Copyright

As a member of Penn State's Faculty Senate Committee on Research (SCoR), the attached document was presented to us for endorsement. This comes from the CIC (basically the BigTen plus UChicago) provosts. I have seen a few posts in various threads concerning publishing and copyright issues so I thought I would see how y'all feel about it. In brief, the document encourages authors to think when signing that copyright transfer form. The members of SCoR obviously span a very wide range of disciplines and were generally agreeable to endorsing the document. However, many people were concerned about encouraging faculty to use the "model CIC publishing addendum that affirms the rights of authors to share their work in a variety of circumstances, including posting versions of the work in institutional or disciplinary repositories." My interpretation of this is that the CIC provosts are encouraging a bit of a grassroots movement to relax the language on the copyright transfer agreements. However, many committee members were worried that doing this might upset the publishers who have generally been very cooperative when asked for permission to use material. No one could site an example were a publisher denied an author's request to use material s/he generated. However, the legal language in the copyright transfer certainly gives them the right to do so. Thoughts?
Update: I am removing the document until I reconfirm that it is a public document. A report from CIC on the same issues is here.
Update: The document is indeed public and can be found here.