Tag Archives: open access

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Book Launch: Legal Framework for e-Research: Realising the Potential


On Thursday night 7 August 2008, I attended the book launch of Legal Framework for e-Research: Realising the Potential, edited by Professor Brian Fitzgerald and published by the Sydney University Press (SUP).

The book was launched in the new University of Sydney SciTech Library (with a delightfully space-age interior in all shades of green) by Dr Michael Spence, who has recently returned to Australia from Oxford University (where he was the Head of the Social Sciences Division of the University of Oxford, Fellow and Tutor in Law at St Catherine’s College Oxford, and CUF Lecturer at the University of Oxford.) as the new Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney. The book launch itself was quite lively and was attended by some prominent figures in the legal and e-Research space, including Professor Brian Fitzgerald and Professor Anne Fitzgerald, Dr Richard Jefferson of CAMBIA, Graham Greenleaf of AustLII, Professor Gillian Triggs of the University of Sydney Law School and Christoph Antons.

The book is a compilation of conference papers from the Legal Framework for e-Research conference that the Legal Framework for e-Research Project at QUT ran last year (2007) on the Gold Coast. It’s essentially a who’s who of experts in the issues surrounding e-Research and includes chapters from:

  • Dr Terry Cutler (who is currently chairing the Australian Government Innovation Review);
  • Dr Chris Greer (NSF);
  • Professor John Unsworth;
  • Paul F Uhlir and Peter Schroder;
  • Professor Paul David and Dr Michael Spence;
  • Claire Driscoll (NIH);
  • John Wilbanks (Science Commons);
  • Fred Friend (JISC);
  • Professor Fiona Stanley AC;
  • Dr Richard Jefferson (CAMBIA);
  • Andrew Hayne (Privacy Commissioner);
  • David Ruschena; and
  • Gaye Middleton.

I have two chapters in the book – one with Professor Brian Fitzgerald titled, “The Law as Cyberinfrastructure”, which also appears as an article in CTWatch Quarterly (Volume 3, Number 3, August 2007: The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications & Cyberinfrastructure) and can be accessed here, and one with Professor Anne Fitzgerald and Anthony Austin titled, “Understanding the Legal Implications of Data Sharing Access and Reuse in the Australian Research Landscape”, which is derived from our 2007 report, Building the Infrastructure for Data Access and Use in Collaborative Research: An Analysis of the Legal Context.

The book is highly comprehensive, coming in at over 500 pages, and looks fantastic – SUP has done an incredible job in putting it together. Hard copies can be obtained from SUP at cost (AU $59.95). A digital version will soon be available online under a Creative Commons licence, which means it can be downloaded and used for free. It is not up yet, but I will post a link when it is.

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Comments about my most recent publication

Sanford Thatcher, Past President and on the Board of Directors of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) provided the following feedback about Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment – A Guide for Authors (2008 OAK Law Project) to the directors of university presses that are members of AAUP:
Thanks to Stevan Harnad for drawing our attention to this important new guide. I have just finished reading all 150 pages of it and can highly recommend it to all of you as an authoritative overview of the landscape of open access publishing as it applies to journal articles. (The guide does not say anything about books, or even contributions to edited volumes.) Among other useful features, it contains a brief but helpful history of the OA movement, a summary (with quotations) from the principal OA statements (Budapest, Berlin, et al.), a survey of OA journals and various business models by which they operate, a discussion of the role of institutional repositories and funding agencies, and a very helpful discussion of the interconnected licenses (including the author’s addendum and Creative Commons licenses) that authors get involved in negotiating with publishers, funding bodies, institutional repositories, etc. I applaud its conservative stance on how to deal with the kind of author’s addendum that claims to be valid even if the publisher does not sign it (see page 109). CIC press directors should see what is said about CIC policies on page 111. If you read nothing else, I urge you to read at least chapters 8 and 9, which discuss how authors can negotiate contracts with publishers. The guide concludes with a Copyright Toolkit, which is a wonderful condensation of a lot of relevant information–and also dramatizes how complex this terrain is getting for authors, who are faced with multiple and possibly conflicting licenses. As a comprehensive tutorial for your staff on the state of OA today, I don’t think there is anything out there that is better than this–though it is limited to the domain of journal articles and clearly has a pro-OA bias (reflected in the numerous quotations from people like Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad).

P.S. Although this is produced by an Australian group, most of what is contained in it is universally applicable. The exception is the short section on Australian copyright law, which differs in a number of respects from U.S. law (including the “moral rights” provisions that Australian law incorporates but U.S. law doesn’t).

Thanks to Sandy for permitting me to republish this feedback on my blog.