The Beagle Project Blog: Open access science publishing lands a big one:

The Beagle Project Blog: Open access science publishing lands a big one: 

16 November 2007

Open access science publishing lands a big one:

Bora at Blog Around the Clock is strutting like a peacock today, and quite right too. He works as online community manager for the science journal PLoS ONE and the journal had just seen the publication of a paper announcing a new and exciting dinosaur find.
It's an herbivore, and it has some new questions to ask of our understanding of big veggie dinosaurs: not least of which is how the hell can a critter that big have a skeleton so delicate?
But here's the exciting thing, the paper by Sereno, Witmer, Wilson, Whitlock, Maga, Ida and Rowe is available for you and I to look at, free. I don't have to have an expensive, exclusive subscription to a journal to read about their work. This matters, because the world increasingly relies on science and we can't have its practices and practitioners arrogating to themselves the trappings of alchemists or gospel writers. Science is a rational, not a gnostic practice: hiding literature in subscription only journals keeps the rest of us out, and makes itself a priesthood and a discipline accessible only to those who have special access and cash.
Some science reporting in the MSM is good, pop science mags are an informative but costly habit but they mediate the work done by scientists. Oftimes that is very necessary, but sometimes it's good to plunge your mind into the raw stuff of science.
Here's a glass of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon to PLoS ONE, Sereno et al and their decision to reveal Nigersaurus taqueti in an open access journal. I don't work as a professional scientist, but I'm a scientifically literate cheerleader from the sidelines (and I'm not the only one), and it's fantastic for me to be able to read this stuff: some of it is above my pay grade, but with a bit of reading around I can understand it all, and even without understanding every word I can relish the work. The more science is freely available the more interested minds might be able understand what science does and what science means.
Finest kind work by all concerned. And the point of all of this to the Beagle Project? We aim to make as much of our education work, our film clips, lecture-lets, blogs from the boat, photos freely available so that students and teachers the world over who can's sail with us can benefit. Our aspiration is to extend the same Open Access ethic to our grown up academic research too.

Posted by Peter Mc at 00:48

The Beagle Project Blog: Open access science publishing lands a big one:

The Tree of Life: Open Access dinosaurs and way to go Paul Sereno

 

Open Access dinosaurs and way to go Paul Sereno

Well, I met Paul Sereno, the dinosaur hunter, for the first time at SciFoo camp (for more about that see here). I confess I was skeptical when he said he was committed to Open Access. But now he has really proven his OA chops. He has a new paper in PLoS One on some friggin cool dinosaur fossils.
The paper is "Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur" by Paul C. Sereno^1*, Jeffrey A. Wilson², Lawrence M. Witmer³, John A. Whitlock², Abdoulaye Maga⁴, Oumarou Ide⁴, Timothy A. Rowe⁵
Check it out at PLoS One.

The Tree of Life: Open Access dinosaurs and way to go Paul Sereno

Medical Illustrations » Open Access and Medical Art

Medical Illustrations » Open Access and Medical Art 

Open Access and Medical Art

Posted under Open Access

With the growing interest in open access, no-cost, medical journals, such as Open Medicine and PLoS Medicine, I’m drawn to wonder what the open access publishing movement means for medical illustrators?

Open access publications operate under the Creative Commons license, which proposes that individuals are able to copy, download, reprint, reuse, distribute, display or perform the published work, free of charge, with the only condition that they cite the origin of the published work.

Author’s with an academic affiliation are able to publish journal articles because they are financially supported by their home institutions. The author’s salary likely comes with conditions that encourage (read expect) them to publish, and publish often. While authors do not get paid (by the journal) to submit articles, they are of paid to write - they are provided a salary by their home institution, which provides them time to do and report on their research.

Ever wonder how much an “average” journal article costs to write? You could start with the average salary for a professor in a medical school is $85,241 / year (as suggested by salary.com). Let’s further assume the person is hard-working and puts in 50 hours a week, or 2450 hours a year if they take few weeks off to enjoy some holiday cheer. The hourly rate for this salary would then work out to $35/hour. Now the challenging part - estimating how long it takes to write, edit, submit, review, revise, re-edit, and resubmit a paper. There is also the issue of multiple authors to cloud the issue. However, even assuming a paper takes ONLY 150 hours to bring from raw data to published study - the cost easily exceeds $5000.

So the author(s) publish their paper, after spending over $5000 worth of time - and the article is available for free to the academic community. There are tremendous benefits to the rapid and wide dissemination of medical information that the open access system provides. Usually the research is paid for by public funds - so the information should be widely available (ideally to everyone who paid for it).

But when the author(s) recognize the value of medical illustrations - they will want to include quality medical images in their article. There are a couple common options. Perhaps the researchers have a medical illustrator available at their home institution - because their institution has recognized the value of providing this valuable resource, which improves publication quality and overall impact of the institution. Alternatively, the author(s) have to pay an independent illustrator to prepare artwork to be incorporated into the article. The later situation takes money out of the authors pocket, or more likely - out of their research grant).

In Canada, the costs associated with the development of web pages, multimedia presentations, and artwork for publications, or information dissemination, are all eligible expenses for research grants awarded by CIHR and NSERC.

Regardless of the way the medical illustrations are paid (internally or by a grant) the Creative Commons License does provide the opportunity to put conditions on the transfer of copyright. Most importantly - there can be a condition on the work restricting its future use for commercial gain. For example, the journal Open Medicine, publishes their articles under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada license. The author and artist are therefore able to protect their rights to the investment made in the development of a published illustration.

Initially I was concerned that open access publishing might reduce the opportunities for publishing medical illustrations, but after exploring the issue further - there seems to be great opportunity here. If the costs for publishing are reduced, more articles are able to be published and distributed more widely - then medical artists will have increased opportunities. Also - the electronic formats of open access journals also increases the opportunity for including multimedia and animation content, expanding the publishing possibilities. It’s a brave new world, indeed.

Food for thought:

CIHR Policy on Access to Research Outputs.

“CIHR considers the cost of publishing in open access journals to be an eligible expense under the Use of Grant Funds.” A good place to discover and note if CIHR does also accept artwork development as an eligible expense.

Blog post about CIHR open-access support

Directory of Open Access Journals

CMAJ congratulates colleagues at Open Medicine and … Open Medicine responds.

Medical Illustrations » Open Access and Medical Art

The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy | EDUCAUSE CONNECT 

The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy

Added by the EDUCAUSE Librarian

Title:
The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy (ID: CSD5237)

Author(s):
Renee Hobbs (Temple University), Peter Jaszi (American University), and Patricia Aufderheide (American University)

Topics:
Copyright, Copyright Act of 1976, Fair Use, Federal Copyright Law, media literacy, TEACH Act

Origin:
Contributed by Organizations or Campuses (09/26/2007)

Type:
Articles, Papers, and Reports

Abstract:

The fundamental goals of media literacy education -- to cultivate critical thinking about media and its role in culture and society and to strengthen creative communication skills -- are compromised by unnecessary copyright restrictions and lack of understanding about copyright law, as interviews with dozens of teachers and makers of media literacy curriculum materials showed.
In K-12, higher education, and after-school programs and workshops, teachers face conflicting information about their rights, and their students' rights, to quote copyrighted material. They also confront complex, restrictive copyright policies in their own institutions. As a result, teachers use less effective teaching techniques, teach and transmit erroneous copyright information, fail to share innovative instructional approaches, and do not take advantage of new digital platforms.
This is not only unfortunate but unnecessary, since copyright law permits a wide range of uses of copyrighted material without permission or payment. Educational exemptions sit within a far broader landscape of fair use. However, educators today have no shared understanding of what constitutes acceptable fair use practices.
Media literacy educators can address this problem with the same techniques they use in their work: increasing shared knowledge. Like other creative communities, such as documentary filmmakers, media literacy educators from K-12 to university level can articulate their own shared understandings of appropriate fair use in a code of practice. This code can educate not only themselves and their colleagues, but their students and administrators. Finally, their code can guide and instruct other educators, in formal and informal settings, who use copyrighted material in their teaching for a wide range of educational purposes and goals.

View this resource:

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The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

COPYRIGHT CLEARANCE CENTER ADDS BLOGS TO ITS LICENSING PROGRAMS

COPYRIGHT CLEARANCE CENTER ADDS BLOGS TO ITS LICENSING PROGRAMS 

Copyright Clearance Center Adds Blogs to its Licensing Programs

Copyright Clearance Center Adds Blogs to its Licensing ProgramsDANVERS, Mass.MA-COPYRIGHT-CLEARANCE

Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), the world?s largest provider of text-licensing solutions for corporations and academic institutions, announced that it has expanded its licensing services to include rights to more than a thousand popular and respected blogs.

CCC is making rights to blog content available through an agreement with Newstex, a leading News and information aggregator.

Newstex delivers real-time news and commentary from thousands of newswires, newspapers, magazines, financial and business sources, official government feeds and blogs.

?Blogs have become critical sources of information for CCC?s customers?those decision makers who need to share up-to-date news and insights with colleagues, customers and business partners,? said Bill Burger, CCC?s Vice President of Marketing. ?Now we?re making it easy for them to use blog content in a host of uses beyond simple linking.?

The addition of blogs, including hundreds that focus on business, technology, finance, healthcare, the law and other topics, adds a new level of value to CCC?s Annual Copyright License for those thousands of companies that rely on it to use and share content within their enterprises. For others uses, including academic uses, rights can be secured via CCC?s pay-per-use services on an as-need basis. For bloggers, the new licensing capability increases the potential of realizing royalty income for the use of their work.

?We are delighted to team up with CCC, the content licensing leader,? said Newstex President Larry Schwartz. ?This agreement exposes the blogs we represent to a wider audience. It?s critical that we not only deliver information quickly, but also enable rapid sharing of content while supporting bloggers? copyrights. CCC?s licensing services round out the content use cycle and provide great efficiencies for our customers.?

Blog content can be licensed through CCC today. Users can go to search box on the CCC website, www.copyright.com, for a full Listing of licensing options by blog title.

About Copyright Clearance Center

Copyright Clearance Center creates innovative licensing solutions for the seamless sharing of knowledge. CCC?s licensing services, combined with its Web-based applications and tools, allow tens of millions of people in corporations, universities, law firms and government agencies to use and share published information with ease. Since its founding as a not-for-profit company in 1978, CCC has created and expanded the markets and systems that facilitate content reuse and the distribution of royalties to publishers and authors around the world. By offering rights to millions of the world's most sought-after publications, the company plays a major role in the global knowledge economy and encourages support for the principles of copyright. For more information please visit www.copyright.com.

About Newstex

Newstex offers Content On Demand® and Blogs On Demand?, including tailored, real-time news and commentary from thousands of branded newswires, newspapers, magazines, financial and business sources, official government feeds and blogs. Newstex collects full-text digital news and commentary feeds, standardizes the content format, adds stock ticker symbols, indexes stories using PeopleTickering® and topical categories, and instantly delivers the result via easy-to-integrate XML or RSS newsfeeds. In the past 12 months, Newstex won Codie Awards from the Software and Information Industry Association for best blog aggregation service and content newcomer of the year, was selected for the EContent 100 list of companies that matter most in the digital content industry, and was voted top new IT enterprise in Information Today?s People?s Choice Awards. For more information, please visit the Newstex site www.newstex.com and the Newstex blog http://newstexblog.com/

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COPYRIGHT CLEARANCE CENTER ADDS BLOGS TO ITS LICENSING PROGRAMS

The MTTLR Blog: Copyright Reform Part 1

The MTTLR Blog: Copyright Reform Part 1 

Copyright Reform Part 1

by: Professor Jessica Litman
Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School

If you hang out among copyright lawyers, you’ll notice widespread agreement that the current copyright statute, enacted more than 30 years ago in 1976 and amended piecemeal in the years since, isn’t working very well. (That doesn’t mean that copyright lawyers agree on which parts need fixed.)¹  The statute treats dissemination of works over digital networks especially poorly. That’s unsurprising; extensive use of digital networks post-dates the statute’s enactment. Yet, you’ll also notice widespread discomfort with the prospect of asking Congress to undertake the project of wholesale copyright revision.
That discomfort is only partially due to the fact that copyright revision is lengthy and expensive. The number of interests affected by copyright is huge, and the complaints those interests have with the current regime are diverse. Overhauling the copyright statute took more than 20 years the last time Congress tried it, and there’s no reason to think it could happen more quickly today.
More importantly, the large role played in copyright lawmaking by lobbyists for important copyright actors has in the past produced statutes that are neither models of clarity nor well-designed to weather the pressures of technological progress. It is difficult to look at section 114 of the current copyright statute,²  for example, and come up with anything nice to say about it.
Moreover, history teaches that in the course of any major copyright revision, new copyright-affected players will pop up and demand that the law be reshaped to accommodate their needs. In the revision process that culminated in the enactment of the 1909 copyright act, the manufacturers of phonographs and phonograph records nearly derailed the entire effort until they were satisfied with the statute’s treatment of them. Multiple attempts to modernize the copyright law during the 1920s and 1930s foundered because new players ASCAP and radio broadcasters could not agree on anything. In the revision process that led to the 1976 Act, broadcast television and then cable television showed up and demanded special treatment; copyright revision ground to a halt until they got it. The prospect of the upstart new copyright interest may be especially scary today because there are tens of millions of ordinary people whose use of YouTube and peer-to-peer file sharing networks means they have direct personal interests in the copyright law. Nobody has succeeded in mobilizing them into a significant political force, but the majority of them are over 18, and many of them vote. It’s entirely possible that over the course of a multi-year, highly publicized copyright reform effort, the interests of ordinary voters could end up playing a more than a nominal role. One can imagine circumstances in which a new awareness on the part of Congress that voters care about copyright could move the law pretty far from where current players would like to see it go.
Thus, it is unsurprising that the perceived need for copyright reform combined with widespread reluctance to involve Congress in the effort, at least at the outset, has generated a host of extra-legislative copyright reform efforts. Some of these efforts have involved taking adventurous positions in litigation, in the hope of persuading courts that the law already means what one wishes it did.³  Some of these efforts have involved using private agreements to contract around inconvenient statutory defaults.⁴   Some have involved committing the United States in trade negotiations to take particular positions on copyright enforcement, and then seeking to import those commitments as a gloss on the meaning of current law.⁵
A different approach seeks to generate a menu of principles to guide later congressional reform. A group may draft copyright principles as part of an advocacy effort⁶ or as an effort to steer legislative drafting in particular directions or away from others.⁷
The copyright bar has grown increasingly polarized over the past 15 years.⁸  Precisely because of that polarization, a project designed to gather a group of copyright experts and charge them with generating a list of copyright principles has features that make it appealing across the copyright political spectrum. First, because the effort involves articulating principles of copyright law, the power and money imbalance between different interests looms smaller, blunting the influence of what Larry Lessig has called “all the money in the world.”⁹  Second, even those with well-developed lobbying muscles have reasons to prefer conversing with other copyright specialists rather than a more general crowd. There’s probably some truth to the charge that we who practice, teach, or write about copyright law for a living have all drunk the copyright Kool-Aid®.¹⁰  Copyright lawyers, as a group, are less likely to challenge the received copyright wisdom, and less likely to propose that copyright-affected players adopt radically new business models. Finally, casting a project as a pursuit of copyright principles allows participants to try to ferret out the issues on which they agree and paper over or vague out the issues on which agreement proves impossible.
One sign that copyright reform is on the horizon is that copyright principles projects are springing up, trying to figure out a way to generate something that will prove useful. I don’t mean to impugn such projects – indeed, as I’ll explain in the next post, I’ve been working with one myself.
Editor: Part 2, in which Professor Litman attempts to "articulate principles on which copyright experts across the copyright political spectrum might be able to agree," will publish tomorrow.

---

¹ Compare, e.g, Pamela Samuelson, Preliminary Thoughts on Copyright Reform, Utah L. Rev. (2007) with, e.g., David Nimmer, Codifying Copyright Responsibly, 51 UCLA L. Rev. 1233 (2004) and Protecting Copyright and Innovation in a Post-Grokster World: Hearing Before the Senate Comm. On the Judiciary, 109th Cong. (Sept. 28, 2005) (testimony of Marybeth Peters, Register of Copyrights).
² 17 U.S.C. § 114 (“Scope of Exclusive Rights in Sound Recordings”).
³ See, e.g., Capitol Records v. Bertelsmann, 377 F. Supp. 2d 796 (N.D. Cal. 2005); Viacom International v. YouTube, Inc., No. 07-CV-2103 (S.D.N.Y. filed March 13, 2007); Capitol Records, Inc. v. Thomas, No. 06-CV-1497 (D. Minn. 2007).
⁴  CBS, Inc. et. al, Copyright Principles for User-Generated Services (Oct. 18, 2007); the GNU General Public License (June 29, 2007); Microsoft, Inc., Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic English End User License Agreement (visited Nov. 12, 2007); see generally Prof. Margaret Jane Radin, The Evolution of Contracts in the Digital Era (Seminar, Fall 2007).
⁵ See, e.g., Brief Amicus Curiae Americans for Tax Reform in Cartoon Network, LP v. Cable News Network, LP, No. 07-1480-CV(L) (2d Cir. filed July 11, 2007) at 15-16.
⁶ E.g., Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property (Oct. 13, 2005); CBS, Inc. et. al., Principles for User-Generated Content Services, supra note 4; Center for Democracy and Technology, Protecting Copyright and Internet Values: A Balanced Path Forward (Spring 2005); EFF et. al., Fair Use Principles for User-Generated Video Content (Oct. 31, 2007).
⁷ See National Information Infrastructure Task Force Working Group on Intellectual Property, Public Hearing on Intellectual Property Issues Involved in the Information Infrastructure (Nov. 18, 1993), (testimony of Gary J. Shapiro, Home Recording Rights Coalition); id. (testimony of Ronald J. Palensky, Information Technology As’sn of America).
⁸ See Jessica Litman, War and Peace: The 34th Annual Donald C. Brace Lecture, 53 J. Copyright Socy 1 (2006).
⁹ LAWRENCE LESSIG, FREE CULTURE 241 (2004).
¹⁰  Kool-Aid® is a registered trademark of Kraft Foods. :-)

The MTTLR Blog: Copyright Reform Part 1

Trial Date Set For Copyright Infringement Case Involving US Playing Card Company - Division of the Jarden Corporation (NYSE: JAH)

Trial Date Set For Copyright Infringement Case Involving US Playing Card Company - Division of the Jarden Corporation (NYSE: JAH) 

Trial Date Set For Copyright Infringement Case Involving US Playing Card Company - Division of the Jarden Corporation (NYSE: JAH)

WEBWIRE – Monday, November 19, 2007

CINCINNATI, Ohio (November 19, 2007) - A trial by jury date has been set in Federal District Court - Ohio, for the copyright infringement case involving the US Playing Card Company and Florida resident and inventor Michael Faessler. The trial will begin January 14, 2008.

The case was filed in September 2005, and alleges that USPC copied Faessler’s Military Playing Card line by selling Patriotic Playing Cards in mass retail markets within the military PX system (Faessler v USPC). Faessler has four registered copyrights, and sold his line to the PXs between 1995 and 2001.

The case is sizing up to be a classic "David v Goliath" battle, with Faessler a military veteran and West Point graduate going up against giants of industry. US Playing Card is a division of the Jarden Corporation (NYSE: JAH), with annual revenues of $5.6B. The military PX system is not yet named as an infringing party in this case, but could be named in a subsequent case for their obvious role in selling the cards. The PX’s have combined annual revenues of $9B.

Faessler states, "This behavior by USPC is not new. In 2004 they did basically the same thing to another small inventor, Kim Simmons (Simmons v. USPC & Wal-Mart). Ironically, this was a fact that USPC conveniently forgot to disclose in official documents to the court. I’m not sure if that played some role in USPC’s sudden decision to fire CEO Jason Lockwood, on the morning of my deposition" Faessler has placed all court filings and photos of the playing cards on www.FAESSLERvUSPC.com .

Documents filed by Faessler indicate they now allege 9 counts of infringement by USPC. By law, statutory damages could be up to $150,000 per infringement, or a maximum of $1.35M for USPC.

To find out more, please visit www.FAESSLERvUSPC.com.

Trial Date Set For Copyright Infringement Case Involving US Playing Card Company - Division of the Jarden Corporation (NYSE: JAH)