Guides: Scholarly Communication & Institutional Repository: Authors Right

All authors, whether they are a faculty member publishing a monograph, a grant-funded researcher publishing a scholarly article, or a graduate student writing a dissertation, need to be familiar with the basic concepts of copyright and have an awareness of the options for publishing, posting, archiving and distributing their scholarship. Many scholars, including teaching faculty, are not well-versed in these issues and therefore not equipped to educate students who they may be similarly advising.

When publishing, authors are presented with a contract or copyright transfer agreement (CTA) drafted by the publisher. Many of these publishers drafted agreements to transfer copyright fully to the publisher thereby restricting an author's subsequent usage of his or her published work, including reuse of the work in teaching and further research. After transferring copyright to the publisher, the author generally has little say in how the work is later used. The result, all too often, is that contracts restrict the dissemination of one’s scholarship, and the author's impact is lessened

Fair Use Rights

Fair use is a statutory exception to the copyright holder's bundle of exclusive rights. It allows for the unlicensed (that is, without permission or payment of royalty) use of a copyrighted work where the balance of several factors weighs in favor of such use. Four of these factors are specifically enumerated in the statute. Application of fair use requires a factual analysis of these four factors as applied to the facts of the proposed use. Although no single factor is determinative, recent court decisions reveal that transformative use is an important consideration as is the potential harm to the market for the copyrighted work.

The four statutory factors of fair use are:

The purpose and character of the proposed use
The nature of the work being used
The amount of the work being used
The effect of the use upon the market for the copyrighted work

Several factual inquiries drive analysis of each of the four factors. The resources in this Toolkit can help libraries understand and conduct these inquiries. Several libraries have also created excellent guides to understanding and applying the four factors:

University of Minnesota Libraries - Understanding Fair Use
University of Pittsburgh - What is Fair Use
Columbia University Libraries - Fair Use
Boston College Libraries - Fair Use Factors
Harvard Library Office of Scholarly Communication - Fair Use Guide

Knowledge on Fair Use

Reclaiming fair use : how to put balance back in copyright /Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi Aufderheide, Patricia Lang Matl | The University of Chicago Press | 2011 Available at Stacks 2nd Floor (KF3020 .A984 2011)

GSU Library Copyright Lawsuit
A timeline of the events in the copyright lawsuit against GSU, including links to court opinions and news coverage of the case.
Fair Use: 12 Myths and Realities
From Fair Use Week, an examination of 12 common myths about the application of fair use and the reality of fair use law.
Transformative Fair Use and Teaching After Georgia State
Article published in the Connecticut Law Review by Brandon Butler (Director of Public Policy, University of Virginia Libraries) on the current state of transformative fair use. See also the related webinar at https://vimeo.com/162858085.
ARL Policy Notes: Fair Use
This link will take you to the ARL Policy Notes blog for a list of posts that have been tagged as "fair use." Current and comprehensive coverage on fair use jurisprudence as applies to libraries.

Public Domain :

This link is updated from cornell university library https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain

Copy right Resources

Beall’s List of Predatory Open-Access Publishers
This is a list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers compiled by Jeffrey Beall:
To view the last version visit the Internet Archive at https://web.archive.org/web/20170103170850/https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/.

Copyright Crash Course
Copyright Crash Course was developed by Georgia Harper and this a guide that provides an overview of important copyright issues. Copyright Crash Course: http://copyright.lib.utexas.edu/

Digitization 101: CopyrightX Lectures

The open course on copyright from Harvard, which was prepared and delivered by Prof. William Fisher was made available to the public, along with other resources. http://copyx.org/

Plagiarism Detection Services
Turnitin is partnering with ProQuest to include more than 300,000 dissertations and theses into the Turnitin comparison database. This addition enhances Turnitin’s repository of 20 billion current and archived web pages, 200 million student papers and more than 110 million articles from scholarly publications.

Turnitin customers can compare documents against the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Database as part of a new premium content offering called “Turnitin Research.” The offering consists of Turnitin bundled with iThenticate, the leading plagiarism checker for scholarly publishers, as well as the ProQuest content. More information about iThenticate: http://turnitin.com/en_us/products/ithenticate-for-researchers-publisher

ProQuest/UMI Copyright Guide
The ProQuest/UMI Copyright Guide provides information on how to avoid copyright infringement and the guide includes sample permission letters that can be sent to the copyright holder. ProQuest Copyright Guide:

http://media2.proquest.com/documents/UMI_CopyrightGuide.pdf

Sharing work with colleague or students?

Accordingly, authors should take care to assign the rights to their work in a manner that permits them and their students and colleagues to use their work in teaching, research and other purposes. Transferring copyright doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Publishers only need the right of first publication, not a wholesale transfer of copyright. So, a compromise is often desirable, which authors can accomplish through an appropriate addendum.

One option is to consider a Creative Commons license which gives you a variety of options for determining how you will share your creative and scholarly works.

Other considerations involve depositing your work on platforms or repositories in which you can self-archive your Scholarly and Creative Works.

[Portions of this page adapted from the ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit (http://acrl.libguides.com/scholcomm/toolkit/authorsrights) and are being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA) license]

Fair Use Guides

Fair Use Week
Fair Use Week is an annual celebration held the last week of February. Various resources, including handouts, images, and a calendar of events by participating institutions are available at the Fair Use Week website.
U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index
The Fair Use Index tracks a variety of judicial decisions to help both lawyers and non-lawyers better understand the types of uses courts have previously determined to be fair—or not fair. The decisions span multiple federal jurisdictions, including the U.S. Supreme Court, circuit courts of appeal, and district courts. For each decision, there is a brief summary of the facts, the relevant question(s) presented, and the court’s determination as to whether the contested use was fair.
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries
This Code of Best Practices identifies eight scenarios identified by the academic and research library community where fair use principles commonly apply and steps libraries should take to help assure fair use. Additional Codes of Best Practices in Fair Use for other communities can be found at http://archive.cmsimpact.org/fair-use/best-practices
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Software Preservation
This Code of Best Practices provides information on the legal issues surrounding the archiving legacy software to ensure access to digital files and to elucidate the history of technology.
ARL "The Good News about Library Fair Use" Infographic
Infographic about fair use and libraries, based upon the Code of Best Practices.
Fair Use Evaluator
A tool developed by the ALA Copyright Advisory Network to assist libraries in evaluating whether a proposed use is fair.
Fair Use Quiz
The quiz, created by MIT Libraries, is designed to help users better understand the core concepts of copyright law’s “fair use” provision.
Fair Use Checklist
Fair use checklists exist in several variations used by libraries. This version was created by the Copyright Advisory Office at Columbia University.
Thinking Through Fair Use
Interactive fair use checklist, from the University of Minnesota, to assist with fair use analysis.

Scholarly Communication & Institutional Repository: Authors Right

Copyright Agreement