NIH Open Access Mandate: A Careful Look at Two Options for Retaining Authors' Rights
-- "Do Nothing" and "Do it Early and Efficiently"
by Georgia K. Harper, I.P. Scholar
"The Director of the National
Institutes of Health shall require that all
investigators funded by the NIH submit or
have submitted for them to the National
Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an
electronic version of their final,
peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for
publication to be made publicly available no
later than 12 months after the official date
of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall
implement the public access policy in a
manner consistent with copyright
law."
And with those 76 words, the former NIH
suggestion, that researchers it funds should
deposit copies of their published research
articles in NIH's open access repository,
PubMed Central, became a mandate early this year.
Many people have worked tirelessly to make
this happen and all believe fervently that
the benefits from open
access (OA) to the immense body of research
funded by the NIH will be monumental. If you
are new to the subject of OA, you can learn
about it at a plethora of Websites devoted to
the subject, such as Peter Suber's Open Access
News and the Create Change Website.
Open Access itself will not be the topic of
this article; rather,
here I would like to explore two
institutional options for complying with the
new mandate.
The mandate involves two related
responsibilities. First is the responsibility
to post articles that report NIH funded
research. But, in order to post, the author
of the article must possess a set of rights
to give NIH to make the posted article
publicly available. Because most authors are
asked to assign all their rights to their
publishers when their articles are accepted
for publication, retaining sufficient rights
to give to NIH can present a problem. It is
this second responsibility, to retain
adequate public access rights, that I want to
address here. Institutions have many options
for facilitating author retention of the set
of rights needed to give NIH its "public
access license." I won't invent a new name
for one of the ones I want to explore -- it's
the old "do nothing" option, and one that I
think many institutions will find quite
attractive. I'll contrast it with one I think
is more effective and efficient -- the "do it
early and efficiently" option, the one I
would most recommend.
Read more...
 Georgia K.
Harper is
the Scholarly
Communications
Advisor for the University of Texas at Austin
Libraries,
where she focuses on issues of digital
access. She
was Senior Attorney and manager of the
Intellectual
Property Section of the Office of General
Counsel for
the University of Texas System until August
2006,
where she specialized in copyright law. Ms.
Harper is
also the 2006-2008 IP Scholar at the Center for
Intellectual Property.
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Peer-to-Peer Filing Sharing on Campus Under Fire Yet Again
Up on the Hill with Kenneth Salomon & James Burger
When we last reported on the content
industry's effort to have Washington regulate
college and university campus networks (see
previous article), the education
community in September had successfully kept
the most burdensome peer-to-peer ("P2P")
regulatory requirements out of the final
version of the Senate's Higher Education Act
reauthorization, the Higher Education
Amendments of 2007 (the "HEA Bill"). As
predicted, however, the content industry -
primarily the Motion Picture Association of
America (the "MPAA") - this year renewed its
efforts in the House of Representatives to
impose new expensive and more stringent
burdens on the higher education institutions
to halt unlawful P2P file sharing. This time
it had better success even though the MPAA
admitted that its underlying "factual" basis
for imposing the new burdens turned out to be
badly flawed.
Read the rest of this
update...
 Attorney
Kenneth
Salomon is a
Member with Dow Lohnes, PLLC, and is head of the
firm's Government Relations Practice Group. He
works with clients in the areas of government
relations and public policy, as well as on
issues involving commercial and public
broadcasting and distributed learning. Mr.
Salomon's decades of
practice have focused on such areas as
communications, government relations and
legislation, intellectual property, mass
media, and post-secondary education.
Attorney Jim Burger is a Member with
Dow Lohnes, PLLC, specializing in
representation of technology companies on
intellectual property, communications and
government policy matters. Mr. Burger has
worked extensively on legal and policy issues
arising from the confluence of digital
technology, intellectual property protection
and government regulation, particularly as
affecting the Internet.
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İollectanea Blog Celebrates One-Year Anniversary!
Collected Perspectives on Copyright
CIP's blog celebrated its one-year
anniversary this February! Georgia
Harper, the Center's Intellectual Property
Scholar, and a handful of her guest bloggers
have kept a large and growing audience
informed and involved about current
events, ideas, and
trends in the arena of copyright through
their observations, questions, pondering and
reading.Recent postings have included:
Read. Comment & talk back. Subscribe to the
feed. Join the growing dialogue...
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8th Annual Symposium Highlights
Join the CIP for its annual symposium
exploring the relationship between the U.S.
copyright monopoly, technological innovation
and higher education institutions.
We'll explore the high-stakes conflict
between copyright law, exclusive ownership,
and monopoly (on one side) and a cultural
landscape that encourages sharing and
collaboration (on the other side). Where do
higher education interests reside? We will
discuss these issues in the context of:
- The Development of User Generated
Content
- Mass Digitization Projects
- The Transformation of "Authorship"
- Use of Wikis, Blogs and other
Technologies in the Development of
Scholarship
This is your premier opportunity to join the
CIP for three exciting days of discussion on
copyright in the digital arena. We are
gathering, all in one convenient location, a
wide range of scholars and
practitioners from higher education, business
and industry, law, policy, government, and
nonprofit sectors.
Program highlights this year include:
Keynote Speakers:
- James Boyle, Professor of
Law, Duke University School of Law;
Co-Founder, Center for the Study of the
Public Domain
- Georgia Harper,
Scholarly Communications Advisor, University
of Texas at Austin Libraries
-
See the full list of other outstanding
speakers...
Pre-Conference Seminars:
***NEW SYMPOSIUM
TRACK***
Institute
for Copyright Leadership &
Management (ICLM)
In addition to the full symposium agenda, the
CIP has partnered with the National
Leadership Institute (NLI) to bring to you a
unique program that
promises to meet the needs of many
institutions struggling to better manage the
changes in copyright law. The goal of the
Institute is to increase participants'
capacity for change management and to lead
copyright initiatives on their campuses.
Register today for yourself...with a
colleague...or receive a special team
discount when you assemble a work group of
three representatives, one each from any of
the following areas at your institution to
attend ICLM: academic administration; general
counsel; library;
information technology; and faculty.
But wait...there is more!
Register
for the
2008 Symposium
TODAY!
Early Bird Rates Apply
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