Washington DC–The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released "PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights: Agreements between 12 Publishers and the Authors Subject to the NIH Public Access Policy," by Ben Grillot, MLS (Maryland 2002), second-year student at the George Washington University Law School, and legal intern for ARL.

To help authors make informed choices about their rights, Grillot compares how the agreements of 12 publishers permit authors to meet the requirements of the recently revised National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy and share their works while they are under embargo. The NIH Public Access Policy requires authors of NIH-funded research to deposit their works in PubMed Central and make them publicly available within 12 months of publication.

Grillot focuses his analysis on how the agreements differ in: the terms and procedures of deposit of the work, the length of any embargo period, and the rights of the author to use and share the work during the embargo period. Grillot presents summary tables that clearly show the similarities and differences across agreements. He also analyzes the implications of these agreements.

Grillot concludes that the significant variability in publisher agreements requires authors with NIH funding to closely examine publisher agreements and the rights granted and retained when deciding where to publish their research. His analysis of these 12 agreements will help authors determine what to look for in an agreement and what questions to ask before signing.

"PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights" is available for free download from the ARL Web site at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/grillot-pubmed.pdf. It will also be included in a forthcoming issue of ARL: A Bimonthly Report.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 123 research libraries in North America. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/.

For more information, contact:
Karla Hahn
Association of Research Libraries
202-296-2296
karla@arl.org

The nature of the problem has been defined by a variety of organizations, including the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC).

SPARC notes the author or authors of a publication, book, or other work holds the copyright “unless and until” they transfer the copyright to someone else. SPARC notes that the copyright agreement received from most journals and publishers asks for “exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, public performance, public display, and modification of the original work.” They note that “Authors who have transferred their copyright without retaining any rights may not be able to place the work on course Web sites, copy it for students or colleagues, … or reuse portions in a subsequent work.” Finally, SPARC notes “The law allows you to transfer copyright while holding back rights for yourself and others.”

Last year, the leadership of the Senate attended a CIC Conference on Faculty Governance at which the CIC Statement on Publishing Agreements was discussed. As of June, 2007, faculty governance from six of the CIC campuses formally endorsed this statement and Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors. This fall, we asked the Faculty Affairs Committee to consider endorsing this agreement for use at Purdue University. As can be seen in Senate Document 07-9, the Faculty Affairs Committee has recommended that the Senate endorse this agreement.

The CIC Statement on Publishing Agreements has also been considered by the ad hoc Task Force on Scholarly Communication at Purdue that was created by the Provost and chaired by Jim Mullins, dean of Libraries.

By passing Senate Document 07-9, Purdue joined other CIC institutions such as the University of Illinois (both the UI-C and UIUC campuses), Indiana University, the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison as endorsing faculty rights to retain use of their intellectual property. The Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors is now available for use by Purdue faculty, if they chose to do so.

Click here to read the Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors (pdf).

For more information about the CIC’s involvement in scholarly communication and author’s rights, please visit their website: www.cic.uiuc.edu/groups/CICMembers/archive/Report/AuthorsRights.shtml.

-George Bodner

Links to articles about this in the New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Harvard Crimson: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/books/12publ.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin

http://chronicle.com/news/article/?id=3943&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=521835>

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=521861

–Beth McNeil 

With something this bold and ambitious, obviously there are a lot of details to be settled…but the idea is getting a lot of traction in Europe, and enthusiasm is building in the US, where HEPAP (the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel) “strongly supports this initiative”…contingent on the resolution of financial concerns (always a big if!).  

A good summary of the project was published in Symmetry:  http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000551

And the HEPAP presentations: one by a SCOAP3 representative, Salvatore Mele:  (http://www.science.doe.gov/hep/HEPAP/November2007/HEPAP-301107.pdf)

Another, cautionary one, by the Editor in Chief of the American Physical Society, Gene Sprouse: http://www.science.doe.gov/hep/HEPAP/November2007/hepap2-1.pdf)

–Michael Fosmire  

Mike Rossner, Heather Van Epps, and Emma Hill reported on their inability to verify published impact factors using data provided provided by ISI.    In their report, they note that they were unable to replicate published impact factors for their own and other journals,  found numerous and serious errors in several data sets provided by ISI, and call into question the validity of both ISI’s dataset and their published impact factors.  

The editorial by Mike Rossner, Heather Van Epps, and Emma Hill was published in the Journal of Cell Biology and is available at http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/full/179/6/1091 

–Beth McNeil (with content from Karla Hahn, ARL)

The NIH is the world’s largest funding provider for scientific research, with a budget last year of $28 million. This open access mandate will mean an unprecedented quantity of research will be available.

For more information, visit http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/release07-1226.html  and http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/20/AR2007122002115_pf.html.

What is scholarly communication? While definitions vary, most agree that scholarly communication is the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use.

Why does Purdue have a task force on scholarly communication? The traditional system of scholarly communication is evolving. Electronic publishing, innovative business models, and the intervention of scholars and societies offer new opportunities for sharing scholarly information. The Task Force was formed to bring together diverse view points on the issues related to scholarly communication and to help inform campus of the changing issues. 

We plan to post information about scholarly communication in general, and specific Purdue-related information, at this site. Please visit often!