Category Archives: Reaching Readers

“A Good Guy Offering a Good Product at a Fair Price”:
Cory Doctorow on Fair Trade E-books, Publishing, Copyright, and the Optimism of Disaster

Posted May 9, 2017

portrait of Cory Doctorow by Jonathan Worth | CC BY-SA 2.0

As part of our mission to empower authors in the digital age, Authors Alliance encourages authors to embrace new strategies for publishing and ensuring the ongoing lifespan of their work, both in print and in digital formats. Best-selling novelist, blogger, and Authors Alliance founding member Cory Doctorow epitomizes this innovative spirit in myriad ways. We sat down recently with Cory for a wide-ranging talk about his newly-launched platform for selling fair trade ebooks, the pros and cons of traditional publishing, and his brand-new novel, Walkaway.

AUTHORS ALLIANCE: At the London Book Fair this past March, you announced your new model for selling fair trade ebooks, affectionately known as “Shut Up and Take My Money.” What was your inspiration for this new platform? How does it address some of the issues with traditional retailing?

CORY DOCTOROW: There are ongoing disputes among publishers and writers about the equitable way to share ebook royalties. I kept hearing from people in publishing that hell would freeze over before publishers would pay 50% instead of 25% for ebook royalties. Now, “never ever” is a long time, and things do change, but if this is a thing you want to feed your kids with, you shouldn’t hold your breath. I got started by retailing my own audiobooks on my website with a modest shopping cart program after I had been kicked out of the traditional audiobook market by refusing to agree to DRM [digital rights management, which controls users’ access to, and use of, copyrighted material]. When I sell my audiobooks directly on my website, I get paid twice: I get the retail cut, as well as the royalty from my publisher, which is pretty damn close to 50%. The same is true for the ebook fair trade model: if you sell an ebook on your website, the royalty plus your retail cut is close to 50%.

There is also the fact that, in the time since Creative Commons licenses were negotiated, publishers have entered into agreements with the large ebook retailers that allow for price matching. This is in part an artifact of anti-trust litigation, but it means that if someone somewhere offers the book at $0, it technically allows all of the other ebook stores to offer the book at $0 as well.

Thus far my publishers have been good about grandfathering in the CC-licensed books that I already had, but for the last couple of books I haven’t done CC licensing, in part because of the real fear that Amazon could set the price at $0 and there would be no recourse for my publishers—not even the recourse of not letting Amazon sell the book, because of deals ensuring that if Amazon sells one book of a publisher’s, they have to sell the whole catalog.

So I thought, “What can I do to accommodate the CC books and the non-CC books that will maximally benefit all the entities here, and play within the Realpolitik of these regulatory settlements?” And I came up with this fair trade ebooks idea.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

The Authors Alliance Guide to Crafting A Reversion Letter

The first step in reverting rights to previously published work is to initiate a conversation with the rightsholder—usually a publisher. This process is not always straightforward, so Authors Alliance has created a concise collection of templates and sample language that may be used as a starting point. The Authors Alliance Guide to Crafting a Rights Reversion Letter (including letter templates) is intended to help authors take the all-important initial step in the rights reversion process. We’d like to thank Nicole Cabrera, Jordyn Ostroff, and Brianna Schofield of the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley Law for their work in creating this guide, which is a companion to their primer on Understanding Rights Reversion.

A collection of rights management tools is available on our Resources page. Check back often for updates and new information!