Areas of expertise: Publishing ethics, copyright, intellectual property, access and distribution licensing  

A frequent speaker on copyright and public policy issues at publishing and scientific conferences, Mark heads up Elsevier‘s global legal department of lawyers which addresses corporate organization and compliance, mergers, acquisitions, and copyright policy and enforcement. Mark is the chair of the Copyright Committee of the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (  STM) and a member of the   Copyright Committee of the Association of American Publishers. The STM association looks to create a platform for exchanging ideas and information and to represent the interests of the STM publishing community in the fields of copyright, technology developments, and end user/library relations.

Mark joined Elsevier in 1995 as General Counsel after working six years in the Legal Department of Reed Elsevier USA. He was closely involved in the rollout of the ScienceDirect licensing practices from 1996 to 1998, he also played a pivotal role in the acquisition of Harcourt in 2001, including UK and US competition clearance and integration and the recent divestitures of MDL and Endeavor.

More recently Mark has coordinated industry-wide negotiations and enforcement actions concerning the Subito university library document delivery system (based in Germany), and similar copyright enforcement efforts in Europe and the US. Finally, Mark also helped coordinate the 2004 litigation brought against the US government (OFAC) concerning authors from "banned" countries such as Iran and Cuba.

Key Links:                            

•   "  Elsevier Agrees to Let MIT Use Bits of Journal Articles Online", Wired Campus, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 10, 2008, Mark Seeley is interviewed on MIT's new deal with Elsevier to allow a limited amount of material from its journals to be used in MIT’s OpenCourseWare project.

•   "  Elsevier Leverages Creative Commons Licence In Groundbreaking Deal With MIT OpenCourseWare.", by Daniel Pollock, Vice President & Lead Analyst - London, UK. Outsell examines the MIT OpenCourseWare deal with Elsevier and what this means for free content usage online--the coming of age of the Creative Commons Licence.

•   "  Commons Touch on Rights" Information World Review, 6 February 2007, Mark Seeley interviewed on the emergence of creative commons licenses.

“The most important thing for STM authors is scholarly use of their own materials. The principles for this could be set out in a Creative Commons licence, but frankly what authors are looking for is generally well covered. What a publisher wants is consistency in approach to things like distribution, permission-granting issues and enforcement in plagiarism."

•  "  Promoting Ethics in Science" Inside Higher Ed, 7 December 2006 Paul Thacker interviewed Mark Seeley, Vice President and General Counsel, about Elsevier’s strategy to maintain high ethical standards.

“From my personal perspective, the most serious thing you can do to punish someone in science who has broken ethics is to publish that,” [Seeley] said….Seeley said that Elsevier released its conflict of interest procedures last year, and is working now on a general guide for ethics. While it may seem that science is racing a rising tide of ethical misconduct, he said, the truth is quite different."

•       Integrity in Science Report

•       WIPO Book Shop Don't miss the link to a short speech by Mark Seeley

Key Accomplishments

Author:

• Facts and Creativity: U.S. Originality Standards for Copyright Protection for Factual Compilations After Feist, Copyright World, 1993.

Recent speeches or presentations include:

• Panel: “Public Access to Research: Grappling with this Megatrend”, CESSE (Council of Engineering & Scientific Society Executives) annual meeting, July 2007, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
  
• Participant/panelist, IS2K7 (Internet & Society) conference, Berkman Center, Harvard Law, May-June 2007
  
• “International Public Policy Issues”, AAP/PSP annual conference, Washington, D.C., February 2007
  
• Presentation-intervention (on behalf of STM association), US Copyright Office, Section 108 Study Group, on limiting extensions of copyright exceptions for libraries to the digital environment (preserving market opportunities), January 2007
  
• “Copyright Exceptions in the Education and Research Markets”, SSP conference, Washington, June 2006
  
• “Impact of the internet on the services aspect of the STM publishing business”, Panel, “Strategic Change”, Academic Publishing in Europe, Berlin, Germany, April 2006
  
• Panel, “Copyright- Current Issues & Recent Developments”, AAP/PSP annual conference, February 2006
  
• Panel, “Ownership, Copyright & Archiving”, Future of Research Information Chain, the Role of Publishers and Learned Societies, Budapest, Hungary, ALLEA, March 2005
  
• Panel, “Science Journals, Science Journalism & Disclosure”, Integrity in Science Conference, July 2004, Washington, DC (Center for Science in the Public Interest)
  
• Panel, “Rights Licensing”, Digital Rights Management Strategies 2004, New York, April 2004
  
• Panel, “International Copyright Issues”, Mass. Continuing Legal Education course “Hot Topics in Copyright Law 2003”, June 2003
  
• Moderator, “If Your Book Was a Song” (Napster), AAP/PSP annual conference, February 2002
  
• Participant/presenter, National Research Council, Resolving Conflicts Arising from the Privatization of Environmental Data (2001)
  
• Presentation on “Publisher considerations: digital archiving and electronic business”, for the conference on “Consolidating the European Library Space”, Luxembourg, November 1999
  
• Presentation on “Legal Considerations in Commercial Database Production”, Building and Owning Biotechnology Databases conference, organized by Biotechnology Information Strategic Forum with support from DG XII of the European Commission, Purmerend, the Netherlands, September 1998
  
• Panel, “Overview of the Present Situation of Centralized Management of Rights”, WIPO International Forum on the Exercise and Management of Copyright in the Face of the Challenges of Digital Technology, Sevilla, Spain, May 1997