BioOne Releases New Model Publication Agreement

[Lauren Kane <lauren@arl.org>]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - April 7, 2008

BioOne Releases New Model Publication Agreement

BioOne (www.bioone.org) is pleased to announce the release of a
model publication agreement that addresses current trends in
copyright assignment and requirements by NIH and other funding
agencies for digital repository deposits.  While the Agreement
was developed at the request of several BioOne publishers, it may
be of interest to any scholarly publishing organization that is
seeking a clear, concise, and legally vetted publication
agreement.

In March 2007, the legal firm Morrison & Foerster LLC
(www.mofo.com) generously agreed to provide pro bono legal
assistance to BioOne in drafting a Model Publication Agreement.
Ms. Pamela Pasti, Of Counsel in the Technology Transactions Group
of Morrison & Foerster's San Francisco office, was assigned to
the project. Over the course of the following year, Ms. Pasti
worked with BioOne to review existing publication agreements,
notable author's addenda, and articles describing emerging trends
in copyright law as it relates to academic publishing.

The resulting agreement allows author(s) to retain copyright,
while granting the publisher both a temporally limited and
exclusive right to first publish, and a perpetual, non-exclusive
right to publish, distribute, and sublicense.  In response to
NIH=92s Public Access Policy (passed by Congress in December 2007)
and other institutional and subject repository deposit mandates,
the Agreement allows authors to deposit their work in digital
repositories directly, or permits the publisher to deposit to the
National Library of Medicine on their behalf.

"The BioOne Model Author Agreement reflects over a year of work
for all involved in this important project," said Mark Kurtz,
BioOne Director of Business Development. "From the onset, we felt
strongly that BioOne was in a unique position as a collaborative
publishing endeavor to draft an equitable agreement.  Still, this
project would not have been possible without the legal guidance
of Morrison & Foerster, and the invaluable feedback garnered from
the publisher and library community."

The final Agreement is freely available on the BioOne website at:

   www.bioone.org

An accompanying 'roadmap' is also available to provide publishers
adopting the Agreement with guidance on specific author and
publisher rights and amendable sections.

###

About BioOne

Established in 2000, BioOne is the product of innovative
collaboration between scientific societies, libraries, academe,
and the private sector, who seek a sustainable, mission-driven
alternative to commercial publishing. BioOne brings to the Web a
uniquely valuable aggregation of the full-texts of high-impact
bioscience research journals.  Most of BioOne's titles are
published by small societies and non-commercial publishers.
BioOne provides integrated, cost- effective access to a
thoroughly linked information resource of interrelated journals
focused on the biological, ecological, and environmental
sciences.

__________________________________
Lauren Kane
Director of Publisher Relations
BioOne
21 Dupont Circle NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036
[phone] 202-296-2296 ext. 122
[fax] 202-872-0884
[email] lauren@arl.org
[web] www.bioone.org