Faculty researchers and authors are paid by the university to create the scholarship and research that they give away FOR FREE to scholarly publishers.

University libraries are then forced to pay exorbitant prices to purchase access to the intellectual property that their own faculty created. **This purchased access is often times not permanent or consistent.

The cost of scholarly publications is (and has been) rising at rates that are several times higher than inflation.

Significant price increases in journals every year decrease the purchasing power of libraries overall which negatively impact the overall (very limited) acquisition budget.

Data from the Association for Research Libraries show that from 1986 to 2005:

• The average cost of serials rose 167%.
• The average cost of a monograph rose 81%.
• The consumer price index for this time period rose 78%.
• Bottom line: prices are going up, and libraries can't keep up.

*Read 2012 Peridocial Price Survey

Author's Right view in YouTube

Alternatives to standard copyright  liscense
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization working to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in “the commons” — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.

View CC descriptive video "Get Creative" about the concept of "creative commons."

• Creative Commons licenses
• Creative Commons license for Education
• Embedding CC licenses in different file types
   

Copyleft - GNU license information
Copyleft is a general method for making a program (or other work) free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well.

"Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” Peter Suber

OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions).

Overivew of Open Access by Peter Suber author of  SPARC Open Access Newsletter

OA Requirements:
The U.S. National Institutes of Health currently requests that NIH-funded researchers deposit a copy of manuscripts stemming from their research into PubMed Central, within twelve months of the article's publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

View Open Access for Faculty Guide

Under U.S. Copyright law YOU as the AUTHOR have the following exclusive rights unless and until you transfer the copyright in a signed agreement:

Right to reproduce, distribute, adapt, publicly perform, and publicly display the copyrighted work.

Copyright protection is automatic. The author obtains these exclusive rights at the moment the copyrighted work has been “fixed in a tangible medium.”

Author's Rights

• Authors Rights Initiative - "You have the right to own your work" - (SPARC)
• SHERPA/RoMEO- check publisher agreements
• Keep your copyrights.org -sample clauses & contracts
• Author's Rights - model language for authors (ARL subgroup)
• Understanding Rights Reversions - Authors Alliance
  
  SAMPLE FORMS
  
• SPARC sample addendum (Word doc)
• CIC sample addendum (pdf)
• Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine - will help you generate a PDF form that you can attach to a journal publisher's copyright agreement to ensure that you retain certain rights.
   

Helpful Guides
Tips for negiotating with publishers (ASU)

• The Facts: The Economics of Publishing (UofCalifornia)
  
• The Facts: How the Crisis in Scholarly Communication Affects You (UC Berkeley)
• Introductions to Publishing Agreements for Authors by Timothy Armstrong (PDF)
• Sign-on-the-Dotted-Line or Negiotate: A Copryight Primer for Scholars by Okerson & Sundar (PDF)
   
• Authors Rights workshop powerpoint