Licensing Principles Questions

["Peter McDonald" <apmcdona@syr.edu>]

Colleagues,

There was considerable discussion at the SPARC Institutional Repository
(IR) Workshop in DC weeks so back, about efforts to include language in
our e-resource licenses that would permit our faculty to have far greater
control (copyright and otherwise) over their e-prints.

One idea was to "push back" against those publishers who impose undue
restraints on authors' abilities to post their articles (etc.) elsewhere
on the net, in local IRs especially. Talk centered on requiring licensing
language to this effect. I should note most licensing principles we've
crafted are generally more library/user centric, rather than
faculty/author centric. But exploring this new licencing language might
lead us into new territory as we work for better more holistic licenses,
and thereby benefit our constituents from a new, but no less important,
angle.

Given that many of us may soon be in the IR business, and therefore asking
our faculty to populate our IRs with their "stuff", and given further that
we are doubtless interested in our faculty's ability to disseminate their
scholarly output widely, does anyone out there in liblicense land know of
an instance either at the local level, or at the consortial, where you
have incorporated language in your various licensing principles to this
effect, e.g. on behalf of our faculty as authors?

I ask because NERL is exploring this possibility, and would be happy to
build on language already vetted elsewhere, and then share it back as
appropriate. Might logically move up to an ICOLC agenda in the future.

If you could forward the specific language to group we might all
benefit as we re-edit our principles. Much obliged,

Peter McDonald
AUL for Collections
Syracuse University Library
#315-443-2977