Materials from Authors’ Rights Event

Weren’t able to attend last Friday’s workshop “You Know What You Write, But Do You Know Your Rights? Understanding and Protecting Your Rights As an Author”?  Attended but want to review the materials again, at your own pace? Here are all the materials shown and discussed at the event — and a few extras, to boot!

You might notice that “moral rights” are mentioned in the Journal of Library Innovation agreement. Moral rights have to do with the right to be attributed and the right to control the fate/integrity of a work.  The Journal of Library Innovation doesn’t touch moral rights, but it was just reported with horror that the Nature Publishing Group asks authors to waive moral rights to articles published in their journals!  Here are two articles on that topic: Nature Publishing Group Requires Faculty Authors to Waive ‘Moral Rights’ (from the Chronicle of Higher Education) and Attacking Academic Values (from the Scholarly Communications @ Duke blog).

More about licenses:

And bit about open access repositories (the best places to self-archive):

Listen to Joe Strummer: Know your rights (about what you write)!
Photo is © edenpictures, used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

OA Landmarks & Bookmarks

Lots of things have been moving recently surrounding open access. Here are just a few bits of news we’re excited about, many of which were brought to our attention and celebrated by our fellow CUNY librarians:

Thanks to our colleagues for emailing and sharing all of this OA news!

Quantifying Open Access in 2012

Over at the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, open access advocate and thinker Heather Morrison takes a look at the astonishing growth of open access in 2012.  No hand-waving here; just cold, hard numbers:

  • The Directory of Open Access Journals now includes 8,461 journals, up by 1,133 since last year.  That’s an average of 3 new journals per day!
  • The Registry of Open Access Repositories is up to 3,032 repositories, up by 449 since last year.  An average of 8.6 new repositories every week!  (We hope to add a CUNY repository to the count soon!)
  • PubMed Central now includes a whopping 2.6 million open access articles, up by 300,000 since last year.  That averages out to 1 article every 2 minutes!

Read her full blog post for all numbers.  Any way you look at it, open access is growing, strengthening, speeding, surging. Put differently, open access is becoming inevitable.