Author Archives: Authors Alliance

Rightsback.org Termination of Transfer Tool

Posted October 31, 2016

In October of 2016, we launched a new online tool at rightsback.org, made with our allies at Creative Commons and designed to help authors navigate the “termination of transfer” provisions of U.S. copyright law.

Complementing our efforts around rights reversions, the area of the law our tool helps clarify allows authors (or, in some cases, their family members) to regain rights to creative works signed away many years ago. Though these termination rights are an extremely powerful boon for authors and creators, exercising them can be daunting. The law is complex and difficult to navigate, requiring attention to detail and careful timing.

The tool provides basic information about how the eligibility and timing of a right based on user input, along with suggestions on next steps that a creator may wish to take in securing rights. To learn more, view our demo video, featuring Professor Sidonie Smith of the University of Michigan that goes through the tool step by step.

As always, you can contact us directly with any questions or suggestions. We are excited to share this  resource with you, and look forward to your comments.

Open Access Resource Roundup

Posted October 28, 2016

screen-shot-2016-10-28-at-12-47-20-pmpublic domain image from the Library of Congress

As Open Access Week comes to a close, we’d like to share a list of resources that you may find helpful in learning about OA and putting it into practice. Whether you are new to open access or just looking for more text, film, image, and audio sources to increase your collection of OA content, this list is a great starting point.

  • The Authors Alliance Open Access Portal: Our one-stop-shop for all things OA, including our primer on Understanding Open Access
  • The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): The comprehensive online repository of OA journals from around the world
  • OA aficionados may already be familiar with the Internet Archive, but it’s worth revisiting to jump into all the new content that’s made available every day—including the Authors Alliance collection of full-text books. And now there’s even a beta version of full-text search at the Archive, making the collections even more user-friendly.
  • The digital collections at the Library of Congress: A treasure trove of public domain materials chronicling American culture and history. They’re an excellent source of images (including the one above, from 1911).
  • Luminos, the UC Press’ new model for creating OA monographs (full text books available)
  • Open Access by Peter Suber: A concise introduction to OA by a pioneering and influential scholar—available in full in the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons license
  • UC Berkeley Library’s Open Access Defined: A handy definition of green and gold OA, plus links to OA journals
  • UPenn Libraries’ extensive guide to finding (and correctly using) OA and public domain images from museum collections and online repositories, including a tutorial on fair use.

These are just a small sample of the OA riches available online, so if you know of a great website we’ve overlooked, contact us and we’ll add it to our resource page!

Brush Up on Your Open Access Knowledge With Our OA Handbook

Posted October 27, 2016

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Just in time for Open Access Week, we’re highlighting our guidebook, Understanding Open Access: When, Why, & How To Make Your Work Openly Accessible. This is the second volume in our series of educational handbooks, following on the success of Understanding Rights Reversion. Our goal is to encourage our members to consider open access publishing by addressing common questions and concerns and by providing real-life strategies and tools that authors can use to work with publishers, institutions, and funders to make their works more widely accessible to all. Here’s a short excerpt from Chapter 1 to get you started.

Are you considering making your work openly accessible?

Are you required to make your work openly accessible by an institutional or funding mandate?

If you answered “yes” to either of these questions—or just want to learn more about open access—then read on! Understanding Open Access is for authors of all backgrounds, fields, and disciplines, from the sciences to the humanities. Because the open access ecosystem in academia is particularly complex, this guide is largely geared to the needs of authors working for academic institutions or under funding mandates. However, many chapters are suitable for authors who write other in contexts, and we encourage all authors interested in open access to read those sections relevant to their needs.

This guide will help you determine whether open access is right for you and your work and, if so, how to make your work openly accessible. This primer on open access explains what “open access” means, addresses common concerns and misconceptions you may have about open access, and provides you with practical steps to take if you wish to make your work openly accessible.

For example, this guide will help you:

  • Learn more about open access and related options;
  • Comply with an open access policy from an employer or funding agency;
  • Select the terms on which you would like to make a work openly accessible;
  • Publish a work with an open access publisher;
  • Make a work openly accessible on a personal or group website;
  • Deposit a work in an open access repository;
  • Negotiate with a conventional publisher to make a work openly accessible;
  • And much more.

This guide is the product of extensive interviews with authors, publishers, and institutional representatives who shared their perspectives on open access options in today’s publishing environment. The information, strategies, and examples included in this guide share the collective wisdom of our interviewees, members, and other experts.

If you have questions or comments about open access, or wish to share your own experiences with open access publishing, get in touch and let us know!

Authors Alliance Partners With the Internet Archive to Make Books Available

Posted October 26, 2016

IA-AA logos

Since the release of our guide to Understanding Rights Reversion in 2015, we have featured a number of “Rights Reversion Success Stories”—books that have been given a new life thanks to their authors’ efforts to regain publication rights and share their work widely.  Many of our members’ titles are already discoverable through the HathiTrust digital library, and we are now partnering with San Francisco-based Internet Archive to make public domain and Creative Commons-licensed works available in full on our new Authors Alliance Collection.

If you’re interested in making your own works more available, see our Resources page for information about rights reversion and open access. We also encourage you try out the beta of our brand-new Termination of Transfers engine—a step-by-step tool developed in partnership with Creative Commons that can help with regaining rights. Internet Archive has also created a handy DIY Guide to Sharing Your Book, with a list of handy links.

And if you have already regained rights to your previously published book(s) and would like to feature them in the Internet Archive, contact us! We can help our members sort out the details, including the scanning and ingest of pre-digital works.

We’re thrilled to be partnering with the Internet Archive on this initiative. Contact us to get started, and help us build the Authors Alliance collection page in the Internet Archive!

This Open Access Week, learn about regaining rights with our new tool

Posted October 25, 2016

openaccess

Just in time for Open Access Week, we are pleased to announce the launch of a brand-new online tool made with our allies at Creative Commons and designed to help authors navigate the “termination of transfer” provisions of U.S. copyright law. The theme of this year’s Open Access Week is “Open in Action” and our new tool helps creators take actionable steps to regain rights and make their work more accessible.

Complementing our efforts around rights reversions, the area of the law our tool helps clarify allows authors (or, in some cases, their family members) to regain rights to creative works signed away many years ago. Though these termination rights are an extremely powerful boon for authors and creators, exercising them can be daunting. The law is complex and difficult to navigate, requiring attention to detail and careful timing.

That is why we’ve partnered with Creative Commons to build an online tool to help clarify the law’s terms and make its intricate timing requirements easier to follow. Through a series of prompts, users enter information about a work, and the tool provides basic information about how the eligibility and timing of a right, along with suggestions on next steps that a creator may wish to take in securing rights.

Want to see it in action? Check out the demo video we’ve made, featuring Professor Sidonie Smith of the University of Michigan (and a member of our advisory board) that goes through the tool step by step.

Want to try it out? The new Termination of Transfer tool is currently in beta, and still needs your review and feedback. We encourage authors and creators to give it a try, and hope you’ll share your feedback via the public comments page. And, as always, you can contact us directly with any questions or suggestions. We are excited to share this new resource with you, and look forward to your comments.

Save the Date! “Publishing Your Dissertation” Event on October 25 at UC Berkeley

Posted October 3, 2016

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Authors Alliance and the University of California are teaming up to present a workshop especially for graduate students on October 25. It’s one of many events taking place at UC Berkeley during Open Access Week. If you are a doctoral student (or hope to be one soon), you won’t want to miss “Publishing Your Dissertation:  Maximizing Your Scholarly Impact through Open Access Publishing, and How to Publish Your First Book.”

The days of submitting a bound hard-copy dissertation (only to have it languish unread on a shelf or on microfilm) are long gone. Doctoral students are now confronted with an array of digital publication, data sharing, and dissemination options. While this presents a wealth of advantages and opportunities for early-career scholars, it also raises many questions about how to navigate the many options available.

An expert panel will address how you can shape what happens after you submit your dissertation, including:

  • How can you start getting cited by others, and boost your scholarly profile?
  • How can you publish and license your dissertation to expand your professional network and academic impact?
  • What are the implications of publishing your dissertation and subsequent “First Book” online?
  • How does publishing your dissertation online impact getting a first book contract?
  • What are the trends in Open Access publishing of first books, and how should you publish yours?

Our panelists are:

Rachael Samberg, the UC Berkeley Library’s Scholarly Communication Officer, will moderate.

For more information and to register, visit the event page.

We hope to see you there!

Michael Wolfe to Present CopyTalk Webinar on SSRN

Posted September 29, 2016

On Thursday, October 6, Michael Wolfe will be the guest presenter for the American Library Association’s monthly CopyTalk webinar. The topic will be “SSRN: Another Enclosure of the Commons?”

Authors Alliance has been scrutinizing the changes at the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), the academic paper preprint server that was recently acquired by Elsevier. Our concerns about continued open access to scholarship and research at SSRN prompted us to submit a list of principles to both SSRN and Elsevier, with the goal of safeguarding authors’ rights. Since then, reports of takedowns and other changes have led us to the conclusion that authors should seriously consider whether to leave SSRN in favor of other preprint archives, such as SocArXiv.

The webinar will take place at 2:00 PM Eastern. For more information and to register, visit the CopyTalk event page.  We hope you’ll join in for this important discussion at the intersection of copyright, open access, and scholarship.

 

Slides from Waikato Workshop and Lecture

Thanks to all those who were able to attend Mike Wolfe’s workshop and lecture at the University of Waikato on 12 September. Please feel free to download the slides from those presentations linked to below:

If you found the presentations valuable, please consider joining us as a member. Membership is free, international, and greatly assists our work.

A note from the Executive Director

Posted September 6, 2016

Authors Alliance executive director Michael Wolfe

Over the last few years, it has been my privilege to work with Authors Alliance and to help the organization launch, grow, and thrive. It is vital that our community of authors working in the public interest has the voice and support their contributions merit, and helping realize that vision is as rewarding a task I could ever hope to have.

Going forward, however, I will be working toward many of these same goals in a new capacity and from a new perspective as I step down as executive director at the end of the year. Beginning in 2017, my primary commitment will be to a new position with a university library. Fortunately, this transition will not be the end of my time at Authors Alliance, as I will continue to be an active member of our community and contributor toward our efforts.

We are now beginning the process of finding the best candidate to move the Authors Alliance effort forward, and I encourage our members and allies to share the job listing, available here, widely. In the meantime, I am committed to driving all of our various efforts forward without delay. Authors Alliance has a great deal of exciting new resources and initiatives to share in the near future, and I remain confident that the organization has a bright and impactful future.

Authors Alliance On the Road: Auckland, Hamilton, and Brisbane

Posted August 31, 2016

AucklandAuckland, NZ by Mathew Waters | CC0

As our members know, part of our mission here at Authors Alliance is to spread the word about our work to empower authors in the digital age. We’ve hosted workshops and attended events throughout North America, and now our Executive Director Mike Wolfe will be heading to Australia and New Zealand to attend a series of events and connect with our friends and members in those countries.

We hope to see many of you at the following events. Spread the word!

Monday, September — 12 University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
2:00-4:30 PM — Scholarly Publishing workshop at Waikato University
5:30-7:00 PM — Lecture on “Copyright, Long-term Accessibility, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement”

Tuesday, September 13 — University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
4:30 PM — “Maximise the impact of your research”

Thursday, September 15 — Brisbane, Australia
Panel on authorship at Queensland University of Technology

Saturday, September 17 — National Writers Forum, Auckland, NZ
1:00 PM — Panel on copyright and contracts at the National Writers Forum in Auckland (conference registration required)

We would like to acknowledge and thank Creative Commons Aotearoa/New Zealand, LIANZA (Library and Information Association New Zealand), the University of Waikato, the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group, and the Queensland University of Technology for their support in making this travel possible.