"The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. Some 200 institutions representing higher education, publishing, network and telecommunications, information technology, and libraries and library organizations make up CNI's Members"

Traditionally, librarians have been viewed as gatekeepers (among other things). However, Librarians (for the most part) view themselves as catalysts helping patrons getting the material they want as quickly and as "painlessly" as possible. For most patrons the ideal librarian is one who can find whatever information they need quickly, easily, possibly be able to teach them how to do it themselves, and -- most importantly -- do all of this for free. Most librarians, I assert, want to be the patron's ideal librarian. So, why then are librarians gatekeepers -- shouldn't librarians be ignoring copyright all-together in order to be the ideal librarian? The answer is that most librarians don't feel as if copyright law is some moral code they must abide by; rather, most librarians are afraid their library is going to get sued. Is having one's library being sued a legitimate fear for librarians? I argue that it is not a legitimate fear. In addition, library's and librarians have come to a breaking point in regards to copyright. Library's can barely afford the high prices for copyrighted material and most librarians believe there needs to be a universal embrace of open access in order for libraries to continue providing the services they have historically provided. Librarians need to be rebellious against copyright in order to push publishers away from price-gouging and the strangle-hold they have over their content. If librarians adopt an end-to-end policy, learn to circumvent copyright law as legally as possible, and know how likely it is that their library will be sued, then librarians will finally be taking a truly proactive and rebellious stance against copyright.

The above article is a PR address from the Association of American Publishers regarding the infringement lawsuit brought up on Georgia State University by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and SAGE Publications. The document gives the reasons why these three publishers felt it necessary to bring up charges against GSU and why it is important that the copyright they hold over their published works is important (mainly because of the significant funds they spend publishing their works).

 

http://publishers.org/main/PressCenter/documents/GSUlawsuitcomplaint.pdf

 

The above link directs you to the legal complaint in its original form. Using the above legal cliam and the press release to help decipher and guide me through this legal document will help me to better understand why the publishers feel they have been wronged by Georgia State University. The infringements listed by Georgia State University have most assuredly been facilitated by the library/libraries of GSU or at least exacerbated by the library/libraries.

 

I will use the above article as a way of understanding what was it exactly that publishers feel are significant reasons to bring up suit against an entity. By examining the stated reasons for the lawsuit, I could further research as to what could be done to eliminate the possibility of being sued for supplying copyrighted works to students, faculty, and staff by the university library. The above articles will help me to define in my essay what is sufficient cause for a publisher to take up suit against a university / library.

 

Note: Lexis Nexis doesn't give persistent links (or else I am unable to find where they do) in order to retrieve this article simply search for "a lay perspective on the copyright wars" with only the legal box checkmarked and it will be the first result.

 

 

 

In this Lecture, Columbia University's University Librarian, James G. Neal, addresses the current environment of libraries in regards to copyright and open access. Neal's lecture mostly addresses the findings of the 108 Study Group which was formed to research copyright. Neal explains the current state of copyright, the findings of the 108 Study Group, and the framework necessary in order to facilitate a more open environment for publications and libraries. Neal's lecture defines the library as an all encompassing entity which disseminates information, a center for research, a publisher in its own right. Because of the library's role as a center for just about everything scholarly, the library has a vision of embracing legacy as well as current trends. The library is an information repository and a portal to information. Serving so many roles simultaneously makes the library at the forefront of the copyright war.

 

In my essay it will be important to state why it is the duty of the librarian to rebel against copyright in order to push for more open access. Neal helps define the library as the center of the copyright war, the very front of the action. By citing Neal and his 108 Study Group's findings, I will be able to convey the importance of the librarian to stand up against copyright in order to defend the very embodiment and idea of the library itself. Neal's article also gives information on the opninion of librarians and library organizations on the issue of copyright and open access. Using some of this information will help me to define how to faciliate a better enviornment for the sharing of intellectual materials.

 

Portal designed to aggregate material to provide training, knowledge development, and skills for the implementing of OA repositories and OA journals.

The aim of this program is to increase access to human knowledge and the fruits of human culture while developing a better framework for understanding the information economy. To date, the program has primarily encouraged digitizing material in the public domain; assuring public archiving, preservation and open access of this material; and fostering its availability to people everywhere through such technologies as books on demand. The technology now exists for universal access to the sum of all knowledge. The potential benefit to humanity is enormous, but it needs to be done in a truly open and non-exclusive basis, with the emphasis on the public good.

Scholarly Communications program focuses broadly on all stages in the life cycle of scholarly resources. The program complements fellowships and other kinds of support for research and teaching at research universities, independent research centers, libraries, and museums by promoting the cost-effective creation, dissemination, accessibility, and preservation of high-quality scholarly resources in humanistic studies broadly defined.

Grantmaking occurs principally in five main categories: new methods of creating scholarly resources, innovations in scholarly publication, cataloging and other forms of access, preservation, and research and evaluation. The Foundation is especially interested in developments that:

• Use forms of scholarly communications to stimulate collaborations among scholars and scholarly institutions in ways that substantially advance knowledge;
• Foster the means economically to sustain forms of scholarly communication; and
• Apply technology to forms of scholarly communications in order to improve quality, lower costs, speed up work, open new perspectives, or make work possible that would otherwise be difficult or impossible.

Research in Information Technology (RIT) is dedicated to supporting the thoughtful application of information technology to a wide range of scholarly purposes. The Foundation is interested in promoting the study of uses of digital technologies that can be applied to research and online and distance learning and teaching. The Foundation also supports investigations of new technical approaches to the archiving of textual and multimedia materials that require improved search and storage techniques and improvements in user-interfaces. The impact of information technology (and especially digitization) on scholarship, scholarly communication, and libraries is indisputable.

The Foundation seeks proposals related to technology that benefits one or more of its constituencies and/or multiple institutions, can realistically be developed by the grantee within the proposed timeframe and budget, provides a significant cost savings, is shareable, reliable, and objectively assessible, and has available IP.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's annual report this year 
features a lengthy essay on the Foundation's initiatives in the 
area of scholarly communications, by Donald J. Waters and Joseph 
S. Meisel.  

"A compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD will make it easier for users, especially newcomers, to discover them and use them for reference. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about OA." Founded by Peter Suber and Robin Peek.

This study explores faculty deposits in
institutional repositories (IR) within selected
disciplines and identifies the diverse navigational
paths to IR sites from library Web site
homepages. The statistical relationship between
the development of an IR and the presence of a
Web site dedicated to the reform of traditional
scholarly communication is also explored. The
implications for the development of institutional
repositories are highlighted.

NSF-funded project managed by Purdue. Simulation tools, presentations/classes, community.

From their homepage, " The Publishing Research Consortium is a group of associations and publishers, which supports global research into scholarly communication in order to enable evidence-based discussion. Our objective is to support work that is scientific and pro-scholarship. Overall, we aim to promote an understanding of the role of publishing and its impact on research and teaching." Publish whitepapers and other papers looking at peer review, open access, etc.

Resources from the ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication.

University of Minnesota's Schol Comm wiki for librarians.

University of Minnesota's faculty-oriented schol comm site.

Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine.

Results of a nationwide census of institutional repositories in U.S. academic institutions.

"A considerable portion of the scholarly record is born digital, and some scholarship is produced in digital formats that have no physical, in-the-hand counterparts. The proliferation of digital scholarship raises serious and pressing issues about how to organize, access, and preserve it in perpetuity. The response of academic institutions has been to build and deploy institutional repositories (IRs) to manage the digital scholarship their learning communities produce."

An international partnership to build a large-scale public infrastructure for research information across Europe.

Research report on purchasing preferences of librarians. Identifies key factors prompting substitution of OA materials for journal subscriptions.

 Alexander, Bryan. "Web 2.0. A New Wave of Innovation For Teaching and Learning" EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 32–44.
pg 33
"The idea dates as far back as the 1960s and JCR Licklider’s thoughts on using networked computing to connect people in order to boost their knowledge and their ability to learn."
The new ways of using the web are about manipulation of content and participation by readers.
pg 34
Describes the importance of "microcontent" for users, who can move around the web. Microcontent is of course not new, and can be seen to go back to email messages, etc.
Tying the use of microcontent and user participation together with user-created metadata, such as tags and folksonomies. [With all of this microcontent out there to be manipulated, and all of these ways of manipulating it, users need to be able to tag the content with terms to help them retrieve them, as they can not count on remembering which bit of microcentent came from where, etc.]
pg 35 -end.
Introduces and describes delicious, mentioning people connecting to each other through metadata. mentions penntags and h20 and then moves on to wikis and writely.
moves on to blogs and rss, moves on to blog searching, technorati, memeorandom, etc. to digg, ohmynews. then onto sites that let users combine these, like gnosh and rollyo. Raises the question of how universities will deal with this: (Pg 42) "How will colleges and universities consider preserving such small pieces of intellectual work, especially as the works migrate across multiple, shifting, changing platforms?"
Then raises questions about copyright, etc.

Proceedings from the "Improving Access..." forum. Sessions on rights management and university publishing are particularly relevant.

University of California's Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee (SLASIAC). Their work has included a resolution on scholarly communication

"The purpose of this website is for legal academics and others to share our copyright experiences with law journals and other legal publishers. As academics, we have an interest in ensuring the widest dissemination of our work. Historically, Law Journals have tended to use standard-form copyright agreements that reqire a copyright assignment, and have tended to impose unreasonable restrictions on our rights to share and re-use our own work."

From the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley. "The motivation for the project reported here was to assess the criteria by which faculty decide when and in what venues to publish or otherwise communicate the results of scholarly research."Add & Goto PennTags

Chapters from the book Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects (N. Jacobs, editor), Chandos Publishing: Oxford, 2006. Links available at eprints.org

Survey of UK institutions.

By Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Discusses what an IR is, and looks at the relationship between IRs and the open access movement.

This is a listing of important and interesting articles, blogs, and webpages that discuss open access and copyright issues on campuses throughout the United States.

"The Office of Scholarly Communication facilitates internal partnerships among the UC libraries, faculty, and administration and, where appropriate, in concert with entities outside UC." Nice use of faculty champions/testimonials.

Compiled and written by Peter Suber. Also includes function for searching the newsletters, the OA blog and other Suber writings on OA.

From their mission statement: " Project Euclid's mission is to advance scholarly communication in the field of theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics. Project Euclid is designed to address the unique needs of low-cost independent and society journals. Through a collaborative partnership arrangement, these publishers join forces and participate in an online presence with advanced functionality, without sacrificing their intellectual or economic independence or commitment to low subscription prices. Full-text searching, reference linking, interoperability through the Open Archives Initiative, and long-term retention of data are all important components of the project."

Advocacy site for self-archive initiatives.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography presents selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. Most sources have been published between 1990 and the present; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1990 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet.Written by Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

Duke Law has published a graphic novel "Bound by Law" to discuss copyright and fair use. It uses documentary film making and clearance as its premise. Very interesting.

Great article on copyright and open access with a catchy metaphor to LOTR. Written by John Ober of UC Office of Scholarly Communication, from C&RL News, April 2006.

PDF of Faculty Senate Statement in support of open access.

New economic experiments and new technologies are beginning to create a greater diversity of complementary -- not competing -- avenues for the dissemination of scholarly work. Institutional repositories such as KU ScholarWorks containing supplementary materials, working papers, and pre-prints extend the options for disseminating scholarly work beyond traditional publication of peer-reviewed articles and books. Open-access journals whose costs are covered through author-fees and other non-subscription revenue are emerging alongside traditional subscription-based journals.

Open access may take the form of posting traditionally published articles (in the author's final draft version) on the Web where they are available to everyone, publishing in one of the more than a thousand open access journals, or making scholarly material openly available in a variety of other ways. Several recent studies have demonstrated that, as suspected, peer-reviewed open access journals are cited more frequently than traditional journals.

Cornell University Library scholary communication policy.

Scholarly communication refers to the formal and informal processes by which the research and scholarship of faculty, researchers, and independent scholars are created, evaluated, edited, formatted, distributed, organized, made accessible, archived, used, and transformed. In recent years the concept of scholarly communication has also begun to connote faculty collaborating with publishers, librarians, and others, in solving the grievous problem of the inability of libraries to keep up with the ever-increasing volume and cost of scholarly resources.

Text of a lecture given by Paul Royster to Library Faculty at the University of Nebraska. Found in their Digital Commons database.

Scholarly journal content is increasingly available in electronic formats, but licenses for electronic content are typically much more expensive than print subscriptions--to account for a larger potential readership. Ease and convenience of use of this content is improved dramatically, but only for those whose libraries can afford to subscribe. Additionally, the terms of the licensing may be restricted.

Scholarly Communication: Information about journal prices, copyright, open access, and more

Scholarly communication is the lifeblood of the university. The dissemination of knowledge is an imperative of land grant universities like Illinois. Anything that threatens access to, or the free flow of, research and ideas is a threat to the health of the entire system

From the dcpriniciples website. "As scholarly, not-for-profit publishers, we reaffirm our commitment to innovative and independent publishing practices and to promoting the wide dissemination of information in our journals. Not-for-profit scientific, technical, and medical publishers are an integral part of the broader scholarly communities supporting scientists, researchers, and clinicians. We work in partnership with scholarly communities to ensure that these communities are sustained and extended, science is advanced, research meets the highest standards, and patient care is enhanced with accurate and timely information."

"A multidisciplinary problem-centered group with a broad concern for all dimensions of contemporary scholarly communication. These include, but are not limited to, the economics of publishing, the evolution of scholarly disciplines and its effect on publishing, information policy, copyright, the interactions of academic reward systems and publishing, and new communication technologies and their potential for providing relief from the crisis in scholarly communication. Through speakers, discussion groups, sharing of literature and news notices, and an electronic bulletin board, the Working Group hopes to stimulate discussion on these issues and, it is hoped, to be a catalyst for papers on scholarly communication, grant proposals and collaborative research."

Rutgers' scholarly communication page. Good use of institutional and library strategic plans in explanation. 

BC libraries' scholarly communications site with a mission to, "keep users informed of and to garner user input regarding developments in all aspects of scholarly communication."

"Dedicated to fostering open access to quality information in support of learning, scholarship, research and patient care."

"Provides commentary on open access, scholarly electronic publishing and digital culture issues."

"Running list of research papers, editorial appointments, and other content and actions results in freely available scholarship by researchers at CalTech. Created by CalTech librarians.

"Reflects the efforts of the Scholarly Communication program to create new models for scholarly exchange that build on the widespread adoption of digital technologies and networking for research, teaching, and learning. At the same time, the program works to improve the traditional systems of scholarly exchange and improve the purchasing power of libraries and the terms and conditions under which content is made available. Thus, issues of copyright, intellectual property, journal costs, library budgets, and similar questions all affect the ability of research institutions to provide access to scholarly information.

Cornell University Library scholarly communication website. "The purposes of this Web page are (a) to inform Cornell faculty of some of the key issues that drive the debates over scholarly communication, and (b) to suggest action that faculty might consider to support needed changes."

"ALPSP serves, represents and strengthens the community of not-for-profit publishers, demonstrating their essential role in the future of international academic and professional communication."

"The University Research Magazine Association promotes excellence and professionalism among those who publish magazines written for the general public and special constituencies which are dedicated to the research and scholarly activities of a university, nonprofit research center or institute.  URMA's goals are to improve policies and procedures affecting the publication of research magazines and related materials; to develop training, documentation, and communication methods leading to the circulation of ideas and problem-solving techniques among URMA members; and to serve as a national forum and source of visibility for professionals working in this field."

"The letter (PDF) was written by Theodore Bergstrom (University of California - Santa Barbara) and R. Preston McAfee (California Institute of Technology)."

"website that lists the price per article and the price per citation for about 5,000 academic journals. Using these statistics, we have constructed an index of costliness for each journal in each of several broadly defined disciplinary areas"...created by UCSB and CalTech...see this article http://www.hss.caltech.edu/%7Emcafee/Journal/OpenLetter.pdf