Update: Sunday, April 26, 1;38 p.m.: The issue has been resolved. Thank you for your patience.
To access Brightspace today, go to dal.ca/Brightspace or go through my.dal.ca. Access through dal.brightspace.com is not working. We are working on fixing this. Thank you for your patience.
April 23 is World Book and Copyright Day!
This is a day to celebrate books for their role in creating inclusive and knowledge-rich societies, and to reflect on the publishing world from multiple angles: “books as vectors of values and knowledge, and depositories of the intangible heritage; books as windows onto the diversity of cultures and as tools for dialogue; books as sources of material wealth and copyright-protected works of creative artists” (World Book and Copyright Day website).
It’s important for all students, staff, and faculty to have some familiarity with copyright, especially Dalhousie’s Fair Dealing Guidelines. Copyright encompasses restrictions on how creative works can be used, but also important exceptions that benefit education, research, and study. Copyright applies not only to the use of other works, but your own creations. Whether you’re creating a video, or writing a thesis, copyright will be a defining component of the final product. You can find out more about copyright restrictions and exceptions on Dalhousie’s Copyright Office website, or e-mail copyright.office@dal.ca
Starting Wednesday, all Dal Libraries locations will be closed for three weeks, with the exception of the CHEB Learning Commons.
Today (Tuesday), all of our libraries will be moving to reduced hours, closing at 5 p.m. and reopening at 9 a.m. tomorrow (Tuesday) morning
Going forward, the Kellogg Library Learning Commons in the CHEB will be open from 7:30 a.m.–4 p.m., Monday–Friday, to provide access to computers and internet-based scholarly resources for students. We recognize that not every student has a computer or internet access.
This is part four in a five-part series of blog posts celebrating Fair Dealing Week 2020 (February 24 to February 28, 2020).
The copyright landscape in Canada has undergone significant changes recently. To ensure a fair and reasonable approach to the use of copyright protected materials on campus, Dalhousie has sought to balance the rights of users with those of creators. To help accomplish this, the University established a Copyright Office and adopted updated Fair Dealing Guidelines.
As students of Dalhousie University, you may copy materials for which the university (e.g. the Library) has negotiated licenses, according to the terms of the individual license agreements. In addition to license agreements, fair dealing allows you to make use of a work for yourself for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, news reporting, education, parody or satire. As an example, this means you can copy one article from a journal, or one chapter from a book for the purpose of your studies and research.
Without fair dealing, any time you wished to make use of a copyrighted work in your course, you would need permission from the copyright holder, perhaps even paying a licensing fee. This short presentation illustrates uses that we might take for granted and would not be legal without fair dealing.
For more information on how fair dealing affects Students, please take some time to read about Fair Dealing for Students, and consult our Fair Dealing Guidelines. Please feel free to contact the Copyright Office with any questions or comments at copyright.office@dal.ca
This is part three in a five-part series of blog posts celebrating Fair Dealing Week 2020 (February 24 to February 28, 2020).
Fair dealing is a powerful tool for using copyrighted works in the classroom. It allows instructors to use photos and videos in class lectures, reduce the cost of materials for students, and facilitate access and accommodation for students. Faculty can also benefit from fair dealing in the context of research, allowing academics to build upon existing research, and facilitating access to scholarly works.
Fair dealing is available in the contexts of education and research, but it is important to remember that copyright in Canada is a balance: between users’ rights on one hand, and the creator’s rights on the other. So, while instructors can engage in copying for their classes, it must be done in a fair and ethical manner.
One of the best resources to make sure your class readings fall under fair dealing is to make use of the Dalhousie Libraries Course Reserves Service. By using course reserves, you can help take the guesswork out of applying fair dealing guidelines for every work that is used as part of class readings, and reduce the cost of material for your students. Course reserves can upload material to Brightspace or create Stable Links to course readings.
Dr. Mike Smit and Dr. Sasha Kondrashov discuss the importance of fair dealing in the video below:
For more information on how fair dealing affects Faculty, please take some time to read about Fair Dealing for Faculty, and consult our Fair Dealing Guidelines. Please feel free to contact the Copyright Office with any questions or comments at copyright.office@dal.ca
This is part two in a five-part series of blog posts celebrating Fair Dealing Week 2020 (February 24 to February 28, 2020).
Fair dealing can be daunting, and there is a lot of confusion and misinformation about what fair dealing means. To clarify this confusion, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) has created an infographic exploring some of the myths and facts surrounding fair dealing: dal.ca/content/dam/dalhousie/pdf/library/services/copyright-office/CARL_FD_myths_facts_EN.PDF
This infographic provides some of the context and history for fair dealing and clarifies some common misconceptions. It also shows how fair dealing functions in academic environments like Dalhousie University.
For more information about fair dealing, you can read all about fair dealing on the Dalhousie Libraries’ Copyright Office’s Fair Dealing Basics page, and consult our Fair Dealing Guidelines. Please feel free to contact the Copyright Office with any questions or comments at copyright.office@dal.ca
This is part one in a five-part series of blog posts celebrating Fair Dealing Week 2020 (February 24 to February 28, 2020).
Fair Dealing Week (Fair Use Week in the United States) is the Association of Research Libraries (ARL)’s annual celebration of fair dealing. This week we celebrate Fair Dealing Week by providing four blog posts on the topic of fair dealing (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday). These posts will outline why fair dealing is important, what fair dealing means to instructors, and how Fair dealing applies to students.
Fair dealing is a right in the Copyright Act (Section 29) which allows the copying and communicating of copyrighted works without permission from or payment to the copyright holder. The Supreme Court of Canada has established a two-part, six-factor test for determining fair dealing:
If your use of a copyrighted work passes both steps, it can be deemed fair dealing. To clarify the determination of fair dealing, Dalhousie has developed a set of Fair Dealing Guidelines, in cooperation with the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. These guidelines apply to all members of the Dalhousie University community – faculty, staff and students.
For more information, you can read all about fair dealing on the Dalhousie Libraries’ Copyright Office’s Fair Dealing Basics page, and consult our Fair Dealing Guidelines. Please feel free to contact the Copyright Office with any questions or comments at copyright.office@dal.ca
by Roger Gillis
When it comes to publishing, authors often want to be in control of how their publication can be used and distributed. Unfortunately, it is often the case with scholarly publishing that authors are asked to transfer the copyright of their publications to third parties like publishers, leading to them losing control over the use of their own publications. This can create complications for researchers who wish to share their publications more widely, such as through a repository like Dal Libraries’ Dalspace, publish their papers on their personal websites, or create new works in different formats (e.g. republishing an article as a book chapter), as it requires the permission (and sometimes payment to) the publisher.
Fortunately, there are tools out there to assist authors with negotiating and retaining rights when publishing. The Canadian Association of Research Libraries recently announced the revision of the author addendum – a tool that assists authors with negotiating to retaining copyright when they publish in order that they can retain as many rights as possible. In addition, an accompanying guide to go along with the addendum was also developed to help walk authors through the process of using an addendum and retaining their rights.
The guide offers advice for steps that authors should consider prior to publishing, during the submission and review process, and after publication. When publishing, authors should be wary of the rights that they might be asked to transfer by checking publishers’ copyright policies on their websites, and should also consider their goals for their publications (such as creating new works later on, publishing on an open access repository, or sharing through a personal website or other means), and whether or not retaining copyright should be a priority when publishing.
The Dalhousie community is encouraged to contact the Dal Libraries’ Copyright Office if they have questions about author rights and copyright, and can also refer to the Copyright Office’s page on retaining copyright.
October is Canadian Library Month & today, the third Friday in October, is Canadian Library Workers Day. Our colleagues at the Dal Libraries are talented, hard-working, and attentive to the needs of those we serve. Cheers to them and all Canadian Library Workers today!
Below is an invitation from Dal Librarians Erin MacPherson and Melissa Rothfus to participate in a survey on the topic of research data management practices at Dal. Your participation will be of great assistance as we finalize our Institutional RDM Strategy for Dalhousie. We want to help our researchers to follow the FAIR principles for research data – ensuring their data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.
Researchers can find more information about current RDM services in the Dal Libraries at https://dal.ca.libguides.com/rdm or contact data.management@dal.ca
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To: Dalhousie University research community, including all current faculty (non-tenured, tenured, limited term appointments), postdoctoral fellows, instructors, staff and graduate students at Dalhousie University
Subject: Invitation to Participate: Understanding Research Data Management Practices at Dalhousie University
Researchers from the Dalhousie Libraries are conducting an anonymous, online survey focusing on the research community at Dalhousie University, including faculty at all ranks (tenure, non-tenure and limited term appointments), instructors, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students at all departments, institutes and schools at Dalhousie University.
The purpose of this survey is to contribute to a national growing body of knowledge on research data management in universities and versions of this survey have been conducted at several other Canadian universities. Additionally, results of this survey may help the Libraries develop infrastructure and educational programmes to meet the research data management needs at Dalhousie University. The combined results may also assist in developing national initiatives for research data management.
We will be sharing our aggregate and anonymized data with the participating schools and the wider community in a data repository such as Dataverse. The researchers also aim to publish and/or present the research results openly within the academic community through academic journals and/or conference presentation and in an institutional repository such as DalSpace.
This research is being conducted by Erin MacPherson (Research Data Management Librarian – MacRae Library, 902-893-3296) and Melissa Rothfus (Scholarly Communications Librarian, Kellogg Library, 902-494-1649) and has been approved by the Research Ethics Board at Dalhousie (REB #2019-4738)
The survey deadline has been extended and is now open until midnight, August 16th, 2019. It can be accessed here: https://surveys.dal.ca/opinio/s?s=48047