Category Archives: scholarly communication

Workshop on Author Agreements

Charlotte Roh and I are running a workshop today for ISSR (Institute for Social Science Research), on negotiating your author agreements.

Author Negotiations Workshop, ISSR, April 17 – 107 Bartlett Hall, 1pm – 3pm

“Negotiating Author Contracts and Agreements” with Laura Quilter, the Copyright and Information Policy Librarian at UMass Amherst

Friday, April 17, 2015 – 1:00pm to 3:00pm
107 Bartlett Hall

Scholars routinely sign away rights when they publish — rights that they need to share their own work with colleagues and students, and rights they need to publish and research new work. What rights should faculty keep, and what are the best strategies for negotiating author agreements? Laura Quilter and Charlotte Roh, both with the Scholarly Communication Dept. at the Libraries, will review the issues and bring their respective legal and publishing expertise.

Laura Quilter is the Copyright and Information Policy Librarian at the UMass Amherst Libraries. She educates the campus community on copyright and related matters, through workshops and consultations. She is an attorney (JD, UC Berkeley 2003) and librarian (MLS, University of Kentucky, 1993).

Charlotte Roh is the Scholarly Communication Resident Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is manages the institutional repository, ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. She is involved in library publishing, author consultations, and scholarly communication social justice. Her background is in academic publishing with Oxford University Press and Taylor & Francis, and she continues to freelance as an editor.

Link

Nicole Allen (@txtbks) and I will be speaking at a panel
at LibrePlanet in Cambridge, MA, this weekend:

New research techniques like data mining have highlighted the shortcomings in “free” (as in beer) licensing of academic research, and the benefits of “libre” licensing that permits true scholarly engagement with data and scholarship. These challenges apply equally in the education sphere, where teachers often need to manipulate resources and not simply distribute them. We will survey what is sometimes called the “open movement” in academia, which incorporates open access, open education, and open data. How are researchers and educators grappling with these challenges, and what can they learn from the free software movement?

https://libreplanet.org/2015/program/

Martin Eve visiting campus

Martin Eve (Oct. 2, 2014), 3:00 – 4:00, Room 2601 Du Bois Library – Martin Eve, Director of the Open Library of Humanities, will speak on open access in the humanities.

“Elsebeer”

Elsevier is, for better or worse, the academic publisher that everyone loves to hate.  They have become the poster-child for everything that is wrong with for-profit paywalled access to scholarship and knowledge.

Here’s an amusing take-off on “Elsebeer”: http://fragments-of-truth.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/academic-publisher-unveils-new-journal.html Perhaps the funniest part of it is that several people I’ve shown it to have been, at least initially, confused into thinking it was real.

RIP Aaron Swartz, 1986-2013 – Open Access Activist

R.I.P. Aaron Swartz, 1986-2013

Aaron Swartz, an open access activist, committed suicide on Friday, January 10, 2013.

He was facing a 13-count indictment from the US Dept. of Justice for breaking into JStor, an academic articles database, although JStor had dropped all charges.

Academics worldwide have begun releasing their papers as a tribute, posting the URL to twitter using the hashtag #PDFtribute and the Internet Archive has begun a memorial archive.

See: NYT obituary; Larry Lessig, “Prosecutor as Bully“.