Louisiana State University (LSU) filed a lawsuit on February 27, 2017, against international science publisher Elsevier B.V. for breach of contract resulting from the publisher’s exclusion of the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine from accessing content licensed by the LSU Libraries. In filing the lawsuit, LSU exercised sound financial stewardship of its public resources...

The Australian copyright community has been shocked by a scandal involving the Copyright Agency, a copyright collective that diverted millions of dollars intended for authors toward a lobbying and advocacy fund designed to fight against potential fair use reforms. The collective reportedly withheld A$15 million in royalties from authors in order to build a war chest to fight against changes to the Australian copyright law. I wrote last month about my experience in Australia, where groups such as the Copyright Agency have engaged in a remarkable effort to mislead policy makers on the state of copyright law in Canada. A former director of the Copyright Agency describes the latest situation as "pathetic" noting that it was outrageous to extract millions from publicly-funded schools for a lobbying fund.  The Australian case is far from an isolated incident. A quick search reveals plenty of examples of legal concerns involving copyright collectives with corruption fears in Kenya and competition law concerns in Italy over the past couple of months as well as recent fines against Spanish collecting societies. In fact, Jonathan Band and Brandon Butler published an eye-opening article several years ago chronicling an astonishing array of examples of corruption, mismanagement, lack of transparency, and negative effects for both creators and users from copyright collectives around the world.

No NDAs.

OAwashing by STM Association.

I had not intended to write about the case decided last month involving the claim by Warner/Chappell Music that they owned the copyright in the song “Happy Birthday To You.”  I figured that it would be so widely covered that I would have little to contribute.  Obviously I have changed my mind, and it is … Continue reading Happy Birthday and extended collective licensing →

Interesting!!! Will other publishers begin to offer this type of access? From Today's NC State Libraries Announcement: The new agreement will allow North Carolina State University researchers to data mine Gale archival collections that are important to historians and humanists.

© The Author(s), 2014. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in BMC Research Notes 7 (2014): 79, doi:10.1186/1756-0500-7-79.

Discovery layers turn away search engines because serials-metadata providers that feed into them don't want "their" metadata escaping into the open.

Ariel Katz looks at the legal implications of STM’s move to release their own version of “open” licenses. As more and more authors consider the openness of a publication venue, pu…