[Air-L] Open Access - NIH and Harvard

[burkx006 at umn.edu]

Given the ongoing discussion, this should be of interest.  DLB

On Feb 13 2008, Michael Carroll wrote:

>   [Apologies for cross-posting]
>
>   Dear all,
>
> I write to draw your attention to two important, copyright-related 
> developments affecting open access to the scholarly literature. Both 
> signal that faculty authors are now paying, or will have to pay, greater 
> attention to how they handle their copyrights.
>
>1. Harvard.
>
> Yesterday, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted in favor of a policy 
> under which each faculty member agrees to grant to Harvard a 
> non-exclusive license to make their scholarly articles freely available 
> through the institution's digital repository or otherwise so long as it 
> is not done for profit. This is a pre-commitment strategy that means the 
> license will have been granted prior to any copyright transfer to a 
> journal publisher. When an article has been accepted for publication, the 
> faculty member will have to alert the publisher to the previously-granted 
> license. In many cases, this will also mean the publisher's copyright 
> transfer form will have to be amended. Faculty can seek a waiver of the 
> university's license on an article-by-article basis. This is big news 
> because it's a bottom-up initiative driven by faculty authors. The 
> mechanics of the pre-commitment strategy are not as new as they may seem. 
> Every federally-funded researcher grants the funding agency a 
> non-exclusive copyright license at the time the copyright vests as part 
> of the funding agreement. For more information on the Harvard policy, see 
> my blog www.carrollogos.com.
>
>2. NIH.  
>
> In December, Congress voted to require that NIH make the author's final 
> manuscript of any peer reviewed journal article reporting NIH-funded 
> research publicly accessible over the Internet through PubMed Central not 
> later than 12 months after the date of publication. Since universities 
> are the recipients of NIH grants, it is the university that is 
> contractually bound to make sure that (1) NIH receives the author's final 
> manuscript (after peer review) when the article is accepted for 
> publication and (2) a copyright license to make the article publicly 
> accessible not later than a year after publication. The policy becomes 
> effective in April, and universities are now scrambling to figure out how 
> they're going to ensure that their faculty authors don't sign away too 
> many rights under copyright such that the university is non-compliant 
> with its grant obligations. (Non-compliance can result in a range of 
> sanctions including ineligibility for future funding.) Again for details, 
> see my blog.
>
> In my view, both of these developments signal better alignment between 
> copyright practices and the progress of science in the age of the 
> Internet.
>
>All the best,
>Mike
>
>
>
>Michael W. Carroll
>Professor of Law
>Villanova University School of Law
>299 N. Spring Mill Road
>Villanova, PA 19085
>Research papers: http://law.bepress.com/michael_carroll
>http://ssrn.com/author=330326
>blog: http://www.carrollogos.org/
>
>See also www.creativecommons.org
>
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-- 
Dan L. Burk
Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor
University of Minnesota Law School
229 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN  55455
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