Andrea Foster, Alternative License for the Arts Fails to Catch On in Academe, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: "Creative commons, an effort to get artists and scholars to give up some control of their works so that they can be more freely distributed, is struggling to gain a foothold in academe. Two years after the project was announced, only a few college programs regularly use the group's licenses to grant access to online works. And few faculty members and scholars have independently chosen to use a Creative Commons license for their works. Intellectual-property experts say that's because most academic publishers require professors to hand their copyrights over to publishers....'So many academic authors haven't received the news yet that they have rights and responsibilities regarding what they do with their copyrights,' says Michael W. Carroll, an assistant professor at Villanova University School of Law who serves on the board of directors of Creative Commons. 'There's an inertia in just signing on the dotted line when the publication agreement comes in, and handing over the copyrights to serial and book publishers.' When Creative Commons was started, Mr. Carroll had said that the academic community was a natural fit for the group's licenses. He says he still believes that, but he adds that Creative Commons needs to promote itself more to colleges and professors."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/27/2004 10:24:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
