Category Archives: Resources

Principles and Proposals for Copyright Reform

Posted November 14, 2014

We believe it is high time for authors like us to speak up for a “Next Great Copyright Act” that will carry forward the Founders’ vision of copyright and meet its goals in the digital age. We believe that these reform proposals will help renew the nation’s commitment to a copyright law that secures a just balance between private ambitions and the public good.

To this end, we propose four principles that should guide copyright law and appropriately align the interests of individual creators with the interests of the public for whom they create, and state a number of proposals to help see these principles realized.

Lydia Loren on Semaphore Press

Posted

Authors Alliance Founding Member Lydia Loren from Lewis and Clark Law School explains how her publishing company, Semaphore Press, is working to produce affordable, high-quality casebooks for use in law school classrooms. She discusses how the Semaphore Press business model is designed to both adequately remunerate casebook authors and ensure that students have access to […]

Making copyright work for authors

Posted November 3, 2014

Authors Alliance Co-Founder Molly Van Houweling On Oct. 10 I traveled to Columbia Law School to attend and speak at a symposium hosted by the Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts entitled “Creation is Not Its Own Reward: Making Copyright Work for Authors and Performers.” It was a fascinating day featuring perspectives from […]

Announcing our Open Access FAQ

Posted October 20, 2014

It’s now Open Access Week, an annual event that celebrates and promotes open access to scholarship and research. Open access is consonant with the Authors Alliance mission of representing and enabling authors who write to be read, and we are pleased to join in this year’s festivities. To begin the week, we’ve prepared an FAQ […]

UC Press Pioneers the Scholarly Monograph’s Open Access Future

Posted September 8, 2014

By Authors Alliance co-founder Tom Leonard, University Librarian at the University of California, Berkeley. Last Spring the view out the windows of the University of California Press was a glass-skinned energy lab dedicated to saving the planet. This fall, the Press’s move from Berkeley to Oakland completed, editors look out on a glass-skinned cathedral that […]

Authors Alliance Members Lead Push toward Open and Accessible Legal Education

Posted September 2, 2014

Textbooks are essential instructional tools but they’re not without problems. Most familiar to students is the problem of cost: textbook prices have been significantly outstripping inflation for some time, rising 82% between 2003 and 2013 and giving rise to charts like the one below. But there’s also the issue of tailoring. There might not be […]

STM’s “Open Access” Licenses: Extend, Embrace, and Extinguish

Posted August 18, 2014

Guest-blogged by Authors Alliance founding member Ariel Katz, Associate Professor of Law and Innovation Chair in Electronic Commerce at the University of Toronto. Authors Alliance recently joined a coalition of research, science, and education organizations that called on the Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) to withdraw a set of New Model Licenses for […]