Category Archives: Resources

Appeals Court Issues Important Opinion For Open Access Community And Licensees Of Creative Commons’ Non-Commercial Licenses

Posted January 27, 2020

Authors Alliance is grateful to Elizabeth H. Yandell, associate at Latham & Watkins, for contributing this post about a recent decision interpreting the “non-commercial” element of Creative Commons licenses. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently issued an important opinion interpreting a widely used Creative Commons “Non-Commercial” license. The case, Great Minds v. Office Depot, […]

Distinguishing Trademarks from Copyrights: A Q&A for Authors

Posted January 14, 2020

Authors Alliance is grateful to Nicolas Charest, Copyright Research Assistant, for researching and drafting this post. There is longstanding confusion between trademarks and copyrights, which can sometimes lead to controversy in author communities. Notably, in 2018 an author sparked what came to be known as “CockyGate” after she registered a trademark for the word “cocky” […]

Ringing in the New Year with Public Domain Works from 1924

Posted January 2, 2020

As we ring in the New Year, authors have one more reason to celebrate: another batch of works has entered the public domain in the United States. Last year, the new year brought works published in 1923 that had previously been protected by copyright into the public domain—the first time in 20 years that published […]

Authors Alliance Supports Immediate Access to Federally Funded Research

Posted December 20, 2019

Media sources report that the Trump Administration is considering a policy to make the results of federally funded research immediately available for the public to freely access and use. Current policy requires results of federally funded research be made available in pre-print form within 12 months of publication. The rumored policy would eliminate the 12-month […]

New Report on Termination Rights for Authors

Posted December 10, 2019

Last week, Public Knowledge released Making Sense of the Termination Right: How the System Fails Artists and How to Fix It, a report that explores the right of authors to terminate a copyright license or grant and regain rights in their works—even if their contracts contain language to the contrary. The termination system was designed […]

Rights Reversion: Opening Classic Works to New Global Audiences

Posted November 12, 2019

We are grateful to Anita Walz, Assistant Director of Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Virginia Tech, for sharing the following rights reversion and open access success story. Anita worked with the authors of an out-of-print textbook to make a digitized version available online under a Creative Commons license for a new generation of […]

Q&A With Barbara Kline-Pope on Open Access Publishing Initiatives at Johns Hopkins University Press

Posted October 23, 2019

Open Access Week 2019 takes place from October 21-27. To mark the occasion, we’re featuring a series of Open Access Success Stories that shine the spotlight on noteworthy OA books, authors, and publishing models. In today’s post, Barbara Kline-Pope, Director of the Johns Hopkins University Press, provides updates about the Press’ open publishing initiatives for […]

Q&A with Calvin Warren: Open Access and Democratizing the Accessibility of Knowledge

Posted October 21, 2019

Open Access Week 2019 takes place from October 21-27. To mark the occasion, we’re featuring a series of Open Access Success Stories that shine the spotlight on noteworthy OA books, authors, and publishing models. Today’s post features Calvin L. Warren, Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. His […]

Resource Roundup: Negotiating Book Publication Contracts

Posted October 2, 2019

In October 2018, we released our guide to Understanding and Negotiating Book Publication Contracts and made it available as a free Creative Commons-licensed download as well as in print in the Authors Alliance store. The guide identifies clauses that frequently appear in publishing contracts, explains in plain language what these terms (and typical variations) mean, […]

Q&A With Jeanne Fromer and Christopher Sprigman on “Copyright Law: Cases and Materials”

Posted August 20, 2019

Jeanne Fromer and Christopher Sprigman of NYU Law School recently published their new casebook Copyright Law: Cases and Materials as an open access work. A PDF of the book is freely available to everyone to read and download under a Creative Commons license, and may also be purchased as a low-cost print-on-demand book. Instructors who […]