Given the ongoing discussion, this should be of interest. DLB On Feb 13 2008, Michael Carroll wrote:

[Apologies for cross-posting]

Dear all,

I write to draw your attention to two important, copyright-related developments affecting open access to the scholarly literature. Both signal that faculty authors are now paying, or will have to pay, greater attention to how they handle their copyrights.

1. Harvard.

Yesterday, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted in favor of a policy under which each faculty member agrees to grant to Harvard a non-exclusive license to make their scholarly articles freely available through the institution's digital repository or otherwise so long as it is not done for profit. This is a pre-commitment strategy that means the license will have been granted prior to any copyright transfer to a journal publisher. When an article has been accepted for publication, the faculty member will have to alert the publisher to the previously-granted license. In many cases, this will also mean the publisher's copyright transfer form will have to be amended. Faculty can seek a waiver of the university's license on an article-by-article basis. This is big news because it's a bottom-up initiative driven by faculty authors. The mechanics of the pre-commitment strategy are not as new as they may seem. Every federally-funded researcher grants the funding agency a non-exclusive copyright license at the time the copyright vests as part of the funding agreement. For more information on the Harvard policy, see my blog www.carrollogos.com.

2. NIH.

In December, Congress voted to require that NIH make the author's final manuscript of any peer reviewed journal article reporting NIH-funded research publicly accessible over the Internet through PubMed Central not later than 12 months after the date of publication. Since universities are the recipients of NIH grants, it is the university that is contractually bound to make sure that (1) NIH receives the author's final manuscript (after peer review) when the article is accepted for publication and (2) a copyright license to make the article publicly accessible not later than a year after publication. The policy becomes effective in April, and universities are now scrambling to figure out how they're going to ensure that their faculty authors don't sign away too many rights under copyright such that the university is non-compliant with its grant obligations. (Non-compliance can result in a range of sanctions including ineligibility for future funding.) Again for details, see my blog.

In my view, both of these developments signal better alignment between copyright practices and the progress of science in the age of the Internet.

All the best, Mike

Michael W. Carroll Professor of Law Villanova University School of Law 299 N. Spring Mill Road Villanova, PA 19085 Research papers: http://law.bepress.com/michael_carroll http://ssrn.com/author=330326 blog: http://www.carrollogos.org/

See also www.creativecommons.org

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