Science Commons, Sparc Announce New Tools For Scholarly Publishing
For Immediate Release
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Washington, DC and Cambridge, MA - May 17, 2007 - Today, Science
Commons and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
(SPARC) announce the release of new online tools to help authors
exercise choice in retaining critical rights in their scholarly
articles, including the rights to reuse their scholarly articles and to
post them in online repositories.
The new tools include the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine, an
online tool created by Science Commons to simplify the process of
choosing and implementing an addendum to retain scholarly rights. By
selecting from among four addenda offered, any author can fill in a
form to generate and print a completed amendment that can be attached
to a publisher's copyright assignment agreement to retain critical
rights to reuse and offer their works online.
The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine will be offered through the
Science Commons, SPARC, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), and the Carnegie Mellon University Web sites, and it will be
freely available to other institutions that wish to host it. It may be
accessed on the Science Commons Web site at http://scholars.sciencecommons.org.
Also available for the first time is a new addendum from Science
Commons and SPARC, named "Access-Reuse," that represents a
collaboration to simplify choices for scholars by combining two
existing addenda, the SPARC Author Addendum and the Science Commons
Open Access-Creative Commons Addendum. This new addendum will ensure
that authors not only retain the rights to reuse their own work and
post them on online depositories, but also to grant a non-exclusive
license, such as the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial
license, to the public to reuse and distribute the work. In addition,
Science Commons will be offering two other addenda, called "Immediate
Access" and "Delayed Access", representing alternative arrangements
that authors can choose.
"The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine will enable authors to
maximize the reach of their work," said Heather Joseph, Executive
Director of SPARC. "It's a significant leap forward in making it easier
for authors to effectively manage their publication rights."
In addition, MIT has contributed to this effort by including its MIT
Copyright Agreement Amendment in the choices available through the
Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine. The MIT Copyright Amendment has
been available since the spring of 2006 and allows authors to retain
specific rights to deposit articles in MIT Libraries' DSpace
repository, and to deposit any NIH-funded manuscripts on the National
Library of Medicine's PubMed Central database.
"The cumulative nature of scientific discovery makes it imperative that
unnecessary barriers to the timely sharing of results of research
should be eliminated wherever possible," said Ann Wolpert, Director of
Libraries for MIT. "The MIT Libraries applauds Science Commons for its
development of tools such as the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine,
which enables authors of scholarly articles to ensure that they can
later reuse their works and make them widely accessible to other
researchers and the public. Timely and broad access to the scholarly
literature and research results is key to the advancement of science,
and we are pleased to participate in this important Science Commons
initiative by offering MIT's Copyright Amendment for inclusion in the
Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine."
"Scientists in many fields believe that progress can best be achieved
by sharing scientific information. Carnegie Mellon is delighted to be
able to host the addendum generator to help faculty balance their
rights as authors with those of their scholarly publishers," said Dr.
David Yaron, Faculty Senate Library Committee Chair of Chemistry at
Carnegie Mellon University.
SPARC offers a suite of materials, including a full color brochure and
poster, that introduce the topic of author rights on campuses and
complement the new SPARC-Science Commons "Access-Reuse" addendum. See http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/.
"This is about authors' rights," said John Wilbanks, Vice President of
Science Commons - a project of Creative Commons. "Right now, authors
trade the most important rights - like the right to make copies of
their own scholarly works - to traditional publishers. That trade has
led to an imbalanced world of restricted access to knowledge,
skyrocketing journal prices, and an inability to apply new technologies
to the scholarly canon of knowledge. Our Scholar's Copyright project
addresses this imbalance. Working with libraries and universities, we
are providing the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine so that scholars
can retain rights to make copies of their own writings available on the
Web."
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Science Commons
Science Commons' goal is to encourage stakeholders to create areas of
free access and inquiry using standardized licenses and other means; a
'Science Commons' built out of voluntary private agreements. A project
of the non-profit copyright organization Creative Commons, Science
Commons works to make sharing easier in scientific publication,
licensing of research tools and materials, and databases. Science
Commons is at http://science.creativecommons.org.
SPARC
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with
SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than
800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open
system of scholarly communication. SPARC's advocacy, educational, and
publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of
research. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc/.