...University libraries are trying to educate faculty with the release of a tutorial explaining the gray areas of copyright.
Karen Williams, associate University librarian for academic programs [a the University of Minnesota], said the tutorial is part of a larger campaign started last year to educate faculty on authors' rights....
Williams and the libraries are encouraging authors to negotiate with publishers so authors can maintain some of their copyrights for the future.
"It's really restrictive on scholars if they give away all of their rights, and costly for students to gain access to them," she said.
The University offers the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition authors addendum, which is an agreement between authors and publishers for the use of material for education-related purposes....
Dr. Jagdev Sharma, of the College of Veterinary Medicine, is the editor of the journal Avian Diseases and allows his authors a lot of their copyrights....Sharma maintains the rights for first publication of a work, but all republication rights are awarded to the authors, he said....
Both Sharma and Williams see the trend of authors keeping some of their rights becoming a more common practice in the future....
"This is the future of scientific publication," he said....
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.
