Plan of Digital Data Repository
Nature reports that the U.S. Government is considering a plan to create an interagency digital repository to facilitate the sharing of research data. From the article (Agencies join forces to share data):
The US government is considering a massive plan to store almost all scientific data generated by federal agencies in publicly accessible digital repositories. The aim is for the kind of data access and sharing currently enjoyed by genome researchers via GenBank, or astronomers via the National Virtual Observatory, but for the whole of US science.
Scientists would then be able to access data from any federal agency and integrate it into their studies. For example, a researcher browsing an online journal article on the spread of a disease could not only pull up the underlying data, but mesh them with information from databases on agricultural land use, weather and genetic sequences.
Fair Use of Copyrighted Materials
An English professor at Stanford University recently won the right to quote copyrighted materials on her scholarly Web site. From a news report on DiGiTAL50.com:
Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project announced today that Stanford University Acting Professor of English Carol Shloss won the right to publish her scholarship on the literary work of James Joyce online and in print based on a settlement agreement with the Joyce Estate. … The case sought to establish Shloss’s right to use copyrighted materials in her writing under the "fair use" doctrine.
…
[Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law professor and director of the Stanford Center for Information and Society, commented:] "But this is just the first of a series of cases that will be necessary to establish the reality of creative freedom that the ‘fair use’ doctrine is intended to protect in theory. We will continue to defend academics threatened by overly aggressive copyright holders, as well as other creators for whom the intended protections of ‘fair use’ do not work in practice. I am hopeful that this is the last time this defendant will be involved in an action like this. But it is only the first time that we will be defending academics in these contexts."
Scholarly Communications Symposium 2007
Drexel University Libraries will host a Scholarly Communications Symposium on April 20, 2007. Its theme is intellectual property rights:
Join us this year as we explore the complex topic of Intellectual Property. This full-day symposium is split into two modules: a morning session on Copyright in art, literature, and entertainment and an afternoon session on patenting in the sciences and the University setting.
Registration is free. The deadline for registration is April 6, 2007.
Open up to Open Access
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School has recently sponsored a talk on open access, "Opening up to Open Access: What Can Other Disciplines Learn from the Sciences?":
What can academics do to ensure that their research results are included in the growing “knowledge commons?” Gavin Yamey MD, Senior Editor of PLoS Medicine and Consulting Editor of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, shares his experiences in the open access movement and explores possible avenues for its expansion to other fields, with a focus on the social sciences and humanities.
The podcast of the talk was divided into Part 1 and Part 2.
Teleconference on Open Access for Chemistry
Chemists without Borders will organize a series of teleconference meetings on open access and open source:
Thursday, April 5th, 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time / Noon Eastern Time
Topic: Federal Research Public Access Act
Speaker: Heather Joseph, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)Thursday, June 7th, 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time / Noon Eastern Time
Topic: Open Access Questions & Answers
Speaker: Peter Suber, Open Access NewsThursday, September 6th, 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time / Noon Eastern Time
Topic: Open Source Chemistry
Speaker: Jean-Claude Bradley, Chemists without Borders
Please contact Chemists without Borders or visit its blog for details.
Additionally, Chemists without Borders has issued an Open Chemistry Position Statement.
Online Copyright Resources
David Hodgins, a librarian at Methodist University, has created a Webliography of online copyright resources:
The resources presented here offer librarians, educators, and other information professionals a wide range of information on copyright from the introductory, to the practical, to the philosophical. There is no shortage of resources on the Web that tackle this thorny issue; a comprehensive listing of Internet resources, and the related issues of intellectual property and digital rights management, could easily consume volumes. The challenge is finding resources that are well designed, current, and authoritative without bogging the reader in legalese or jargon. The following Web sites are just a slice of some of the better resources one will find when researching the topic.
Petition for Public Access to Publicly Funded Research in United States
There is an online petition for public access to publicly funded research in the United States:
This petition builds on the 23,000+ signatures collected from around the world in support of free and open access to European research and for the recommendations proposed in the EU’s ‘Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe’ as well as the 132 higher education leaders who have written of their explicit support for public access to publicly funded research.
Sign this petition to register your support for free and open access to research funded by the U.S. Federal government. For more information on current policies and legislation for taxpayer access to federally funded research – including the Federal Research Public Access Act – visit the Alliance for Taxpayer Access Web site.
More than 700 people have already signed the petition to show their support!
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, 2006 Edition
The 2006 edition of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB), compiled by Charles Bailey, is available online:
Annual editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are PDF files designed for printing.
Each annual edition is based on the last HTML version published during the edition’s year. Minor corrections, such as updated URLs, may have been made in the annual edition.
The complete SEPB archive, which can be used for any non-commercial purpose according to the attached Creative Commons license, is also available for download.
Sharing Knowledge via Internet
Webcasts of some sessions of the De Lange Conference, which was recently held at Rice University, are now available. Among them are:
- Open Access Education - Building Communities and Sharing Knowledge by Dr. Richard Baraniuk, Rice University
- Science Wars: The Next Generation by Dr. James Boyle, Duke University
- Read as We May by Dr. Paul Ginsparg, Cornell University
- Open Access Publishing in the Biomedical Sciences by Dr. Harold E. Varmus, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Positive Attitude toward Open Access Publishing
A recent study reports that researchers’ attitude toward open access publishing is positive:
Up to 91% of the 688 participants in a study conducted jointly between researchers at the University of Munich and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock describe their attitude toward Open Access publishing to be positive or very positive. However many show reluctance to use these new means of distributing their research work. While about two-thirds of the respondents indicate to have accessed Open Access literature before, only one third has published work in Open Access outlets. Advantages like increased speed, range and potentially higher citation rates of Open Access publications are seen alongside insufficient impact factors, lacking long-term availability and the inferior ability to reach the specific target audience of scientists within one’s own discipline.
A summary of the report with "practical implications" is available online.
