ARL “Know Your Copy Rights™” Brochure

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published “Know Your Copy Rights™ – What You Can Do,” a brochure that gives faculty and teaching assistants in higher education an easy-to-scan explanation of when and how they can legally use intellectual property in their teaching, often without requesting permission or paying fees. An electronic copy of the brochure is available free on the Know Your Copy Rights™ Web site at http://www.knowyourcopyrights.org/.

The Academic Publishing Industry: A Story of Merger and Acquisition

Though the web site, The Academic Publishing Industry: A Story of Merger and Acquisition, has been up for several years, it is still a very informative account in time-line format of a major trend among publishers, namely the tendency for mergers and acquisitions. "A major finding of this research has been how many of the major imprints bought by academic librarians all over the world are owned by the same company. . . . The story is sobering." A clear message is that as publisher mergers and acquisitions increase, so do the cost of their journals and books. The author, Mary H. Munroe, updated the site in December, 2006.

American Society for Cell Biology Announces Support for Open Access

The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) has announced its support for free public access to federally-funded research within 6 months of publication. The Society has provided open access to research articles in the journal, Molecular Biology of the Cell, since 2001 and has seen no financial difficulties in this procedure. For the full story see: http://ascb.org/index.cfm?navid=10&id=1968&tcode=nws3.

Princeton Joins Google's Digitization Project

Princeton University Library is partnering with Google to make approximately 1 million books from its collection available online. From Princeton's 5 Feb., 2007 press release:

. . . . In a move designed to open Princeton's vast resources to a broad international audience, the library will work with Google over the next six years to digitize books that are in the public domain and no longer under copyright. The partnership is part of the Google Books Library Project, which digitizes books from major libraries and makes it possible for Internet users to search the collections through Google Book Search. . . . .
Princeton is the 12th institution to join the Google Books Library Project. Books available in the Google Book Search also include those from collections at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of California, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas-Austin, the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the New York Public Library, the University Complutense of Madrid and the National Library of Catalonia.

THE FULL PRESS RELEASE.

EUA Working Group on Open Access

The European University Association (EUA) recently established a “Working Group on Open Access”. Its goal is: (i) to raise awareness of open access to scholarship to the university community; and (ii) to develop a common strategy on key selected issues. The EUA Working Group has identified five “priority issues”:

1) Universities’ public role and responsibility as “guardians” of research knowledge/results as “public goods” – the preparation of statements and positions addressed to academic authors, and to public funding bodies.
2) The need for well-functioning open access repositories and networking between them (on the basis of common standards) for archiving purposes as a viable alternative to other modes of publication in the digital world.
3) Strengthening of legal rights position (non-exclusive copyright) and related legal requirements through the promotion, advancement or encouragement of model copyright agreements at university/ institutional as well as individual researcher level.
4) The promotion, advancement or encouragement of business models for publishing based upon open access principles.
5) The promotion, advancement or encouragement of peer review and quality control mechanisms by academic researchers for open access journals.

The 26 January, 2007 statement of the EUA Working Group on Open Access is available here.

SPARC E-News

ARL SPARC's E-News for Dec. 2006-Jan.2007 is now available. Particularly interesting is the bibliography (under "Articles of Interest") on the recent hiring by the Association of American Publishers of an "aggressive" PR firm to counter the rapidly growing Open Access movement.

Google: "Books are Not Part of a Network."

There's an interesting article about the Google Book project ("Google's Moon Shot: The Quest for the Universal Library") in the current New Yorker. It offers insight into Google's relationships with publishers and libraries and into some of the issues of copyright and competition. But it also includes this curious quote from Dan Clancy, identified as the chief engineer in Google’s system for scanning books in library collections:

“The scanning technology is boring,” Clancy said. “The real challenge is to get somebody something that they are actually interested in, inside a book. Web sites [my emphasis] are part of a network, and that’s a significant part of how we rank sites in our search—how much other sites refer to the others.” But, he added, “Books are not part of a network. There is a huge research challenge, to understand the relationship between books.”

Except, of course, that books are part of a network, and the relationship between them, in the sense of one referring to another in the way that Web sites do, is not so hard to understand. It may not be easy to parse those references when they're not in the form of http links, but the challenge should not be, as Clancy puts it, "to understand the relationship between books" but to draw on that relationship to get people to sources they'll find useful.