Library Connection

Capturing Your Intellectual Assets: How Institutional Repositories Are Part of the Solution

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:19:44 +0000

Researchers poring over ancient manuscripts or medieval incunabulum can still read the words set down by famous scholars of the past. Take a simple stroll through the moveable shelves of Morgan Library and one might stumble upon the original volumes of Nature, first published in 1870. The pages are a bit fragile, tinged a shade of ochre, but one can clearly read the discoveries of Alfred Wallace and J.W. Dawson or a recounting of Mr. Darwin's lecture at the French Institute. As the old adage says, "It's the printed word that lasts forever."

In today's world, every day we generate billons of digital files. In fact, the intellectual output of more and more of our top researchers and academics across the nation is born in digital form. Yet, what are we doing to capture those files and make sure that the basis of our current thinking will be preserved for generations? Who is to say that the research data you are gathering for your current project will be available ten years from now when you or a colleague would like to pick it back up again and examine some other angle of your thesis? Who can guarantee that the presentation you gave at a most recent conference will be accessible so that a colleague or student might be inspired by your discoveries sometime into the future?

Collecting the Digital You: The Birth of Digital Archives

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:18:00 +0000

Take a moment to think about all that is born in a digital format. Our daily interactions often happen as email. Photographs and videos are taken digitally. Books, papers and articles are mostly written on computers. Most sound recordings are made digitally. The human experience--our thinking and discovery--is now primarily recorded in digital form.

Accelerating Information Exchange: The Role of Institutional Repositories in the Research Marketplace

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:15:30 +0000

There is no question that electronic publishing has profoundly impacted research and teaching. It is simply astounding that most current scholarship is literally at your fingertips and can be located within seconds, most often seamlessly made available to you by libraries. This sea change has prompted many in the research, publishing, and library fields to question traditional practices, and the implications and effects of new emerging digital information sharing tools have yet to be fully discovered. Yet, one immediate and undisputed benefit of institutional repositories is that they are filling a critical place in the digital information gap, providing a safe space to house information that would otherwise be lost or inaccessible.

Your Work at The World's Fingertips: CSU's Digital Repository

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:12:43 +0000

Recognizing the benefits of an institutional repository, Colorado State University Libraries is implementing the creation of CSU’s own institution-based digital repository. CSU's Digital Repository (DR) will house the scholarly work of CSU faculty including papers, research data, conference presentations, public performances and exhibitions, as well as “eprints” of peer-reviewed publications as publishers allow; publically funded research results published by CSU; theses and dissertations of graduate students; undergraduate research projects; and CSU produced publications. The aim of the DR will be to help the CSU community manage the products of your research and teaching and help you share that information with colleagues around the world.

Know Your Author Rights: Retain Your Right to Self-Archive

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:10:09 +0000

How can you publish in leading journals while retaining the right to place your articles in CSU’s developing digital repository?

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (http://www.arl.org/sparc/), has developed
one tool to assist authors in keeping key rights to the articles that they publish. Their Author Rights brochure details the Author Addendum, a legal instrument that authors may use to modify their publication agreements with publishers.

The Author Rights Addendum can be downloaded as one element of the informative Author Rights pages made available by SPARC, an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system.

Partnerships for the Future: Library Services to Help Disseminate Intellectual Output

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:10:09 +0000

When asked about the biggest challenges for implementing the DR, Assistant Dean Bush notes, “There are technical challenges to overcome, but the experience of other universities shows that recruitment of content is a major challenge.” Most importantly, the Libraries wants the DR to be a tool that aligns organically with the research process. “We expect that implementation will help identify new digital and repository services to develop to better meet the needs of users,” adds Bush.

Put Your Work at the World's Fingertips

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:10:09 +0000

If you would like to post your work in CSU's digital repository to maximize the impact of your research, appear in Google and other search engines, reach new audiences, and provide stable, permanent access to the products or your research and teaching, contact us!

Dawn Bastian, Digital Repositories Coordinator
Dawn.Bastian@Colostate.edu | 970.491.1849

Or Contact your College or Department Liaison Librarian
http://lib.colostate.edu/collegeliaisons

Find Out More

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:51:06 +0000

Additional information about copyright and digital legislation:
The Lessig Blog . Author of Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. This blog discusses current copyright law and its cyber implications.
Public Knowledge, an advocacy group working to promote and defend a "vibrant" information commons in the digital environment. The site includes resources, news releases, current legislation, litigation, and a blog on copyright and fair use policy.
American Library Association Copyright Page includes information on current copyright policies and debates.
The actual wording of the CTEA bill can be found online at: http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/s505.pdf
The actual wording of the DMCA bill can be found online at: http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf

Copyright in the Classroom

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:25:13 +0000

Managing Your Copyright

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:24:19 +0000

The great value of the Internet is that having a journal publish your work is no longer the end of the story. You have the power and tools to help distribute your own work so that it can resonate in ways never before imagined. First, you have to be sure to retain at least some of your copyright during the publishing process. Here's how:
Establish a Creative Commons License . Creative commons is a nonprofit organization that helps "authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry." It allows you to copyright your work while enabling people to more readily copy and distribute your work--provided they give you credit--in the ways you want them to.
Publish in journals that allow you to retain your rights. This will make it possible for you to share your work in the digital environment. The RoMEO database is a growing list of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement. It is searchable by publisher and enables you to add publishers to the list. Self-archiving (posting on a personal/ departmental website or in a digital collection supported by the University) is a key right to retain so that you can create a digital copy of your own body of work.
Download the SPARC Author Addendum . When added to traditional publication agreements, the addendum will help you to retain more of your own rights to your journal publications and make it possible for you to more easily control your work in the digital environment (including protecting your right for online posting or using portions of your articles in future work.)

Current Standings

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:17:20 +0000

Regardless of where you fall in the copyright debate or the degree to which you view knowledge as individual property, a public good, or a mix of both, the reality is that something isn't working with the current state of copyright law. The forces of copyright and ownership and being paid for distributing intellectual property don't balance with the free exchange of knowledge and ideas in the way Internet technology can facilitate. There is evidence of this everywhere across all disciplines.

Free Culture vs Permission Culture

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:12:54 +0000

The answers to these questions? It depends. This is not meant to make you panic. Of the 149 publishers included in the RoMEO publishers' copyrights database, approximately 78% allow you to retain those rights, including the right to self-archive (posting to a personal, departmental or university Web site). Those publishers include the American Physical Society, Elsevier, and Cambridge University Press.7 (You can access this list of publishers online at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php.) Know Your Copyrights also explains that sharing your work with your students constitutes fair use, and is therefore allowed in the academic setting. But this also means that 22% of publishers included in the RoMEO database don’t allow you to retain these kinds of rights to your own work. Among the publishers that don’t allow you to self-archive are the American Chemical Society, the American Medical Association, and the Modern Humanities Research Association.8

Fast Forward: Publishing Goes Digital

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:11:09 +0000

Now it is 2007. We are all publishers. We all have the power and tools to create copies. This is not some Orwellian fantasy, this is our reality. We can all think of things, write them down, take pictures or record sounds, and transmit that information to a broad range of audiences around the world. We can send an e-mail to a listserv with a readership of hundreds. We can print a thousand copies of something and have it professionally
bound for very little money.

Traditional Publishing: A Brief History

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 17:49:09 +0000

There is no question that in the traditional publishing market, publishers add value to authors' work. Essentially, we sign away our rights to our work because of the efforts publishers put into our work in return--the long, labor-intensive process of facilitating peer-review; proofing, copy-editing, and typesetting; and marketing and distributing copies to readers. We provide the rights to our "intellectual property" and publishers provide the value of distributing our work. In turn, publishers profit from this exchange primarily by making money, and authors profit indirectly through tenure, promotion, acclaim, etc. Copyright was born of this exchange--sort of.

Exploring Copyright

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 17:42:24 +0000

In an academic setting, publishing is essential. It enables us to communicate our research and teaching to others, to further the exploration of ideas and theories, to share discoveries and make important advances that directly impact our communities and quality of life. Ideally, publishing gives us a voice in the vast discourse of our fields. Most practically, it provides us with professional standing and enables us to pursue important advancements such as tenure. Most view publishing as the end result of months or sometimes years of toil--the products of our research and teaching. Once our work has been accepted, especially if it is to be published by a top tier journal, we often sign whatever paper the publisher puts in front of us. It is so important that our work has made the journey from our own desktop and into the wider world to be read, discussed, and hopefully cited that most of us probably don’t even know what it is we are signing away.