NCSU Libraries Focus Online

Volume 21 number 2 - Winter 2001

By Peggy Hoon, Scholarly Communication Center

By all accounts, North Carolina State University's first all-day Scholarly Communication Colloquium, held on October 5, 2000, proved an unqualified success. More than 230 participants attended the colloquium, entitled "Reinventing the Knowledge Wheel: Leading the Revolution in the Ownership and Management of Scholarship." The event, cosponsored by the NCSU Libraries, the Office of the Provost, and the Scholarly Communication Subcommittee of the University Library Committee, provided informative, timely, and well-received insights into copyright ownership and management issues for academics with respect to scholarly journal publications and teaching materials.

James G. Neal, Sheridan director of the Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University, opened the event with a presentation entitled "SPARC: Returning Science to Scientists." The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) was instituted to leverage library resources and influence, stimulate market forces, and provide support for new models of scholarly publishing. With more than 200 members, SPARC has created numerous publishing partnerships resulting in journals that compete head-to-head with the high-priced journal publishers. Neal elucidated the key issues in publishing scholarly research, including the imbalance in the price of information relative to its value and source costs and the imbalance in information authorship, ownership, and property rights. He also discussed the underlying differences in the goals, strategies, and reward systems between the worlds of scholarship and commerce.

The next speaker, Michael Rosenzweig, became a publishing partner with SPARC to develop the journal Evolutionary Ecology Research. He inspired and motivated many in the audience with his vivid description of the collision of values between academics, who are primarily interested in the dissemination of information, and for-profit publishers, whose bottom line is usually concerned with profit margins. He urged faculty to educate themselves on this situation and to take a stand in favor of open scholarly communication.

The final morning speaker was Richard Lucier, founding university librarian for the California Digital Library (CDL), who spoke about "E-Scholarship: Scholar-Led Innovation in Scholarly Communication." He described CDL's vision of an integrated digital system for scholarly information management, which is based on the belief that effectively managing the continuous and rapid increase of information is a more significant driving force than the increasing cost of publication. The CDL has developed its electronic scholarship Web site to provide an infrastructure for digital scholarly communication by communities of scholars. One example is "University E-Pub"--a database of self-archived scholarship in the sciences of physics, mathematics, and computer sciences--which will be available in January 2001. Lucier also discussed other exciting projects currently in progress at CDL.

The afternoon sessions addressed the challenging issues involved in copyright ownership and management of works created in the academic setting. Provost David Shulenburger of the University of Kansas gave the keynote address. As he so eloquently stated, the challenges facing scholarly communication are not a library problem, but rather a problem for all faculty and scholars. Shulenburger has been intimately and actively involved in issues of scholarly communication for many years and recently facilitated the discussion leading to the development of the "Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing," commonly known as the Tempe Principles. Those principles are currently under discussion on campuses across the country and promote the concept of common ownership of these works--that is, that research and scholarship are products of social collaborations and are assigned ultimately to the community. These principles, as well as a thorough presentation of the facts concerning costs involved in scholarly communication, can be viewed at Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing: The Tempe Principles.

The final speaker was Professor Dan Burk of the University of Minnesota School of Law, who discussed copyright law as it intersects with intellectual property traditions and policies concerning ownership of scholarly works and course materials. The challenge of a good copyright ownership policy is to reward stakeholders fairly while providing sufficient incentives to create quality works. The insights and information provided were stimulating and laid the groundwork for the subsequent panel discussions.

The first panel discussion, moderated by NC State Provost Kermit Hall, was composed of David Danehower (NCSU), Laura Gasaway (UNC-Chapel Hill), Peggy Hoon (NCSU), James Neal (Johns Hopkins), and Benjamin Speller (NC Central). Hall led the panelists through a role-playing scenario portraying the positions of a faculty member, university counsel, university president, consultant, and state legislator. The panelists, given the scenario of a faculty member who has created a marketable course using various resources, effectively illustrated the multiple perspectives involved.

The closing panel consisted of Hall, Gretchen Bataille (UNC General Administration), and Hadley Cocks (Duke University). Bataille and Cocks presented and discussed the new and proposed copyright ownership policies at their institutions, each of which can be found at http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/scc/colloquium.html.

The colloquium provided a forum for the significant exchange of information among participants, who had gathered together as a community to address the challenging issues concerning scholarly communication and intellectual property.