Complying with the NIH Public Access Policy - Copyright Considerations and Options

On January 11, 2008, the National Institutes of Health ('NIH') adopted a revised Public Access Policy for peer-reviewed journal articles reporting research supported in whole or in part by NIH funds. Under the revised policy, the grantee shall ensure that a copy of the author's final manuscript, including any revisions made during the peer review process, be electronically submitted to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central ('PMC') archive and that the person submitting the manuscript will designate a time not later than 12 months after publication at which NIH may make the full text of the manuscript publicly accessible in PMC. NIH adopted this policy to implement a new statutory requirement under which: The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law. This White Paper is written primarily for policymaking staff in universities and other institutional recipients of NIH support responsible for ensuring compliance with the Public Access Policy. The January 11, 2008, Public Access Policy imposes two new compliance mandates. First, the grantee must ensure proper manuscript submission. The version of the article to be submitted is the final version over which the author has control, which must include all revisions made after peer review. The statutory command directs that the manuscript be submitted to PMC 'upon acceptance for publication.' That is, the author's final manuscript should be submitted to PMC at the same time that it is sent to the publisher for final formatting and copy editing. Proper submission is a two-stage process. The electronic manuscript must first be submitted through a process that requires input of additional information concerning the article, the author(s), and the nature of NIH support for the research reported. NIH then formats the manuscript into a uniform, XML-based format used for PMC versions of articles. In the second stage of the submission process, NIH sends a notice to the Principal Investigator requesting that the PMC-formatted version be reviewed and approved. Only after such approval has grantee's manuscript submission obligation been satisfied. Second, the grantee also has a distinct obligation to grant NIH copyright permission to make the manuscript publicly accessible through PMC not later than 12 months after the date of publication. This obligation is connected to manuscript submission because the author, or the person submitting the manuscript on the author's behalf, must have the necessary rights under copyright at the time of submission to give NIH the copyright permission it requires. This White Paper explains and analyzes only the scope of the grantee's copyright-related obligations under the revised Public Access Policy and suggests six options for compliance with that aspect of the grantee's obligation. Time is of the essence for NIH grantees. As a practical matter, the grantee should have a compliance process in place no later than April 7, 2008. More specifically, the new Public Access Policy applies to any article accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008 if the article arose under (1) an NIH Grant or Cooperative Agreement active in Fiscal Year 2008, (2) direct funding from an NIH Contract signed after April 7, 2008, (3) direct funding from the NIH Intramural Program, or (4) from an NIH employee. In addition, effective May 25, 2008, anyone submitting an application, proposal or progress report to the NIH must include the PMC reference number when citing articles arising from their NIH funded research. (This includes applications submitted to the NIH for the May 25, 2008 and subsequent due dates.) Conceptually, the compliance challenge that the Public Access Policy poses for grantees is easily described. The grantee must depend to some extent upon the author(s) to take the necessary actions to ensure that the grantee is in compliance with the Public Access Policy because the electronic manuscripts and the copyrights in those manuscripts are initially under the control of the author(s). As a result, any compliance option will require an explicit understanding between the author(s) and the grantee about how the manuscript and the copyright in the manuscript are managed. It is useful to conceptually keep separate the grantee's manuscript submission obligation from its copyright permission obligation because the compliance personnel concerned with manuscript management may differ from those responsible for overseeing the author's copyright management. With respect to copyright management, the grantee has the following six options: (1) rely on authors to manage copyright but also to request or to require that these authors take responsibility for amending publication agreements that call for transfer of too many rights to enable the author to grant NIH permission to make the manuscript publicly accessible ('the Public Access License'); (2) take a more active role in assisting authors in negotiating the scope of any copyright transfer to a publisher by (a) providing advice to authors concerning their negotiations or (b) by acting as the author's agent in such negotiations; (3) enter into a side agreement with NIH-funded authors that grants a non-exclusive copyright license to the grantee sufficient to grant NIH the Public Access License; (4) enter into a side agreement with NIH-funded authors that grants a non-exclusive copyright license to the grantee sufficient to grant NIH the Public Access License and also grants a license to the grantee to make certain uses of the article, including posting a copy in the grantee's publicly accessible digital archive or repository and authorizing the article to be used in connection with teaching by university faculty; (5) negotiate a more systematic and comprehensive agreement with the biomedical publishers to ensure either that the publisher has a binding obligation to submit the manuscript and to grant NIH permission to make the manuscript publicly accessible or that the author retains sufficient rights to do so; or (6) instruct NIH-funded authors to submit manuscripts only to journals with binding deposit agreements with NIH or to journals whose copyright agreements permit authors to retain sufficient rights to authorize NIH to make manuscripts publicly accessible

A Primer on U.S. Intellectual Property Rights Applicable to Music Information Retrieval Systems

Digital technology has had a significant impact on the ways in which music information can be stored, transmitted, and used. Within the information sciences, music information retrieval has become an increasingly important and complex field. This brief article is addressed primarily to those involved in the design and implementation of systems for storing and retrieving digital files containing musical notation, recorded music, and relevant metadata – hereinafter referred to as a Music Information Retrieval System (“MIRS”). In particular, this group includes information specialists, software engineers, and the attorneys who advise them. Although peer-to-peer computer applications, such as Napster’s MusicShare or the Kazaa Media Desktop, can be conceived of as creating a MIRS, my analysis focuses on MIRS designed or operated by an entity that takes responsibility for choosing and controlling the music information stored in the system. Examples would include digital music collections stored in research libraries or on university intranets, as well as commercial systems with similar design features. This article describes how certain provisions of U. S. intellectual property law apply to MIRSs and mentions relevant law in the European Union for purposes of comparison. The focus is on U. S. copyright law, with very brief mention of U.S. patent and trade secret law. Additionally, the article mentions proposed legislation for database protection, which already exists in the European Union. Enactment of such legislation could be very significant for developers and operators of MIRS

Libraries\u27 Shifting Roles and Responsibilities in the Networked Age

My goal in this chapter is to advance the argument that access denied to resources in digital form is a more serious, and more solvable, problem than one might glean from the literature. Digital networks make access possible to a degree that would have been unimaginable in the analog era. What was once a mix of technological and economic constraints on access is now reduced to legal, rather than technological, constraints. The library community should more explicitly commit itself to the goal of ubiquitous access to digital content. The role of the library in public life should be to minimize or eliminate these legal barriers to access and use through a mixture of creative and fair licensing arrangements, and policy advocacy on behalf of those currently denied access. To begin to solve this problem, libraries should develop a more robust network consciousness, by which I mean they should realign institutional priorities and resources to explicitly position individual libraries and consortia as network nodes through which patrons can access networked resources or as a site of publication of networked resources. This argument recognizes that a network consciousness should not be the sum total of a library’s attentional focus. For the library has also been, and remains, an intensely local institution whose physicality through its architecture, geography, and relation to its analog resources are as important to library patrons as ever. I am convinced that libraries are capable of meeting the challenges of balancing their local and global roles if institutional leaders make this a priority.https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_bk_contributions/1178/thumbnail.jp

Owning Music: From Publisher\u27s Privilege to Composer\u27s Copyright

More than four years after Napster demonstrated the power of the Internet as a means of distributing music, we still are in the midst of a cultural and legal debate about what the respective rights of music copyright owners, follow-on creators, disseminators, and purchasers should be. A common assumption underlying much of the debate is that whatever settlement emerges, it will apply equally to all forms of expression. This Article questions that assumption by investigating the early history of copyright in music. For the first time in legal scholarship, the Article reveals and examines the distinct early history of copyright in music and relates this history to contemporary conflicts. The historical investigation covers the pre copyright era in England and Europe (1500 1700), the eighteenth century in England when the first copyright law was enacted (1710) and then applied to music (1777), and American history from the beginning of the printing trade in the latter seventeenth century, through the adoption of copyright as a constitutional good (1787) and as the subject to federal statutory protection (1790), ending in 1831, when the Copyright Act was amended to included musical compositions as the appropriate subject matter for copyright protection. Although music publishers and recording companies are today among the most aggressive advocates for strong copyright in music, when the first copyright law was enacted in England, music publishers actively resisted its application to music. The first struggle over music copyright in England, and to a much lesser extent in the United States, has lessons to teach policymakers seeking to resolve the current conflict. Copyright in musical texts, whether sheet music or recorded music, always has allocated liberties between composers, publishers, and end users. Digital technology has brought latent conflicts in this allocation to the fore. The Article concludes with recommendations about how copyright history should, and should not, be used in litigation

The Struggle for Music Copyright

Inspired by passionate contemporary debates about music copyright, this Article investigates how, when, and why music first came within copyright\u27s domain. Ironically, although music publishers and recording companies are among the most aggressive advocates for strong copyright in music today, music publishers in eighteenth-century England resisted extending copyright to music. This Article sheds light on a series of early legal disputes concerning printed music that yield important insights into original understandings of copyright law and music\u27s role in society. By focusing attention on this understudied episode, this Article demonstrates that the concept of copyright was originally far more circumscribed than it is today and that music - which currently is treated as core copyrightable subject matter - presented a difficult case. A number of audiences will benefit from a better understanding of the struggle over music copyright, including scholars who advance general theories about the evolution of property rights and policymakers seeking to place the current disputes over music copyright in historical perspective

Creative Commons and the New Intermediaries

This symposium contribution examines the disintermediating and reintermediating roles played by Creative Commons licenses on the Internet. Creative Commons licenses act as a disintermediating force because they enable end-to-end transactions in copyrighted works. The licenses have reintermediating force by enabling new services and new online communities to form around content licensed under a Creative Commons license. Intermediaries focused on the copyright dimension have begun to appear online as search engines, archives, libraries, publishers, community organizers, and educators. Moreover, the growth of machine-readable copyright licenses and the new intermediaries that they enable is part of a larger movement toward a Semantic Web. As that effort progresses, we should expect new kinds of intermediaries that rely on machine-readable law to emerge

Patent Injunctions and the Problem of Uniformity Cost

In eBay v. MercExchange, the Supreme Court correctly rejected a one-size-fits-all approach to patent injunctions. However, the Court\u27s opinion does not fully recognize that the problem of uniformity in patent law is more general and that this problem cannot be solved through case-by-case analysis. This Essay provides a field guide for implementing eBay using functional analysis and insights from a uniformity-cost framework developed more fully in prior work. While there can be no general rule governing equitable relief in patent cases, the traditional four factor analysis for injunctive relief should lead the cases to cluster around certain patterns that often will have an industry-specific cast. This Essay identifies these patterns and summarizes the guideposts that courts and litigants should look for when conducting the traditional analysis in patent cases

Copyright’s Creative Hierarchy in the Performing Arts

Copyright law grants authors certain rights of creative control over their works. This Article argues that these rights of creative control are too strong when applied to the performing arts because they fail to take account of the mutual dependence between writers and performers to fully realize the work in performance. This failure is particularly problematic in cases in which the author of a source work, such as a play or a choreographic work, imposes content-based restrictions on how a third party may render the work in performance. This Article then explores how Congress might craft a statutory license to mitigate this unequal treatment

“One for All: The Problem of Uniformity Cost in Intellectual Property Law.” American University Law Review 55, no.4 (May 2006): 845-900.

Intellectual property law protects the owner of each patented invention or copyrighted work of authorship with a largely uniform set of exclusive rights. In the modern context, it is clear that innovators\u27 needs for intellectual property protection vary substantially across industries and among types of innovation. Applying a socially costly, uniform solution to problems of differing magnitudes means that the law necessarily imposes uniformity cost by underprotecting those who invest in certain costly innovations and overprotecting those with low innovation costs or access to alternative appropriability mechanisms. This Article argues that reducing uniformity cost is the central problem for intellectual property policymaking. There are three approaches for reducing uniformity costs: (1) granting real options to obtain or maintain intellectual property rights (such as renewable terms); (2) using standards rather than rules to define rights, thereby making their application more context-sensitive; and (3) tailoring rights legislatively or judicially. This Article focuses on the ways in which current law deploys these approaches to reduce uniformity cost and argues that recent changes in the law have exacerbated the problem of uniformity cost