Author Archives: Authors Alliance

Is it time for authors to leave SSRN?

Posted July 17, 2016

Since we first heard of mega-publisher Elsevier’s acquisition of SSRN, the popular social sciences pre-print and working paper repository, we have expressed concern. Elsevier is not known to be an avid supporter of the open access publishing practices favored by many of our members, and has historically taken a restrictive stance toward author control and ownership of scholarship.

In response, we reached out to Elsevier and to SSRN with a set of principles the service could adopt that would reassure authors that SSRN could continue to be a go-to resource for those looking to refine and share their work. We have since heard back from SSRN: they would not commit to adopting even one of our principles. They offered more general reassurances that their policies would continue as before. We were not satisfied, but we decided to wait and see whether our fears would be borne out.

As feared, it now appears that SSRN is taking up restrictive and hostile positions against authors’ ability to decide when and how to share their work. Reports are surfacing that, without notice, SSRN is removing author-posted documents following SSRN’s own, opaque determination that the author must have transferred copyright, the publisher had not consented to the posting, or where the author has opted to use a non-commercial Creative Commons license. One author, Andrew Selbst, reported that SSRN refused his post even though the article’s credits reflected his retained copyright.

This policy fails to honor the rights individual authors have negotiated in order to put their work on services like SSRN. It misreads the Creative Commons licenses authors adopt in order to share their work. And it is a marked departure from the standard notice and takedown procedures typically used to remove user-uploaded copyright-infringing works from the web, eliminating both any apparent notice from the putative copyright owner and any clear recourse for the affected authors.

SSRN authors: you have not committed to SSRN. You can remove your papers from their service, and you can opt instead to make your work available in venues that show real commitment to the sharing, vetting, and refinement of academic work.

Just recently, SocArXiv—a new social sciences preprint archive built on the model pioneered in physics by arXiv—opened their doors to submissions. SocArXiv is supported by the University of Maryland, not run for profit, and formed with an explicit commitment to openness in academic writing. They are still in early days, but appear to be building a promising successor community to SSRN.

It is also important to remember that your work does not need to be restricted to any one venue. Try SocArXiv, but also see if you can host your work in an institutional repository or on a personal website. Make your work available wherever it can best reach your readers. It is also worth protesting the practices that would restrict your work’s availability and reach by leaving the services adopting them. If the reports about SSRN’s new practices are accurate, then it may be time to leave SSRN and adopt more author-friendly alternatives. Authors, tell us about your experiences with SSRN and other repositories by sending a note to info@authorsalliance.org.

Authors Alliance Presents Elsevier With Principles for Openness in SSRN

Posted June 2, 2016

The recent purchase of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) by Elsevier has caused a great deal of concern among our members and in the scholarly community. In response, Authors Alliance has created a list of principles that could be adoped by Elsevier to reassure authors that SSRN will remain open and author-friendly. Today, we presented those principles to the leadership of both SSRN and Elsevier for consideration. We will continue to scrutinize the transition in ownership and any changes in SSRN’s policies, and look forward to engaging in a constructive conversation in response to our concerns.

Celebrating Two Years of Empowering Authors in the Digital Age

Posted May 27, 2016

In May 2014, Authors Alliance officially launched with a party at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. We’ve been keeping busy in the two years since, growing to support and advocate for our expanding community of 800 and members and counting. We’ve released two educational guides for authors, and provided assistance with rights reversion and contract questions. We’ve spoken at the national level about pressing copyright and policy issues, and traveled around North America to host workshops and panel discussions.

We’re currently working on a third educational guide on fair use for non-fiction authors, and are partnering with the Internet Archive to help our members make books more available, as well as with Creative Commons to build a tool to assist with termination of transfers (an area of copyright law that enables authors to regain the rights to their work if certain conditions are met). We look forward to sharing more details with you as these projects move ahead.

As we celebrate two years of empowering authors who write to be read, we encourage those of you who may not yet be members to join. Membership in Authors Alliance is free, and our members are the first to hear about our news and resources. Sign up here today!

Authors Alliance to Take Part in the Second Annual
Bay Area Book Festival

Posted May 23, 2016

Welcoming visitors at the 2015 Bay Area Book Festival

On the first weekend in June, downtown Berkeley will be transformed into a book lover’s paradise. The second annual Bay Area Book Festival is coming to town, and once again, Authors Alliance will be part of the fun. We’ll be staffing an information booth in the “Writer’s Row” section of the festival on Center Street, and look forward to taking part in this can’t-miss event for everyone who enjoys reading and writing as much as we do.

The Bay Area Book Festival is free and family-friendly, and runs from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM on Saturday, June 4 and Sunday, June 5. We invite our local friends and neighbors to stop by and meet us, and learn how Authors Alliance can help creators with copyright, publishing contracts, fair use, and more!

After Reversion: Tracking Down Digital Copies

Posted May 20, 2016

After you get your rights back with Understanding Rights Reversion, how will you make your work newly available? The internet offers no shortage of ways to disseminate your work, but it’s still not necessarily easy to see your work successfully placed in all the channels you would like. Authors Alliance is committed to helping its members take full advantage of the digital age’s promise for their recovered works, and this online guide is part of a series designed to help them with that goal.

Last updated: 2016-10-13

So you have your rights back, and have big dreams about what you’ll do next. Release your work as an open access title—something that was perhaps unimaginable when it was originally published? Maybe convert it into an “enhanced” electronic version? Update it for release as a new edition?

Before doing any of these, you will need a digital version of the text. Do you have one? If not, don’t panic: there’s more than one way to get your work back out there.

Step 1: Can your publisher provide a copy?

As we stress in Understanding Rights Reversion, recovering rights to an out-of-print or otherwise unavailable title does not have to be an adversarial or acrimonious process. While your publisher is not likely under an obligation to furnish you with any digital copies in their possession, they might nevertheless do so out of goodwill.

Contract Drafting Tip: you can include a commitment from the publisher to furnish you with digital copies of your work in the case of a reversion. Consider doing so!

Your own word processing files, or those recovered from your publisher, will be the easiest and best way to make your reverted work available because modern files can be painlessly converted to the most popular e-reading formats. But there’s still hope even if you don’t have that advantage.

Step 2: Find and “unlock” other existing digital versions

Authors Alliance has written many times before about how mass digitization efforts benefit authors by making their work more discoverable. But there’s an additional advantage for authors looking for digital copies of their work: a scanned copy of the document might already exist as the result of a mass digitization effort. Authors with the necessary rights can often work with these projects to see their works “unlocked” and made newly available.

Have documentation regarding your rights reversion on hand to demonstrate your ownership of the necessary rights, and then consider tracking down copies from some of these existing collections:

HathiTrust is a digital library partnership of dozens of academic libraries, containing millions of titles indexed for full-text search. While in-copyright titles are not viewable, individual rights holders can change the availability of their works by filling out a simple permissions form, available here.

In addition to opting to make your work available, the HathiTrust permissions form also helps authors to apply a Creative Commons license to their work. For more information on why you might want to use a Creative Commons license, and the ins and outs of the various choices, take a look at Chapter 4 of our guide, Understanding Open Access.

The HathiTrust process is a simple way to both make your work available, and to gain access to a pre-existing digital copy. Authors Alliance members Robert Darnton, John Kingdon, Joseph Nye, Stephen Sugarman, and others have taken this route.

Google Books is the world’s largest book scanning effort, currently containing tens of millions of volumes. As with HathiTrust, Google does not make in-copyright books available to the public, but instead allows their text to be searched. And, as with HathiTrust, authors who have reverted rights can make their work available through the Google Books service. However, Google’s process is a little more difficult.

First, you’ll need to be a “partner” at the Google Books Partner Center, essentially, signing up as a publisher on the Google platform. Please note that, as of the time of writing, Google is not allowing new sign ups for this platform. However, some of our members have nevertheless been able to secure accounts after talking with Google support.

Once set up with an account, support should be able to link your partner account with your work, and make it available on the terms you request.

Finally, The Internet Archive, the internet’s own non-profit library, is another source that might have a scanned copy of your book. There is not yet a formal process for unlocking books on the Internet Archive, but stay tuned—we’ll be updating this post with more information as we work with them to make the process easy for authors. In the meantime, try reaching out directly to the Archive at info@archive.org with a link to the page containing your work and let them know that you’ve recovered rights and would like to see it unlocked.

Step 3: Scan and OCR your book

If you cannot find an existing digital copy, you can still make one. There are any number of book scanning services out there (a quick web search will turn up many), and the Internet Archive can also both non-destructively scan and host your books.

You may also request that Google scan your book at one of its Library Partners. According to HathiTrust, you may use this form to make the request. If the book is scanned at a Library Partner that participates in HathiTrust, it will also end up in HathiTrust, at which point you will need to complete the HathiTrust permissions agreement.

When scanning, there are a few things to consider. Some book scanning processes are destructive, resulting in the loss of the book. Not something to do with a rare copy!

You will also want to consider quality. Scanning is simply photographing pages. Those pages can (and should) undergo “optical character recognition” or “OCR,” where the computer works to identify and read text on the page. Better quality scanning helps with quality OCR, which will help give you a more usable, discoverable, and readable document.

Have further questions? Stick around! Further posts in this series will explore where and how works can be posted in order to maximize their discoverability and usability. You can also always email us at reversions@authorsalliance.org, or join us as a member to get our latest updates.

Principles For Reassuring Authors of SSRN-Posted Papers Under Elsevier’s Ownership

Posted May 19, 2016

Note: This post was updated on June 2, 2016 in order to reflect changes in the final list of principles as presented to Elsevier and SSRN.

For-profit publisher Elsevier’s acquisition of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) was disturbing news for many scholars who use SSRN to share their writings with colleagues. SSRN was never fully committed to the broadest conceptions of open access. But for those of us who have posted our works on SSRN over the years, it was open enough for purposes of disseminating our works to readers without charge. Our user-generated content—the hundreds of thousands of scholarly works that researchers have posted on SSRN and the network effects that have arisen from our usage of the site—is what made the SSRN platform valuable to scholars and readers, as well as valuable enough for Elsevier to want to acquire it. That content is collectively ours, not SSRN’s, and not Elsevier’s.

Despite some reassurances that SSRN policies won’t change post-acquisition, there is reason to be concerned about the willingness of an Elsevier-run SSRN to accommodate the open access preferences of scholars who post there. Elsevier has recognized that displaying some receptiveness to open access is shrewd in the current era, although it has pursued policies that have created obstacles to true open access in the view of many scholars.

How might Elsevier reassure SSRN authors that it will continue to respect the policies that have attracted scholarly authors to post on that site? As a starting point, Authors Alliance proposes these principles:

SSRN will be transparent about Elsevier’s plans for SSRN and apprise all contributing authors of any contemplated change no less than four months before effectuating it.
To post a work on SSRN, authors will not need to grant SSRN more than a nonexclusive license to reproduce and distribute verbatim copies of that work in the SSRN database. Licenses for any additional uses of authors’ works must be obtained separately.
The license for posting is and will remain a revocable license, so that if authors decide to withdraw their work from SSRN because of changes in its policies, or for any other reason, they can take down their previously posted works and can download a copy of their works before taking them down.
SSRN will remain an open platform for posting works regardless of their publication status. SSRN will not adopt a policy prohibiting authors from posting their works to SSRN where that posting is not prohibited by any agreement that the author has made with another party or any other obligation undertaken by the author.
SSRN will not remove a work posted by an author unless the author directs that it should be taken down, or SSRN must take the work down to comply with applicable law.
Authors may freely update versions of previously posted works.
SSRN will not interfere with authors’ ability to self-archive works posted on SSRN and to post the same works on other sites, including institutional open access repositories.
SSRN users should be able to download works posted on SSRN for any lawful purpose, without charge, unless the author elects to impose a charge. Such an agreement should be specifically obtained and separately consented to.
Authors’ right to rely on fair use to post works on SSRN that include third-party materials will not be limited by the terms of any SSRN or Elsevier policy or license.
SSRN will not give preferential treatment in posting, search results, rankings, or otherwise to works published by Elsevier, to authors affiliated with Elsevier or Elsevier-related entities, services, or tools, nor to publications distributed for a fee.
SSRN will promptly notify in advance authors who have posted works on SSRN about any changes in SSRN policies or terms of service that would impact the interests of those authors, including attempted changes in the terms of the license granted by authors or changes in the availability of posted works and statistics about views and downloads of posted articles. Changes in license terms or availability of works or data shall not take effect without affirmative consent from affected authors, not merely on the basis of blanket consent to prior policies.

This list focuses primarily on terms of use related to ownership and licensing of the articles posted on SSRN. It does not exhaust the features that will be important to keeping SSRN an attractive platform for the scholarly community. We also care about the platform’s approach to privacy, metadata, usage statistics, and interoperability. As the contributors of content that underlies SSRN’s value, we will monitor with interest whether these policies align with our values.

Agree with these principles? Join us in standing up for them by joining us as a member, or by letting SSRN know on twitter.

Elsevier buying SSRN and the future of open scholarship in the social sciences

Posted May 18, 2016

In a move signalling further consolidation in scholarly communication, Elsevier announced yesterday its purchase of SSRN, a popular working paper and pre-print repository used by a large number of our members. For these members and for those in many scholarly fields, SSRN has been one of the most important platforms for publicly and openly accessible scholarship—the go-to source for posting and finding the latest work. Given Elsevier’s history of creating obstacles to open scholarship, Authors Alliance is among those concerned about the long-term effects of the acquisition.

Elsevier and SSRN have stated that the changes ahead won’t alter SSRN’s “ethos.” These assurances are welcome, but they are not enough. We will be asking Elsevier for explicit commitments to maintaining or improving those aspects of SSRN that have made it work for open scholarship. And we will be taking this opportunity to suggest that our members take affirmative steps now to ensure that their work is made available on their terms regardless of what happens to SSRN—or any other individual platform—in the future.

We will have more updates to come on both these aspects of the SSRN acquisition—watch this space for more. And please let us know your thoughts by emailing us at info@authorsalliance.org or tweeting us at @Auths_Alliance.

Update, 2016-05-19

The principles we are asking SSRN to uphold are now available here.

Moving Toward a “Moral Right” of Attribution in U.S. Copyright Law

Posted May 4, 2016

Authors Alliance Executive Director Michael Wolfe

When Authors Alliance launched two years ago with its Principles and Proposals for Copyright Reform, one of the reforms we endorsed was support for a formal “moral right” of attribution. In that document, we said:

The law should recognize the right of authors to be acknowledged as creators of our works. This is especially important for those of us who create in order to contribute to knowledge and culture. Attribution serves not only our interests as authors, but also the reading public’s interest in knowing whose works they are consuming and society’s interest in an accurate record of the intellectual heritage of humankind.

A fitting way for Authors Alliance to celebrate its second birthday was to serve as an invited speaker at Authors, Attribution, and Integrity: Examining Moral Rights in the United States, a symposium organized by the U.S. Copyright Office in Washington, D.C. on April 18.

Although you might expect otherwise, copyright law in the United States does not provide authors with the right to be acknowledged as the creator of their works. The United States has long resisted adoption of so-called “moral rights,” including the right of attribution, mostly because of objections from copyright industry firms, not from authors. However, there has been increasing momentum in particular around our adoption of a right of attribution. The Symposium reflected this renewed energy, and a building consensus toward the idea that a right of attribution could work here, to the benefit of our creative economy.

The Copyright Office announced that it will be seeking public comments on moral rights issues very soon. Authors Alliance plans to submit formal comments, but below is a summary of some of the discussion at the April 18 symposium.

On the topic of attribution, two central themes were explored. First, what would an American attribution right look like? Second, what do authors and the public stand to gain from an attribution right?

Jeffrey MacKie-Mason Joins the Authors Alliance Board of Directors

Posted April 28, 2016

We are delighted to welcome Jeffrey MacKie-Mason to our Board of Directors, where he joins Pamela Samuelson, Molly Van Houweling, Carla Hesse, and Thomas Leonard in guiding the strategic decisions and activities of the Authors Alliance. MacKie-Mason is the University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer at UC Berkeley, and has joint appointments as a professor in the School of Information and in the Department of Economics.

MacKie-Mason came to Berkeley from the University of Michigan, where he served as Dean of the School of Information for 2010-2015. He was on the Michigan faculty for 29 years as Professor of Information and Computer Science, Professor of Economics, and Professor of Public Policy.

MacKie-Mason earned his Ph.D. in economics from MIT and a master’s in public policy from the University of Michigan. He is a pioneering scholar in the economics of the Internet, online behavior, and digital information creation and distribution. His more than 85 publications appear in scholarly journals in the areas of economics, computer science, law, public policy, and information and library science. He has served on two advisory boards to the NSF, and on many editorial boards. He has testified before the US Department of Justice and the US Federal Trade Commissions, and consulted on competition and pricing for numerous clients, including AT&T, Electronic Data Systems, Compuware, Hewlett-Packard, AOL Time Warner, Telstra (Australia), Valassis Communications, GO Computer, and Sun Microsystems.

“We are fortunate to have Jeff’s deep expertise contributing to the Authors Alliance mission,” says Executive Director Mike Wolfe. “His experience and leadership at the intersection of libraries, authorship, technology, and public policy are an excellent fit for us.”

We look forward to working together with Jeff to empower authors in the digital age!

New Resource: Adventures in Self-Republishing by Jeff Hecht

Posted April 26, 2016

Authors Alliance member Jeff Hecht successfully regained the rights to a number of his books, and has subsequently re-published them himself. In his new guide, Adventures in Self-Republishing: How to Get Your Old Books Back into Print, Hecht shares his experience with everything from formatting and OCR to working with self-publishing websites and e-reading tools. An abbreviated version of the guide is available as a free download; the full-length version may be purchased here.

We thank Mr. Hecht for sharing this indispensable resource for any author looking to self-publish after a successful reversion of rights!