On May 7, the University of Wisconsin at Madison adopted the Author Addendum drafted by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). (Thanks to Dorothea Salo.)
Excerpt from the resolution adopted by the UWM Faculty Senate:
...Institutions and organizations around the world, including the CIC provosts, are leading initiatives to inform authors in all disciplines about their rights and how to retain them. When scholarship is published in journals or elsewhere, publishers typically ask authors to sign a transfer agreement, or contract, that describes the assignment of rights to the publisher of the intellectual property. These agreements often result in the deprivation of various authors’ rights such as the right to post the article on the public internet or to make copies for classroom use. According to traditional publication agreement, all rights—including copyright—are typically surrendered to the publisher.
The CIC provosts recognize the complexity of the issues involved in publication, but are nonetheless committed to helping our faculty make the most of their work and support the free flow of scholarly information in support of university missions. To that end they have distributed the attached Statement on Publishing Agreements along with the Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors.
The CIC provosts suggest that faculty authors consider a number of factors when choosing and interacting with publishers for their works. The goal of publication should be to encourage widespread dissemination and impact; the means for accomplishing this will necessarily depend on the nature of the work in question, the author’s circumstances, available suitable outlets, and expectations in the author’s field of inquiry.
The Library Committee amended the original CIC addendum distributed by the CIC provosts to include subsection 4 that was derived from ARL’s Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)....This sub-section is a default clause that states that in the event that the publisher publishes the article in the journal without signing a copy of the addendum, the publisher will be deemed to have assented to the terms of the addendum....
PS: Kudos to all involved at Wisconsin, especially to the Library Committee which prepared the resolution and submitted it to the Faculty Senate.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
