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.)

Posted by Judea Franck at 06:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Continue reading "Current Standings" »

Posted by Judea Franck at 06:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Continue reading "Free Culture vs Permission Culture" »

Posted by Judea Franck at 06:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Continue reading "Fast Forward: Publishing Goes Digital" »

Posted by Judea Franck at 06:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Continue reading "Traditional Publishing: A Brief History" »

Posted by Judea Franck at 05:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Continue reading "Exploring Copyright" »

Posted by Judea Franck at 05:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Comment on this issue
It's been ten years since CSU Libraries launched its Web site, and since then the Internet has revolutionized the way we bring you information. Today the Library provides you with access to more than 24,000 electronic journals and more than 198 databases, regardless of whether you’re at home, at the office, or out in the field. The Library Web site has no doubt transformed the way that CSU faculty and staff conduct their writing and research. The Internet has had a similar effect on the classroom, with students now able to do research from computer labs inside the Library, across campus, in their dorm rooms, and beyond. Thanks to the Library's Electronic Reserve system, we're also making it easier for you to share materials online with your students without the costly expense of paper copies.

As a society, we are in the midst of an information revolution. For the first time in history, Internet technology enables the dissemination of knowledge and the exchange of ideas both globally and instantly. The Internet is also transforming notions of authorship. As blogging, e-mail listservs, and other forms of online publishing are embraced across academia, the ways in which we publish and share our work are being radically transformed. In the midst of this burgeoning technology, lawmakers are faced with important questions on the ways in which to govern--or, some would argue, to protect--information in the digital environment. This issue of Library Connection explores copyright in the digital age. Who owns creative work and who has the right to share it? For educators, the Know Your Copy Rights will serve as a quick guide to help you navigate some important questions when sharing digital content in the classroom. We're happy to assist you in the Library and the General Counsel's Office can also answer specific legal questions pertaining to copyright information. The article we present here in Library Connection is addressed to you as authors. It is meant to help you explore the options of ownership of your own creative work--the rights you have, the rights you sign away, and the rights you may want to keep.

Posted by Judea Franck at 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)