Category Archives: Issues

Our Guide to Understanding Open Access is Coming Soon!

Posted October 23, 2015

OA Guide Cover

In celebration of Open Access Week, we are offering sneak previews of our forthcoming guide, Understanding Open Access: When, Why, & How To Make Your Work Openly Accessible. This guide 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. We will officially launch the guide on November 3 during our workshop on “Writing To Be Read” at the New York Public Library. In the meantime, here’s a short excerpt from Chapter 1 about the scope of Understanding Open Access.

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.

We hope these excerpts have been helpful, and we look forward to launching the guide in early November. Until then, if you have questions or comments, or wish to share your own experiences with open access publishing, get in touch and let us know!

Understanding Open Access:
The Human Side of Machine Readability

Posted October 22, 2015

OA Guide Cover

Removing legal restrictions on use is a key component of making your work openly accessible. Authors may also want to consider additional factors that shape how available their works are for readers to fully access, share, and reuse. Making a work available in a machine-readable format can increase readers’ ability to access and use your work and maximize its reuse.

Cory Doctorow is a fiction writer, activist, blogger, and journalist and a member of Authors Alliance. After making his novel Little Brother openly accessible, Mr. Doctorow received a braille copy of the book from Patricia Smith, a Detroit public school teacher of visually impaired students. Although braille versions may be permissible under one or more copyright exceptions, creating a braille version often first requires painstakingly entering text into a digital format. This obstacle prevents many works from being translated into braille. However, because the text of Little Brother is openly available without technical limitations to prevent its copying, printing, and sharing, Ms. Smith was able to directly run the book’s digital file through a braille embosser and make the book available to her visually impaired students.

Ms. Smith also included a note, which stated: “What I could not enclose is the gratitude from my braille reading students. For various reasons, most books in braille are aimed at younger children. My students are all between the ages of 12 and 15 and have no real interest in reading a Kindergarten level book. I was finally able to give them something interesting, compelling, and, most importantly at their grade level.”

Machine-readable formats enable search engines to index the entire text of a work, in turn making it easier for readers to search for and find works. Making metadata about your work available in standardized formats also enhances your work’s machine-readability and helps readers find it. Metadata includes information such as the author’s name, institutional affiliation, the title of the work, an abstract, and open access license terms. Open access repositories commonly include this metadata when a work is uploaded to the repository.

We will post excerpts from Understanding Open Access throughout the week. If you have questions or comments, or wish to share your own experiences with open access publishing, get in touch and let us know!

Caged Masterpiece: Robert van Houweling Reviews Morris Fiorina’s Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies

Posted October 21, 2015

In this, the second post in our series on “Caged Masterpieces,” Robert Van Houweling, a professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and Authors Allliance member, reviews Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies by Morris Fiorina. This 1974 book laid the foundation for much of Fiorina’s later work, and remains relevant to today’s political landscape, yet it is out of print and difficult to find—a “caged masterpiece” that remains largely inaccessible to scholars, students, and the public.

Morris P. Fiorina of Stanford University has been a leading voice in debates about the partisan polarization of American politics. His central contribution has been the observation that the positions of politicians have polarized more quickly than those of voters. This has created what Fiorina terms a representational “disconnect.” The source of this disconnect and its ability to persist in the face of frequent democratic elections has become a central puzzle in political science.

While Fiorina’s most recent contributions on this topic are written for a wide audience and readily available, his initial attempt to understand the relationship between voters and their elected representatives is nearly impossible to obtain. It is his 1974 caged classic Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies. If you are lucky enough to find a copy in your library, it will be heavily marked up to the point of being unreadable. You might find a similarly well-loved (or hated) copy for a reasonable price in the secondary market, but a fresh copy will cost hundreds of dollars. This is too bad, because the observations and correctives that Fiorina offers in this 1974 volume continue to be important for understanding politics today. I’ll offer two examples.

Fiorina presents a theoretical treatment of when and how we can expect legislators to represent different groups of voters in their districts. A powerful point he makes is that analysts often assume that demographic groups will gain influence in a linear fashion in proportion to their numbers. For example, a representative of a district with an electorate that is 20% Latino will be twice is likely to represent the interest of Latino voters than a representative from a district that is 10% Latino. Fiorina points out that there is a critical flaw in this logic. For the influence of the group to grow it must become pivotal to the re-election prospects of the representative. In most cases this will create a non-linear relationship between a group’s size and its sway over its representatives. There will be some point at which it becomes large enough to be critical to the re-election prospects of the representative, and at that point the representative will speak and vote for the group. But below that threshold the representative can safely ignore the group, and its size will matter little in driving the actions of the representative. Fiorina’s observation has implications for a range of debates in political science today, the most obvious of which are ones surrounding gerrymandering and redistricting.

Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies also provides a prescient contribution to contemporary debates about polarization. In short, Fiorina offers the first evidence of the “disconnect” that has become a focus of his more recent scholarship. He does this by comparing the roll call records of legislators from different parties who represent the same district back-to-back. What he finds is that, when a legislator is replaced by a legislator from of the other party in the House of Representatives, the way the district is represented on roll calls changes substantially. Today this insight might not come as a shock given the popular debate surrounding polarization. But a couple of things are worth bearing in mind. First, these swings over the center of the district mean that the moderates in a district (the median voter in formal lingo) are almost never well-represented in Congress. This is a point that still escapes many modern scholars, pundits, and journalists. Second, some level of “disconnect” was already a feature of American politics in the less polarized era that immediately preceded the publication of Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies.

This was a book before its time that is important for understanding ours. It did not enjoy the multiple printings and robust secondary market its insights merit. It is time to uncage it.

Countless works of enduring value and significance fall out of print and remain essentially off-limits, which not only denies their creators an intellectual legacy, but also stymies researchers, libraries, artists, and others whose work could be enriched by access. A treasure trove of creative, historical, and cultural output languishes in this informational no man’s land, and the power of these works to inform, educate, and enlighten is greatly diminished.

Authors Alliance is deeply committed to the belief that these “caged masterpieces” deserve to be widely read. To that end, we are creating a series of examples to highlight them. We want to hear from you about works that are valuable, interesting, relevant—and out of reach. We invite you to contact us at info@authorsalliance.org and nominate more “caged masterpieces” to be featured in this space. And to all authors whose own books might be locked away out of sight, we encourage you to take action and recover the rights to your work in order to give it new life.

Understanding Open Access:
Can Monographs Be Openly Accessible?

Posted

OA Guide Cover

Conventional publication and open access are not mutually exclusive. For example, many conventional publishers allow authors who publish with them to also upload the authors’ final versions of their works to open access repositories. In such cases, authors can benefit from the imprint of a well-established print publisher while still making their works openly accessible.

Many publishers are developing programs to make books openly accessible. For example, the University of California Press recently launched Luminos, an open access publishing program for monographs. Authors who publish with Luminos can make digital editions of their books openly accessible under the University of California Press imprint. Open Humanities Press has also launched an open access program for monographs, making the books it publishes in print available as full-text digital editions published under open licenses.

Book authors who are interested in open access may choose to negotiate with conventional publishers to publish their books in print but also retain the rights to make their books openly accessible. Authors who have already assigned their rights to conventional publishers may be able to exercise or negotiate for rights reversions that would allow them to make their books openly accessible. For more on this possibility, please see the Authors Alliance guide Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why, and How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available.

Understanding Open Access: When, Why, & How to Make Your Work Openly Accessible

Posted October 20, 2015

Open access removes price barriers and harnesses the power of the Internet to enable readers to find works more easily. For example, openly accessible works are often full-text indexed, helping potential readers easily locate a work using a search engine, and, importantly, access the work without being turned away by pay walls.

As a result of this increased discoverability and access, some authors find that open access increases their readership. The majority of studies find that open access leads to a greater number of citations. Regardless of whether their works are in fact cited more frequently, many authors find that open access increases their works’ visibility, helping it to reach readers and benefit the public.

Shawn Martin is a Scholarly Communication Librarian at the University of Pennsylvania and Authors Alliance member. Open access facilitated the translation and wide dissemination of Mr. Martin’s work. After he deposited an article about library publishing infrastructure in the University of Pennsylvania’s Scholarly Commons repository, a group of librarians found Mr. Martin’s article and, with his permission, translated it into Romanian. The work was subsequently translated into Russian and several other Eastern European languages. Because Mr. Martin’s article has been translated into so many languages, it is cited in proceedings and conferences around the world. According to Mr. Martin, “Opening up access can allow audiences you never intended to find value in your work, and in my view that’s a great thing.”

Some authors have even found that widespread dissemination of their openly accessible works stimulates demand for print copies of their works, contributing to royalties for these authors.

Fair Use Affirmed On Appeal in Google Books Case

Posted October 16, 2015

Today the Second Circuit Court of Appeals issued a widely anticipated ruling in favor of the defendants in the Authors Guild v. Google case, marking a major victory for fair use in a lawsuit which has been making its way through the courts for a decade.

A brief summary of the litigation highlights the crucial importance of this decision. In 2005, the Authors Guild filed suit against Google, claiming massive copyright infringement due to the digitization of copyrighted works by Google Book Search. After protracted negotiations, a controversial settlement agreement was proposed in 2009, but ultimately rejected in 2011 by Judge Denny Chin. In November 2013, the case was dismissed on the grounds that Google Books’ use of digitized materials met the criteria for fair use, and was of significant public benefit. Chin also rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that Google Books does economic harm to copyright holders; on the contrary, he stated that Book Search can, in fact, increase sales. In April 2014, Authors Guild appealed that decision, but the Second Circuit has now unequivocally reaffirmed the earlier rulings in favor of Google.

Today’s decision states that “Google’s unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals.”

For those who have been following the Authors Guild litigation, today’s decision—significant as it is—was not unexpected. In recent years, a growing body of caselaw has developed around fair use, some of which originated with another unsuccessful lawsuit. That case, Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, filed in 2011 as a parallel action to Google Books and concerning the use of books digitized by Google and shared among a consortium of libraries, had already been decided in the defendants’ favor in 2012, a ruling that was upheld on appeal by the Second Circuit in June 2014.

As an organization whose members believe in making their work available and accessible, Authors Alliance stands firmly on the side of fair use. Last July, we filed an amicus brief with the Second Circuit in support of the fair use defense in this case, because Book Search increases the discoverability of work without threatening its marketability. One year ago, we expressed our hope that the court would rule in favor of Google and Book Search. Today, we applaud the courts’ decisive reaffirmation of fair use in helping authors to make their work more widely available and accessible to researchers, students, and the public.

Authors Alliance Urges Reconsideration of Extended Collective Licensing

Posted October 9, 2015

Today Authors Alliance submitted comments to the U.S. Copyright Office in response to a proposal in the June 2015 Report on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization to establish a pilot program for Extended Collective Licensing (ECL) for mass digitization projects. We believe that mass digitization plays a crucial role in disseminating knowledge for the public good, and welcome the attempt to simplify the copyright and permissions complexities that can impede digitization efforts. However, we are concerned that the ECL proposal does not adequately address the interests of authors who write to be read. Nor does it consider the complexity and feasibility of managing permissions and licenses across multiple groups of potential rightsholders. These latter issues in particular have also been addressed by Authors Alliance co-founder Pamela Samuelson in her own comments to the Copyright Office, which detail specific reservations about the scope, creation, and implementation of the ECL pilot project.

We suggest that the Copyright Office’s proposal, while well intentioned, is not the solution we need to realize the potential of mass digitization, and urge the Office to reconsider implementing its proposed pilot program.

Read the Authors Alliance comment here.

Authors Alliance Hosts “Understanding Rights Reversion” Webinar

Posted October 2, 2015

On September 30, the Authors Alliance Rights Reversion team hosted a webinar on Understanding Rights Reversion for ASERL (the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries). The webinar, led by Nicole Cabrera, Jordyn Ostroff, and Brianna Schofield of the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, offers a step-by-step look at how authors can regain rights from publishers in order to make their work more available. Interested authors can watch the full video above, check out our team’s slide deck, or grab a copy of the guide, which is available both online and in print.

“Happy Birthday” Freed From False Copyright Claims

Posted September 24, 2015

Under a court ruling this week, Warner/Chappell music publishing no longer gets a slice of every “Happy Birthday” cake. After years of litigation, a federal court in California has found that the company does not, in fact, hold copyright to the words of a century-old children’s ditty. “Happy Birthday” is quite possibly the most popular and enduring English-language song in the world, and it’s so much a part of our everyday lives that many are surprised to learn that it might be proprietary. Although the melody has long been out of copyright, Warner/Chappell has maintained a chokehold on the lyrics, making an estimated $2 million a year in royalties from people like Jennifer Nelson, a filmmaker who sought to make a documentary about “Happy Birthday” only to learn that Warner would charge her $1,500 to use it in her film.

The recent ruling was a qualified victory for the public domain. The court found that there was no evidence that the songwriters, Mildred and Patty Hill, ever transferred the rights to “Happy Birthday” lyrics. While this doesn’t conclusively establish that any copyright in the song has expired, it doesn’t seem likely that a new claim to ownership will emerge anytime soon—either because the song has been orphaned, or otherwise because it has actually been in the public domain all this time.

All of this legal wrangling over a six-note preschool song highlights many of the aspects of our copyright system that are most in need of change. Most importantly, we need to do something about the overly-long copyright terms that contribute to confusion about ownership and obstruct new works of authorship that would build on our shared cultural past.

Authors Alliance has advocated against further lengthening copyright terms in our Principles and Proposals for Copyright Reform and in our comments on ongoing trade agreement negotiations. In this case, the advanced age of “Happy Birthday” made it difficult to either verify or disprove Warner/Chappell’s ownership claim, while allowing it a copyright that would have extended to 2030 had it prevailed.

The amount of time and effort spent teasing apart the ownership of “Happy Birthday” also highlights the need for better information flows about copyright ownership. When work is in the public domain, the public deserves to be able to be confident in that assessment. When work is owned, authors and the public are best served by making the identity of the owner reasonably knowable. Warner/Chappell’s bottom line aside, no one was served by wrongly keeping “Happy Birthday” out of reach of singers, filmmakers, and anyone else who wanted to feature this ubiquitous little song in their creative work.

Understanding Rights Reversion: Now in Print

Posted September 15, 2015

When we released Understanding Rights Reversion this past April, we published the guide as a digital file under a Creative Commons license with the goal of putting it in reach of anyone who might need it. We’re pleased to say that the guide is now available, digitally, through any number of outlets, from NYU libraries to Australian Policy Online, as well as from our website.

But digital can’t reach everyone and many of us find paper resources easier to read and navigate. For everyone with a preference for paper, and for those who want to support Authors Alliance’s continuing non-profit mission, Understanding Rights Reversion is now available the old-fashioned way. After joining or donating, purchasing a guide from us is one of the best ways to stand behind our organization. Buy one today (below or in our store) and who knows, we might even throw in some stickers!