Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs & Provost
November 20, 2008
Dear faculty, staff, and students,
There is no question but that the extraordinary economic challenges currently facing the University require our utmost dedication and focus. At the same time, we must relentlessly continue our commitment to academic excellence and to the essential work required by our University mission. We all are involved, as a University community, in important and vital academic work that we must continue to advance. We can, and will, strive to lead and to be innovative during these difficult financial times.
Recently, the University developed a new copyright policy with important and exciting implications for our entire University Community. The new policy represents an opportunity for the University of Minnesota to take a leadership role among other leading universities nationally.
In this message, I will share some thoughts with you on recent initiatives regarding the stewardship of our intellectual resources. As many of you realize, we live in a knowledge-based economy in which our fundamental mission as a University must be deployed in service of the broader transnational learning process.
Intellectual property is a formalized way of referring to how we acknowledge, recognize, reward, and protect recorded expression in the arts and humanities and science and technology. With the rise of the Internet, the environment for intellectual property has expanded, becoming effectively a boundaryless means for collaborative enterprise and communication. The evolving technology arena has added to the complexity of our decisions related to copyright, decisions on ownership as well as decisions on use of copyrighted resources. In many cases, new dynamic or complex media challenge the existing copyright framework. Twenty-first century authors and creators are working in uncharted territory. Within the academy, we have a responsibility to help shape the evolving environment for scholarship; we expect sustained engagement and dialogue on these issues across the University
As part of the University’s policy development process, we will be strengthening existing educational programs and reference sources related to copyright to help all at the University to better understand our new policies and the critical and dynamic arena of copyright (See the policy site and the Libraries’ copyright resource site). These resources are only a first step. The University's new copyright policy affirms our institutional recognition of, and commitment to, scholars and practitioners whose creative endeavors produce new knowledge to which property interests are attached. In addition, the policy reflects the wisdom of the U.S. Constitution which defines the goal of the creative enterprise as one intended: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." Constitution Art. I, §8, cl. 8.
In addition to underscoring the core values of our University by encouraging all forms of scientific, humanistic, and artistic innovation, we also are promoting the progress of our great democracy, ensuring that these intellectual assets can be effectively leveraged in today's knowledge economy. The new copyright policy both explicitly affirms the ownership interest of faculty and students in their academic works and encourages management of their copyrights in a manner that enables broad access to others, whether within the university community or beyond. The new policy provides a platform from which to create the broadest possible culture of intellectual entrepreneurship, locally, nationally, and internationally.
It is vital, especially today, that every member of our university community be aware of, and committed to the many options by which knowledge created in our great University might best be harnessed and diffused as broadly as possible, while respecting copyright ownership rights and responsibilities. These options include: Creative Commons licensing of educational resources, shared data sets, policies and practices in support of open access, and new genres of journal and book publishing.
Some of this exciting work already has started here, and it is strategically advancing the visibility of the University, and of its faculty and students. For example, authors are working with the University’s Digital Conservancy to deposit copies of their works in this open access venue. Professor Gary Balas, along with members of his department, have confirmed what research has shown, that is, that once copyrighted works are deposited in an “institutional repository,” the works are more highly ranked in Google Scholar. Over 300 UMN faculty have published their research in open-access journals since 2003 (See: Libraries’ Open Access Day web site). Professor Laura Gurak and several of her graduate students used the UThink campus blog service to publish a peer-reviewed edited monograph, Into the Blogosphere. The University recently has launched a public iTunes U site which will provide a platform for faculty and students to make resources freely available to a worldwide audience to view and download our digital academic content.
These are but a few examples of promising developments here at the University. I believe these examples will inspire and challenge faculty, staff and students to boldly explore new ways of broadly disseminating their scholarship and creative endeavors.
I hope that this message has informed and challenged you to explore new ways that you and your colleagues can contribute to the mission of our great University.
Sincerely,
Tom Sullivan
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