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