From: "Clifford Lynch" <CNI-ANNOUNCE@cni.org>
Sender: <cgplmgr@cni.org>
To:  CNI-ANNOUNCE
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2015 15:02:18 -0400
Message-ID: <redirect-28387254@cni.org>
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Subject: Authors Alliance Guide to Rights Reversion
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Yesterday I was fortunate to be able to attend a session offered by 
the Authors Alliance that was hosted by the University of California, 
Berkeley. As part of this session the Alliance announced the 
availability of a new guide that covers issues around rights 
reversion for authors who have published books.

The presentation placed this firmly in the context of being able to 
"preserve intellectual legacy in the digital age", and sought to help 
monograph authors to manage ongoing access to their work, encouraging 
them to think about where and how they want to make their work 
available, particularly books that are now out of print or perhaps 
approaching the end of their commerical life.

I think this will be a very helpful resource for authors who have 
previously published books, but  also those considering how they want 
to approach publication of new monographic works.

With so much coverage in recent years on the move to open up the 
scholarly journal literature and how scholars can engage and advance 
this,  I think this will be a very welcome complement for monograph 
authors, where the history, economics, norms and current developments 
(such as efforts from some university presses to open up backlists, 
or the evolution of Hathi Trust)  are so different.

There's a blog post on the guide here:

http://www.authorsalliance.org/2015/04/09/keeping-your-books-available/

The guide can be directly downloaded from


http://authorsalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/Documents/Guides/Authors%20Alliance%20-%20Understanding%20Rights%20Reversion.pdf


Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI