Literature and links
Websites
SURF: copyright
The SURF Foundation has launched this website (www.surf.nl/copyright) under the name 'Copyright Management for Scholarship'. This site is about the international aspects of copyright and the agreements made in this field between scientific authors, publishers and university employees. The site treats questions such as; how can researchers and employees get optimal access to scholarly works? And how can universities create more awareness among their scientific staff about these copyright issues?
SURF: FOBID
This site, which unfortunately only has general information in English, gives information on the activities of the FOBID Legal Committee, one of the permanent committees of the FOBID Netherlands Library Forum, the national umbrella organisation between libraries in the Netherlands.
The FOBID Legal Committee is concerned with all the legal aspects which are of importance to libraries, information and documentation centres. She initiates (inter)national activities in this field. The FOBID Legal Committee, for example, lobbied in Brussels for the stand of the libraries concerning the introduction of the copyright directive. She also prepared the libraries' position on the Catalogue and undertook action during various European activities such as the Database directive.
Creative Commons
On this site you can find the Creative Commons-licences in many different languages. According to Bernt Hugenholtz of the Institute for Information Law (IViR) these licences represent "a user-friendly way to indicate that you won't make a fuss about copyright."
SPARC: Author Rights
SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition is a strategic collaboration between academic and research libraries and organisations. This collaboration strives to correct the defects in the system of academic publishing by means of education and inventing alternatives. They have a page about "Author Rights" and here you can find the addendum to attach to a standard publisher's contract.
IViR
The Institute for Information Law (IViR) is a research centre that is part of the Faculty of Law of the University of Amsterdam. Over 25 qualified researchers conduct research to the legal aspects of the production, storage, distribution and the use of information. At present the IViR belongs to the most important research centres in this field in the world.
SHERPA RoMEO
The RoMEO Project (Rights MEtadata for Open archiving) has conducted research into the copyright issues surrounding the 'self-archiving' of scientific research material in the United Kingdom according to the 'Open Archive Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting'. One of the results of this project is a database containing information on the policy of many publishers that is kept up-to-date by the SHERPA-project (SHERPA builds on the work done by the RoMEO project).
Open directory: Journals
This is a website that offers an overview per subject field of the journals within that field that have a favourable policy with regard to Open Access publishing.
Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science
On this page you can find the Washington DC Principles as they were drawn up in 2004 in Washington DC.
Stanford University Libraries, Copyright and Fair Use
This Stanford University website gives general information, this information mainly concentrates on the United States. You can also find useful links to other information sites on this page.
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: legal issues
The 'Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography' has a section 'legal issues' which contains links to other relevant websites, mailinglists, weblogs, organisations and publications. This information almost entirely concens the United States, but still this in an interesting website.
University of California: Office of Scholarly Communication
The scholars of the University of California reorient the academic publishing process.
Publications
Zwolle Principles (2003)
Over the last couple of years the SURF Foundation has developed a number of activities in the international field of copyrights. An internationally assembled Steering Committee, the 'Zwolle Group', has been occupied with the 'Zwolle Principles'. This is a document that formulates the principles to optimise the access to scientific information. SURF was internationally doing pioneering work with these principles and in the Netherlands interesting initiatives have been developed in this field. Furthermore, the Netherlands are interesting for other countries because some of the big scientific publishers are located here.
www.wetten.overheid.nl (Dutch)
On this site you can find the most recent version of the Dutch 'Auteurswet', the copyright rules and regulations dating from 1912, which were adapted to the European guidelines in 2004. This document is only available in Dutch on this website. If you wish to find the Dutch rules you need to use the search term 'Wetten naar Auteurswet'.