Can authors post their articles on their course Web sites or in institutional repositories?
Can an author share his work freely after assigning exclusive copyright to a publisher?
Is it okay for an author to post her work in NIH’s PubMed Central?
These and other questions are heard more and more frequently on campuses. That’s why SPARC has developed Author Rights - an educational initiative that informs faculty across all disciplines about how to use the SPARC Author Addendum to secure their rights as authors of journal articles.
The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal instrument that authors may use to modify their publisher agreements, enabling them to keep selected key rights to their articles, such as:
Distributing copies in the course of teaching and research,
Posting the article on a personal or institutional Web site, or
Creating derivative works.
SPARC’s Author Rights brochure identifies the rights faculty have as copyright holders and encourages them to retain the rights they need to ensure the broadest practical access to their articles. It explains how to use the SPARC Author Addendum and even gives tips on what to do if the publisher rejects the Addendum. It also offers specific language authors can insert in a publisher agreement when their article will be deposited in NIH’s PubMed Central.
Please take advantage of this new resource to inform your campus about the key issue of author rights. Here’s how:
A full color brochure and Author Rights poster are available for use at your institution. Display the poster in your library. Offer it to faculty members. Distribute the brochure in your library, through faculty mailboxes, or at liaison meetings. You can order [them] from our Web site...($15.00 for 50 copies of the brochure and $2.50 for each poster). The poster and brochure are also available online and for free download....
A podcast of the SPARC-ACRL forum on “Authors and Authority: Perspectives and Negotiating Licenses and Copyright” (January 2006) is now available on our Web site....The forum offers perspectives on copyright from a librarian, publisher, and an attorney - and is a great introduction to the issue. Add a link to your Web page or email the different files to faculty, depending on where their understanding is. Michael Carroll’s talk from the attorney perspective, for example, makes clear that “as soon as the author’s finished typing, federal law showers down upon the author a set of exclusive rights…the author does not transfer any exclusive rights until the author signs a document.”...
SPARC staff members are available to visit your campus and meet with members of the library, administration, faculty, and students as you deem necessary. Simply email Julia Blixrud, Assistant Director for Public Programs, to discuss....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/08/2006 09:04:00 AM.
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.
