Suddenly, Open Access is all the rage. February 14, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Copyright Issues and Legislation, Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing , add a commentIn December the National Institute of Health made public access to research articles that grow out of NIH funded research mandatory; research are now required to place their final version of articles accepted for publication after April 7 into the PubMed Central database at NIH within one year of publication.
This was a victory for many library and higher ed. advocates of public access, but there is a certain element of “be careful what you wish for” here. Many campus are now scrambling to figure out the legal, practical and financial implications of complying with this mandate. Three issues must be addressed in a relatively short time frame.
1. How will authors manage their copyrights to comply with the mandate? It has long been important for authors to think about and negotiate for an appropriate copyright arrangement with publishers. Insofar as this mandate forces them to do what they ought to have been doing for years, its impact is salutary. But it will still come as a shock to many researchers and will increase the need for sound copyright guidance and policies on campuses.
2. How will campuses deal with the mechanics of deposit? Since lack of compliance could imperil future research funds, this is an issue which should not be left entirely to individual authors. Institutional repositories, where they exist, are in a good position to help with the mechanics of deposit, and library staffs will also need to be aware of the process and ready to assist. Although the process is not hard, and is easier to accomplish if the author is involved, it is clear that institutional guidance and assistance is called for.
3. Likewise, researchers will need assistance locating and tracking the PubMed reference numbers of their articles that are deposited with NIH. Starting with the May round of grant funding, NIH will require that these numbers be included as part of the investigators previous work with NIH when applying for renewals or new funding. Again, libraries are in the best position to help researchers locate and retrieve this information.
Hard on the heels of this public access mandate came news of the vote this week by the Harvard faculty to require deposit of all articles written by the Arts and Sciences faculty in Harvard’s own institutional repository. The faculty agreed unanimously to automatically grant to Harvard a non-exclusive license to their work to put those articles in the repository; authors retain copyright and are free to publisher their work anywhere they lack as long as the publisher will accept that copyright is subject to this prior license. The decision is a strong affirmation of the value of open access to academic research, both to the public and to the academy itself.
Lots of commentary on these two decisions is available. This comment by William Patry addresses both, and there is an excellent roundup of information and comment on the Harvard decision here on Open Access News and on Mike Carroll’s blog here. I have written about the NIH mandate here.
Blogging law February 7, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing, Uncategorized , 2commentsTrying to catch up on interesting developments over the past few weeks, I note the very interesting and wide-ranging discussion going on across several blogs dealing with legal scholarship about the value of blogging in that discipline. It seems to have started with several reports (here on Balkinazation, here on the Volokh Conspiracy, and here on Law Librarian Blog) about the rapid increase in citations to blogs in the legal literature. Lots of interesting questions are raised here. Why are these citations growing? Jack Balkin writes about the assimilation of blogs into the “larger universe of legal writing.” Is there a different ethic and etiquette for citing blogs in scholarly articles? Eugene Volokh suggests that there is and provokes a fascinating chain of replies. His discussion of the ethics of citing unpublished sources continues here. And finally, is this good for scholarship, or the beginning of the end? Brian Leiter writes a long piece on “Why Blogs are Bad for Legal Scholarship.” In spite of the apparent “liar’s paradox” here – telling others not to read blogs in a blog – Leiter makes an interesting argument about the importance of mediation and some way to test and evaluate the expertise of the one whose writing is being cited.
It is also interesting to speculate on why legal scholarship seems to be the discipline in which this conversation is taking place. When I first read about it, I wondered if the unique aspects of legal scholarship, where most of the journals are edited by students rather than by full-time academics, might lead the professorate to feel less proprietary about their publications and thus more willing to experiment outside of the traditional confines of scholarship. Leiter suggests a somewhat different spin on this observation when he writes: “The problem is that reputational effects in the legal academy are mediate by two institutions whose primary arbiters are not, themselves, experts or even quasi-experts… First, one of the major venues for legal scholarship remains the student-edited law reviews” (the second institutional problem is the “journalistic reception” of legal ideas). For Leiter, the problem to which this lack of expertise contributes is the “availability cascade” – “an opinion that appears to be informed gains credibility by virtue of being repeated and thus becoming current in discourse.” For its discussion of this phenomenon alone, Leiter’s piece is worth reading, even while recognizing that blogs are certainly here to stay and scholarship is going to have to find ways to deal with them.
In search of a problem? January 31, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Copyright Issues and Legislation, Open Access and Institutional Repositories , 1 comment so farI have written before about the PRO IP bill introduced in Congress in December of 2007; its primary purpose seems to be to dramatically increase the amount of statutory damages available to a copyright owner whose work is infringed. The specific way this is accomplished — by allowing a separate recovery of statutory damages for each individual work contained in an infringed collection — seems carefully crafted to benefit the Recording Industry Association of America and almost nobody else. So unusual is this provision that the Copyright Office convened a roundtable to discuss it. According to this report on the event from Public Knowledge’s Sherwin Siy, the most interesting part of that roundtable was the fact that very few participants seemed very strongly in favor of the provision. This seems to be the classic solution in search of a problem, at least to everyone but the RIAA, who simply want larger recoveries from all their litigation. Siy’s long post does an excellent job of explaining the provision, its context and the discussion at the roundtable. This post by Google’s William Patry, another participant in the roundtable, offers his perspective as well.
What I want to focus on is the unintended consequences of this steep increase in statutory damages on the problem of orphan works. For libraries and higher education institutions, the difficulty with using a so-called orphan work (a work whose rights holder either cannot be determined or cannot be found) is that high risk is associated with great uncertainty. One cannot predict if a rights holder might turn up sometime after your digital display or YouTube video becomes available, but you do know that, if that happens, the potential liability is very great. Thus works that are serving no useful purpose at all remain hidden because statutory damages are so high that they discourage schools from taking even a small risk. Raising those damages as dramatically as PRO IP proposes would magnify this chilling effect, and the result would be a pure social loss — works that are not generating any profit at all for the rights holders will still be locked away from potential users, readers and viewers because of fear.
The Orphan Works legislation introduced in the last Congress was intended to address this fear, so it seems like a good time to consider re-introducing that proposal. The orphan works bill would have made statutory damages unavailable if a user had made a reasonably diligent effort to locate the rights holder and was not able to do so. If a rights holder reappeared after an unauthorized use had been made, they would be entitle to the reasonable licensing fee they could have collected if they had been around to ask in the first place, but not the draconian statutory damages designed to discourage piracy, not scholarship. With a proposal to increase those statutory damages now on the table, it seems like a great time to really press for the reintroduction of orphan works legislation as well. Only if orphan works protection is considered in conjunction with PRO IP can this legislation, which hardly seems to be needed at all, be prevented from doing far more harm than whatever good it is supposed to achieve.
Orphan works is important legislation in its own right; far too much of our cultural past is unavailable because libraries and universities do not dare risk the expensive vagaries of copyright law. A bill to make socially productive uses of this material possible without inhibiting profits at all is worth reintroducing on its merits. But it is absolutely vital at this point, as a corrective to the excessive protectionism of PRO IP. Lets hope someone in Congress sees the obvious connection between these two pieces of legislation, and orphan works protection makes a comeback.
Caveat emptor! January 15, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing , add a commentThis posting on the NY Times Technology blog – “On eBay, Some Profit by Selling What’s Free” – caught my eye over the holidays because it recounts a situation very similar to one in which we have found ourselves at my university. The post describes the experience of purchasing an old film from an eBay vendor only to discover later on that the entire film is available for free download from the Internet Archive site. The author is unsure whether to feel cheated, since he paid for something he could have obtained for free, or to recognize that the vendor had earned his fee by finding material the author wanted but would not have found himself. Both the vendor involved and Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, basically take the latter position, with Kahle pointing out that no one is getting rich doing this while expressing the wish that more creative, transformative uses were being made of the older material.
At Duke we have been struggling to deal with a very similar situation. A great deal of effort went in to the creation of digital collections feature lots of wonderful material in our collections on the history of advertising. So our staff was understandably distressed to find out that an Internet entrepreneur had downloaded virtually the entire collection, which is mostly public domain images, and was selling the CDs through his own website and via eBay intermediaries. It is a well-established principle of copyright law, of course, that “sweat of the brow” does not give one rights in a collection of facts or public domain material. Nevertheless, we were unhappy because we made the collections available in order to facilitate scholarship and research without barriers of place or fees for access; selling the material undermines our vision of the research purposes of the collection.
We finally decided to send a letter asking the vendor to stop selling this collection. We based our request on three claims – a compilation copyright in the whole collection, which was copied in its entirety with our selection and arrangement (and some commentary) intact; a fear that, because the Duke name appears in a few places, there might be confusion about our relationship with the vendor (there is no such relationship, in fact); and our concern that some of the images may still be protected by copyrights held by the donor who gave us the material in the first place. Most galling to us is the fact that the vendor who has appropriate this material himself claims, on the site, to hold a compilation copyright in the material.
So far our letter has been ignored, and the material is still available for sale. We are unsure if we want to take further steps or what those steps might be. We have no desire to impede the flow of information to people who want or need it. But we do want to uphold the value of free access to the public domain, and also to protect and value the intellectual efforts of our fine curators. Perhaps the best thing I can do is to use this space to encourage readers to check out the free digital displays of this fascinating material on the Emergence of Advertising in
Changing the economics of scholarly publishing January 2, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing , add a commentInside Higher Ed recently published an article about a “New Collaboration for Scholarly Publishing” that describes how five university presses hope to alter the discouraging economic situation for publishing scholarly books. NYU, Fordham,
