In the meantime, check out the resources on personal digital archiving on the Library of Congress Personal Archiving page.

"Protests, Petitions and Publishing: Widening Access to Research in 2012" is part of the Research Without Borders (RWB) speaker series. On April 5 our next event will feature George Mason University Center for History and New Media Managing Director Tom Scheinfeldt speaking on "Invisible College: THATCamp as Scholarly Society." For past events, search for the #rwob hashtag on Twitter or view the full RWB video playlist on YouTube.

Columbia University Libraries/Information Services invites you to a morning of collegial critique and thoughtful analysis of the current state of Fair Use decision making in libraries and universities.  

Speakers:

• Brandon Butler, Director of Public Policy Initiatives, Association of Research Libraries
• Sheree Carter-Galvan, Associate General Counsel, Yale University
• Robert Clarida, Partner, Reitler, Kailas & Rosenblatt and Co-Chair, Copyright Committee, New York State Bar Association IP Section
• Peter Jaszi, Professor, Washington College of Law, American University
• Lisa Rose-Wiles, Science Librarian/Assistant Professor, Seton Hall University Libraries
• Gretchen Wagner, General Counsel, Secretary, and Vice President of Administration, ARTstor

Hosted by:

• James Neal, Columbia University Librarian
• Kenneth Crews, Copyright Advisory Office, Columbia University

Co-sponsored by the Copyright Advisory Office and the Scholarly Communication Program.

How can access to important research and scholarship be available to all, not just “the one percent”?  “Protests, Petitions and Publishing: Widening Access to Research in 2012” looks at how Occupy Wall Street, the Research Works Act (RWA), the boycott of Elsevier journals by a growing number of academics, and other recent developments are informing the debate over access to research and scholarship. 

The Occupy movement resonated widely on college campuses in America and around the world when it began in Fall 2011 and reinvigorated discussion of socioeconomic inequality and increasing costs associated with higher education. Current debates about scholarly publishing have further echoed these themes. Two bills—the RWA, which seeks to end public-access policies to federally funded research, and the Federal Research Public Access Act, which seeks to expand the reach of these policies—are currently under consideration in Congress. In response, over 6,000 scholars have signed an online petition boycotting the scholarly journals published by the commercial publisher Elsevier, one of the major financial supporters of the sponsors of the RWA. Meanwhile, several societies have begun to address their membership’s concerns about publishing practices that may be seen to exclude scholars at all but the most wealthy institutions. Are scholars and publishers finally ready to change the process by which scholarship is distributed?

The speakers bring a variety of perspectives to the issue of access to research.

Allan Adler is Vice President for Legal and Governmental Affairs in the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), where he deals with intellectual property, freedom of speech, new technology, and other industry-related issues.

Gail Drakes is a doctoral candidate in the Program in American Studies at New York University and Associate Faculty at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her current teaching and research interests explore the ways in which copyright (and other forms of private ownership of information) serve to regulate access to the stories, sounds, and images that shape collective scholarly and public understandings of the past.

Alex Golub is assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His research interests include kinship and identity, resource development, and political anthropology. He is a founder of the popular cultural anthropology blog “Savage Minds.”
 
Oona Schmid is the Director of Publishing at the American Anthropological Association. She is responsible for the daily oversight and long-term planning around a complex publishing program that includes more than 20 specialized anthropological journals.

Peter Woit is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at Columbia University and author of the blog “Not Even Wrong.”

This event is part of the Research Without Borders speaker series.

Columbia is one of many universities and other groups representing researchers and research institutions that have submitted responses to the RFIs. Many publishers of scholarly journals are also expected to comment.

Read the CUL/IS response to the publications RFI and its response to the data RFI.

Answering these RFIs has been especially crucial in light of the recent introduction of the Research Works Act (RWA) in the House of Representatives. The RWA (HR 3699, co-sponsored by Congressman Darrell Issa and New York Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney), would prevent Federal agencies from adopting policies requiring that peer-reviewed journal articles reporting the results of Federally funded research be made publicly accessible without the prior consent of both the author and publisher of the article. The RWA would mean the end of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy and would prohibit other Federal agencies from adopting similar policies. The bill has been broadly criticized by researchers, librarians, and advocates of open access, open government, and open source software. Though the Association for American Publishers supports the bill, AAP members including MIT Press, ITHAKA, and Pennsylvania State University Press have denounced it.

Ask your questions about copyright, using copyrighted materials in your dissertation or thesis, and depositing your work in Academic Commons. Copyright Advisory Office director Kenneth Crews and Academic Commons manager Robert Hilliker will offer advice to Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) students preparing their dissertations or theses for electronic filing. Bring specific questions!

Though the focus of this discussion will be on GSAS dissertations, all members of the Columbia community are welcome.

VIDEO COMING SOON. How are THATCamp gatherings informing collaborative work between scholars and others interested in the digital humanities? 

The speakers illuminate the potential of the Semantic Web as a productive tool for scholarship and research while illustrating how semantic technologies are still in the beginning stages of development.

Check out this and other videos of events on the Past Events page.

Our speakers are all involved in innovative initiatives using the Semantic Web. Micki McGee is an assistant professor of Sociology at Fordham University and is project director of the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Compatible Data Initiative, a project aiming to generate standards for shared, interoperable data sets for humanities‑based network analysis projects. Benno Blumenthal is Data Library Manager at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University. He is currently interested in using semantic technologies to facilitate the distribution of Earth science data for public use, and he is the author of the IRI/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Climate Data Library, which offers freely accessible climate data via the Web. Cristina Pattuelli is an assistant professor at the Pratt School of Library and Information Science. Her research focuses on information organization and the knowledge representation methods and tools applied to information systems, with a current emphasis on using semantic technologies in cultural heritage resources. The discussion will be moderated by Columbia Department of English and Comparative Literature doctoral candidate Graham Sack.

If you can't attend the discussion, follow it on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/ScholarlyComm/. See the Past Events page for videos  of other Research Without Borders events.