Resolution by the Library Board for consideration by the Faculty Senate.

Approved by the Library Board on 24Apr06.

WHEREAS the Cornell Faculty Senate on 11 May 2005 passed a resolution on scholarly publishing, according to which “The Senate strongly urges all faculty to negotiate with the journals in which they publish either to retain copyright rights and transfer only the right of first print and electronic publication, or to retain at a minimum the right of postprint archiving”; and
WHEREAS the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)¹, has made available a standard form that authors may attach to publishing agreements in order to secure a non-exclusive right to make their work available for non-commercial uses; and
WHEREAS the widespread use of such an addendum would educate publishers about the importance scholars attach to the ready availability of their scholarly work for educational purposes²,
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT The Senate urges faculty members to attach the SPARC Author’s Addendum to publishing contracts that they sign unless they arrange to retain copyright itself and transfer only the right of first print and electronic publication.

Discussion

The resolution passed by the Faculty Senate on 11 May 2005 acknowledges the importance of faculty management of copyrights. Faculty create work, often give it to publishers, and then must license it back to use it. The Cornell University Library spends millions of dollars a year to rent access to scholarly material produced largely by faculty here and elsewhere; departments and individual faculty members license permission to use scholarly material on course web sites; and students pay to use the material through course pack permission fees. The SPARC Author’s Amendment is an easy and effective way of negotiating desired rights. It allows faculty authors to retain the following rights, which  otherwise might not be available under the standard contract provided by the publisher:

• The right to make your article available in a non-commercial open digital archive on the Web (such as ArXiv, DSpace at Cornell, or NIH’s PubMed Central, as NIH has requested);
• The right to make copies of your article for use in the classes that you teach;
• The right to authorize others to use the article in teaching and research, both here at Cornell and elsewhere;
• The right to modify and use the article in later articles, books, and other publications, without having to ask permission of the publisher;
• The right to receive from the publisher a PDF version of the article, as published.

In the event that a publisher refuses to accept the SPARC Author’s Addendum, faculty are encouraged to ascertain which of the above rights the publisher will not allow the faculty member to retain. Faculty should weigh how important those rights are to the faculty member, to Cornell, and to scholarship in general.

The Scholarly Communications program of the Cornell University Library in conjunction with the University Counsel’s and other offices on campus stands ready to offer workshops to interested faculty and departments on publication options as well as analysis of individual publishing agreements.

¹ Author’s Addendum Intro http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.html
The above introduction provides a link to the SPARC Author’s Addendum document http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/docs/AuthorsAddendum2_1.pdf

² The NIH Public Access Policy pertaining access to NIH research is at: http://www.arl.org/sparc/oa/nih.html