Science Commons, SPARC Announce New Tools for Scholarly Publishing

[Jennifer McLennan <jennifer@arl.org>]

SCIENCE COMMONS, SPARC ANNOUNCE NEW TOOLS FOR SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING

For Immediate Release
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Contact: Kaitlin Thaney
Fax: (617) 532-0025
E-mail: kaitlin@creativecommons.org

Washington, DC and Cambridge, MA - May 17, 2007

Today, Science Commons and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic 
Resources Coalition (SPARC) announce the release of new online 
tools to help authors exercise choice in retaining critical 
rights in their scholarly articles, including the rights to reuse 
their scholarly articles and to post them in online repositories.

The new tools include the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine, an 
online tool created by Science Commons to simplify the process of 
choosing and implementing an addendum to retain scholarly rights. 
By selecting from among four addenda offered, any author can fill 
in a form to generate and print a completed amendment that can be 
attached to a publisher's copyright assignment agreement to 
retain critical rights to reuse and offer their works online.

The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine will be offered through 
the Science Commons, SPARC, the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology (MIT), and the Carnegie Mellon University Web sites, 
and it will be freely available to other institutions that wish 
to host it. It may be accessed on the Science Commons Web site at 
http://scholars.sciencecommons.org.

Also available for the first time is a new addendum from Science 
Commons and SPARC, named 'Access-Reuse,' that represents a 
collaboration to simplify choices for scholars by combining two 
existing addenda, the SPARC Author Addendum and the Science 
Commons Open Access-Creative Commons Addendum. This new addendum 
will ensure that authors not only retain the rights to reuse 
their own work and post them on online depositories, but also to 
grant a non-exclusive license, such as the Creative Commons 
Attribution-Non-Commercial license, to the public to reuse and 
distribute the work. In addition, Science Commons will be 
offering two other addenda, called 'Immediate Access' and 
'Delayed Access,' representing alternative arrangements that 
authors can choose.

"The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine will enable authors to 
maximize the reach of their work," said Heather Joseph, Executive 
Director of SPARC.  "It's a significant leap forward in making it 
easier for authors to effectively manage their publication 
rights."

In addition, MIT has contributed to this effort by including its 
MIT Copyright Agreement Amendment in the choices available 
through the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine. The MIT 
Copyright Amendment has been available since the spring of 2006 
and allows authors to retain specific rights to deposit articles 
in MIT Libraries' DSpace repository, and to deposit any 
NIH-funded manuscripts on the National Library of Medicine's 
PubMed Central database.

"The cumulative nature of scientific discovery makes it 
imperative that unnecessary barriers to the timely sharing of 
results of research should be eliminated wherever possible," said 
Ann Wolpert, Director of Libraries for MIT. "The MIT Libraries 
applauds Science Commons for its development of tools such as the 
Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine, which enables authors of 
scholarly articles to ensure that they can later reuse their 
works and make them widely accessible to other researchers and 
the public. Timely and broad access to the scholarly literature 
and research results is key to the advancement of science, and we 
are pleased to participate in this important Science Commons 
initiative by offering MIT's Copyright Amendment for inclusion in 
the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine."

"Scientists in many fields believe that progress can best be 
achieved by sharing scientific information. Carnegie Mellon is 
delighted to be able to host the addendum generator to help 
faculty balance their rights as authors with those of their 
scholarly publishers," said Dr. David Yaron, Faculty Senate 
Library Committee Chair of Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon 
University.

SPARC offers a suite of materials, including a full color 
brochure and poster, that introduce the topic of author rights on 
campuses and complement the new SPARC-Science Commons 
'Access-Reuse' addendum. See http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/.

"This is about authors' rights," said John Wilbanks, Vice 
President of Science Commons, a project of Creative Commons. 
"Right now, authors trade the most important rights - like the 
right to make copies of their own scholarly works - to 
traditional publishers. That trade has led to an imbalanced world 
of restricted access to knowledge, skyrocketing journal prices, 
and an inability to apply new technologies to the scholarly canon 
of knowledge. Our Scholar's Copyright project addresses this 
imbalance. Working with libraries and universities, we are 
providing the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine so that 
scholars can retain rights to make copies of their own writings 
available on the Web."

###

Science Commons

Science Commons' goal is to encourage stakeholders to create 
areas of free access and inquiry using standardized licenses and 
other means; a 'Science Commons' built out of voluntary private 
agreements. A project of the non-profit copyright organization 
Creative Commons, Science Commons works to make sharing easier in 
scientific publication, licensing of research tools and 
materials, and databases. Science Commons is at 
http://science.creativecommons.org.

SPARC

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), 
with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance 
of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to 
create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC's 
advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs 
encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is on the Web 
at http://www.arl.org/sparc/.

--
Jennifer McLennan
Director of Communications
SPARC
(202) 296-2296 ext. 121
(202) 872-0884 Fax
http://www.arl.org/sparc