- Authors Guild calls on members, authors to locate HathiTrust's 'orphan works' authors
- Grants available for open textbook communities
- College Open Textbooks grant program promotes open textbook adoption
- Authors, author groups file copyright infringement suit against HathiTrust, five universities
- Transcripts now available for three writing podcasts
- Notable Author Ron Larson: Author aims to teach real-life math skills
- Bruening receives $1,000 TAA Publication Grant
Authors Guild calls on members, authors to locate HathiTrust's 'orphan works' authors
The Authors Guild posted a list of HathiTrust's "orphan work candidates" on its website and is calling on its members and others to locate the authors and estates. Many of the titles on the list are textbooks, including Engineering Mathematics (1960) by Joseph Blakey, and An Introduction to Clinical Psychology (1954) by L.A. Pennington.
The Guild is part of a group of authors and author groups who filed a copyright infringement suit last month against HathiTrust and five universities. HathiTrust and the University of Michigan have since postponed work on the Orphan Works Project until they can create new procedures for identifying orphan works. See the complete University of Michigan statement on the Orphan Works Project.
See this article: Authors, author groups file copyright infringement suit against HathiTrust, five universities
Grants available for open textbook communities
By Dionne Soares Palmer
College Open Textbooks, a non-profit organization funded by the Hewlett Foundation, is offering grants for instructors involved in open textbook adopter communities. The deadline for the grant is Monday, September 26.
The COT’s Adopter Communities Small Grant Program will award selected applicants with up to $2,500 to pay for expenses related to establishing and maintaining a community of practice in which open textbook adopters work together to share resources and improve the textbook.
Strong adopter communities may help increase open textbook adoption and provide instructors with helpful resources for their classes. “We were finding that it is a little bit of a leap of faith to get into open resources,” said Una Daly, the director of College Open Textbooks, “and if we can encourage faculty to work together so it’s not as daunting, they can really leverage a lot of each other’s capabilities.”
“We’re hoping that the grants will help the communities continue to grow over the next year and a half,” Daly added.
In order to help adopter communities succeed, Daly and her colleagues will keep in touch with grant recipients and let them know about the strategies that other adopter communities in the program found effective.
To learn more about grant program or to apply, click here.
Dionne Soares Palmer is a freelance writer based in northern California.
College Open Textbooks grant program promotes open textbook adoption
This fall, College Open Textbooks (COT) offered grants of up to $2,500 for research and activities related to open textbook adoption. The COT's Adopter Communities Small Grant Program awarded grants for activities such as:
- Customizing an open book
- Creating new materials or ancillaries
- Enhancing accessibility features
- Improving an open textbook through collaborative efforts, especially between faculty members at different colleges and through the sharing of in-kind services
COT will be announcing the winners at the end of October.
For more information on COT's grant program, contact Una Daly at una.daly@opendoorsgroup.com
Authors, author groups file copyright infringement suit against HathiTrust, five universities
HathiTrust statement on Authors Guild, et.al lawsuit The HathiTrust Digital Library released a statement in response to a copyright infringement lawsuit filed September 12 by the Authors' Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois (UNEQ), and eight individual authors. In the September 16 statement, HathiTrust defended its Orphan Works Project, saying, "Digitization is a reflection of library prudence, rather than the reckless activity as characterized by the Authors' Guild complaint and accompanying statement." The statement asserts that the primary motive for the HathiTrust's digitization efforts has been preservation: "Preserving the scholarly and cultural record is at the core of the Library's mission." |
The Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois (UNEQ), and eight individual authors have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court against HathiTrust, the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University. Plaintiff authors include children’s book author and illustrator Pat Cummings, novelists Angelo Loukakis, Roxana Robinson, Danièle Simpson, and Fay Weldon, poet André Roy, Columbia University professor and Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, and Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning biographer T.J. Stiles.
The universities obtained from Google unauthorized scans of an estimated 7 million copyright-protected books, the rights to which are held by authors in dozens of countries. The universities have pooled the unauthorized files in a repository organized by the University of Michigan called HathiTrust. In June, Michigan announced plans to permit unlimited downloads by its students and faculty members of copyright-protected works it deems “orphans” according to rules the school has established. Other universities joined in Michigan’s project in August.
The first set of so-called orphans, 27 works by French, Russian, and American authors, are scheduled to be released to an estimated 250,000 students and faculty members on October 13th. An additional 140 books, including works in Spanish, Yiddish, French, and Russian, are to be released starting in November.
“This is an upsetting and outrageous attempt to dismiss authors’ rights,” said Angelo Loukakis, executive director of the Australian Society of Authors. “Maybe it doesn’t seem like it to some, but writing books is an author’s real-life work and livelihood. This group of American universities has no authority to decide whether, when or how authors forfeit their copyright protection. These aren’t orphaned books, they’re abducted books.”
“I was stunned when I learned of this,” said Danièle Simpson, president of UNEQ. “How are authors from Quebec, Italy or Japan to know that their works have been determined to be ‘orphans’ by a group in Ann Arbor, Michigan? If these colleges can make up their own rules, then won’t every college and university, in every country, want to do the same?”
The complaint also questions the security of the 7 million unauthorized digital files. The numbers are staggering. The universities have, without permission, digitized and loaded onto HathiTrust’s online servers thousands of editions, in various translations, of works by Simone de Beauvoir, Italo Calvino, Bernard Clavel, Umberto Eco, Carlos Fuentes, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, Michel Houellebecq, Clarice Lispector, Mario Vargas Llosa, Herta Müller, Haruki Murakami, KenzaburoÌ„ OÌ„e, Octavio Paz, and Jose Saramago, among countless other authors. Works from nearly every nation have been digitized. HathiTrust’s databases house more than 65,000 works published in the year 2001, for example, including thousands of works published that year in China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Russia, Spain, and the U.K., and hundreds from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Mexico, The Netherlands, The Philippines, South Korea, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam.
“These books, because of the universities’ and Google’s unlawful actions, are now at needless, intolerable digital risk,” said Authors Guild president Scott Turow. “Even if it weren’t for this preposterous, ad-hoc initiative, we’d have a major problem with the digital repository. Authors shouldn’t have to trust their works to a group that’s making up the rules as it goes along.”
Google’s library scanning project is already the subject of a federal class-action lawsuit in New York. A status conference in that case is scheduled before Judge Denny Chin this Thursday, September 15.
Attorneys Edward Rosenthal and Jeremy Goldman of Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz are representing plaintiffs.
Transcripts now available for three writing podcasts
Transcripts are now available for the following three writing podcasts:
- First Time Authors: An Inside Look at Journal Publishing
- Kicking It Out the Door: How to Finally Submit Your First Journal Article
- Summer Writing 101: How to Avoid the Biggest Mistakes Academic Writers Make During the Summer Term
Notable Author Ron Larson: Author aims to teach real-life math skills
By Dionne Soares Palmer
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Longtime professor and textbook author Ron Larson has dedicated his career to mathematics education. After receiving his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1970, Larson began working as an assistant math professor at Pennsylvania State University, earning full professorship in 1983.
His textbook authoring career began with Calculus, which was coauthored with Robert P. Hostetler and published in 1978. Since then, Larson has written 55 textbooks to date, almost all of which have multiple editions. His textbooks range from the high school to the university level, and he has also developed tutorial math software for K-8 students. Larson has won several awards for his work, including a 2010 TAA Texty Award for Big Ideas Math, a textbook series for middle school students.
In 1984, Larson founded Larson Texts, a textbook company that now has over fifty employees who work to develop and produce Larson’s books.
Currently, Larson is working on a free online textbook called Math & YOU that seeks to teach adult students everyday math skills and help them develop a liking for mathematics. Math & YOU teaches 7th and 8th grade math skills through scenarios and problems that are appropriate for college-level adult learners.
Math & YOU is not an open textbook, so instructors cannot modify content, but the online version of the book allows students and instructors to comment on the content of the book and interact with each other as a community of learners and educators. Students can also access data in interactive spreadsheets and graphs through the online version of the book in order to further understand solutions and experiment with the numbers themselves.
The first several chapters of Math & YOU are currently available online, and the remaining chapters will be available in November of 2011.
Of the hundreds of books Larson has written, he is most proud of Math & YOU.
“I think the most compelling thing [about the book],” Larson said, “is that this is real, non-algebra mathematics for adults, and I don’t think there is much of that anywhere else. This is not math for dummies. This is math for smarties.”
Bruening receives $1,000 TAA Publication Grant
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Michael Bruening, an assistant professor of history at Missouri University of Science & Technology, has been awarded a TAA Publication Grant in the amount of $1,000 for costs incurred in publishing his book, Epistolae Petri Vireti: The Previously Unpublished Letters and a Register of Pierre Viret’s Correspondence, which will be published in September 2011 by the Swiss press Librarie Droz.
“I was thrilled to hear that I had been awarded a TAA publication grant for my book,” said Bruening. “My critical edition of Reformation-era correspondence is the kind of book that will be used by scholars for decades to come. It will be an essential volume for good research libraries, yet it clearly will not be a bestseller.
“The TAA publication grants are vital for assisting authors seeking to publish substantial scholarship that might not necessarily be ‘sexy’ enough for the publisher to fund fully. With academic publishing going through difficult times, publishers are increasingly demanding substantial book subventions from the authors, at the same time as humanities departments are raising their publication expectations for tenure. Publication grants like those offered by the TAA will be increasingly important for American academics seeking to establish their reputations as serious scholars.”
Epistolae Petri Vireti is a critical edition of 180 previously unpublished letters from the Reformation era. The author of the letters (or the recipient in some cases) was Pierre Viret (1511-1571), a very close friend of the better known John Calvin. Viret was the chief Protestant reformer of Lausanne, which held the French-speaking world’s first Protestant academy and was the first significant city outside of Geneva to embrace Calvin’s vision of reform. Viret’s friends and colleagues formed a significant group of the reformers and missionaries in the early French Reformed movement, and his previously unpublished correspondence sheds significant light on the events and debates in the years that say the formation of Calvinism. The book will be published by Librairie Droz in 2011 to coincide with the 500th anniversary of Viret’s birth.
TAA Publication Grants are open to member and non-member authors. Authors can apply for a Publication Grant of up to $1,000 to cover the cost of publishing already accepted journal articles, or for the preparation of artwork or other charts, diagrams or images to be included in accepted articles or academic books.
Bruening is an assistant professor of history at Missouri S&T in Rolla, Missouri. He received his Ph.D. in history from the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies at the University of Arizona in 2002. From 2002 to 2007, he taught at Concordia University in Irvine, California. He has published one earlier book, Calvinism’s First Battleground: Conflict and Reform in the Pays de Vaud, 1528-1559 (Springer, 2005), which will appear later this year in French translation.
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TAA Publication Grants are open to member and non-member authors. Authors can apply for a Publication Grant of up to $1000 to cover the cost of publishing already accepted journal articles, or for the preparation of artwork or other charts, diagrams or images to be included in accepted articles or academic books.
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