Category Archives: Resources

Read your open access publishing agreements, or: how you might accidentally give Elsevier or Wiley the exclusive right to profit from your OA article

Posted June 5, 2023

Reading publishing agreements–even for short academic articles–can be extremely time consuming. For many academic publishers, you’ll find an array of information about your rights and obligations as an author, often spread across multiple websites and guides, in addition to the publishing contract itself. It’s tempting to just assume that these terms are standard and reasonable.  […]

Athena Unbound and Untangling the Law of Open Access

Posted May 26, 2023

A few months ago, Authors Alliance and the Internet Archive co-hosted an engaging book talk featuring historian Peter Baldwin and librarian Chris Bourg. They discussed Baldwin’s new book, Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should be Free For All. You can watch the recording of the talk here and access the book for free […]

An Update on our Text and Data Mining: Demonstrating Fair Use Project

Posted April 28, 2023

Back in December we announced a new Authors Alliance’s project, Text and Data Mining: Demonstrating Fair Use, which is about lowering and overcoming legal barriers for researchers who seek to exercise their fair use rights, specifically within the context of text data mining (“TDM”) research under current regulatory exemptions. We’ve heard from lots of you […]

Fair Use Week 2023: Looking Back at Google Books Eight Years Later

Posted February 24, 2023

This post is authored by Authors Alliance Senior Staff Attorney, Rachel Brooke.  More recent members and readers may not be aware that Authors Alliance was founded in the wake of Authors Guild v. Google,  a class action fair use case in the Second Circuit that was litigated for nearly a decade, and finally resolved in […]

Fair Use Week 2023: How to Evade Fair Use in Two Easy Steps

Posted February 23, 2023

This post is by Dave Hansen and also posted to the Fair Use Week blog here. Fair use is an essential part of the Copyright Act’s careful balance—on the one hand protecting rightsholders’ interests, while on the other “[permitting and requiring] courts to avoid rigid application of the copyright statute when, on occasion, it would […]

Fair Use Week 2023: Resource Roundup

Posted February 21, 2023

Authors who want to incorporate source materials into their writings with confidence may find themselves faced with more questions than answers. What exactly does fair use mean? What factors do courts consider when evaluating claims of fair use? How does fair use support authors’ research, writing, and publishing goals? Fortunately, help is at hand! This […]

Announcing the “Text and Data Mining: Demonstrating Fair Use” Project

Posted December 22, 2022

We’re very pleased to announce a new project for 2023, “Text and Data Mining: Demonstrating Fair Use,” which is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation. The project will focus on lowering and overcoming legal barriers for researchers who seek to exercise their fair use rights, specifically within the context of text data mining (“TDM”) research […]

US Copyright Office Defends Artists’ Rights to Terminate their Copyright Transfers

Posted November 11, 2022

UPDATE: You can find Authors Alliance’s comment on the Copyright Office’s proposed rulemaking here. “Termination of Transfer,” is a legal tool that allows authors to recapture rights previously handed over to another party, even if their contract contains language to the contrary. It’s a really great idea. The policy rationale is that we need a […]