Copyright Symposium Action Items from Participants

The Break-Out sessions elicited a nice range of discussions. Assessment comments that participants returned were mostly good to outstanding on these sessions. Attendees commented on the useful information presented and the discussions that followed. One result from these good discussions was that we did not end up with as many “action items” as originally intended. This is okay in that the attendees enjoyed the sessions and took away information they could use. We would still like to go ahead and share the action items collected in break out sessions and through our assessment tool.

Action items collected where the planning committee or Libraries were asked by attendees to:

Help us disseminate our peer reviewed work. More emphasis on KU ScholarWorks. Publicize the copyright addendum language suggested in order to do this.
Educate more faculty and graduate students about publishing issues in general and also specific resources such as ScholarWorks
Organize more sessions: As faculty member, would like to continue to educate myself. Would you organize sessions like this again in the future?

Get faculty involved by administrators writing institutional policy that faculty will have opportunity to react to or to accept if faculty don't react to.
Develop a click-through tutorial on copyright and require faculty who want to use
BlackBoard or E-reserves to view it.
Offer assistance to adjunct faculty: How can adjunct instructors receive assistance in preparing for courses when their contract time does not start until shortly before the semester? Adjunct faculty need to be informed as much as possible and would try but deadlines that are two months before the semester isn't conducive since her contract starts a few weeks before class.
Offer an entire conference on scholarly publishing.
Join or collaborate with planning of other local conferences: E-scholarship and publishing is an issue that is just beginning. Another university in the area is interested in hosting a conference on the issue.
Provide additional information on DMCA issues: Although we have a number of policies in place with respect to the DMCA, "take down" and "acceptable use" of computers, I am not aware of and cannot find a policy with respect to electronic course reserves and faculty web sites. It's an issue I will raise with the system library directors and the VP for Technology.
Help design copyright training required for new faculty and grads: From the Institutional Policy breakout, it's clear to me that there are several costs associated with adopting a university policy on copyright. The discussion of "guidelines vs. policy" tilted toward "guidelines." I was persuaded by Mitrano's "education first" stance. I think that new faculty and graduate students should be required to attend some kind of copyright training. Just like there's IRB approval for research, there should be some kind of Copyright Approval for using E-Reserves and Bb. There are gigantic variations in faculty compliance with basic copyright principles.
Advertise widely pilots on digital repositories: At the moment, digital repositories are a frequently discussed issue at a university in the region. They are making considerable progress on this issue, led by their library's efforts. Various pilots are underway and a system-wide task force has been dedicated to this issue.