About Author: Edward Shreeves

Posts by Edward Shreeves

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Some observations on Authors’ Guild suit vs. HathiTrust

From Kenneth Crews, who notes regarding orphan works:

The complaint is about much more than just the orphan work initiative at HathiTrust, but orphan works receive ample attention.  Orphans seem to be emphasized in the complaint as an example of the expanded use of the digital files that HathiTrust is clearly willing to pursue.  For the libraries and users, that may be a good thing.  For the rightsholders in this complaint, it is far overreaching.  Moreover, the complaint cites the Google Books case and the failed efforts by Congress to enact orphan works law to argue that orphans need a legislative solution—not a private innovation.

See http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/2011/09/13/authors-copyright-and-hathitrust/ for the full item.

And from James Grimmelmann, who concludes:

The Orphan Wars are upon us, I fear. We might have hoped that they would be the Orphan Discussions, or perhaps the Orphan Debates, but no. The Orphan Wars it will be.

See http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/09/12/the_orphan_wars 

 

 

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Authors’ group sues HathiTrust, Michigan and other universities.

From the September 13th Inside Higher Education:

The Authors Guild on Monday sued the HathiTrust (a consortium of universities) as well as Cornell and Indiana Universities and the Universities of California, Michigan and Wisconsin, charging widespread copyright violations. The universities and the trust have worked with Google on its project to digitize books (a project now on hold) and on a recent effort to release to their campus communities digitized copies of “orphan works” ….”

Iowa had been poised to join Michigan and others in making available “orphan works” which we held in print form to the campus.

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Appeals court decision on “first sale” doctrine could affect library lending

A decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on the First Sale doctrine could affect the right of libraries to lend (and individuals to resell) some books.  See the analysis of Duke Scholarly Communications Officer Kevin Smith at http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2011/08/24/getting-first-sale-wrong/ and

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Coalition of universities with open access mandates is formed

A number of prominent institutions have over the past few years passed open access “mandates,” requiring campus authors (unless a waiver is sought) to deposit copies of their scholarly articles in the school’s institutional repository–their equivalent of our Iowa Research Online , or IRO. Passage of these mandates has come about through the efforts of faculty concerned about problems in the system of scholarly publishing,  and been passed by the equivalents of Iowa’s Faculty Senate. Institutions with open access mandates  include Harvard, Duke, MIT and Kansas, among others.

Now a group of these institutions have formed the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, or Coapi, to help address the issues that arise in implementing such policies. University of Kansas Dean of Libraries Lorraine Haricombe observed:

“Society depends on universities for the creation of new knowledge, so we have a responsibility to disseminate and share that knowledge to gain the most benefit for science and society. This new coalition will offer academic institutions an opportunity to stand together and establish open access to knowledge in the sciences and humanities as a broad societal norm.”

Marc L. Greenberg, professor and chair of the Slavic Languages and Literatures department added:

“I always keep the idea of ‘knowledge as a public good’ in mind in doing work for open access and I view what we do as part of renegotiating the social contract between universities and society. Universities belong to the public.”

See the story by Jennifer Howard in today’s Wired Campus: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/universities-join-together-to-support-open-access-policies/32632?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

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Canadian law library directors call for free access to legal information.

In May, 2011 the organization of Canadian law library directors joined a distinguished group of US law librarians in calling for electronic publication of law journals and other scholarly work produced at their institutions in open and freely available forms. The precedent setting Durham Statement by law librarians from Harvard, Chicago, Yale and others was issued in late 2008. The Council of Canadian Academic Law Library Directors asserts that “it will benefit legal education, improve the dissemination of legal scholarship, promote free access to legal information and enhance access to justice if our law schools commit to making the scholarship they publish available in stable, open, digital formats in an institutional or other open-access repository.”  For the full statement see http://library.osgoode.yorku.ca/documents/Calgary_Statement.pdf

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British research library group demands reductions in “Big Deal” costs

A recent article in Wired Campus by Jennifer Howard calls attention to the announcement by a group representing British research libraries that they would not sign agreements with Wiley and Elsevier for journal packages–so-called “big deals”–unless a significant price reduction were offered. The group represents many of the most prominent university libraries in the UK, including Oxford and Cambridge. Many US libraries have recently backed away from such agreements, which often include publishers like Sage, Nature Publishing Group, Springer and Taylor and Francis, as well as Elsevier and Wiley. The University of Iowa Libraries is watching these developments with interest. Our current contracts with Wiley, Springer and Nature all expire at the end of 2011.

For the story, see http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/british-research-libraries-say-no-to-big-deal-serials-packages/32371?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

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JSTOR files posted online

The indictment of Aaron Swartz has prompted a good deal of comment in blogs, Twitter and other media. The story below from a Chronicle of Higher Education/wiredcampus post by Jen Howard describes a response in protest from one individual who has put massive amounts of pre-1923 content from JSTOR online.

“Prompted by the indictment this week of the online activist Aaron Swartz, a programmer has posted JSTOR’s archive of a historic science journal online via BitTorrent. In a note on the Pirate Bay Web site, Gregory Maxwell said he was sharing 18,592 papers from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society—33 gigabytes’ worth.”

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/user-posts-thousands-of-jstor-files-online/32378?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

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Humanities Scholars Discuss Their ‘Shared Mental Map’ for a New Age of Digital Communication

A report on the Scholarly Communications Institute just held at UVa talks about the future of “digital humanities,” the academic reward system and new models for communicating scholarly work.

See http://chronicle.com/article/Humanities-Scholars-Discuss/128282/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

For views into t he future by some of the participants, see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NiQSR-e-Yu88-IsVmezcE1QHPBKRNmbXpScdMhBmzC8/edit?hl=en_US&pli=1#

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Top Research Funders found top-tier open access bioscience journal

Three research organizations who are major funders of biomedical research have announced their intention to create a top-tier open access e-journal. Yesterday the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Society and Wellcome Trust proclaimed their plan for a new journal to publish the best research in the biomedical and life sciences. The journal, as yet unnamed, will exist only online and employ an “open and transparent” peer review system. As an open access journal it will be free to readers anywhere. The first issue is expected in 2012. The announcement makes no such claims, but reads as if this new journal is intended to compete in terms of impact and prestige with Nature and Science.

From the announcement: 

“The three research organizations developed their plans following a workshop in 2010 at HHMI’s Janelia Farm Research Campus attended by a number of leading scientists. The participants concluded that there was a need for a model of academic publishing that better suits the needs of the research community.” [Emphasis added]

See http://www.hhmi.org/news/20110627.html

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The Georgia State filing – A declaration of war on the faculty?

In another blog post on the Georgia State e-reserves case, Paul Courant, University Librarian (and former Provost) at the University of Michigan, argues that the plaintiffs (Cambridge & Oxford University Presses plus Sage, supported by the Copyright Clearance Center) have crossed the “boundary from adversary to enemy.” Two paragraphs quoted below–for the entire post, see http://paulcourant.net/2011/06/09/the-georgia-state-filing-a-declaration-of-war-on-the-faculty/

The plaintiff’s draft order applies formally only to Georgia State, but if the Court grants the plaintiffs what they seek, the result will be, in the words of Duke University’s Kevin Smith, “a nightmare scenario for higher education:” fair use would be destroyed, university faculty, students, and staff would be subjected to outrageously restrictive copyright policies, and every university would be required to hire a squad of copyright cops to ensure that faculty do the publishers’ bidding. And while it’s not an uncommon strategy to ask for far more than you expect to receive in a negotiation, which this proposed injunction surely is, your “highball” offer is certainly something that you wouldn’t mind having. What the plaintiffs are saying is that they are quite willing impose enormous costs on academic performance and academic freedom in exchange for higher profits. This is not the request of a friendly adversary; this is the attack of an enemy. (Yes, academic authors would also receive some financial benefit, but note that the typical split for incremental revenue is around 90-10 in favor of publishers, and that the additional revenue that publishers would receive under the plaintiffs’ draft order would be obtained NO additional cost incurred by the publishers beyond cashing checks and paying their lawyers.)

As a faculty member, I do not know that I could comply with the restrictions in the proposed injunction for using copyrighted material in my classroom; they are too onerous and much too expensive. As an author and an educator, I have a great respect for copyright law, and I believe in a balance between creating incentives for authors and promoting the ”progress of science and the useful arts.” The proposed injunction does not strike that balance; it unreasonably restricts access to copyrighted works, eliminates fair use, and will force professors to spend much of their time in an exercise of copyright self-censorship. Imagine that if every time you wanted to quote from a text, show an image, or distribute a handout to your students you had to seek the approval of the University Copyright Police; the consequences would be dramatic. (Lest you think I am exaggerating, check out the form that, were the publishers to have their way, faculty would have to fill out every time they put copyrighted works on electronic reserve.