SPARC Europe (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have just announced a new SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access Journals.

In order for journals to be approved, they must use a Creative Commons Attribution license - which is compliant with the Open Knowledge Definition. It is great to see growing support for making scholarly publications fully open!

The announcement - which includes comments from OKF advisory board members John Wilbanks and Peter Suber - is reproduced below.

Growing numbers of peer-reviewed research journals are opening-up their content online, removing access barriers and allowing all interested readers the opportunity of reading the papers online, with over 3300 such journals listed in the DOAJ, hosted by Lund University Libraries in Sweden.

However, the maximum benefit from this wonderful resource is not being realised as confusion surrounds the use and reuse of material published in such journals. Increasingly, researchers wish to mine large segments of the literature to discover new, unimagined connections and relationships. Librarians wish to host material locally for preservation purposes. Greater clarity will bring benefits to authors, users, and journals.

In order for open access journals to be even more useful and thus receive more exposure and provide more value to the research community it is very important that open access journals offer standardized, easily retrievable information about what kinds of reuse are allowed. Therefore, we are advising that all journals provide clear and unambiguous statements regarding the copyright statement of the papers they publish. To qualify for the SPARC Europe Seal a journal must use the Creative Commons By (CC-BY) license which is the most user-friendly license and corresponds to the ethos of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

The second strand of the Seal is that journals should provide metadata for all their articles to the DOAJ, who will then make the metadata OAI-compliant. This will increase the visibility of the papers and allow OAI-harvesters to include details of the journal articles in their services.

‘We want to build on the great work already done by the publishers of many open access journals and improve the standards of open access titles,’ said David Prosser, Director of SPARC Europe. ‘Working with the DOAJ means that we can provide help and guidance to journals who wish to move beyond the first step of free access to full open access and our long-term aim is to ensure that all journals listed in the DOAJ can attain the standards expressed within the Seal’

‘Improving the standards of the rapidly increasing numbers of open access and contributing to the widest possible visibility, dissemination and readership of the journals is very much in line with our mission,’ said Lars Björnshauge, Director of Libraries at Lund University. ‘We are very happy to see the enormous usage of the DOAJ and the support from our membership’

‘Legal certainty is essential to the emergence of an internet that supports research. The proliferation of license terms forces researchers to act like lawyers, and slows innovative educational and scientific uses of the scholarly canon’ said John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons. ‘Using a seal to reward the journals who choose to adopt policies that ensure users’ rights to innovate is a great idea. It builds on a culture of trust rather than a culture of control, and it will make it easy to find the open access journals with the best policies.’

‘This is an excellent program with two important recommendations. CC-BY licenses make OA journals more useful, and interoperable metadata make them more discoverable. The recommendations are easy to adopt and will accelerate research, facilitate preservation, and make OA journal policies more open and more predictable for users. I hope all OA journals will adopt them –not to get the Seal from SPARC Europe and the DOAJ, but for the same reasons that moved these organizations to launch the program: to make OA journals more visible and useful than they already are,` said Peter Suber, Open Access Advocate & Author of Open Access News.

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Dr. Paolo D’Iorio recently invited me to attend the first meeting of an EU funded Working Group “devoted to analyzing the current debate on the legal, economic and social conditions for setting-up open scholarly communities on the web”. The meeting was part of COST:

COST – European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research – is one of the longest-running European instruments supporting cooperation among scientists and researchers across Europe. COST is also the first and widest European intergovernmental network for coordination of nationally funded research activities.

Action 32, of which Dr. D’Iorio is Chair, is called “Open Scholarly Communities on the Web” and has two aims:

• to create a digital infrastructure for collaborative humanities research on the Web; and
• to establish and foster the growth of Scholarly Communities that will provide feedback to the IT developers regarding the needs and expectations of humanities researchers and will serve as a core group of early adopters.

Talks included:

• Paolo D’Iorio (CNRS-ITEM, Paris), How to build a Scholarly Community on the Web
• Maria Chiara Pievatolo (University of Pisa), Copyright in Europe. History and perspectives
• Thomas Margoni (University of Trento), How to access primary sources in Europe. The legal framework
• Annaïg Mahé (URFIST, Paris), The market for SSH Journals in Europe
• Jennie Grimshaw (British Library), Negotiating spaghetti junction: legal constraints on archiving government e-documents in the UK
• Christine Madsen (OII, Oxford), The significance of “marketing” digital collections: the case of Harvard
• Yann Moulier Boutang (Professeur de sciences Economiques - Université de Technologie de Compiègne, Directeur adjoint de Laboratoire de l’Unité de Recherche EA 22 23), Economic model(s) of Scholarly Communities: Open Source or Creative commons?
• Francesca Di Donato (University of Pisa), The evaluation of science. From peer review to open peer review
• Eric Meyer and Ralph Schroeder (OII, Oxford), Open Access and Online Visibility in the Age of e-Research

Notes and comments

• For many humanities subjects, having something like the public domain calculators would help to facilitate the growth of open resources for scholarly communities built on works in which the copyright has expired.
• Paolo’s presentation of Nietzsche Source and the Discovery project gave a compelling vision of how communities might grow around a resource for corpus based scholarship - with users having their own virtual workspace with annotations and notes that could be shared with other users. The ‘Scholarsource’ system would have stable URLs to support accurate citation, and robust ontologies to facilitate exploration of the material. Licensing that permits re-distribution is also a good preservation strategy.
• The term ‘open’ was often not used in the sense of the Open Knowledge Definition. Several projects used licenses with non-commercial restrictions. While some participants assumed that scholars and institutions would often prefer that their work was not exploited commercially - it would be great if public domain sources such as documents, images and records, could be published under an open license. An approach which recommended open licensing for material that had not been enhanced (scans, text files …) could help to stimulate the growth of a commons that would encourage greater experimentation and collaboration than one which restricted certain kinds of re-use (cf. 7. and 8. in the OKD).
• The importance of a close working relationship between scholarly communities and technologists. It is crucial that technical development is informed by the needs and working practices of researchers. This is something we’ve been thinking about in relation to Open Shakespeare and Open Milton. Open licensing allows developers to experiment with scholarly material to develop new tools and applications that could be of unanticipated value (e.g. semantic approaches, text analysis or visualisation).
• Legal, technological and social obstacles to building open scholarly communities. We have various legal mechanisms and emerging technologies to facilitate such communities. Sometime the most hard parts are social - in growing user base, increasing participation and so on. Value and limits of ‘build it and they will come’ approach.

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Make Textbooks Affordable, a campaign composed of Student Associations and Public Interest Research Groups from across the US, yesterday released a statement in support of open textbooks signed by 1000 academics. From the press release:

Open textbooks are complete, reviewed textbooks written by academics that can be used online at no cost and printed for a small cost. What sets them apart from conventional textbooks is their open license, which allows instructors and students flexibility to use, customize and print the textbook. Open textbooks are already used at some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions - including Harvard, Caltech and Yale - and the nation’s largest institutions - including the California community colleges and the Arizona State University system.

“Open textbooks are comparable, affordable and flexible alternatives to traditional expensive textbooks,” said Professor Linda Bisson, Chair of the Enology and Viticulture Department at the University of California, Davis. “Not only do they save students money, but they provide instructors with a high-quality textbook that they can customize to meet their needs.”

Textbooks cost students an average of $900 per year, which is a quarter of tuition at an average four-year public university and nearly three-quarters of tuition at a community college, according to a study conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

“Textbooks can price students out of higher education. With costs rising faster than inflation and tuition, some students are faced with the difficult choice to drop out, take on additional debt, or undercut their own learning by not purchasing textbooks,” said Nicole Allen, Textbooks Advocate for The Student PIRGs.

Research conducted by The Student PIRGs identifies publisher tactics as the primary cause of escalating prices. Bundling textbooks with unnecessary supplements forces students to purchase items they do not need; unnecessary new editions undermine the used book market; and withholding critical price information keeps faculty in the dark.

“As faculty members, our top priority is to choose the textbook that is best for our students. We share concerns about affordability, and face similar frustrations with publisher practices,” said Sandra Schroeder, Chair of the American Federation of Teachers Higher Education Program and Policy Council. “Open textbooks and other affordable options, when appropriate for a course, are a win-win for everyone.”

On the What are Open Textbooks? page, they mention our Open Text Book project, and the Open Knowledge Definition - which is great to see! Its good that they emphasise the importance of licensing that permits people to “reproduce, customize, or distribute” as well as access.

However while they allude to Creative Commons licenses - they don’t explicitly distinguish between those licenses which are open (Creative Commons Attribution and Attribution Sharealike), and those which are not (Creative Commons licenses with No Derivatives or Non-commercial options).

While the latter do afford people more choice about what can be done with their work - there are problems with interoperability, and do not serve well as the basis of an ecosystem of textbooks and textbook content that may be built upon, modified and redistributed without restriction. For example, publishers may not have the incentive to add value to existing content if they would be unable to re-distribute this in a commercial context.

Nevertheless its fantastic to see growing support for open textbooks!

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Yesterday Creative Commons announced that their Attribution and Attribution Sharealike licenses will feature a seal of approval and link to Freedom Defined - the Definition of Free Cultural Works. We’ve been in touch with Freedom Defined since May 2006 (we blogged about the project last year) as their aims are so similar to that of opendefinition.org and the Open Knowledge Definition.

While there was discussion last year of merging the two projects, it now looks as though they will remain complementary - with Freedom Defined focusing on cultural works, and with the Open Knowledge Definition retaining a broader conception of ‘knowledge’ that includes data (see e.g. Good news for open data).

Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons comments:

This added signaling is part of an ongoing effort to distinguish among the range of Creative Commons licenses — never say the Creative Commons license, as there is no such thing. Our license deeds have always communicated the distinct properties of each license with icons and brief descriptions.

This is great news and will hopefully contribute to the strengthening of a more robust sense of free culture/open knowledge within the plethora of liberal licensing options that are now available!

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Andrew Vickers, a biostatistician at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, recently published an article in the New York Times about his experiences trying to get hold of raw data for cancer research: Cancer Data? Sorry, Can’t Have It. In it he describes various difficulties he has encountered trying to get hold of the data that could “make an immediate and important impact on the lives of cancer patients”. Reasons for reluctance to share data included:

• potentially making researchers uncomfortable that their analyses could be undermined;
• refusal on the grounds that the original research team might “consider a similar analysis at some point in the future”;
• privacy concerns;
• red tape;
• unwillingness to co-operate;
• the “difficulty of putting together a dataset”;
• potential for misinterpretation or misrepresentation.

Vickers states:

Given the enormous physical, emotional and financial toll of cancer, one might expect researchers to promote the free and open exchange of information. The patients who volunteer for cancer trials often suffer through painful procedures and harsh experimental treatments in the hope of hastening a cure. The data they provide ought to belong to all of us. Yet cancer researchers typically treat it as their personal property.

He cites the research of Dr John Kirwan at the University of Bristol into researchers’ attitudes towards data sharing:

He found that three-quarters of researchers he surveyed, as well as a major industry group, opposed making original trial data available. It is worth restating this finding: most scientists doing research on how best to help those in pain, or at risk of death, want to keep their data a secret.

Vickers makes a strong case for the importance of sharing data and for “robust debate” in the domain of cancer research. He notes the ease with which raw data can now be shared.

This is an excellent particular case of a more general line we take at the OKF (e.g. see Give Us the Data Raw, and Give it to Us Now and Dead Knowledge: why being explicit about openness matters). Surely much is lost if data that could prove useful to cancer researchers sits collecting dust. Much could be gained if more trials data were open.

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Last week I went to the first COMMUNIA workshop on Technology and the Public Domain in Turin.

COMMUNIA coordinator Juan Carlos De Martin and Rishab Ghosh of MERIT, University of Maastricht gave opening talks. I was on a panel with Kaitlin Thaney of Science Commons, Nathan Yergler of Creative Commons and Keith Jeffery of euroCRIS. My slides are available at:

• http://m.okfn.org/files/talks/communia_20080118/

Other talks directly related to open knowledge included:

• Xavier Serra (Music Technology Group, Pompeu Fabra University) - on automated metadata production for sound, and the freesound project (content is currently licensed under CC Sampling Plus, but there are plans to introduce other licensing options)
• Simone Brunozzi - on BeeSeek, a peer to peer open-source search engine
• Séverine Dusollier (FUNDP - Centre de recherche informatique et droit) - on setting up a positive legal definition and regime for the public domain

Seeing as though there look to be many areas of common interest between the OKF and the COMMUNIA network, I suggested in my talk and thoughout the day that:

• We should work together to create a set of ‘public domain calculators’ - or algorithms that can help to determine whether or not a given work is out of copyright in a given jurisdiction (such as we’ve been working on with Public Domain Works and the Open Library);
• We should work together to pool open metadata - whether this be bibliographic metadata, or metadata for databases or large collections of knowledge resources (such as are listed in CKAN).

This is a great opportunity to strengthen the community of individuals and organisations with an interest in open knowledge and the public domain across Europe. I look forward to seeing the launch of the Working Groups!

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Today the Free Knowledge Institute is officially launched in the Netherlands:

The Free Knowledge Institute (FKI) is a non-profit organisation that fosters the free exchange of knowledge in all areas of society. Inspired by the Free Software movement, the FKI promotes freedom of use, modification, copying and distribution of knowledge in four different but highly related fields: education, technology, culture and science.

From their press release:

The Free Knowledge Institute (www.freeknowledge.eu) is an initiative from three Amsterdam-based professionals who currently work for Internet Society Netherlands. In the past years the association coordinated the large-scale EU-project SELF which embraced the same objectives. The need to share knowledge freely has become so important that the institute now turns into an independent organisation.

“More and more governments realise the benefits of free knowledge and free information technology”, says Wouter Tebbens, the president of the new institute. The Free Knowledge Institute intends to be a knowledge partner helping to show the way in available free knowledge and technology. “That way, we can elaborate on the existing pool of free knowledge and free software, which is growing enourmously. Look at projects such as Wikipedia, Linux, and the internet itself”, Tebbens states. “Why reinvent the wheel yet again?”

Its main lines of activity are Free Knowledge in technology, education, culture and science. Free Knowledge in education focuses on the production and dissemination of free educational materials; Free Knowledge in IT mainly refers to free software, open standards and open hardware; Free Knowledge in culture includes open content; and Free Knowledge in science includes open access and anti-privatisation of scientific knowledge.

We’ve certainly got a lot in common and having already been in touch with Hinde ten Berge, vice-president of the FKI, we hope to find ways to work together in the future.

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On Saturday I attended a ‘BarCamp’ on the Power of Information Review Recommendation 8 - which suggests there should be a re-use request service for UK Public Sector Information (we blogged about this in October).

The event was organised by John Sheridan of the Office of Public Sector Information and was attended by representatives from government, the private sector, the media, and nonprofits - including mySociety’s Tom Steinberg, who co-wrote the review in June 2007.

The meeting went well - and quite a bit of time was spent planning what the service will look like and what it will do. Below are some jottings for those that are interested. (These are rough and uncomprehensive, please don’t hesitate to get in touch if there’s anything missing or incorrect!)

Notes

John Sheridan: Government have limited expertise in developing certain kinds of web services. What are barriers to being able to re-use UK PSI?

Brainstorming session: all participants were invited to suggest the kinds of things they’d like to see and discuss throughout the BarCamp.

Rob McKinnon, mySociety NZ

• suggested a kind of e-democracy existed in the 19th c. with suffragists?
• parliament = paper?
• insert vote output legislation
• more paper inside parliament
• parliament is about data
• creating data rather than paper
• he was inspired by Public Whip and They Work For You
• screenscraping HTML from government website
• NZ theyworkforyou site
• (aside, Francis Irving: we used data, then the click use license came along)
• (aside, John Sheridan: several hundred thousand pounds of potential revenue lost through switch to click license)
• no copyright exists on NZ parliamentary debates
• (aside, Richard Quarrell: distinction between local government and central government?)
• screenscraping parliament.nz
• getting metadata from HTML SPAN tags
• trying on a small sample, testing on a larger sample
• doesn’t have to be structured/semantic data, rdf
• making ‘’’source”’ information available - people will make use of it
• politics about politicians or people?
• networked democracy
• making information transparent, facilitate social collabortation, participation
• make data discoverable
  • 80% of TheyWorkForYou NZ’s visitors come via Google’s search
  • use canonical, reliable and readable URLs
• make data linkable
• let people mark content
  • dopplr, upcoming
• more participation through transparency of requests
• (aside, Michael Cross: legal basis for requesting information remained available? National Archives. famous case of documents from East India Company smelling of a certain oil - which turned out to be source of information about health)
• (aside, Richard Quarrel: its an interesting question whether metadata/html tags count as ‘information’ under, e.g. FOI requests…)

Discussion

• John Sheridan: NZ gov effectively developed own microformats. One thing he [John] does is convince government metadata working group to develop microformat. Microformats for licensing like Creative Commons. Adding licensing information to URI.
• John Sheridan: Heaps of work on microformats already exist.
• Tom Steinberg: Respond in a flexible manner to demand for formats rather than blanket mandate for all material to be in format X.
• Richard Quarrell: government sharing - egovernment standards?
• Tom Steinberg: different tags for different government departments

Francis Irving, mySociety

• Freedom of Information requests
• discussed mySociety’s Freedom of Information Filer and Archive service which is under development
• database dumps
• (aside, Glyn Wintle: sometimes government find it easier to give whole database rather than answer a particular query)
• encouraging real names on requests rather than pseudonyms
• (aside, John Sheridan: snag that not all data gov has it owns. can’t re-publish third party information without investigation… local authority can serve requests, but cannot give permission to republish.)
• (aside: rights in, e.g. address data. 3 different bodies own rights: Post Office, …)
• make copyright clear on data
• (aside, John Sheridan: suggest we move naturally on to licensing psi, rights, etc.)

Michael Cross, Free Our Data

• APSI looking at bigger economic picture
• raw data should be made available for free
• (aside, John Sheridan: government encrypting all in sight, if think no-one wants it. whilst policy framework encourages re-use…)
• (aside, Stephan Carlyle: Deal with 40,000 FOI requests. 900,000 environmental information regulation requests. Value added requests. Point to info already published. Publishing often costs less than production. Balanced approach to access. Most requests are members of public wanting to out certain things in their locality. Danger of having too much of a focus on boundaries and exceptions. 97% of requests easy to respond to within 20 days.)
• (Tom Steinberg demonstrated Department of Health Information Asset Register)
• (aside, Richard Quarrell: plan to publish comprehensive list of IARNs - information asset register numbers)
• (aside, Tom Steinberg: do we design a request service to put pressure on government FOI policy, or one that works within the bounds of existing legislation?)
• (aside, Rob McKinnon: refinement with proprietry content?)
• (aside, John Sheridan: Cross Cutting Review [of Knowledge] says material is available for re-use by default)
• Discussion of point 9.7 of click use license, about using PSI in misleading context.

(Lunch)

• Demoing maptasm

Brainstorming for request service

• What are the goals?
• Who are the users?
• What sort of things are people going to request?
• How will people find out that they can request info?
• How will the service help PSIH’s (Public Sector Information Holders) to be more responsive?
• How do we make sure the data is released in internet time?
• Relation to FOI + distinction?
• The process - how should it work?

Aims

1. Government information provision is driven by what people want. Provision should become driven by demand.
2. Not enough to make culture change documents. Need sticks. Quite strong incentives. Shame and money. Pressure through revealing failure to serve. Threat of budget cuts if information isn’t served.
3. Increase knowledge of what is available and what has value (if not published).
4. What ‘raw’ info is available and consistent way of gaining access. Expressing this.
5. Complement other initiatives
6. To be safety net for all other information provision.

Types of request

1. Too expensive to get under other rights of access or re-use
2. Clarification of licenses
3. Change of licensing terms
4. Can’t find
5. Change of law relating to info publication
6. data that doesn’t exist but should
7. Change cost of information
8. Different formats of information
9. Change purchasing or obtaining

Who are the users

1. Civic society
2. Academics
3. Private sector (data products, open models)
4. Public servants/departments
5. Individuals

How will people find out

1. In every copyright statement
2. Within click use license pages
3. OPSI front page
4. Google
5. IFTS site
6. Anywhere you can buy information from government
7. PSIH how to get info pages
8. FOI officer training
9. Information Commissioner’s office (ico)
10. Success stories?
11. Business office
12. Its own blog

• Distinction between procedural and policy complaints?

How does it work

• Category of change requested
• Details of user
• PSIH(s) concerned (and ‘don’t know’)
• Dataset requested
• Problem is wrong policy
• Problem is execution
• Nature of problem
• What I could do if I had it
• How it should work in future
• Story/history

The process - what happens?

1. Published on a page
2. Published on a new items page
3. Problems email alterts + rss feeds
4. Mail named contact?
5. Provides tips and tricks + explanation for obtaining what they want
6. Endorse function inc. status of endorses + use cases
7. Discussion thread inc. authentication for PSIH responses
8. Write to creator of report

• Canonical list of bodies which pulbish PSI? See civil service handbook for lists.

Endorsing page

• Name
• Email
• Allow me to be emailed by (opsi/poster/anyone)

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A couple of weeks back we blogged about the ‘Future of Bibliographic Control’ draft report from a working group at the Library of Congress. Since then, we’ve submitted to the group a brief, collaboratively edited response to the draft and an appendix with some additional detailed comments.

The response was drafted by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Aaron Swartz of the Open Library and was co-signed by over 150 groups and individuals, including:

• Lawrence Lessig, Founder, Creative Commons
• Brewster Kahle, Founder, Internet Archive
• Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO O’Reilly Media
• Tim Spalding, Founder, LibraryThing.com
• Peter Suber, Senior Researcher, The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
• John Wonderlich, Program Director and John Brothers, CTO, Sunlight Foundation
• Paul Miller, Rob Styles, Terry Willan, Talis
• Rick and Megan Prelinger, Prelinger Library & Archives
• … and librarians, system librarians, catalogers, assistant librarians, library support staff, library users, library school lecturers and students, consultants, academics and software developers from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, the Ukraine, the UK and the US.

Many, many thanks to all of those who helped to publicise this, and to those who co-signed the response! We hope that the working group consider amending the draft in light of our comments in January.

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Last night Science Commons announced the release of the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data:

The Protocol is a method for ensuring that scientific databases can be legally integrated with one another. The Protocol is built on the public domain status of data in many countries (including the United States) and provides legal certainty to both data deposit and data use. The protocol is not a license or legal tool in itself, but instead a methodology for a) creating such legal tools and b) marking data already in the public domain for machine-assisted discovery.

As well as working closely with the Open Knowledge Foundation, Talis and Jordan Hatcher, Science Commons have spent the last year consulting widely with international geospatial and biodiversity scientific communities. They’ve also made sure that the protocol is conformant with the Open Knowledge Definition:

We are also pleased to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation has certified the Protocol as conforming to the Open Knowledge Definition. We think it’s important to avoid legal fragmentation at the early stages, and that one way to avoid that fragmentation is to work with the existing thought leaders like the OKF.

Also, Jordan Hatcher has just released a draft of the Public Domain Dedication & Licence (PDDL) and an accompanying document on open data community norms. This is also conformant with the Open Knowledge Definition:

The current draft PDDL is compliant with the newly released Science Commons draft protocol for the “Open Access Data Mark” and with the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Definition.

Furthermore Creative Commons have recently made public a new protocol called CCZero which will be released in January. CCZero will allow people:

(a) ASSERT that a workhas no legal restrictions attached to it, OR
(b) WAIVE any rights associated with a work so it has not legal restrictions attached to it,
and
(c) “SIGN” the assertion or waiver.

All of this is fantastic news for open data!

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