The Fair Use and Video Project has posted online its document titled “Community Practices in the Fair Use of Video in Libraries.”  This project began as an attempt by the Video Roundtable (VRT), a group within the American Library Association (ALA), to establish a recommended body of practice in the fair use of video for educational purposes. A team of six librarians, with advice and guidance from ALA’s Office of Information Technology Policy, coordinated the process of gathering input from the media librarian community and created the final document. Over the course of the project, our aims shifted from suggesting best practices, which was leading us into a thicket of conflicting copyright interpretations, to documenting community practices, which allowed us to explore how librarians routinely and responsibly fulfill their mission to preserve and provide access to our cultural record.  The team conducted in-person interviews at national conferences and hosted a series of focus groups at locations across the country: Boston, Seattle, Evanston, Washington, D.C. and Richmond.  About eighty library staff members with varying responsibilities for buying, processing, and/or supporting the educational use of video were included in our surveys.

The report concludes that librarians are deeply respectful of fair use as a means to ensure the kind of access to valuable content that is appropriate to the classroom, library, and learning space of today’s university. Such is the pace of change in higher education that new technological breakthroughs, court cases, and revisions to the law will likely change the landscape, over and over again, for use of library content of every conceivable format. However, fair use is clearly the cornerstone of a philosophy of service based on the principle of unfettered access to the materials of research and scholarship. This philosophy will endure as long as libraries maintain a strong commitment to the real intention of the copyright law, to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” Without fair use, libraries would most assuredly have to sharply curtail their efforts to deliver the essential materials of scholarship in the form and manner appropriate for real academic inquiry.

The document has a place for comments in the box at the top right of the page.

The World Bank announced yesterday that it has created a “search-engine friendly” Open Knowledge Repository that contains more than 2,000 books, articles, reports and research papers and will allow the public to distribute, reuse and build upon much of its work—including commercially.

The repository, launched today, is a one-stop-shop for most of the Bank’s research outputs and knowledge products, providing free and unrestricted access to students, libraries, government officials and anyone interested in the Bank’s knowledge. Additional material, including foreign language editions and links to datasets, will be added in the coming year.

And, in a bid to promote knowledge-sharing around the world, the Bank has become the first major international organization to require open access under copyright licensing from Creative Commons—a non-profit organization whose copyright licenses are designed to accommodate the expanded access to information afforded by the Internet.

The repository and Creative Commons licenses are part of a new open access policy that takes effect on July 1 and will be phased in over the next year. The policy formalizes the Bank’s practice of making research outputs and knowledge products freely available online, but now much of that content can be shared and reused freely, if the Bank is credited for the original work.

Google has opened their Google Scholar Citations service to everyone.   It allows individuals to track their citations.

http://googlescholar.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-scholar-citations-open-to-all.html

This issue continues to generate a great deal of debate, as well it should. You can find some more recent discussions by following the links below. Today Jennifer Howard reports in the Chronicle of Higher Ed that the Modern Language Association, among other professional associations, is also protesting the proposed legislation that ‘will curb access to research’.

On January 13, Alison Mudditt, Director of the University of California Press, noted that the ‘University of California Press differs from AAP on Research Works Act‘.

Richard Poynder lists other good discussions on the issue:

* Nature Publishing Group, Digital Science and the AAAA do not support the Research Works Act: http://bit.ly/wwgw3I

* The Library of Congress and RAND Corporation remain neutral on the Research Works Act: http://bit.ly/ycouSd

* BioMed Central opposes the Research Works Act: http://bit.ly/xGZ0uQ

* Springer does not think the Research Works Act will be successful: http://bit.ly/zXnaqZ

The topic isn’t really new, but there is a very interesting thread on the Chronicle of Higher Education website about the use of Twitter at scholarly conferences. Is it too difficult to tweet and concentrate on what is being said simultaneously? Is tweeting in the middle of someone’s presentation rude? Does the 140 character limit of tweets trivialize scholarly communication? Are most tweets made during conference presentations just snarky remarks? These and other negatives are discussed.
But the scholars who find this tool to be very useful are apparently in the majority, starting with the original blogger, a Professor of English who had just returned from the Modern Language Association’s annual conference in Seattle. Among the comments are:
“The overwhelming majority of tweets about sessions are sharp summaries of the presentations and discussions. The rapid exchange of ideas on Twitter–along with links to articles, blogs, Web sites, etc. — give the convention a rich dimension for those present and those participating at a distance.”
“When I realized that a speaker had made a point I did not understand, instead of being frustrated, I asked Twitter what the speaker meant, got an answer, and was, again, super grateful.”
“Twitter convos are often more insightful and interesting than comment streams because people have to be concise.”
“I ended up being introduced to like-minded individuals I would have never met on my own. In fact, the collaborative, cross-discipline work we have been doing since that time could not have been possible without Twitter.”
“I can confidently say that my use of Twitter this MLA has and will result in many more professional contacts and collaborations than any MLA I’ve attended previously.”
(From a graduate student): “Twitter was a great way to feel engaged and connected in new conference territory that was a bit overwhelming at first.”
(Another graduate student): “I have been able to digitally “meet” people and projects I never would have otherwise, and have gained a better sense of what I am getting myself into and what opportunities might be available to me; thanks to this, I feel much more engaged in the subject areas that interest me.”
“Tweeting by community-minded participants in the 2012 MLA and AHA [American Historical Association] meetings enabled me to gain a sense of the debates and discussions as well as to gain access to links that led me to resources and projects of great value to me.”
(From a presenter): “I find it very helpful to see the tweets posted as a result of a paper I have given, myself. … I’ve only ever had constructive, thoughtful feedback or further questions, which I very much welcome.”

Thanks to an award from the Simons Foundation, Cornell University Library will take a major step toward building a permanent governance model for arXiv, the free scientific repository that has revolutionized the way scientists share information.
The Simons Foundation, based in New York City, has provided a $60,000 planning grant to support the development of a governance model that will guide the online repository’s transition from interim to long-term governance.
“This is a critical step in the transition to a self-sustaining funding model,” said Oya Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Digital Scholarship Services. “Ensuring the future of arXiv through a stable, transparent and collaborative governance structure is one of the Library’s primary goals, and the Simons Foundation helping us make great strides toward that goal.” The Library recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of arXiv, with an event featuring the repository’s founder, Paul Ginsparg, and meetings about its governance model, support structure and organization of its advisory board. In 2001, Ginsparg joined the Cornell faculty, bringing the arXiv with him.
more : Oct 25 2011 press release

The UCSD Libraries invite all interested faculty to the fall Scholarly Communications Luncheon:

• Monday, October 24, 2011
• 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.
• Geisel Library Seuss Room

To mark Open Access Week, the UC San Diego Libraries invite interested faculty to join us Monday, October 24, 11:30 – 1:30, for a Scholarly Communications luncheon.

Please RSVP if you plan to attend this event.  A buffet lunch will start at 11:30, followed by a panel discussing their experience with open access and other publishing models and resources in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

PANELISTS:

• Eric Bakovic, Associate Professor, Linguistics
• Jim Carmody, Senior Lecturer Theatre and Dance Department and Editor of TheatreForum
• Rick Grush, Professor, Philosophy Department
• Annelise Sklar, Political Sciences Librarian, on Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN)

Martha Hruska, AUL for Collection Services, will moderate the discussion.

Hosted by: UCSD Libraries Scholarly Communications Committee

For more information, and to RSVP, please contact Erin O’Brien, ekobrien@ucsd.edu

A judge dismissed a lawsuit on Monday that had accused the University of California, Los Angeles of copyright infringement for streaming videos online. The lawsuit against UCLA was filed by the Association for Information Media and Equipment (AIME) and Ambrose Video Publishing Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Those plaintiffs claimed that UCLA had violated copyright and breached its contract by copying DVD’s of Shakespeare plays acquired from Ambrose and streaming them online for faculty and students to use in courses.

U.S. District Court Judge Consuelo B. Marshall found multiple problems with these arguments. Among the most important: He didn’t buy the plaintiffs’ claim that UCLA had waived its constitutional “sovereign immunity,” a principle that shields states—and state universities—from being sued without their consent in federal court. The judge also held that the association, which doesn’t own the copyrights at issue in the dispute, failed to establish its standing to bring the case.

The decision means “universities will have a little more breathing room for using media,” says James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at New York Law School. But the more important implication is that the case will be a precedent that universities can cite in future copyright disputes, Mr. Grimmelmann says. The UCLA decision will make the Authors Guild case against HathiTrust more of a long shot, he speculates. That battle, which concerns a collection of digital books that Google scanned from university libraries, also involves an association suing on behalf of copyright owners, and the target of the lawsuit is a digital repository hosted by a state institution, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In addition to Michigan, defendants in the HathiTrust case include Cornell University, Indiana University, the University of California, and the University of Wisconsin. “That suit has almost exactly the same sovereign-immunity and standing problems as this one,” Mr. Grimmelmann says. “If the HathiTrust suit were to be decided tomorrow by the same court, it would be dismissed.”

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) hailed the UCLA victory as an especially welcome bit of good news, given all the copyright struggles dogging universities. But ARL pointed out in a blog post that the decision ”stops short of vindicating the strongest fair-use arguments in favor of streaming.” Kevin Smith, Duke University’s scholarly-communications officer, also noted in his own post that, because much of the dismissal hung on the sovereign-immunity question, “a major part of the decision applies only to state entities” and “does not translate to private universities.”

–Adapted from an article by Marc Perry in The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 4, 2011