Category Archives: copyright

Book liberation with open data (or, how The Online Books Page just got much bigger)

Posted on October 18, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

As we begin Open Access Week, it’s worth noting the importance of open access not only to research articles, data, teaching materials, and the like, but also to books.  We are fortunate not only that millions of historic volumes are … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, discovery, metadata, online books, open access, subjects | 2 Comments

Journal liberation: A community enterprise

Posted on October 15, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The fourth annual Open Access Week begins on Monday.  If you follow the official OAW website, you’ll be seeing a lot of information about the benefits of free access to scholarly research.  The amount of open-access material grows every day, … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, discovery, open access, publishing, serials, sharing | Comments Off on Journal liberation: A community enterprise

Journal liberation: A primer

Posted on June 11, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

As Dorothea Salo recently noted, the problem of limited access to high-priced scholarly journals may be reaching a crisis point.  Researchers that are not at a university, or are at a not-so-wealthy one, have long been frustrated by journals that … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, libraries, open access, publishing, sharing | 5 Comments

Copyright information is busting out all over

Posted on April 7, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Like the crocuses and daffodils now coming up all over our front garden, new copyright registration information has been popping up all over the net lately.  As I’ve described in various previous posts, this information can be extremely useful for … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, sharing | Comments Off on Copyright information is busting out all over

Shedding light on images in the public domain

Posted on February 8, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

For years, I’ve regularly gotten requests from authors and publishers for licenses to reproduce images in books listed on The Online Books Page, or included in the local collection of A Celebration of Women Writers.  Sometimes these requests relate to … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, sharing | 3 Comments

Public domain day 2010: Drawing up the lines

Posted on January 1, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

As we celebrate the beginning of the New Year, we also mark Public Domain Day (a holiday I’ve been regularly celebrating on this blog.)  This is the day when a year’s worth of copyrights expire in many countries around the … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, online books, open access | 2 Comments

Google Book settlement: Alternatives and alterations

Posted on September 17, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

In my previous post, I worried that the Google Books settlement might fall apart in the face of opposition from influential parties like the Copyright Office, and that such a collapse might deprive the public of meaningful access to millions … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, online books, open access | 5 Comments

Google Books, and missing the opportunities you don’t see

Posted on September 15, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The Google Books settlement fairness hearing is still a few weeks away, but in the last few weeks the deal has been talked and shouted about with ever-higher volume.  Still, it wasn’t until the other day, in a House Judiciary … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, online books, open access | 2 Comments

For those wanting more drama in their lives

Posted on July 14, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Thanks to the scanning services of Penn’s Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI), and a loan of over a dozen volumes from Stanford University Libraries, we have now posted online records of copyright renewals for drama (and works … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright | Comments Off on For those wanting more drama in their lives

What you’re asked to give away

Posted on May 8, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

If you’ve published an article in an Elsevier journal, you might have missed an interesting aspect of the contract you signed with them to get published.  It goes something like this: I grant Elsevier the exclusive right to select and … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, crimes and misdemeanors, open access, publishing, serials | 1 Comment