Today at the Michigan Union, copyright specialists Jessica Litman and Jack Bernard gave a talk entitled “Risks, Rights, and Responsibilities: Current Copyright Issues for Academics.” The talk was very interesting, and demonstrated the university and library commitment towards working to educate faculty about copyright. While university-level educators continue to sign restrictive licensing agreements with publishers, it’s important to support faculty in their aims to retain important intellectual rights.
At large research universities, tenure-track faculty are continually under the gun to publish, publish, publish. While there are increasingly more open access platforms to communicate research and scholarly articles, we still have a long way to go to in reducing the lock-in that traditional publishing gatekeepers have over the process. We want to continue to encourage faculty to publish, and it’s in the best interest of faculty and the university to support this. At the same time, we want to support the ever-growing community of scholars and teachers who see the benefits of opening up their work with the world–not keeping it locked within a publishing framework where content is resold to universities at extraordinary cost.
Perhaps department heads, tenure review boards, and the administration as a whole needs to review this peculiar incentive structure and begin to embrace new, more open modes of evaluation that can jump out of this deep, harmful publishing rut. Perhaps universities, especially public universities, need to leverage their political power with taxpayers in re-analyzing the logic behind paying once for research and then paying again for access to that same research.
What I found striking about the talk today is the fact that often all an article author needs to do when negotiating copyright terms of a contract is ask for different terms. Litman asserted that most publishers have alternative contracts for “pushy people” (aka those who don’t want their rights stripped from them . . . how pushy). If UM were to create a policy that worked to keep copyright in the hands of authors (university employees) rather than publishers, the statement would be remarkable.
Very interesting article, thanks Sally