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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
April 26 is World Intellectual Property Day—an opportunity to highlight and learn more about IP issues around the world. This year, a group of Polish and European organizations has provided a sobering example of what can go wrong with overlong, complicated, and internationally inconsistent copyright terms. To call attention to these issues, Centrum Cyfrowe, in […]
Pamela Samuelson, President, Authors Alliance There was very good news for authors in the Supreme Court’s decision not to review last year’s ruling in the Authors Guild v. Google litigation. That decision, which will now stand, found that Google’s scanning of in-copyright books from research library collections for purposes of creating an index and serving […]
Books that have fallen out of print, or aren’t selling as well as they used to, can enjoy a second life thanks to rights reversion—the process by which an author may regain control of some or all of her rights in a previously published work. Thanks to reversion, works can appear online, in new editions, […]
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 […]
by Raoul Grifoni-Waterman, Copyright Policy Research Assistant at Authors Alliance, LL.M. Candidate at U.C. Berkeley Law, and Leiden University LL.M. Every country leaves some room in its copyright laws to protect free expression and allow for the everyday uses of copyrighted works that creators and consumers need. But not everyone takes the same approach. Out […]
Lydia Pallas Loren is a founding member of Authors Alliance and a law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon. Her recent article Fair Use: An Affirmative Defense? appears in the University of Washington Law Review. Larry Lessig once famously declared, “[F]air use in America simply means the right to hire a […]
