Copyright for Scholarly Authors: What Are Our Rights and Should We Keep Them?

Lorre Smith, Librarian for Digital Library Initiatives, University at Albany

Wednesday, April 25, 2007, 8:30 – 9:30 a.m.

Scholarly authors need to know what their rights are now more than ever. Commercial scholarly publishers often ask authors to sign over all their rights to the distribution of their work. This work is then sold back to the scholarly community by the publishers, sometimes at prohibitive costs that pose significant barriers to access. Are there other options? What does copyright mean for authors? Author rights and negotiations with publishers for rights will be the main topic of this discussion. There will also be a brief discussion of the current Open Access movement within scholarly communication and scholarly publishing.

Lorre Smith achieved the M.L.S.degree in 1978 from Indiana University, just as the Copyright act of 1977 was implemented. During the late 1970s and early 1980s she worked as director in small public and academic libraries, insuring that all necessary copyright policies and procedures were implemented in the libraries under her direction, while taking advantage of the many workshops and institutes offered to orient librarians to the new laws. In 1989 she began at the University at Albany as head of the Media, Microforms, Periodicals and Reserves Department. During that year she developed and managed an Interactive Media Center with 25 full multimedia workstations, and insured that copyright policies and procedures for the reserves services plus the multimedia workstations were implemented. Currently Lorre is Librarian for Digital Library Initiatives for the University Libraries, where has served as the Geographic Information Systems services librarian and "point person" for various digital library projects. She also has organized several copyright education activities for the University at Albany community, including two full-day workshops, a teleconference, many brief workshop and guest lecture sessions, and a web page of resources.