Regaining Control
Managing Copyrights
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Authors' Rights: Regaining Control

In the new scholarly communication landscape, all authors -- including graduate students and especially doctoral students – need to be familiar with basic concepts in intellectual property and have an awareness of the options for publishing, posting, archiving and distributing their scholarship. The current generation of scholars (faculty and non-faculty) is not universally aware of these issues and therefore not equipped to educate students. Librarians can fill this gap.

Librarians have already made significant progress toward this goal. Focused outreach at the local and the national level has strengthened alliances with stakeholders throughout the scholarly communication process. These bridges have helped identify academic libraries as partners in advancing higher education. One of the most important alliances for librarians to continue to cultivate is with the researchers and authors at their own institution. These faculty members, from tenured chairs to the most junior lecturers, are now in a position to effect change in the publications process, altering a decades-old business model in which they typically signed away all rights to their scholarship in exchange for publication.

The publishing status quo is well documented, but worth revisiting here. Scholars who sign away all rights must request permission from publishers (often for a fee) to place their own articles on a personal web site, in a course pack for a class they are teaching themselves, in an institutional repository, or to distribute copies to colleagues. And though scholars create the content (i.e., articles) and provide editing and peer review, publishers typically receive both content and quality control at no cost. Academic libraries then purchase back this content in an attempt to support all disciplines on campus. This contributes to the fact that some commercial publishers post large profits – up to 40% in some cases. As a result, publishers rather than scholars manage and control access to scholarship and research.

Scholars and researchers can retain control over access to their works by managing copyrights. This is where librarians can intervene, educating both the younger generation of scholars and seasoned faculty members on new options.