Open Access

Theories, Movement & Collected Stories

James Boyle has just given an excellent presentation on what the environmental movement did right. He points to the right mix of theory, movements and the collection of stories in the creation of the concept of the environment. The environment as a concept did not exist prior to its creation, establishment and acceptance in the wider public.

What he means is that the movement to protect public domain and develop creative commons requires more than the creation of licenses and preaching to the choir. The theory is required as a base but the broader public does not want to read theory. Therefore what is required is a movement of people to enable the transfer of dry theory in the communication to the public.

How should this be done? Well the environmental movement added a collection of stories. Individual examples of environmental damage. Burning streams, smog cities, nuclear waste and silent springs. The collection of stories have become established and iconic. They are established in the mental image of the public to such a degree that protection of the environment becomes an obvious step.

So, in order to establish the protection of the public domain, open access and creative commons the organisations working with these issues should look at the strategies of the environmental movement.

Posted on by mklang

Harvard Thesis Repository

With so many discussions on Free Culture, Open Access and the problems connected with making academic publishing available outside academia it is surprising how few good places there are to find thesis’ online.

This is why I was happy when Peter Murray-Rust pointed me towards the Harvard College Thesis Repository (a project of Harvard College Free Culture).

Here Harvard students make their senior theses accessible to the world, for the advancement of scholarship and the widening of open access to academic research.

Too many academics still permit publishers to restrict access to their work, needlessly limitingâ??cutting in half, or worseâ??readership, research impact, and research productivity. For more background, check out our op-ed article in The Harvard Crimson.

If you’ve written a thesis in Harvard College, you’re invited to take a step toward open access right here, by uploading your thesis for the world to read. (If you’re heading for an academic career, this can even be a purely selfish moveâ??a first taste of the greater readership and greater impact that comes with open access.)
If you’re interested in what the students at (ahem) the finest university in the world have to say at the culmination of their undergraduate careers, look around.

The FAQ explains much of the process. It is also good to see that they are applying Creative Commons Attribution License

Q. What permissions do I have to grant to free my thesis?

A. To make sure your thesis is always available for scholars to build on, we ask that you give everyone permission to do the things you’d want to be able to do with a scholarly work you liked: download the work, read it, keep copies, share it with other people, and adapt it into fresh works. The specific legal permission we ask for is the Creative Commons Attribution License, the same one required by the world’s leading biology journal PLoS Biology and the other journals of the Public Library of Science.

My only (small) complaint is that I wish the repository was clearer in showing the license terms for their content. I only found it in the faq. Normally I would not bother reading the faq. To increase the usability of the site the terms should be on the download page and preferably on the essay file.
Despite this I think this is an excellent initiative and I would hope that the fact that Harvard has taken a step such as this would work as an incentive for other universities to follow suite.

Posted on by mklang

Libraries and Copyright

Copyright has a tendency to make library work difficult. This is a growing trend and many of the larger libraries in the world are struggling to come to terms with copyright issues.

Yesterday the EU’s High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries – which includes, inter alia, stakeholders from the British Library, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the Federation of European Publishers and Google – presented an advisory report on copyright issues to the European Commission.

The group also discussed how to ensure more open access to scientific research and how to improve public-private cooperation. The work of the High Level Group is part of the European Commission’s efforts to make Europe’s rich cultural and scientific heritage available online. For this purpose, the group advises the Commission on issues regarding digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation of cultural material.

Read their Report on Digital Preservation, Orphan Works and Out-of-Print Works, Selected Implementation Issues available here and the annex Model agreement for a licence on digitisation of out of print works available here.

(EU Press Release)

Posted on by mklang

Open Access Petition

Have you signed the “Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results”? No? Well there is still time. The purpose of the petition is to register support for 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‘.

Read more about the petition and sign it here. Over 18000 have already signed but there is always room for more.

Posted on by mklang

Free and open access to European research results

January 29th 2007. Nobel laureates Harold Varmus and Rich Roberts are among the more than ten thousand concerned researchers, senior academics, lecturers, librarians, and citizens from across Europe and around the world who are signing an internet petition calling on the European Commission to adopt polices to guarantee free public access to research results and maximise the worldwide visibility of European research.

Organisations too are lending their support, with the most senior representatives from over 500 education, research and cultural organisations in the world adding their weight to the petition, including CERN, the UK’s Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Italian Rector’s Conference, the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts & Sciences (KNAW) and the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), alongside the petition’s sponsors, SPARC Europe, JISC, the SURF Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Danish Electronic Research Library (DEFF).

The petition calls on the EC to formally endorse the recommendations outlined in the EC-commissioned Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe.  Published in early 2006, the study made a number of important recommendations to help ensure the widest possible readership for scholarly articles.  In particular, the first recommendation called for ‘Guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication’.

The EC will host a meeting in Brussels in February to discuss its position regarding widening access and the petition is intended to convey the overwhelming level of public support for the recommendations of the EC study.

JISC Executive Secretary Dr Malcolm Read, said: ‘Maximising public investment in European research and making more widely available its outputs are key priorities for the European Union as it seeks to enhance the global standing of European research and compete in a global market. JISC is proud to be sponsoring a petition which seeks these vital goals and which has already attracted such widespread support.’

One of the petition’s signatories, Richard J Roberts, Nobel Prize winner for Physiology or Medicine in 1993, said: “Open access to the published scientific literature is one of the most desirable goals of our current scientific enterprise. Since most science is supported by taxpayers it is unreasonable that they should not have immediate and free access to the results of that research. Furthermore, for the research community the literature is our lifeblood. By impeding access through subscriptions and then fragmenting the literature among many different publishers, with no central source, we have allowed the commercial sector to impede progress. It is high time that we rethought the model and made sure that everyone had equal and unimpeded access to the whole literature. How can we do cutting edge research if we don’t know where the cutting edge is?”

The petition is available at: www.ec-petition.eu

The EC-commissioned Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe is available here.

The petition is sponsored by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark).

Posted on by mklang

CC Books Wiki

Looking for books distributed under a CC license? Then here is a wiki for you. Actually these kinds of pages are really good unless they become too popular and all of a sudden they implode because of their own success â?? information overload, too many books make the search for the book you want impossible.

But letâ??s not get carried away with early Sunday morning pessimism. If you know of a book which belongs on this wiki â?? add it. If the concept of book confuses you (which all concepts have done since the great Plato/Aristotle disagreement on the theory of forms) then you might be helped by the wiki definition.

By “book” we generally mean works over 35,000 words that are or have been commercially available in hardcopy and have an ISBN. We’ve expanded the definition in two added sections below, however, to include the most popular books published through do-it-yourself press Lulu, and “books” published on websites of established organizations or notable blogs.

(via Open Access News)

Posted on by mklang

Web 2.0 Licentiate thesis

Does the term Web 2.0 confuse or annoy you? Is there anything beyond the flashy buzzword? Well I guess the best way to begin to understand Web 2.0 is to experience it (insert your Matrix jokes here!) but if you prefer to be guided by someone else then I can recommend Peter Gigerâ??s (2006) Licentiate Thesis on the topic. The title is â??Participation Literacyâ?? and it is an interesting exploration in the termâ??s growth and meaning.

From the abstract:

The thesis concerns the Web 2.0 concept construction. Web 2.0 is a new mindset on the Internet. The main characteristics include â??Web as a Platformâ??, Collective Intelligence, Folksonomy and interfaces build with lightweight technologiesâ?¦Web 2.0 is not only a technique, but also an ideology â?? an ideology of participation. A Web 2.0 service is completely web based and generally draws on open access. It includes tools for people to interact within areas such as encyclopaedias, bookmarks, photos, books or research articles. All Web 2.0 services are web communities. A web community is a group of individuals, linked together by a network of social relations with some degree of continuity. Community members learn from each other and the knowledge base of the community grows for every interaction. The core values of Web 2.0 are democracy and participation.

Download it here or visit Peter’s research blog.

Posted on by mklang

Summer sale?

This arrived in my mailbox and thought it might be of interest. SAGE Publications are offering free online full text access to the current and back issues of selected cultural studies journals (see list below) until August 31st 2006.

To access the journals, register at: https://online.sagepub.com/cgi/register?registration=FT6122

The journals include:

Body & Society
Crime, Media, Culture
Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies
European Journal of Cultural Studies
French Cultural Studies
International Journal of Cultural Studies
Journal of Consumer Culture
Journal of Visual Culture
Media, Culture & Society
Space and Culture
Theory, Culture & Society

Is this limited open access a strange form of the summer sale or are SAGE simply trying to ensure that people have something good to read during their summer holidays?

Posted on by mklang

Creative Commons Culture and Terra Nullius

I recently published an article in a Swedish journal called InfoTrend. The article included an English abstract which you can read below. The journal wanted me to sign a copyright form which I did. Their contract also included a clause granting me permission to reproduce the article on my website – so I feel I must! So here it is. I realise that I probably should refuse to sign all such documents and demand that they implement CC licenses and open access values but then not many articles would be published and I will not be able to spread the word. It’s a catch 22 kind of situation.

Creative common licensing model as an alternative The great land grab between the 15th and 18th centuries was often legitimised by the concept of terra nullius – since the land was not being commercially exploited, it was being wasted and was therefore free for anyone to take. This stance has in hindsight been criticised for its tragic impact on the cultures and ecology of the lands being taken. Thus today the concept of terra nullius has fallen in disrepute. Despite this the concept is being widely used in the debate on the ownership of copyrightable material. The actions of major cultural producers, such as Disney, show that exploiting from the public domain is a profitable business model. This article discusses the implications of these actions and presents the Creative Commons licensing model as an alternative for buildning a body of cultural material, which is secured under copyright, but can still be used in a manner akin to the public domain.

Posted on by mklang

14th European Conference on Information Systems

Tomorrow the 14th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) begins. This is the biggest annual European IS conference and this time it has the additional bonus of being in my hometown. I have been accepted to the track on â??Open Source, Open Access and the Open Information Societyâ?? with a paper entitled â??Informational Commonsâ??.

The venue: The School of Economics and Law

The conference tracks include: Communities and New Forms of Organizations – eBusiness – eGovernment – Enterprise Systems – Grand Challenges of System Development – Human Computer Interaction – Information and Knowledge Management – IS and Organizational Change – IT in Tourism and Travel – Living in, and Coping with, the society – Mobile Communication, Telematics and Ubiquitous Computing – New Technologies, Innovation and Infrastructure Development – Open Source, Open Access and the Open Information Society – Philosophy and Epistemology of IS Research – Strategic Management of IS and IT – The Economics of IS

A harbour view near the opera

The programme (including a list of all papers) can be found here.

Posted on by mklang