YouTube vid

Thanks to Gareth Johnston from the RSP in Nottingham for sending this on. I think it spells out the issues in quite the sophisticated manner. Nice one Gaz! 🙂

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Ruptures over PRISM

Making huge waves in the blogosphere, the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM) has been established by AAP and partners to ‘protect the integrity of scientific research’. They’ve already come under fire in the early days of their website release with claims of the use of copyright protected images on their site. The pro-Open Access movement has fired off numerous responses, including an open letter from Peter Murray-Rust at Cambridge to Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University Press, questioning their support for PRISMs aims. Alma Swan has also weighed in with her thoughts, and much of the conversations are being recorded, as usual, by Peter Suber in his Open Access News blog…

Also hitting the blogosphere headlines, yesterday’s Guardian newspaper contained an article discussing peer review with the British Academy, a collection of 800 scholars in the humanities and social sciences answering some of the questions put toward the integrity and usefulness of peer review lately.

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Licenced to publish

Yesterday we met with two legal people from the University to discuss licences and legal requirements for outlining deposit agreements and the like. The discussion brought up points I hadn’t thought to consider, and also highlighted the need to provide information and education on Intellectual Property Rights, including copyright and the fine print for publishing industry funded work.

Today I was trawling through a database and came across an article published by researchers here, published in a journal that is, by Sherpa ROMEO standards, a ‘white‘ journal. This means archiving is not formally supported by the publisher. I took a look at the publisher copyright statement to be signed by authors. It requires the author to agree to the following:

The author(s), in consideration of the acceptance of the above work for publication, does hereby assign and transfer to {the publisher} all of the rights and interest in and to the copyright of the above-titled work in its current form and in any subsequent ly revised form for publication and/or electronic dissemination.

Now I understand this has been standard practice for publishers and authors, but would I want to divest myself so entirely of the right to my own intellectual capital? It highlights for me the need to offer signposting to alternatives to these licences. Why not try an addendum or use the JISC/SURF Licence to Publish?

Awareness is clearly the key to making informed decisions on what happens to your intellectual property. I’m going to be working on developing material for our website, for training sessions and anywhere else I can get my foot in.

(Licence or License – my natural instinct is for the ‘s’, sorry… a case of the old ‘separated by a common language’. I fall between the two.)

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