Author Rights, Copyright Issues, Oh My!

[Donna Okubo]

Do You Want to Focus on These Issues During OA Week But You Feel Don’t Have Enough Information?

Here are some wonderful resources to help you build your author rights educational program. The links include handouts, brochures, and videos for OA Week 2010!

Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS)

• Author’s concerns about Open Access Research:
• A list of 35 of author questions, plus the answers to them, has been prepared by Stevan Harnad at Southampton University.

SPARC’s Resources for Authors Website

• ACRL/ARL/SPARC Web cast: Understanding Author Rights --- Downloadable Video
  This one hour webcast is designed to help librarians better engage disciplinary faculty and researchers on the topic of author rights. Learn the basic issues and understand outreach strategies.
• Introduction to Copyright Resources
  Practical guidance when submitting journal articles.
• Know Your Copy Rights - Downloadable brochure
  Among the topics covered in the brochure are: fair use, the advantage of linking to instead of copying works, and special provisions for displaying or performing works in classes.
• Campus and Regional Initiatives
  Institutions and organizations across the world are leading initiatives to inform authors in all disciplines about their rights and how to retain them. A sample is presented here.
  

SURFdirect
SURF's digital rights expert community, has produced a short film on Author rights, your rights.

[Stevan Harnad]

The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Universities are invited to use this document to help encourage the adoption of an Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate at their institution. Note that this recommended "Immediate-Deposit & Optional-Access" (IDOA) policy model (also called the "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy") has been specifically formulated to be immune from any delays or embargoes (based on publisher policy or copyright restrictions): The deposit -- of the author's final, peer-reviewed draft of all journal articles, in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR) -- is required immediately upon acceptance for publication, with no delays or exceptions. But whether access to that deposit is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access (with only the metadata, but not the full-text, accessible webwide) is left up to the author, with only a strong recommendation to set access as Open Access as soon as possible (immediately wherever possible, and otherwise preferably with a maximal embargo cap at 6 months).

This IDOA policy is greatly preferable to, and far more effective than a policy that allows delayed deposit (embargo) or opt-out as determined by publisher policy or copyright restrictions. The restrictions apply only to the access-setting< i>, not to the deposit, which must be immediate. Closed Access deposit is purely an institution-internal book-keeping matter, with the institution's own assets, and no publisher policy or copyright restriction applies to it.

[In the meanwhile, if there needs to be an embargo period, the IR software has a semi-automated EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button that allows any would-be user to request (by entering their email address and clicking) and then allows any author to provide (by simply clicking on a URL that appears in the eprint request received by email) a single copy of the deposited draft, by email, on an individual basis (a practice that falls fully under Fair Use). This provides almost-immediate, almost-Open Access to tide over research usage needs during any Closed Access period.]

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)