Over one year after UVA’s Faculty Senate formed its Task Force on Scholarly Publications and Authors’ Rights, debate continues on a resolution regarding copyrights and faculty publications. Though this resolution was expected to be voted on at the Senate’s last meeting of the semester on November 20, lack of consensus pushed the vote back until next semester.
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Brian Pusser, chair of the Task Force and professor in the Curry School of Education, says that the resolution in question would require every faculty member at the University to submit an addendum to his or her contract with a publisher. “The repository will bring attention to the scholarship of faculty at the University of Virginia,” he says. “It will also help students build a community of scholarship with students at other universities, based on what is put in the repositories.” |
“A simple majority vote would not provide the legitimacy that transformative legislation requires,” says Brian Pusser, chair of the Task Force and professor in the Curry School of Education. The resolution in question would require every faculty member at the University to submit an addendum to his or her contract with a publisher. Essentially, the supplement keeps the publisher from possessing exclusive rights to faculty’s works and allows the original author more negotiation rights, compared with the contract currently in place.
A second component of this resolution is aimed at creating an Open Access Program at UVA, centered on an online repository for scholarly publications. This repository will operate as a database of scholarly works that is open to the general public. Articles will be placed in it only 12 months after being published in an academic journal. Those wanting to opt out would have to submit a waiver, most likely in the form of an e-mail.
By modifying the standard contract currently in place between faculty authors and scholarly publications, authors would be given more options for using their work in a noncommercial manner, such as in the classroom or for further research.
Post-publication uses of scholarly works usually include distributing articles to students and colleagues electronically, posting works on course websites such as UVA’s collaboration site UVaCollab, printing works in course packets without fear of violating publishers’ contracts, and most broadly, allowing the free flow of information to the public. “The repository will bring attention to the scholarship of faculty at the University of Virginia,” Pusser says. “It will also help students build a community of scholarship with students at other universities, based on what is put in the repositories.”
The Task Force consulted a variety of disciplines and schools throughout the process and found two main areas of dissatisfaction: the mandatory nature of the resolution and the implementation of the repository. These concerns came up at the November 20 meeting. A common theme appeared to be a desire for a discipline-specific approach to the issue. For example, representatives from the Physics and Mathematics departments explained that much of their research is collaborative with non-UVA faculty, and as such, coordinating publication contracts across multiple institutions would be difficult and an added burden.
Another concern comes from faculty in the School of Architecture and the department of Art History. While the repository would be text-only, professors from these disciplines rely on illustrations to convey their work. Thus, they would be forced to opt out of the open access network. The next step for the Task Force is to consider the comments from the Senate meeting and to draft a new resolution, perhaps with the assistance of those faculty members in opposition. The Task Force expects to present an updated resolution that is quite different when the Senate reconvenes in February 2010.
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