Text of Georgia State University Filing in E-Reserves Copyright Case

Georgia State University's filing in copyright infringement suit the e-reserves copyright infringement suit brought against key GSU officials by three publishers is now available. It presents eighteen defenses, including sovereign immunity and fair use.

Read more about it at "Georgia State University Strongly Answers Publishers’ E-Reserve Lawsuit."

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement: ISP Filtering and Three-Strikes?

KEI has leaked the RIAA's suggestions for regulations to be included in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, such as the use of Internet filtering to stop infringement and the termination of ISP service to repeat infringers. (ACTA is being negotiated in secret.)

Read more about it at "Proposed Secret Copyright Deal Takes Aim at iPods, Providers," "Secret Super-Copyright Treaty MEMO Leaked," and "RIAA's ACTA Wishlist Includes Gutted DMCA, Mandatory Filters."

Licensing across Borders—A Round Table Discussion Podcast

JISC has released a new podcast titled Licensing across Borders—A Round Table Discussion.

The podcast deals with the Knowledge Exchange's multinational licensing initiative. Knowledge Exchange participants are JISC, Danmark's Elektroniske Fag-og Forskningsbibliotek (DEF), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), and the SURF Foundation.

Critique of the National Archives' The Founders Online Report

Peter Hirtle has posted a sharp critique of the National Archives' The Founders Online report on the LibraryLaw Blog that, among other points, questions whether the digitized works that result from the project will be free of copyright and access restrictions.

Here's an excerpt:

5. Perhaps the most problematic issues in the report surround its use of the term "open access." For some, open access means "digital, online, and free of charge." The report, while saying it wants to provide open access to the material, appears to recommend that all material be given to UVA's Rotunda system for delivery. Rotunda follows a subscription model—not open access—that is remarkably expensive considering that citizens have already paid for all of the editorial work on these volumes. How could this be open access? Apparently Rotunda might be willing to give up its subscription approach if a foundation were willing to pay for all of its costs. Unless such a commitment is in place, I find it disingenuous to describe a Rotunda delivery option as "open access." There is no discussion of other, free, delivery options, such as the willingness expressed by Deanna Marcum of the Library of Congress at the Senate Hearing to make all of the Founding Fathers papers accessible through LC (which already has a good site pointing to currently accessible papers).

6. Others argue that for true open access, information must be accessible outside of specific delivery systems (such as Rotunda) and made available in bulk. Open data and open interfaces allow for all sorts of interesting uses of material. For example, someone might want to mashup George Washington's papers to Google Maps in order to be able to easily visual geographically the spread of information. Others might want to mesh manuscript material with published secondary literature. Rather than anticipating the widespread dispersal and re-use of the Founding Fathers papers, however, and hence the need for harvestable data, open APIs, distributed access, etc., the report calls instead for "a single, unified, and sustainable Web site"—apparently the locked-down Rotunda system.

Coverage of the 2008 Association of American University Presses Annual Meeting

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an overview of the 2008 Association of American University Presses Annual Meeting by Jennifer Howard ("Scholarly Publishers Discuss How They're Adapting to Changing Realities"; restricted access).

An interesting revelation from the conference was that the University of Minnesota Press has found that its "sales figures through Amazon were 26 percent greater than its combined sales to libraries." Also, rumor had it that Amazon was pressing university presses hard to move any print-on-demand publishing to its BookSurge service (university presses aren't the only ones affected; Booklocker.com has filed a class action suit against Amazon over its POD distribution policy).

Another interesting disclosure was that, with six exceptions, university presses have embraced Google Book Search.

In another CHE article ("Thunderstorms and Open Access"), Stan Katz of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton recounted his trip to the conference, and, reacting to a speech by Stevan Harnad, said that "I fear that the obligation to 'publish' by mounting articles on free Web sites will make it impossible for nonprofit presses (such as the university presses I was addressing in Montreal) and learned societies to sustain themselves." Harnad has replied in "Exchange with Stan Katz at Association of American University Press Meeting in Montreal."

It's possible that there was more conference coverage on the AAUP Blog, but we'll never know, since access to that Weblog is restricted to AAUP members.

Stanford University School of Education's Open Access Mandate—Harvard Medical School Next?

On June 26, Stevan Harnad and Leslie Carr broke the story that John Willinsky had announced an open access mandate for Stanford University's School of Education in a speech at ELPub 2008. Peter Suber then posted a link to the video of the speech.

Today, Willinsky posted the Stanford University School of Education Open Access Motion on the SPARC-OAForum, noting that it "was passed unanimously by the faculty of the School of Education, Stanford University on June 10, 2008, and was cleared by the Provost's Office and Stanford University's legal counsel on June 25th, 2008."

Here's the text of the motion:

In recognition of its responsibility to make its research and scholarship as widely and publicly available as possible, the faculty of the Stanford University School of Education is determined to take advantage of new technologies to increase access to its work among scholars worldwide, educators, policymakers, and the public. In support of greater openness in scholarly and educational endeavors, the faculty of the School of Education agree to the following policy:

Faculty members grant to the Stanford University permission to make publicly available their scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. They grant to Stanford University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to their scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are properly attributed to the authors not sold for a profit.

The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while a faculty member of the School of Education, beginning with articles for which the publisher's copyright agreement has yet to be signed. The Dean or the Dean's designate will waive application of the policy upon written request from faculty who wish to publish an article with a publisher who will not agree to the terms of this policy (which will be presented to the publishers in the form of an addendum to the copyright agreement).

No later than the date of publication, faculty members will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Dean of Education's Office, who will make the article available to the public in an open-access repository operated by Stanford University.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending policy changes to the School of Education from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented on the policy to the School of Education.

Willinsky also posted on the list "Questions and Answers on Harvard’s Open Access Motion," which is "a series of questions and responses that arose as part of a discussions of passing such a motion at the Stanford University School of Education (SUSE) by Claude Goldenberg, Roy Pea, Sean Reardon, and John Willinsky."

Peter Suber has commented on these Stanford documents in his "Details on the Stanford OA Mandate" posting.

In a Library Journal article ("At SPARC Forum, News of the University of California’s Open Access Near Miss") published today, a "representative of Harvard Medical School" is quoted as saying: "I think we’re going to be the next school to go for OA." (This article provides some brief additional information about the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences and Law School mandates and discusses as yet unsuccessful efforts at the University of California to pass a mandate.)

Princeton University Press to Release E-Book for the Kindle

Prior to print publication, Princeton University Press will release The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It as an e-book for the Kindle, Amazon's e-book reader. The press currently sells e-books in the Adobe Acrobat Reader and Microsoft Reader formats.

Yesterday, Indiana University Press announced that it would sell e-books for the Kindle.

Read more about it at "University Presses Start to Sell Via Kindle."

Georgia State Claims Fair Use in E-Reserves Lawsuit

In a filing in the Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and SAGE Publications copyright infringement suit against Georgia State, Georgia State University has claimed that is use of materials from those publishers in its e-reserves system is permitted under fair use provisions.

Read more about it "In Lawsuit, University Asserts That Downloading Copyrighted Texts Is Fair Use."

Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences Named as SPARC Innovators

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has recognized Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences as SPARC Innovators.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

A February 12 vote made the Harvard faculty the first in the U.S. to embrace an Open Access directive and the first to grant permission to the university to make their articles openly available. The policy, drafted by a 10-member provost’s committee, was ratified by unanimous vote of a quorum of faculty members.

The Harvard FAS vote and Open Access policy emerged at a time when there is growing concern among faculty that traditional publishing processes are not ensuring maximum access to their research.

"The FAS vote confirms that broadening access to their collective output is of fundamental importance to our faculty, and that they are willing to take strong and decisive action to ensure the accessibility of their works," adds Stuart M. Shieber, professor of computer science at Harvard, Chair of the provost’s committee, and recently named director of the university’s new Office of Scholarly Communication.

The new SPARC Innovator profile details the process that led to the faculty’s ultimate vote. It explores motivations behind the decision to take action, looks at how members of the faculty were informed and engaged, why the Open Access requirement and its opt-out provision emerged, and how Harvard has paved the way for other institutions to follow suit.

"People think Harvard can do this kind of thing because Harvard is so rich," said Shieber. "The irony is that the reason people here got involved was the financial unsustainability—even at Harvard—of the current scholarly publishing regime, which has led to a steady erosion of access as we and other institutions must cancel subscriptions. The goal of this and future policies we will develop is not to save money. The goal is to broaden access."

"Harvard’s leadership on this issue is an inspiration to academic institutions across the country," said Diane Graves, University Librarian at Trinity University in San Antonio. "Thanks to Harvard’s prestigious reputation and the unanimous vote by the Arts and Sciences faculty, colleges and universities throughout North America have the incentive to start—or strengthen—similar conversations between their libraries and the faculty. This landmark vote—and the votes that are sure to follow—signals the beginning of a new, sustainable model for scholarly communication."

"Harvard’s success was possible because of the determination of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to ensure the widest exposure of their research. We hope their forward-looking step will serve as invitation to other campuses and departments of all kinds to explore their own policies for research access," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. "It is SPARC’s pleasure to highlight their achievement in as many ways as we can. . . ."

The SPARC Innovator program recognizes advances in scholarly communication propelled by an individual, institution, or group. Typically, these advances exemplify SPARC principles by challenging the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities, and the public.

Australian National University's Harvester Service Released

The Australian National University has released its Harvester Service.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Harvester Service is a proxy harvester for processing and routing OAI-PMH Data Provider responses to various applications. It is intended it be used for integration with other applications requiring a harvesting service.

EM-Loader: Making Self-Archiving Easier

Building on the work of the SWORD Project, the EM-Loader project will build software that allows authors to use the metadata from PublicationsList.org to deposit works in the Depot.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

We will show proof of concept at an early stage by building a web service module that connects two existing services: the Depot, the JISC repository for researchers who do not have other provision; and PublicationsList.org, a service for researchers to build a web page listing their publications. Instead of recreating interoperability standards from scratch, the project has adopted and expanded the SWORD Deposit API.

In our revised approach we suggest that depositing papers into repositories can be made easier and rewarding for researchers by concentrating initially on compiling a personal publications list with complete metadata and then performing a batch submission to the repository.

Traditionally stage 1—compiling a personal bibliography—is by manual entry, but this can be made much easier with batch search and select of items from citation databases such as Web of Science and PubMed, and import from personal bibliography tools such as BibTeX, EndNote and Reference Manager. Full text of papers can be uploaded and attached to metadata in stage 2 (typically in PDF or DOC formats).

Functionality for stages 1 and 2 already exists and is provided to this project through PublicationsList.org. The main focus of our project activity is to build the workflow to enable all the structured metadata to be forwarded to the appropriate repository, alongside the associated digital object (full text) where available.

Read more about it at: EM-Loader and the EM-Loader proposal.

(Thanks to Open Access News.)

U.S. Copyright Office to Implement Online Registration System

On July 1, 2008, the U.S. Copyright Office will implement an online registration system called the electronic Copyright Office (eCO).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Filing an eService claim via eCO offers several advantages:

  • lower filing fee of $35 for a basic claim;
  • fastest processing time;
  • earlier effective date of registration;
  • online status tracking;
  • secure payment by credit or debit card, electronic check or Copyright Office deposit account;
  • and ability to upload certain categories of deposits directly into eCO as electronic files.

Even users who intend to submit a hard copy of the work being registered may file an application and payment online and print out an eCO-generated shipping slip to be attached to the hardcopy deposit. Beginning July 1 eCO may be used to register basic claims to copyright for literary works, visual arts works, performing arts works including motion pictures, sound recordings and single serials. Basic claims include (1) a single work, (2) multiple unpublished works if they are by the same author(s) and owned by the same claimant, and (3) multiple published works if they are all first published together in the same publication on the same date and owned by the same claimant.

D-NET Version 1.0 Released by Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research

DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) has released version 1.0 of D-NET.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The first of its kind, this open source software offers a tool-box for deploying a customizable distributed system featuring tools for harvesting and aggregating heterogeneous data sources. A variety of end-user functionalities are applied over this integration, ranging from search, recommendation, collections, profiling to innovative tools for repository manager users. . . .

The DRIVER D-NET v. 1.0 software is released under the Open Source Apache license with accompanying documentation, and with (limited to capacity) technical support by the DRIVER Consortium technical partners. . . .

In particular, the DRIVER software can be used for two main reasons:

  • Deploying new services on top of an operational DRIVER infrastructure Running instances of the DRIVER Infrastructure can be enriched in any moment with new service instances so as to empower or expand the available functionalities. Examples are:
    1. Deployment and configuration of customized portals for designated communities over the aggregated data (e.g. a portal over national repositories or over subject-driven content, such as RECOLECTA and DART Europe DEEP above);
    2. Deployment of new aggregation services so as to distribute and delegate harvesting and aggregating activities to specialized DRIVER National or Community Correspondents, carrying out their tasks over an assigned selection of repositories.
  • Deploying a new DRIVER infrastructure to serve other service providers and communities

NEH/DFG Bilateral US/German Humanities Digitization Grants

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) have issued a call for bilateral US/German humanities digitization grant proposals.

Here's an excerpt from the call:

These grants provide funding for up to three years of development in any of the following areas:

  • new digitization projects and pilot projects;
  • the addition of important materials to existing digitization projects; and
  • the development of related infrastructure to support international digitization work and the use of those digitized resources.

Collaboration between U.S. and German partners is a key requirement for this grant category.

New ACRL Publications Agreements FAQ

ALA's Association College & Research Libraries has made available a new ACRL Publications Agreements FAQ, which covers serials, book chapters, book editors, and podcasts.

The FAQ's statement about Creative Commons licenses and serials is of special interest:

We didn’t want to require our authors to publish their works using a Creative Commons license, but you are welcome to attach the CC license of your choosing to your work after it is published by ACRL. Visit the Creative Commons website (http://creativecommons.org/) to learn more about their licensing options.

This is welcome news, and ACRL is to be applauded for supporting the use of Creative Commons licenses.

It is very helpful to have a concise and clear explanation of ACRL's copyright and other publication policies regarding serials, and the information about book chapters, book editors, and podcasts is very helpful as well. It would be highly desirable for other ALA divisions to follow ACRL's lead in this matter.

Note that ACRL's copyright forms are on the ACRL Forms page.

Associated Press Charges By the Word for Quotes

The Associated Press has established a fee schedule for the use of excerpts from its articles by bloggers and others. There are different fees for standard, educational, and nonprofit use, but all fees are based on word counts. For example, the free for nonprofit use of 5-25 words is $7.50.

In "Associated Press Declares War on Bloggers, Fair Use," Public Knowledge blogger Mehan Jayasuriya says:

That’s right, if you want to quote an AP article in your blog post, you’ll be paying by the word for the privilege. What’s more, in order to purchase a license to quote AP content, you’ll have to agree to a Terms of Use agreement, which states, among other things, that you may not criticize either the AP or the author of the article in your post or article. If you do, the AP reserves the right to revoke the license granted.

The problem with the AP’s licensing structure is that it ignores existing fair use rights, which clearly state that a short quotation from any news story is fair game. . . .

Blogger Michelle Malkin decided to calculate, using the AP’s licensing structure, how much the AP owes her for quotations it has used from her blog posts in recent months (it’s also worth noting that the AP did not link to her blog in the articles where these quotes were used). By Malkin’s count, the AP owes her somewhere in the neighborhood of $132,125.

Code4Lib Journal Adopts Creative Commons Attribution License

Starting with its just released third issue, the Code4Lib Journal is using the Creative Commons Attribution License for its articles, making this freely available journal an open access journal under the strictest definition of that term (sometimes called "full open access").

Here's an excerpt from the editorial that discusses this change:

In order to facilitate the ability of our readers to build upon the ideas presented in the Journal, beginning with Issue 3 all articles are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. The CC-BY license lets you reuse, share, and build upon the work presented in the article, as long as you credit the author for the original creation. This licensing is required for inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and to receive a SPARC Europe Seal. Code snippets included in the text are included under the CC-BY license. For other code included with an article, we recommend, but don’t require, an open source license. We are contacting all authors with articles published in previous issues to request they license their previously published Code4Lib Journal articles under the CC-BY license.