
* Additional Ways to Purchase Copyrighted Books – Building off publishers’ and authors’ current efforts and further expanding the electronic market for copyrighted books in the U.S., by offering users the ability to purchase online access to many in-copyright books;
* Institutional Subscriptions to Millions of Books Online – Offering a means for U.S. colleges, universities and other organizations to obtain subscriptions for online access to collections from some of the world’s most renowned libraries;
* Free Access From U.S. Libraries – Providing free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at designated computers in U.S. public and university libraries; and
* Compensation to Authors and Publishers and Control Over Access to Their Works – Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project.
Under the agreement, Google will make payments totaling $125 million. The money will be used to establish the Book Rights Registry, to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees....
Holders worldwide of U.S. copyrights can register their works with the Book Rights Registry and receive compensation from institutional subscriptions, book sales, ad revenues and other possible revenue models, as well as a cash payment if their works have already been digitized.
Libraries at the Universities of California, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Stanford have provided input into the settlement and expect to participate in the project, including by making their collections available. Along with a number of other U.S. libraries that currently work with Google, their significant efforts to preserve, maintain and provide access to books have played a critical role in achieving this agreement and, through their anticipated participation, they are furthering such efforts while making books even more accessible to students, researchers and readers in the U.S. It is expected that additional libraries in the U.S. will participate in this project in the future.
---
Note: As a member of the CIC, the University of Illinois is in line to have over 1 million of it's books digitized by Google, and added to Google Books. Read more about this local endeavor.
You can view all the videos back to back, or view them one at a time:
October 14, 6:00 - 7:15 PM, Grainger Commons (Grainger Engineering Library)
Join the University Library, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS),and Students for Free Culture for the first international Open Access Day. Learn more about Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public! Hear from researchers, students, librarians, and others on the impact of Open Access. Read more at: http://openaccessday.org
]]>Borders has been under financial pressure for some time now. According to Publisher's Lunch, The Wall Street Journal reports that the next phase of its loan arrangements with Pershing Square Capital Management starts on October 1. If Borders has not negotiated a deal to sell the company by that date, which seems increasingly unlikely given the state of our financial system, then Pershing Square acquires warrants to purchase another 8% of the company. At the moment, those warrants aren't worth exercising, since they're priced at $7 a share, a level Borders' stock hasn't seen since the company disclosed its liquidity pressures earlier this year. The report also estimates that Pershing Square already owns more than 35% of Borders, making it the company's largest shareholder.
The markets may also impact Reed, which had hoped to sell the Reed Business Information group of magazines. Gruner + Jahr, which had evaluated a bid for the group, announced that they will not make an offer.
It's likely that we'll see more bargain sales in the future along with a slowdown in what might have been the normal pace of sales of units by companies in stronger financial situations.
Just before the successful circulation of the first beams in the LHC accelerator at CERN, seminal articles describing the construction of the LHC and its detectors were published Open Access in the Journal of Instrumentation. This is in line with the commitment of HEP scientists to Open Access.
Elsevier has meanwhile announced that it will join Springer and SISSA/IOP in publishing Open Access without any author fees the first articles describing the physics results of the LHC.
Comments on these stories can be found in Symmetry. Publishing in HEP and Open Access are among the subjects of Richard Poynder's interviews of Rolf-Dieter Heuer in Computer Weekly and Annette Holtkamp in Open and Shut.
For more info, please visit: http://scoap3.org
Peter Suber at Open Access News also mentions that NPG is interested in working with institutional repositories (such as IDEALS) as well. This could be a very important development for institutions who are interested in providing wide access to their research and scholarship.
]]>I often strongly suggested to grad students who are preparing their dissertations that they be SURE to look at EVERY paper they cite in their disseration / articles! I had thought, with the advent of reference management systems such as EndNote and RefWorks that the phenomenon of bad citations would decline.... apparently not.
Apparently this problem is still around.
As summarized in the July 8 Inside Higher Ed:
Cite Check
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/08/citation
and as reported in Interfaces:
Vol. 38, No. 2, March-April 2008, pp. 125-139
The Ombudsman: Verification of Citations: Fawlty Towers of Knowledge?
Malcolm Wright, J. Scott Armstrong
http://interfaces.journal.informs.org/cgi/content/abstract/38/2/125
There is no clear interpretation of "Fair Use" relating to the amount of material that can be used for such activities as scholarship, teaching, reporting, and review.
In addition to advancing its fair-use argument, the university also says it is protected from federal lawsuits by sovereign immunity protections guaranteed by the 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The outcome of this lawsuit will impact the ways in which colleges and universities distribute course materials and provide access to digital materials.
Read more in today's Chronicle of Higher Education.
]]>