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Rufus Pollock, The Need for More Openness, a PPT presentation at the conference, Copyright and Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Edinburgh, March 30, 2007). On open access, open data, and how current copyright law blocks desirable advances.
Also see his blog notes on the conference. Excerpt:
I was most struck by the points made by Professor Geoffrey Boulton in his summing up of the ‘Copyright Owners’ panel in which he voiced strong support for moves to open up information — as an anecdote he narrated how his own research group (which works on Climate Change) had ended up mainly collaborating with academics from the US in large part because it was so easy to get access to US geodata.
Canada's New Government Provides Free Online Access to Digital Mapping Data, a press release from the Canadian government, April 5, 2007. Excerpt:
Experts and other users of digital topographic data will no longer have to pay to use digital versions of government maps and data. The Honourable Gary Lunn, Minister of Natural Resources, today announced that as of April 1, 2007, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) began making its electronic topographic mapping data available to all users free of charge over the Internet.
"Our Government recognizes the importance of providing Canadians with access to the latest digital mapping information at no cost," said Minister Lunn. "Not only will Canadians now have free access to digital maps, but Canada will be known as an important source for digital mapping data around the world." ...
The new no-fee access policy applies to data that is solely owned by NRCan. This policy builds on an earlier initiative [GeoBase], which in 2003 provided free access to various co-owned federal, provincial and territorial topographic data. As well as waiving access fees, NRCan is lifting all cost and licence restrictions on the redistribution of the data. This will help ensure that accurate and consistent information is available for users.
NRCan has provided the private sector with access to digital topographic data since the early 1990s. With the ongoing rapid growth of the Internet and the resulting drop in distribution costs, it is appropriate to make public information in digital form available without any restrictions on its use or redistribution. The data collections will be made available through the GeoGratis Web portal. Users will need to have a geographic information system or image analysis system and the graphics applications of editing software to view the data....
The April issue of the Hardin Scholarly Communication News is now online. This issue has 13 brief stories on OA-related developments. While all have been blogged here, it's a digest that helps see the forest through the trees.
John Willinsky, Open Access: The Sea Change in Scholarly Publishing, a podcast of a recent talk at the University of Alberta. (Thanks to OA Librarian.)
Alma Swan, Open Access and the Progress of Science, American Scientist, April-June 2007. Excerpt:
...If we could start now, equipped with the World Wide Web, computers in every laboratory or institution and a global view of the scientific research effort, would we come up with the system for communicating knowledge that we have today?...
No, we would think of a new way, one that would provide for rapid dissemination of results that any scientist could access, easily and without barriers of cost. We might debate how to implement quality control, how to ensure that originators of ideas or findings are given their proper due, how our new and better system should be paid for and how to deal with bandwidth constraints in some parts of the world. But no one would say, "Hey, why don't we only let some researchers see this stuff and see how science gets on?" Yet that is precisely where we are today....
The bickering over varied business models, and the side arguments over public access to publicly funded results, obscure a larger, more important question: Can open access...advance science? My work involves measuring, analyzing and assessing developments in scholarly communication. From that perspective I argue that the answer is yes, and that the advance of science is the prime reason that access is an imperative....
[A]n open-access article has greater visibility, and it's becoming evident that scientists do take the opportunity to read and use what they would otherwise not have seen....[A]cross a range of scholarly disciplines, opening access to articles increases their citation rate....
[I]n some fields of physics (high-energy, condensed matter and astrophysics) [open access] has been commonplace for more than a decade. The arXiv, an open-access archive now maintained at Cornell University, contains copies of almost every article published in these disciplines, deposited by the authors for all to use. Tim Brody of Southampton University has measured the time between when articles are deposited in arXiv and when citations to those articles begin to appear. Over the years, this interval has been shrinking as the arXiv has come into near-universal use....In other words, a system built on open access is shortening the research cycle in these disciplines, accelerating progress and increasing efficiency in physics.
Open access can also advance science by enabling semantic computer technologies to work more effectively on the research record....Semantic technologies can do two things. First, they hold out the promise of being able to integrate different types of research output—articles, databases and other digital material—to form a single, integrated information resource and to create new, meaningful and useful information from it....Second, Web 2.0 technologies, the set of tools that aid collaborative effort....
Open access also enables a different kind of software tool to aid the management of science. Such tools...can track the evolution of ideas, topics and fields and facilitate trends analysis, enabling better prediction of which research areas are waxing and waning. The value of such tools to research managers, policymakers and funders will be enormous, enabling better funding and planning decisions to be made in the interest of scientific progress. To work, though, they need access to the full-text of research articles—an open literature.
Finally,...open literature facilitates the finding and coming together of disparate scientific efforts that in a closed-access world are circumscribed by conventional definitions of topic, field or discipline and isolated from one another in discrete families of journals....
New work by economist John Houghton and colleagues at the University of Victoria in Melbourne shows that enhanced access to research findings is likely to result in an enhanced return on investment in research and development, something that can benefit every economy in the world....
Comment. Alma is right: the central question is whether OA advances science and scholarship better than the current system. If it does, then we should agree on the goal and work together on the means. We may be close to agreement on the goal already --or at least most the bickering seems to be about the means. Some of this bickering is unavoidable: there are some honest disagreements about the means. But some is not: there is widespread fixation on illusory problems and repetition of groundless objections. This confuses many researchers and policy-makers new to the debate, who erroneously conclude that the disagreements go to the merits of OA itself rather than to implementation details. If we were more explicit in our agreement on the goal, then more stakeholders would join the work of implementing it and the work could be less fractious and more collaborative. And if we encountered new, real problems --problems not already solved and not based on misunderstandings-- then we could start from agreement that they were worth solving.
Creative Commons is hiring a web developer/sysadmin (let’s call it a web engineer) for its San Francisco office. The technical requirements are broad but not deep — the ideal candidate would have the ability to learn quickly and willingness to tackle any technical task with gusto — from IT drudgework to developing cool web apps. See the job description for application details.
Please forward to anyone who would be interested but just happens to be offline for a spell. What other excuse would they have for not reading the CC blog? :-)
Also check out our openings for General Counsel and CC Learn Executive Director.
As mentioned before, Jay Dedman invited myself and Colette Vogel to speak about Creative Commons Licensing and the Podcasting Legal Guide as the kick-off event to this week, the annual international Videoblogging Week. Both Colette and I led a discussion with many popular videobloggers outside in a nice sunny park in mission bay in SF. We then went indoors where I discussed how Videobloggers can mark their video files with video bumpers (in accordance with our trademark policies of course), to signal to others how they may use original content.
Please check out the video bumpers that people created last saturday and remember that marking your videos (and other content) visually before uploading to sites like Youtube and MySpace is important for signaling how you want your work used in accordance with a CC license of your choice. Don’t forget to “Leave Your Mark.”
JISC and the University of Glasgow have launched OpenLOCKSS, a new program to use LOCKSS for preserving OA journals. From the announcement:
The OpenLOCKSS project, funded by JISC and led by the University of Glasgow will negotiate with a number of UK Open Access publishers to seek their permission for the inclusion of their titles in LOCKSS.
Just before Christmas 2006 participants in the UK's LOCKSS Pilot programme received a survey asking them to 'vote' for open access titles, mainly UK based taken from the DOAJ list. This was done with a view to contacting the most popular titles and making arrangements if possible for them to participate in LOCKSS preservation arrangements (BioMed Central titles have been excluded, as they are already in contact with LOCKSS)....
JISC have asked the University of Glasgow to take this forward and the OpenLOCKSS project has been set up, to run until the end of July 2007. The project aims to bring around 12-15 titles into LOCKSS participation....
An OpenLOCKSS project website has been set up and while still in a relatively early stage of development it includes the proposal to JISC with the full survey results, together with the project deliverables, workplan and timescale....
Adrian Burton, Avoiding a digital dark age, Science Alert, April 5, 2007. Burton is the Project Leader for the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR). Excerpt:
Advances in information and telecommunications technology present opportunities and risks for research and research data. These advances are propelling us into a new age of research. The question is “Is this a golden age or a dark age for research information?†...
If all works out nicely, this represents a golden age for researchers: unlimited new online collections of data and research information with powerful tools for aggregating, analysing, and accessing that information. But what are the risks?
Being able to preserve digital data is a must for a golden age of research information, and a major risk is therefore the rapid obsolescence of digital objects....[Without stewardship and continuity of access] these online research collections and datasets will never last long enough to revolutionise the way we do research. At worst a new digital dark age will follow where access to the previous generations’ information is severely compromised....
The golden age is predicated on openness, a willingness to grant access to scholarly outputs and research data....
Openness of research data has social barriers in some disciplines where primacy and sole use of data is important to academic reputation. Other disciplines have adopted at a community level a greater expectation of immediate open access to research data.
Advances in ICT technology are enabling the prospect of a golden age of research information. However the barbarians are massing outside the empire, and unless we invest to secure digital longevity, persistent identification, interoperability, richness of data, and open access, a regression into a digital dark age is also possible.
Aid to Open-Access Research Journals, a new funding program from Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). (Thanks to Heather Morrison.) From the page:
SSHRC recognizes that the peer-reviewed scholarly journal is a primary tool for fostering intellectual debate and inquiry. Today, new information and communications technologies are beginning to change the way research results are published and disseminated. Open-access journals, published online and made available to the reader without charge, are allowing for increased and more broad-based and efficient access to scholarly literature, and, ultimately, knowledge.
SSHRC welcomes this change and, through this Aid to Open-Access Research Journals program, will contribute to maximizing the national and international impact of advanced scholarship in the social sciences and humanities....
The objectives of this program are to:
[F]unds will be awarded to help defray the costs of publishing scholarly articles. Grants are to be considered a contribution to the journal’s operating costs for production and distribution. Eligible expenses include those related to:
Grants are tenable for 12 months and are not renewable. The maximum value of a grant is $25,000....
The application deadline for the current funding cycle is June 30, 2007. The results will be announced in September.
Richard Poynder, The OA Interviews: Leo Waaijers, Open and Shut? April 4, 2007. Excerpt:
The Netherlands is a leading nation in the ongoing struggle for Open Access (OA). It has been more successful than any other country in creating a network of institutional repositories, and it has led the world in deposit rates — most notably by means of its Cream of Science and Promise of Science initiatives. Significantly, it has achieved this without the need to mandate researchers to deposit their research papers. Instead it has incentivised them. Much of the credit for this success must go to the manager of SURFshare Leo Waaijers.
But how successful is successful? Can the Netherlands ensure that the entire nation's research output will eventually become freely available on the Web without a mandate? ...
RP: ...How do you define OA...?
LW: OA to knowledge means that the only access limit is your own comprehension....
RP: What's your view on the respective merits of [green and gold approaches to OA]?
LW: In terms of the OAI layers: green is data, gold is a service....The point is that green is necessary but insufficient on its own....
RP: There has also been some debate about what research institutions should be placing in IRs. What are your views on this?
LW: Every research result of the institution that's meant for reuse and sharing should be placed in the IR. I would stress that the institution is responsible for the quality of the stuff in its IR. And while it could outsource elements of the quality control — e.g. to a publisher — that does not exempt it from this responsibility....
RP: It's widely agreed...that the greatest problem facing IRs today is getting people to put material into them....What's your take on this problem, and what is the answer?
LW: The main driver for authors is exposure. That's why they write in the first place. So, you get their co-operation if you can demonstrate that putting their papers in an IR is not detrimental to their current exposure (from publishing in journals), that it gives them new exposure (by making their work available through, say, Google Scholar, and through national, institutional, personal, disciplinary or other document-based web sites), and that it guarantees long term exposure (curation). You also need to convince them that they can achieve all that without too many (perceived) problems. In short, what we need to do is to remove all the barriers (administrative, technical and copyright barriers), create awareness and, foremost, exhibit good practices and champions. Repositories per se are part of an infrastructure and do not sell themselves. It's services that do the trick....
RP: ...Are you in favour of [mandating green OA]?
LW: Not primarily. Authors are spontaneously in favour of Open Access. All that stops them from acting are the administrative, financial and copyright obstacles that exist, or are perceived to exist. So, the first priority for institutions or research funders should be to remove those (mental) hurdles. Only when that has been done will an institution be in a position to mandate self-archiving for the few academic mavericks who always oppose everything. In other words, mandating could be an eventual step, but a mandate is not necessary in order to start the institutional OA enabling process....
Stephen Schwarzman is the chief executive of the Blackstone Group, which is one of those Wall Street operations that is described as a “private equity firm.” He was on the cover of Fortune magazine in February, which means he’s a pretty big cheese right now. He’s definitely big in my corner of the world. Blackstone recently bought up 14% of the office space in Marin County, California, through a leveraged buy-out of the owner. Leverage is debt. Leveraged buy-outs involve tons of it.
To get out from under this load, Blackstone is going to have to sell off quickly – ie “flip” -- the office buildings here. That means more debt, more taxes – and most likely, higher rents. Blackstone will have built nothing and improved nothing. It simply will have taken existing assets and used debt to conjure money out of them. But don’t blame the Big Cheese for the higher rents in prospect, “Rents are only what the market will bear,” a local real estate man said. That’s what we always hear. “We didn’t do it. The market did.”
Jill E. Grogg and Beth Ashmore, Google Book Search Libraries and Their Digital Copies, Searcher, April 2007. Excerpt:
...How will the librarians at participating Google Book Search libraries use their copies of the digitized books, commonly referred to as the library digital copy, the copy that Google gave to them in return for their participation in the Book Search project? ...
According to [Jennifer Colvin, strategic communications manager, U of California Office of the President], UC has organized a “system-wide group with representatives from across the UC system to try to figure out what the next step is going to be and how we can possibly integrate those digital books in with our collection.†According to [Dale Flecker, associate director of the Harvard University Library for Planning and Systems], Harvard is not using the data at this point: ...“We are excited about the possibility of making the collection of scanned books available in the future for text mining, which we believe will open up powerful new ways of doing research.†...
[T]he Google Library partners meet twice a year to take advantage of the lessons learned from each of their very individual ventures....
[Karin Wittenborg, university librarian, U of Virginia] emphasized the opportunity this presents for UVA: “...[O]nce we suddenly get content, we will find out there are all kinds of things we can do. I think there will be parts of the content that we will mark up for added value, but we just don’t know yet.â€
UW-Madison, another new member of this exclusive club, has particular plans for organizing and providing access to the library’s digital copies of Google-scanned material. [Edward Van Gemert, interim director at the U of Wisconsin - Madison Libraries] stated: “Our intention is to have material searchable through our OPAC and our intention is to collaborate with other CIC [Committee on Institutional Cooperation] institutions on a shared digital repository.†...
[The University of Michigan] has one of the most developed systems for providing access to its Google scanned materials — MBooks. MBooks allows patrons to discover books through full-text searching in its online catalog, Mirlyn. Once a title is identified, a patron can click on a link, which takes them to a “page turner†interface that allows them to navigate the book, print individual pages, and enlarge and rotate the page image as well as to search within that individual title....
As part of an ongoing overhaul of creativecommons.org sites Alex Roberts has given search.creativecommons.org a very attractive new look.
Keep an eye out for new CC-enabled search services. If you aspire to be one, check out ccSearch integration on our wiki.
Gary Taubes interviews Derek McPhee in the April issue of Thomson's In-Cites. (Thanks to Dietrich Rordorf.) Excerpt:
In a recent analysis of Essential Science Indicators data, the journal Molecules was named a New Entrant in the field of Chemistry. The journal’s current record in this field includes 1,118 highly cited papers cited a total of 2,289 times to date. In the interview below, in-cites correspondent Gary Taubes talks with Dr. Derek McPhee, the Editor-in-Chief of Molecules....
Was there a change in policy or editorial direction that might account for your recent success?
The main one has been the decision to go entirely to open access with the author or institution pay model. Over the years, we tried a variety of models. We tried a subscription base, for instance, that would financially support the journal, but that didn’t work terribly well. We had mixed models, in which papers whose authors did not want to pay fees could either contribute samples to the repository or their articles could be subscription-only access —pay per view. Those would be password-protected and so nobody could read them without paying for them. But we found that with so much free literature out there, that’s a hard sell. So over the past couple of years, we’ve moved to be completely free to readers, with all payments coming from authors or institutions. Although because we get submissions often from developing countries, where $500 is a lot of money, in many instances the fees are waived....
Have there been specific developments in the fields served by your journal that may have contributed to your rising citation rate?
Not in the field itself so much as in electronic publishing as a whole. The whole advent of open-access publication and the Internet allowed for the proliferation of electronic journals. Molecules is perhaps unique in that it is one of the first and survived so long....
Something important is happening at this website. That’s my sense – and if you’re reading this, I’ll bet it’s yours as well.
As I follow the writings On the Commons, I gain historical insights and pick up ideas about innovative initiatives. Yet, informative as these individual postings are, their value multiplies greatly when seen as threads in a larger narrative.
In this first guest post, I’d like to venture an aggregation of some recurring themes that I see at OTC. Glass of wine in hand and glancing over two years of del.icio.us bookmarks, here’s what I’ve come up with. How would you refine/redefine/recombine them? What others would you think are essential?
-->Last fall we mentioned a great post by Wikipedia leader (and now CC board member) Jimmy Wales on why free knowledge requires free software and free file formats.
Now Wikipedian Erik Möller weighs in with a practical post on Wikimedia’s open source toolset, which may be seen as a paean to open source media creation software generally (Wikipedia leading the way).
Erik specifically calls out Inkscape, a drawing application with contributions from now CC employee Jon Phillips (his open source contributions were crucial to getting a job here).
Inkscape also happens to have a built-in feature enabling CC licensing of drawings, something we hope to see in many more content creation applications.
CC chairperson Joi Ito writes:
Impress, a Japanese publisher, just released a Mook (magazine/book) called The Future of Web 2.0 - The Sharing Economy based on presentations at the Digital Garage New Context Conference last year in Tokyo. The book is in Japanese. There are excerpts from presentations by Mitchell Baker, John Buckman, Tantek Çelik, David Isenberg, Lawrence Lessig, Jun Murai, Hiroyuki Nakano and Cory Ondrejka.
A really cool thing about this is that Impress has decided to release this mook under CC BY-NC (v 2.1 Japan). They have also made a PDF versions of each section available for download simultaneously under the same license on their site.
For those who cannot read Japanese, we’ve recently blogged about Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons (Australia) and Community Created Content (Finland), both in English and also CC licensed.