Law Commons^™

Virtual Energy, Joel B. Eisen, Felix Mormann, Heather E. Payne

Faculty Scholarship

From employment to education, many areas of our daily lives have gone virtual, including the virtual workplace and virtual classes. By comparison, the way we generate, deliver, and consume electricity is an anachronism. And the electric industry’s outdated business model and regulatory framework are failing. For the last century-and-a-half, we have relied on ever larger power plants to generate the electricity we consume, often hundreds of miles away from the point of production. But the outsized carbon footprint of these power plants and the need to transmit their output over long distances threaten the electric grid’s reliability, affordability, and long-term …

Comparison Of Library Publishing Workflows By Oa Model, Sue Ann Gardner

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Conference Presentations and Speeches

Population of an institutional repository is a form of publishing. Green and diamond OA library publishing workflows are compared. The workflow for gold OA does not involve library publishing. Some data about the UNL Digital Commons institutional repository (https://digitalcommons.unl.edu) are included.

How “Open” Are Australian Museums? A Review Through The Lens Of Copyright Governance, Paul L. Arthur, Lydia Hearn, Isabel Smith, Nikos Koutras

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Museums are increasingly employing innovative digital techniques to curate, link, and market collections, enabling new kinds of public engagement to better connect with popular culture. By embracing contemporary modes of delivery to open access to their collections, museums are signalling a drive toward greater democratisation of knowledge and information through increased interaction and accessibility. Yet with this has come a series of copyright and legal complexities. This paper reviews current copyright barriers for museums in Australia and examines how international examples offer potential models and ways forward. The authors conclude that recent copyright modernisation reviews offer the museum sector an …

A Call For The Library Community To Deploy Best Practices Toward A Database For Biocultural Knowledge Relating To Climate Change, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Abstract

Purpose – In this paper, a call to the library and information science community to support documentation and conservation of cultural and biocultural heritage has been presented.

Design/methodology/approach – Based in existing Literature, this proposal is generative and descriptive— rather than prescriptive—regarding precisely how libraries should collaborate to employ technical and ethical best practices to provide access to vital data, research and cultural narratives relating to climate.

Findings – COVID-19 and climate destruction signal urgent global challenges. Library best practices are positioned to respond to climate change. Literature indicates how libraries preserve, share and cross-link cultural and scientific knowledge. …

The Right To Access Legal Information: Progress And Evolving Norms In A Digital Age, Heidi L. Frostestad

College of Law Faculty Publications

The right to access information is a historically fundamental right according to international legal norms. During an era of increasingly complex innovation and burgeoning digital legal information, the tension between access and barriers to easily accessible legal information like encryption and privacy have changed the landscape of open access. This article addresses the traditional international law facilitation of open access to legal information and current legislative efforts for protection of these norms. It also offers a matrix of international and national initiatives as model regimes for this important right to access information and, especially, preserving open access to legal information.

Tort Law: Cases And Commentaries, Samuel Beswick

All Faculty Publications

The law of obligations concerns the legal rights and duties owed between people. Three primary categories make up the common law of obligations: tort, contract, and unjust enrichment. This coursebook provides an introduction to tort law: the law that recognises and responds to civil wrongdoing. The material is arranged in two parts. Part I comprises §§1-11 and addresses intentional and dignitary torts and the overarching theories and goals of tort law. Part II comprises §§12-25 and addresses no-fault compensation schemes, negligence, nuisance, strict liability, and tort law’s place within our broader legal systems.

Themes explored within this coursebook include:

• …

Openness Through The Lenses Of The Three-Step-Test: International Perspectives On Copyright Protection, Marinos Papadopoulos, Nikos Koutras

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This paper is focused on openness movement and the principles that said movement declared regarding the use of works set under copyright protection to enable for open access works. The three-step-test legal edifice is deeply rooted in international copyright law; its meaning and application is of vital importance for any consideration of amending copyright law with the aim to include provisions for openness. Unless a provision for openness passes the three-step-test there can be no sustainable amendment of copyright law in favour of openness.

The Role Of Institutional Repositories In Advancing Open Scholarship: A Case Study From The United Arab Emirates University, Amina Itani, Linda Östlundh

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The digitization of theses and dissertations at the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) began five years ago with the Digital Commons institutional repository (IR) platform, ScholarWorks, employed for the purpose. The project, initiated by the University Library, exemplifies how academic libraries can take the lead in advocating for digital preservation and open access publishing of institutional research materials. This case study describes how the library’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) initiative has provided an excellent model to the UAEU for it to start disseminating its research output and how the library’s copyright and open access policies have been crucial for …

Final Report Of The Durham Statement Review Task Force, Durham Statement Review Task Force

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Open Is Not Forever: A Study Of Vanished Open Access Journals, Mikael Laakso, Lisa Matthias, Najko Jahn

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The preservation of the scholarly record has been a point of concern since the beginning of knowledge production. With print publications, the responsibility rested primarily with librarians, but the shift towards digital publishing and, in particular, the introduction of open access (OA) have caused ambiguity and complexity. Consequently, the long-term accessibility of journals is not always guaranteed, and they can even disappear from the web completely. The purpose of this exploratory study is to systematically study the phenomenon of vanished journals, something that has not been done before. For the analysis, we consulted several major bibliographic indexes, such as Scopus, …

A List Of Zea Books, Published By University Of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Zea Books

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

94 published titles (2005-2020), plus 1 forthcoming this fall.

Zea Books are produced by the Office of Scholarly Communications, and published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries.

With links to online pdf editions and Lulu.com print-on-demand online storefront.

Zea Books are online at https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/

Print-on-demand editions are available @ http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/unllib

The Nci Cancer Moonshot Public Access And Data Sharing (Pads) Policy – Initial Assessment And Implications, Jorge L. Contreras, Tammy Frisby

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Since 2013, federal research-funding agencies have been required to develop and implement broad data sharing policies. Yet agencies today continue to grapple with the mechanisms necessary to enable the sharing of a wide range of data types, from genomic and other -omics data to clinical and pharmacological data to survey and qualitative data. In 2016, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) launched the ambitious $1.8 billion Cancer Moonshot Program, which included a new Public Access and Data Sharing (PADS) Policy applicable to funding applications submitted on or after October 1, 2017. The PADS Policy encourages the immediate public release of published …

Open Access Uptake By Universities Worldwide, Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, Rodrigo Costas, Thed N. Van Leeuwen

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The implementation of policies promoting the adoption of an open science (OS) culture must be accompanied by indicators that allow monitoring the uptake of such policies and their potential effects on research publishing and sharing practices. This study presents indicators of open access (OA) at the institutional level for universities worldwide. By combining data from Web of Science, Unpaywall and the Leiden Ranking disambiguation of institutions, we track OA coverage of universities' output for 963 institutions. This paper presents the methodological challenges, conceptual discrepancies and limitations and discusses further steps needed to move forward the discussion on fostering OA and …

Open Access Publishing In The European Union: The Example Of Scientific Works, Nikos Koutras

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Access to information resources and publicly-funded research outcomes have been considered in Europe during the last decade. Open access practice became part of the European institutions’ agenda since 2006 within the final report of the European Research Advisory Board. The Lisbon Treaty (2007) explicitly confirmed the European Union’s commitment to free circulation of scientific knowledge (Article 179 TFEU) and the dissemination of research results (Article 183 TFEU). In this regard, the Horizon 2020 program illustrates the importance of open access policy towards further dissemination of scientific information. The European Commission also introduced in July 2012 a scientific information package to …

Making Open Access Viable Economically, Andrew Hyde, Russell A. Miller, Emanuel V. Towfigh

Scholarly Articles

The Editors-in-Chief have decided that we will provide our much-cherished readers with an editorial every so often as a way of sharing insights from the “machine room” where so much of the thinking and work is done to publish the German Law Journal. We want to let you in on the ideas that are on our minds, share with you our observations, and include you in the conversations we are having that might be of interest to you. We begin this tradition with this issue, Volume 21 – Number 6. Andrew Hyde, a member of the editorial team with which …

Who’S Writing Open Access (Oa) Articles? Characteristics Of Oa Authors At Ph.D.-Granting Institutions In The United States, Anthony J. Olejniczak, Molly J. Wilson

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The open access (OA) publication movement aims to present research literature to the public at no cost and with no restrictions. While the democratization of access to scholarly literature is a primary focus of the movement, it remains unclear whether OA has uniformly democratized the corpus of freely available research, or whether authors who choose to publish in OA venues represent a particular subset of scholars—those with access to resources enabling them to afford article processing charges (APCs). We investigated the number of OA articles with article processing charges (APC OA) authored by 182,320 scholars with known demographic and institutional …

Foundations For Open Scholarship Strategy Development, Version 2.1 [Pre-Print], Jonathan Tennant, Jennifer E. Beamer, Jeroen Bosman, Björn Brembs, Neo Christopher Chung, Gail Clement, Tom Crick, Jonathan Dugan, Alastair Dunning, David Eccles, Asura Enkhbayar, Daniel Graziotin, Rachel Harding, Johanna Havemann, Daniel S. Katz, Kshitiz Khanal, Jesper Norgaard Kjaer, Tim Koder, Paul Macklin, Christopher R. Madan, Paola Masuzzo, Lisa Matthias, Katja Mayer, David M. Nichols, Elli Papadopoulou, Thomas Pasquier, Tony Ross-Hellauer, Michael Schulte-Mecklenbeck, Dan Sholler, Tobias Steiner, Pawel Szczesny, Andy Turner

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

This document aims to agree on a broad, international strategy for the implementation of open scholarship that meets the needs of different national and regional communities but works globally.

Scholarly research can be idealised as an inspirational process for advancing our collective knowledge to the benefit of all humankind. However, current research practices often struggle with a range of tensions, in part due to the fact that this collective (or “commons”) ideal conflicts with the competitive system in which most scholars work, and in part because much of the infrastructure of the scholarly world is becoming largely digital. What is …

Sustainable And Open Access To Valuable Legal Research Information: A New Framework, Alex Zhang, James Hart

Scholarly Articles

This article evaluates the current status of access to foreign and international legal research information, analyzes the challenges that information providers have experienced in providing valuable and sustainable access, and proposes a model that would help create and facilitate effective and sustainable access to valuable foreign, comparative, and international legal information.

From Coalition To Commons: Plan S And The Future Of Scholarly Communication, Rob Johnson

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Abstract

The announcement of Plan S in September 2018 triggered a wide-ranging debate over how best to accelerate the shift to open access. The Plan’s ten principles represent a call for the creation of an intellectual commons, to be brought into being through collective action by funders and managed through regulated market mechanisms. As it gathers both momentum and critics, the coalition must grapple with questions of equity, efficiency and sustainability. The work of Elinor Ostrom has shown that successful management of the commons frequently relies on polycentricity and adaptive governance. The Plan S principles must therefore function as …

How Many Copies Are Enough Revisited: Open Access Legal Scholarship In The Time Of Collection Budget Constraints, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

This article discusses the results of a study into the open access availability of law reviews, followed by a discussion of why open access has such a high rate of adoption among law reviews, especially in comparison to the journal literature in other disciplines.

Navigating Scholarship Discovery, Research Impact, And Open Access, Carol A. Watson, Jean-Gabriel Bankier, Gregg Gordon

Presentations

The leadership teams of bepress and SSRN will present the findings of an integration pilot conducted in partnership with Columbia Law School’s Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, the University of Georgia School of Law’s Alexander Campbell King Law Library, and Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business. Expanding the reach of open access scholarship is central to the mission of both bepress and SSRN. However for many institutions, the separation of the two platforms had created barriers to faculty engagement and the building of successful open access initiatives. With both companies now part of the Elsevier portfolio, it seemed the …

Bepress & Ssrn Pilot Presentation, Carol A. Watson, Thomas J. Striepe

Presentations

A panel discussion announcing and sharing information about the joint pilot project exploring the integration between bepress and SSRN platforms launched in March 2018.

The State Of Oa: A Large-Scale Analysis Of The Prevalence And Impact Of Open Access Articles, Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem, Vincent Larivière, Juan Pablo Alperin, Lisa Matthias, Bree Nordlander, Ashley Farley, Jevin West, Stephanie Haustein

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles. We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigateOAin three populations: (1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, (2) recent journal articles indexed in Web of Science, and (3) articles viewed by users of Unpaywall, an open-source browser extension that lets users find OA articles using oaDOI. We estimate that at least …

Rethinking Digital Repositories And The Future Of Open Access, Margaret Schilt, Karen Shephard, Carol A. Watson

Scholarly Works

Over the last two years, changes in the legal publishing arena involving digital repository platforms have raised concerns about the future of open access. This article reviews the current status of the various repository platforms and how they impact legal scholarship. The article goes on to analyze the areas that law libraries should focus on in platform selection.

Creative Commons: An Explainer, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Copyright protection attaches automatically to original works you create, whether a poem, photograph, painting, song, video, or essay. Copyright limits what others can do with your creative work and protects your original work from, for example, being compiled or reused and sold for profit. If you hold the copyright—and didn’t, say, create the original work in an employment context where it may be subject to being a work for hire—you may want to allow others to use your work for particular purposes. You could individually negotiate a license granting rights to each person, which would undoubtedly take more and more …

Osi2018 Summary Report On The 1st Summit Meeting Of The Global Open Scholarship Initiative, March 12-14, 2018, The Open Scholarship Initiative, Glenn Hampson

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

When the roadmap for OSI was first being developed in 2015, our original intent was to hold a series of 10 annual meetings beginning in 2016. After the first two meetings, however, it became apparent that the next step in this process should be to pause and have just the summit group meet to formally discuss and plan out what comes next instead of having this complex conversation online (which we had been doing since mid-2017) or amongst a group of several hundred participants. This decision was also necessitated by the lack of a large enough budget to put together …

Leveraging Elsevier’S Creative Commons License Requirement To Undermine Embargoes, Josh Bolick

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

In the last round of author-sharing policy revisions, Elsevier created a labyrinthine title-by-title embargo structure requiring embargoes from 12 to 48 months for authors sharing via institutional repository (IR), while permitting immediate sharing via an author’s personal website or blog. At the same time, all prepublication versions are to bear a Creative Commons-Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) license. At the time this policy was announced, it was criticized by many in the scholarly communication community as overly complicated and restrictive. However, this CC licensing requirement creates an avenue for subverting an embargo in the IR to achieve quicker and wider open distribution …

Creative Commons: An Explainer, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Copyright protection attaches automatically to original works you create, whether a poem, photograph, painting, song, video, or essay. Copyright limits what others can do with your creative work and protects your original work from, for example, being compiled or reused and sold for profit. If you hold the copyright—and didn’t, say, create the original work in an employment context where it may be subject to being a work for hire—you may want to allow others to use your work for particular purposes. You could individually negotiate a license granting rights to each person, which would undoubtedly take more and more …

Looking Into Pandora's Box: The Content Of Sci-Hub And Its Usage, Bastian Greshake

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Despite the growth of Open Access, potentially illegally circumventing paywalls to access scholarly publications is becoming a more mainstream phenomenon. The web service Sci-Hub is amongst the biggest facilitators of this, offering free access to around 62 million publications. So far it is not well studied how and why its users are accessing publications through Sci-Hub. By utilizing the recently released corpus of Sci-Hub and comparing it to the data of ~28 million downloads done through the service, this study tries to address some of these questions. The comparative analysis shows that both the usage and complete corpus is largely …

Can Scientists And Their Institutions Become Their Own Open Access Publishers?, Karen Shashok

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

This article offers a personal perspective on the current state of academic publishing, and posits that the scientific community is beset with journals that contribute little valuable knowledge, overload the community’s capacity for high-quality peer review, and waste resources. Open access publishing can offer solutions that benefit researchers and other information users, as well as institutions and funders, but commercial journal publishers have influenced open access policies and practices in ways that favor their economic interests over those of other stakeholders in knowledge creation and sharing. One way to free research from constraints on access is the diamond route of …