by Pat McNees
Who owns (or is assumed to own) the copyright in an interview seems to vary among professions (say, journalists and oral historians) and sometimes those doing the interviewing seem to be taking too much advantage of the people they are interviewing. Read More
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Who owns an interview? Who controls the right to use it?
Revolution in academia: Copyright and open access
(updated 10-15-2020)
In academia a wide-ranging discussion about open access is weakening academic journals' monopoly on profiting from publishing research findings. Different interest groups view this differently, of course. Meanwhile, as the publishing landscape changes, are academic authors, who have long abandoned claims to copyright on many of their scholarly articles (in the "public or perish" world of university faculty-making), less docile about publishing rights, with tenured faculty positions scarcer and scarcer? This round-up of relevant pieces starts with a possible break in the pattern:
• New PLOS pricing test could signal end of scientists paying to publish free papers (Jeffrey Brainard, Science, 10-15-2020) "PLOS, the nonprofit publisher that in 2003 pioneered the open-access business model of charging authors to publish scientific articles so they are immediately free to all, this week rolled out an alternative model that could herald the end of the author-pays era. One of the new options shifts the cost of publishing open-access (OA) articles in its two most selective journals to institutions, charging them a fixed annual fee; any researcher at that institution could then publish in the PLOS journals at no additional charge."
• Want to know if an article is freely available? To check for open access, see
---PLOS
---PLOS ONE (covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine)
---PLOS Medicine
---PLOS Biology
---BioMed Central
---CORE (UK)
---Paperity (the first multidisciplinary aggregator of Open Access journals and papers)
---Google Scholar
• A New Kind of ‘Big Deal’ for Elsevier (Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 11-22-19) Carnegie Mellon University has signed an open-access deal with Elsevier -- the first of its kind for the publisher in the U.S. Elsevier struck a similar deal with a consortium of Norwegian research institutions earlier this year.
• Elsevier Mutiny: Cracks Are Widening in the Fortress of Academic Publishing (Mathew Ingram, Forbes, 11-2-15) "All six editors and the entire editorial board of the well-respected linguistics journal Lingua have resigned to protest the company’s failure to embrace open access. Read More
Bad Behavior: Rights bandits on the Wild Web
• BuzzFeed announces $19.3m Read More
How long does copyright last?
When someone asks if she can reprint a biography of her long-dead relative first published (probably self-published) in 1960. Among other things, the underlying question is, How long does copyright protection last? One person suggested "life plus fifty years," which used to be true but no longer is
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