Transitions

White House petition reaches 25,000 signatures

The White House petition sponsored by Access2Research and calling for open access to all journal articles arising from federally-funded research reached the required 25,000 signature mark on June 3, well ahead of the June 19 deadline. As of June 11, 26,592 signatures had been received. White House petitions which reach 25,000 signatures within 30 days receive an official response from the Administration.

The petition calls for the published results of all taxpayer-funded research be posted freely on the internet. Currently, only articles resulting from research funded by the National Institutes of Health have this requirement. The NIH Public Access Policy requires that articles be posted to PubMed Central within 12 months of being published.

Fister: “An Academic Spring”

Be sure to check out Barbara Fister’s piece “An Academic Spring“. She follows scholar Timothy Gowers’ decision to withraw his participation from the scholarly activities of the large publisher, Elsevier:

“Gowers faulted the corporation for high prices, bundling subscriptions in ways that made selection prohibitively expensive for libraries, and for supporting the Research Works Act (RWA), proposed legislation that would prohibit government agencies from requiring that publicly funded research be freely accessible within a year.”

Gowers’ decision prompted action across academia. A petition against Elsevier was created, and brought together 10,800 signatures from those scholars who intended to boycott Elsevier as well.

Fister connects the “Academic Spring” with last year’s “Arab Spring” in a clever way that just might propel sudden change.

Injunction Proposed in Georgia State Ruling

Inside Higher Ed reports that the drama over a copyright lawsuit filed by the Association of American Publishers against Georgia State University continues.

Following a ruling largely negative to the AAP, the plaintiffs have proposed an injunction which “…would prohibit Georgia State professors from making unauthorized copies that are not “narrowly tailored to accomplish the instructor’s educational objectives” and do not “constitute the ‘heart of the work’ ” from which they are excerpted, among other criteria.”

Read the fully story by Steve Kolowich at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/04/publishers-seek-injunction-e-reserve-case

MLA Changes Copyright Policy

The Modern Language Association (MLA) has recently changed its copyright policy to allow authors in its publications to retain copyright. Authors will now be able to include versions of their work on their own web sites and in institutional repositories. Inside Higher Education has this article for more information.

Kevin Smith’s “Saying the right things, then doing them” goes into further detail and analyses what MLA’s shift may do to the humanities.

These 3 points may be most important,

Open access is not only possible, but is even vitally important, in the humanities.

Open access, especially in its “green” form of author self-archiving, is not a threat to scholarly societies.

The value of organized publishing efforts is in the services they provide around the content, not in the content itself (which, of course, the publishers do not create).

Authors certified as class in lawsuit against Google bookscanning project.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that “Judge Denny Chin on Thursday denied the company’s requests to dismiss professional associations as plaintiffs, and granted a motion to accord members of the Authors Guild status as a class in the lawsuit brought by three of its members.”

University of California, San Francisco, adopts open access “mandate”

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), faculty senate voted unanimously for an open access policy that requires articles published by its researchers in scholarly journals to be made publicly available in electronic form. UCSF thus joins Harvard, Duke, Kansas and a number of other institutions in mandating such access. See the article by Michael Kelley in Library Journal and the May 23rd statement from UCSF.

As reported in the UCSF statement: “Our primary motivation is to make our research available to anyone who is interested in it, whether they are members of the general public or scientists without costly subscriptions to journals,” said Richard A. Schneider, PhD, chair of the UCSF Academic Senate Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, who spearheaded the initiative at UCSF. “The decision is a huge step forward in eliminating barriers to scientific research,” he said. “By opening the currently closed system, this policy will fuel innovation and discovery, and give the taxpaying public free access to oversee their investments in research.”

White House petition calls for open access to federally funded research results

Under the sponsorship of Access2Research a White House petition has been initiated that calls for open access to journal articles published as a result of federally funded research. The Access2Research web site urges:

“Sign the petition to require free access over the Internet to journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research. This will require you to create an account at the White House petition website, confirm the account by clicking on a link in your email, and then sign the petition itself.

25,000 signatures in 30 days gets an official Administration response. We want to hit that number – blow it out of the water – to escalate this issue inside the White House. We believe the idea of requiring free access has support but is stuck. This could well be the event that gets it through.”

University Press group criticizes GSU ruling

The Association of American University Presses has issued a statement critical of the ruling in the Georgia State case and some of its interpretations, especially by librarians.

“We believe it is premature and unwise for anyone to declare victory or defeat. The ruling is 347 pages long and not easy to understand, its interpretation of the law is controversial and unprecedented in several important respects, and it appears to make a number of assertions of fact that are not supported by the trial record.”

More on Georgia State ruling: ARL Issue Brief by Brandon Butler

Brandon Butler, Director of Public Policy Initiatives at the Association of Research Libraries has written an eight page Issue Brief discussing the recent ruling in the Georgia State case in some detail. The Executive Summary appears below:

Executive Summary

The case concerns the use at Georgia State University (GSU) of electronic course reserves and electronic course sites to make excerpts from academic books available online to students enrolled in particular courses. The named plaintiffs in the case are three academic publishers (Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Sage), but an early filing in the case confirmed that the lawsuit was in fact being funded 50% by the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) and 50% by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The plaintiffs argued that the unlicensed posting of digital excerpts for student access almost always exceeded fair use and should require a license.

Although the decision is certainly not perfect (the use of bright line rules for appropriate amount under factor 3 is particularly troubling), Judge Evans has written a thorough and thoughtful analysis of the issues, and her opinion represents an overwhelming victory for Georgia State individually, a major defeat for the plaintiff publishers and for the AAP and CCC, and overall a positive development for libraries generally. The substance of the opinion is not ideal, but it is far more generous than the publishers have sought, it establishes a very comfortable safe harbor for fair use of books on e-reserve, and libraries remain free to take more progressive steps.

Elsevier allows experimental text mining of its journals at UBC

In an agreement with the University of British Columbia (UBC) Elsevier recently agreed to allow researchers there to text-mine Elsevier content for a number of purposes. The agreement came about through the efforts of Heather A. Pinowar, a post-doc at UBC whose “work depends on text mining, using computers to automatically pull certain kinds of information from large amounts of text, including databases of journal articles.” See details in Jennifer Howard’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.