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The Year in (Public Domain) Review

February 15, 2012 in OKF Projects, Our Work, Public Domain, Public Domain Works, WG Public Domain

Last month, the glorious Public Domain Review celebrated its first birthday.

The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into the whopping plenitude that is the public domain, helping our readers to explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is more well-known.

It’s been a fantastic year for our online compendium of public domain treasures: here’s a little round-up of some of the highlights – take what you like, and find more on the website!

Articles

Julian Barnes told the story of when a young Guy de Maupassant was invited to lunch at the holiday cottage of Algernon Swinburne. A flayed human hand, pornography, the serving of monkey meat, and inordinate amounts of alcohol, all made for a truly strange Anglo-French encounter.

Utriusque Cosmi (1617-1621), the masterwork of physician and polymath Robert Fludd, was explored by Urszula Szulakowska, who looked at the philosophical and theological ideas behind the extraordinary images found in the second part of the work, which you can access through the post.

Julie Gardham took a look at the book that was said to have spurred a young Isaac Newton onto the scientific path, The Mysteries of Nature and Art by John Bate. In this picture you can see “Another manner of forcing water, whereby water from any spring may be forced unto the top of a hill”

And in Bugs and Beasts Before the Law, Nicholas Humphrey explored the strange world of medieval animal trials, with murderous pigs sent to the gallows, sparrows prosecuted for chattering in Church, a gang of thieving rats let off on a wholly technical acquittal.

Collections

We’re also constantly expanding our collections of film, image, text and audio. Check out the collection of maps by Piri Reis, a sixteenth century Ottoman Admiral famous for his detailed and accurate maps and charts of the Mediterranean.

Alexandria

Or the these pages from Giambattista della Porta’s 1586 book on physiognomy De humana physiognomonia libri IIII, courtesy of the National Library of Medicine via Wikimedia:

Become a Public Domain Review Patron

The first year of the Public Domain Review was made possible by seed funding from the Shuttleworth Foundation. We are now, however, relying solely on support from our readers to keep the project going, so please, if you enjoy the site and wish to see it continue and grow do consider becoming a patron! Your generosity will help keep us afloat while we scour the web in search of the most interesting and unusual public domain artefacts that we can find, and the most erudite and entertaining voices to write about them. It will also ensure the continuation of our work behind the scenes with institutions (universities, libraries, museums, etc.) trying to ensure that works in the public domain remain in the public domain when they go online.

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COMMUNIA’s response to the proposed amendments to PSI Directive

February 2, 2012 in Open GLAM, WG EU Open Data

The following guest post is by Timothy Vollmer, policy coordinator at Creative Commons. It has been adapted from his post on the same subject over on the COMMUNIA International Association blog. Creative Commons and the Open Knowledge Foundation are institutional members of COMMUNIA. The mission of COMMUNIA is to educate about, advocate for, offer expertise and research about the public domain in the digital age within society and with policymakers.

The European Commission Public Sector Information Directive, which describes the conditions under which European public sector information (PSI) should be made available for reuse by the public, has been in place since 2003. PSI ranges from digital maps to weather data to traffic statistics, and there’s a lot of potential value in making PSI available for reuse for commercial and non-commercial purposes – up to €140bn. The EC says that increasing the reuse of PSI can generate new businesses and jobs – and to this end is planning to update its nine-year-old Directive. COMMUNIA International Association last week released a short policy document in reaction to the to the European Commission’s (EC) proposals, which the OKF’s Daniel Dietrich presented at the LAPSI conference in Brussells to a positive and interested audience.

To give a bit of background: in December 2011 the EC published a proposal to update the PSI Directive. The Open Knowledge Foundation already covered the basics of the Commission announcement. The COMMUNIA document draws attention to two areas where these proposals still need improvement: firstly regarding the conditions for re-use of public sector information that falls within the scope of the Directive; and secondly regarding public domain content that is held by libraries, museums and archives.

Conditions for re-use of public sector information

 

From the perspective of COMMUNIA, the way the amended Directive addresses licensing of public sector content remains underdeveloped and as such has the potential to create diverging and potentially incompatible implementations among the Member states. The article of the amended Directive dealing with licensing mentions “standard licenses,” but does not sufficiently clarify what should be considered to be a standard license, and encourages the development of open government licenses. Instead of recommending the use and creation of more licenses, COMMUNIA suggests that the Commission should consider advocating the use of a single open license that can be applied across the entire European Union. Such licenses (stewarded by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Creative Commons) already exist and are widely used by a broad spectrum of data and content providers.

Public Domain Content held by libraries, museums and archives

 

COMMUNIA is supportive of the Commission’s suggested change to include cultural heritage institutions into the scope of the amended Directive. Access to and re-use of PSI has been one of the issues that has featured prominently in the work of COMMUNIA. For instance, the EC’s amendments to the Directive are aligned with COMMUNIA’s January 2011 policy recommendation #13, which states, “The PSI Directive needs to be broadened, by increasing its scope to include publicly funded memory organisations – such as museums or galleries – and strengthened by mandating that Public Sector Information will be made freely available for all to use and re-use without restriction.”

The South Prospect of the Cathedral of St. Pauls / gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliotheque nationale de France / Public Domain

Including such content under the purview of the Directive will improve citizens’ access to our shared knowledge and culture and should increase the amount of digitized cultural heritage that is available online. But, while the amended Directive makes it clear that documents held by cultural heritage institutions in which there are no third party intellectual property rights will be re-usable for commercial or noncommercial purposes, it does not address the largest category of works held by cultural heritage institutions — those that are not covered by intellectual property rights at all because those works are in the public domain. COMMUNIA thinks that explicitly including public domain content held by libraries, museums and archives in the re-use obligation of the amended PSI Directive will strengthen the Commission’s position with regard to access and re-use of public domain content.

The full COMMUNIA association reaction to the EC’s proposal to amend Directive 2003/98/EC on re-use of public sector information can be downloaded here.

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Linked Open Data and Low Carbon Development

January 27, 2012 in External, Guest post, Open Data

The following guest post is by Denise Recheis from reegle, the clean energy info portal.

Offering multiple explanations for a concept increases understanding and using LOD allows both humans and machines to semantically connect related content. This is a huge advantage in our increasingly complex world!

Especially in the field of clean energy, the increasing availability of LOD is really beneficial. To make sense of the often complex factors contributing to climate change and the highly technical solutions thereof, as well as rapid development in national and international policy regarding these factors, access to high quality and timely information is crucial.

The clean energy info portal www.reegle.info and the energy info wiki www.openEI.org see themselves as gateways to a wealth of information regarding renewable energy, energy efficiency and climate change issues. They are hosted by REEEP (Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership – where I work) and NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) respectively. Both organizations have a strong commitment to the idea of Linked Open Data (LOD) and have been integrating the core principles of LOD into their online portals.

In an effort to increase awareness about the possibilities associated with publishing and consuming LOD, we organized a well-attended workshop in Abu Dhabi in January 2012. Alongside the event, we brought out a publication explaining the basics of LOD, as well as the first steps for any organization considering joining the LOD cloud. “Linked Open Data: The Essentials” (published by Semantic Web Company and REEEP) is available as a downloadable PDF, as well as a booklet which can be ordered.

“Linked Open Data: The Essentials” also highlights some best practice examples, two of them being reegle and OpenEI. Reegle’s country energy profiles are a prime example of mashed up open data. These dossiers present the reader with statistics, maps, general facts and policy and regulatory details in a pleasant design. The information is provided by LOD providers such as DBpedia (Wikipedia), the UN and the World Bank, OpenEI and other highly trusted sources. Reegle has also developed an extensive thesaurus covering clean energy and climate compatible development with full liked data capabilities, which is available for free to re-use as a widget or word press plugin, and which is currently used as the basis for a brand-new API. Of course reegle provides all its datasets as Linked Open Data free for re-use and provides datasets in RDF (Resource Description Framework) format and via a SPARQL endpoint on our data portal.

OpenEI (Open Energy Information) has always seen sharing as one of its key missions. The data is available in RESTful API, RDF and SPARQL, for integration into external websites. But even when browsing the site, users benefit from a variety of LOD sources which enhance and increase the information presented. For example, several definitions offered in the glossary are collected from different LOD sources and OpenEI’s country pages feature information from a variety of sources, including reegle’s country energy profiles. This is easily possible when organizations rely on LOD, because when several websites describe the same things they can all be connected and give users a more rounded picture of sometimes difficult subjects.

Our expected end-users include the educational sector, helping students across the world study laws and regulation, efficient engineering, and the latest ideas in clean energy from many different authoritative sources in a single gateway. Specialists and project developers can quickly gather valuable information about specific regions and areas focusing on energy-relevant issues.

Integrating the principles of LOD has had a pleasant side-effect which has been highlighted in the recent workshop in Abu Dhabi: sharing data is often a starting point for fruitful collaborations between organizations with a similar agenda. Sharing data very often also means sharing the work burden. Each organization can then focus on their specific areas of expertise, while freeing up resources from areas that can be taken over by other organizations. Sharing the results of such targeted efforts generates high-quality content, and makes it available to all stakeholders in renewable energy, energy efficiency and climate adaptation/mitigation.

We are committed to increasing the share of information available as LOD, and will continue to actively support other organizations thinking of joining the LOD cloud.

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LODLAM-NZ Round Up

December 20, 2011 in Guest post, WG Cultural Heritage, WG Humanities, WG Open Bibliographic Data

The following guest post is by Jon Voss, whose projects include History Pin and Civil War Data 150.

I recently traveled to Wellington, New Zealand to take part in the National Digital Forum of New Zealand (#ndf2011), which was held at the national museum of New Zealand, Te Papa. Following the conference, the amazing team at Digital NZ hosted and organized a Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives & Museums unconference (#lodlam). The two events were well attended by Kiwis as well as a large number of international attendees from Australia, and a few from as far as the US, UK and Germany.

When it comes to innovative digital initiatives in cultural heritage, the rest of the world has been looking to New Zealand and Australia for some time. Federated metadata exchanges and search has been happening across institutions in projects like Digital NZ and Trove. I was able to learn more about the Digital NZ APIs as well as those from Museum Victoria, Powerhouse Museum, and State Records New South Wales. In fact, the remarkable proliferation of APIs in Australasia has allowed us to consider the possibilities of Linked Open Data to harvest and build upon data held in databases in multiple institutions.

Given the extent to which tools for opening access to data have been developed here, I was surprised by the level of frustration that exists around copyright issues. There’s a clear sense that government is moving too slowly in making materials available to the public with open licensing. We talked a lot about the idea of separately licensing metadata and assets (i.e. information about a photo vs the digital copy of the photo), as has been happening across Europe and increasingly the United States. There are strong advocates within the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives & museums) here, and demonstrating use cases utilizing openly licensed metadata will go far in helping to move those conversations forward with policy makers.

To that end, a session was convened to explore the possibilities of an international LODLAM project focused on World War I, the centennial commemoration of which is fast approaching. The Civil War Data 150 project we’ve been slowly moving forward in the US may provide a rough framework to build from. At least a half dozen or more libraries, archives and museums have expressed interest in participating in a WWI project already. First steps may be identifying openly licensed datasets to be contributed, key vocabularies and ontologies to apply, and ideas for visualizations that would leverage the use of Linked Open Data. For anything to happen here, someone will need to take the lead in organizing (not me, we’re still trying to build some tools around the Civil War Data 150 concept!). Good notes were posted on the LODLAM blog about the conversation and how to convene future conversations. Anyone who gets involved with this, please spread the word and keep the LODLAM community apprised of your progress and ways to contribute.

We also had a workshop on using Google Refine by Carlos Arroyo from the Powerhouse Museum, with props to the FreeYourMetadata crew. Some lively sessions dug into just what and how Linked Data is and some of the pitfalls and potentials. Another session explored the importance and potential of local vocabularies, and how they can contribute to Linked Data implementations. One great example was the vocabularies surrounding Maori artifacts (Taonga) at Te Papa, and how publishing those datasets can aid other museums around the world to better describe and provide digital access to Maori collections.

As I’ve attended various LODLAM meetups since June, I’ve noticed clear momentum from one to another as these conversations progress rapidly, with those further along helping those of us just learning. After LODLAM-DC I realized the importance of including library, archive, and museum vendors in all of these gatherings. At LODLAM-NZ I could see the potential of bringing together developers in the GLAM sector and those utilizing Linked Data in commercial settings. In places like San Francisco, where commercial interests are already leading the charge on Linked Data (which is not a bad thing) and there’s an active Semantic Web developer community, the GLAM sector may be playing catchup. But the sheer number of datasets potentially available as open data coming from the GLAM sector, together with the expertise of managing massive amounts of structured data, creates a space ripe for collaboration and experimentation, and these lines will continue to blur.

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Open Humanities Working Group Update

December 20, 2011 in WG Humanities, Working Groups

The following update is from the Open Humanities Working Group, courtesy of James Harriman-Smith. To help you keep up with everything that’s going on across the OKF, we are publishing weekly updates from different Working Groups.

Salvete. Ahem. The latest and most important news from the Open Humanities Working Group is that we now have a blog, intended to help coordinate all of the Foundation’s projects in the humanities: http://humanities.okfn.org. This follows on from the merger of the Open Literature mailing list into the Open Humanities one.

On the site you will find:

If you have a spare moment, please do have a look and give me any feedback about content and design you have. You might also like to tell us about an upcoming event, join our mailing list, or drop in for our next general meeting on Wednesday 18th January at 5pm GMT.

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Opening Government Data in Bulgaria

December 16, 2011 in Guest post, Open Government Data, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data

The following guest post is by Boyan Yurukov, blogger and open government data activist.

In the beginning of 2011 some open data was released by the Bulgarian government on www.parliament.bg. Visitors could export information of bills and members of parliament as XML or CSV. They could also download the votes of individual MPs or parliamentary groups as Excel files. While what data was useful and an important step forward, I found problems in the format and the exported files. Also, one could find a lot more information on the website, that could not be exported as open structured data.

So I started a project to scrape the website, fix the available data, refine, enrich and link it. After several versions of the schema, the final dataset was released in the beginning of December. It contains over 11,000 data points and over 1.12 Gb of data. The items are as follows:

  • Profiles for each MP – general biography, previous parliamentary terms, participation in parliamentary groups, committees, “friendship groups” and delegation, supported bills, absences, external consultants, questions during plenary meetings.
  • Data on bills – laws, legislative proposals, decisions and official declarations.
  • Parliamentary groups and committees – current members and member history, proposed bills, external consultants, meeting schedule, agenda, transcripts and reports.
  • Parliamentary delegations and “friendship groups” – current members and member history.
  • Parliamentary sittings – program for the sitting with questions and legislative proposals; transcripts; voting history for each MP on each discussion point.
  • Parliamentary procurements – description, topic, procurement registry code.

The dataset can be downloaded as two ZIP files together with the XSD schema. The scraping scripts are also open sourced in GitHub. You can find all this open Bulgarian Parliament data on the DataHub.

Although refined, this data is not without its flaws. Some historical data on MPs’ biography and questions is missing. Also, transcripts are not structured, but in free text, making it almost impossible to parse. There is some hope that the parliamentary administration will release the transcripts in XML, but I’m not holding my breath. Currently the transcripts go back 20 years, and those back to the ’70s are being parsed and will be released soon. All other data is since 2001, except individual votes, which are since 2009.

This data can be quite useful for parliamentary journalism, but in itself consists only of raw XML files. This is why another project is being set up that aims at building a platform for analyzing and visualizing the refined dataset. It will be targeted at data journalists and visualization experts. It is sponsored by the Institute for Public Environment Development and all results will be released as open data. I hope that in the first quarter of 2012 the first beta will come out.

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SNCF launches a debate on open transport data in France

December 15, 2011 in Guest post, Open Data, WG Open Transport

The following guest post is by Pieter Colpaert from iRail npo and Pierre Chrzanowski, and was reviewed by Regards Citoyens. Pieter and Pierre are both members of our brand new Working Group on Open Transport – watch this space for a full announcement of the working group’s activities and details on how to get involved!”

At first sight, you may think that data.sncf.com is the new open data website of the SNCF, the National Corporation of French Railways. Not yet. The company preferred to launch a consultation website before opening up its data. Anyone can add their thoughts on open transport data on data.sncf.com.

In a country struggling to involve the transport industry in the open data movement, this initiative is most welcome. After the release of data.gouv.fr, we hope transport data will soon be part of the available datasets. The lack till today of open transport data in France led independent initiatives to extract the data without authorisation, placing them in legal insecurity. A change by SNCF is therefore really welcome.

Although SNCF seems to be ready for open data, other public transport operators in France are still reluctant. RATP, the state-owned subway operator for Paris area, recently refused to let other app developers use its map for free. This inspired CheckMyMetro, a startup which was forced to remove the RATP map from its smartphone application, to organize a subway map design contest.

As a lot of organizations are launching similar debates on open data, it is important that they rightfully apply the word “open” and that while doing this they know how to gain an added value for themselves and their customers. Data.scnf.com is a great opportunity to remind the SNCF and other transport actors in Europe of the actual meaning of the word “open” and to help introduce a productive open data policy.

Open data for multimodal transport

Today, commuters use different types of transport to go to work or to travel across Europe. For them, access to timetables, networks maps and real-time transport data is the key to organize their journey or to get informed of disruptions. Multimodal transport is part of the last European Commission transport policy which has announced the launch of a contest for the best European multimodal journey planner. The software behind these intermodal journey planners can be as intelligent as can be, but when there is no data, the software is useless.

Some countries are already doing their part. The UK Government recently committed itself to the release of high-value transport data. Which also seems to provide a good input to answer the data.sncf.com consultation. Here is the comprehensive list of transport data soon to be released: - Rail timetable information on a weekly basis - Real-time running data from Network Rail - Location about Great Britain Rail Network and GB rail network stations - Traveline National Dataset on a weekly basis (Great Britain buses) - Next Buses API of planned and real-time information at 350 000 GB bus stops

There are already many journey planner apps offered either by transport companies or developed by independent developer teams, but only a few can help you to organize your journey across the whole EU – deutschebahn offers the closest. Furthermore, with open data, there are new services to come that transport companies did not think about.

Transport innovation through real open data

By starting a debate on open data, data.sncf.com wants to take the first steps towards clearing the path for innovative services. The definition of open data is clear and not debatable. As defined by the Open Knowledge Foundation: “A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike”. This means data need to be released for free in an open license and available in open formats. The French statements on open data also give a clear definition of what “open” means. SNCF could then choose to open its datasets either under the new French Open License or among other open licenses available like the ODbL, already in use in different French cities. On open formats, the 5 star-ranking of the W3C is a good reference. But open transport data is part of an industry and a new market. If we want to help developers to develop multimodal apps, the respect of standards is required.

Let’s hope this initiative from the SNCF is the beginning of a real shift towards open transport data in France and beyond.

You can participate to the SNCF debate here

The ePSIplatform is also working on a report on the re-use of transport data in Europe. You can reply to their questionnaire here.

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Open Data – Destination Hackney

December 14, 2011 in Guest post, Open Data

The following guest post is by Duncan Ray, from Destination Hackney.

In Summer 2012, the borough of Hackney in London will be opening its doors to millions of visitors flocking to the Olympic games. It’s an exciting time for this part of London, and through the Race for Apps competition it’s a fantastic opportunity for open data too!

Race for Apps is a competition to crowdsource mobile apps from the digital community to showcase Hackney’s area and talent to journalists and businesspeople coming into the local Hackney area next year during the Olympics. It’s a collaboration between Hackney Council, the Technology Strategy Board and Digital Shoreditch.

Race For Apps from race for apps on Vimeo.

From the beginning the organisers were very conscious of how releasing data openly could lead to the creation of innovative apps, and that data could provide a big differentiator for the competition.

We carried out research, talking to various developers, and got the strong impression of ‘find my nearest’ and ‘what’s on’ guides as being the key data sets. We have maintained an open dialogue with developers as the competition has gone live, and are still picking up with our internal IT team where data is being requested as the foundation for a new app entrant.

The website Destination Hackney (www.destinationhackney.co.uk), launching in January, showcases Hackney for visitors to the area next year.

Fortunately they had a ready-made data set covering local businesses and events.

Unfortunately the data sets weren’t open: they weren’t licensed for third party commercial use, which made app development a bit of a non-starter.

To resolve this we are now establishing a new dataset, hosted on Destination Hackney’s site, that can be freely used by app developers, and we will be updating this via RSS. The dataset is licensed under the attribution-only Open Government License for Public Sector Information. This will go live from January 2012 for Race for Apps entrants and the data set will build as more businesses come on board. Benefits for businesses and events are substantial, with those apps using Destination Hackney data providing a plethora of new marketing channels for businesses to use to get to visitors next year.

The competition is now on, and you can enter your ideas, finished apps, or apps reworked for the local context in four categories of “Finding Your Way”, “Making Connections”, “Citizen Journalists”, “Fun and Games”, and “Wild Card” on the Race for Apps site. Or you can hold out for the release of the Destination Hackney dataset in the New Year!

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Update from the Open Science Working Group

December 13, 2011 in Open Science, WG Open Data in Science

This week’s Working Group update comes from our Open Science group – thanks to Jenny Molloy for the post and for her great work coordinating the group! This follows on the recent updates from the Archaeology and EU Data groups – and next week we’ll have another…

The open data in science working group have had a busy year, with much activity to come in 2012 as open data in science continues to feature on the agendas of governments, funders and scientific organisations.

SWAT4LS Hackathon

In conjunction with the Semantic Web for the Life Sciences conference and the JISC funded project DevCSI, the working group ran a hackathon on 6-7 December looking at applications for the semantic web in the life sciences, with a focus from OKF participants on generating open research reports, single access points to the open literature on individual diseases, with semantic functionality to allow complex searches and the ability to append additional information such as lay summaries, translations and more. You can see the background to ORRs here and watch a introductory video. The outcomes of the hackathon are documented on the event wiki, including the ORR effort to consolidate different literature sources and the work of other teams on exciting applications to view disease outbreak locations and visualise the interaction of drugs and genes, among others.

Peter Murray-Rust at the OSS

Open Science Summit

Several members of the working group attended the Open Science Summit in Mountain View, CA either in person or virtually via live streaming (see blog and OSS 2011 video archive). It was a great opportunity to find out what a wide range of people and orgaisations are up to across the field of open science and forge links with other communities. These will be strengthened by the forthcoming launch of the Open Science Alliance network from the team behind the Open Science Summit which will enable groups from across the broad discipline of open science to update and communicate with each other e.g. open data advocates and bio-hackers.

Panton Fellowships

We are pleased to announce that the OKF has been successsful in obtaining OSI funding for two fellowships in the field of open data in science. More details to follow but needless to say this is a very exciting achievement! Thank you to Jonathan Gray and Peter Murray Rust for making this happen.

Journal coverage

PLoS Biology last week published a profile of the working group in their Community Pages entitled ‘The Open Knowledge Foundation: Open Data Means Better Science‘. We hope to continue to raise the profile of the working group and projects such as the Panton Principles within the wider scientific community during 2012. Thanks to Grahan Steel and the team at BioMedCentral thousands of people have already seen a web banner advertising the Panton Principles.

Reports

The working group and subsets of it have responded to numerous consultations on scientific communication and open data in science in the last few months, including the Royal Society Science as a Public Enterprise (SAPE) consultation (response), The European Commission Information Hearing on Scientific Information in the Digital Age (blog from working group members Diane Cabell and Cameron Neylon) and the subsequent Consultation (response from OKFN Deutschland).

Open Science Dev

Following a pre-OKCon workshop on Open Science and Social Science, the open-science-dev mailing list was set up to encourage more projects developing tools and applications for open data in science. One outcome of the workshop was the data transcription tool Data Digitiser (demo), for which development is coninuing. More recently Rufus Pollock and others have begun porting BOSSA, the open-source software framework for distributed thinking (i.e. crowd sourcing volunteers to perform tasks that use human cognition and problem solving via the Internet), to python – creating pyBOSSA. If you’d like to contirbute to these projects or have a suggestion for an open science development project please sign up to the mailing list.

SWAT4LS Hackathon

Local groups

The open science group in Stockholm is developing well and fledgling groups are soon to begin in Oxford, New York and Washington DC. Open Science advocates from MIT, Kentucky, India and Brazil have all been in touch with the working group and we’d love to start building more local open science communities. You can check out the current list of groups here.

Plans for 2012

Projects already in the pipeline for 2012 include:

  • Generating publicity material and increasing the profile of the Panton Principles
  • Generating adaptable presentations and resource packs for open data talks (at academic conferences, within institutions etc)
  • Investigating the use of CC-BY-NC licenses or other non-commercial clauses
  • Developing Open Research Reports (including software development, liaison with the patient community, funders and more)
  • Increase the number of local open science groups and generate guidance on running a local group.

We’d love to hear your ideas for building communities, tools, apps and datasets for open data in science via the open-science mailing list or the OKFN Ideas Incubator.

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Public Domain Day: January 1st 2012

December 13, 2011 in COMMUNIA, Events, Guest post, Public Domain, Public Domain Works, WG Public Domain

The following guest post is by Juan Carlos de Martin, from the the Politecnico of Torino, Italy, one of the organisers of the annual Public Domain Day of which the OKF is a proud supporter.

Every January a growing number of people throughout the world gather to celebrate the new year. But not for the usual reasons. They meet because every January 1st the works of authors who died decades before – typically, seventy years before – enter the public domain, that is, their copyright protection expires.

Why a celebration for such an apparently technical reason? Because as the new year starts, the works of those selected authors have finally reached the state to which all culture is headed since the earliest times. I am talking of the state that automatically allows any human being to sing, play, translate, summarize, adapt what other human beings have thought before them. Wish to produce a big print edition of your favorite poetry? Now you can. Fancy translating into Sicilian dialect a play you love? Now you can. Possessed by the desire to illustrate, manga style, the ideas of your preferred political scientist? Now you can. Longing to publish a more correct version of a score riddled with typos that the publisher never cared to correct? Now you can.

In principle, all the above activities are perfectly possible even before the expiration of copyright. On condition, however, that one asks for permission the copyright owner (assuming that they can be located: let’s ignore here the huge problem of the so-called “orphan works”) and pays whatever is requested. Noting that very often the copyright owner is not the author (or his/her descendants), but a for-profit publishing house.

Consequently, many activities do not take place because either the copyright owner does not like the idea (no manga, for instance), or because the wannabe new author cannot afford to pay what is requested by the copyright owner.

Such restrictions, introduced, in their modern form, about three centuries ago to provide – for the common good – incentives to authors, now last an unprecedented seventy years (in Europe and in many other countries) after the death of the authors.

A shockingly long time, which an increasing number of scholars, NGO’s and citizens are asking to reduce. To know more about the current debate on copyright reform and the role of the public domain, see for instance the Public Domain Manifesto and the brand new, Brussels-based COMMUNIA association for the digital public domain, or check out the OKF’s Working Group on the Public Domain.

But as we work towards copyright reform, every January people who care about the public domain get together and welcome the works of a new batch of authors. In recent years, public domain day celebrations have taken place in cities throughout the world, from Zurich to Warsaw, from Torino to Haifa, from Rome to Berlin. The volunteer-staffed website http://publicdomainday.org provides an information hub for such celebrations.

The celebrations typically take place in libraries, universities or cafés. People read – or sometimes perform – the work of the new authors. It is often a moving experience, as great men and women from the time of our grand (and great-grand) fathers come back to life under our affectionate gaze.

During the month of January 2012 people will gather again. Celebrations have already been announced in, among other places, Warsaw, Zurich, Torino and Rome. We hope that others will follow the example. Welcoming the works of some of our great writers, musicians, painters, poets, journalists, scholars is a most gratifying way to start the new year and also a great way to enhance the knowledge of our common cultural roots.

If you’re interested in organising an event in your area, you can join the pd-discuss list.

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