Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog http://blog.okfn.org Wed, 14 May 2008 22:21:35 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.1 en Beyond Strong and Weak: Towards a Typology of Open Access http://blog.okfn.org/2008/05/09/beyond-strong-and-weak-towards-a-typology-of-open-access/ http://blog.okfn.org/2008/05/09/beyond-strong-and-weak-towards-a-typology-of-open-access/#comments Fri, 09 May 2008 02:01:40 +0000 Jonathan Gray Open Knowledge Open Knowledge Definition Open Access Open/Closed http://blog.okfn.org/2008/05/09/beyond-strong-and-weak-towards-a-typology-of-open-access/ Over the past week or so there has been a flurry of posts about ’strong’ and ‘weak’ open access, including the following:

Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad both agree:

The term “open access” is now widely used in at least two senses. For some, “OA” literature is digital, online, and free of charge. It removes price barriers but not permission barriers. For others, “OA” literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. It removes both price barriers and permission barriers. It allows reuse rights which exceed fair use.

There are two good reasons why our central term became ambiguous. Most of our success stories deliver OA in the first sense, while the major public statements from Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin (together, the BBB definition of OA) describe OA in the second sense.

As you know, Stevan Harnad and I have differed about which sense of the term to prefer –he favoring the first and I the second. What you may not know is that he and I agree on nearly all questions of substance and strategy, and that these differences were mostly about the label. While it may seem that we were at an impasse about the label, we have in fact agreed on a solution which may please everyone. At least it pleases us.

We have agreed to use the term “weak OA” for the removal of price barriers alone and “strong OA” for the removal of both price and permission barriers. To me, the new terms are a distinct improvement upon the previous state of ambiguity because they label one of those species weak and the other strong. To Stevan, the new terms are an improvement because they make clear that weak OA is still a kind of OA.

On this new terminology, the BBB definition describes one kind of strong OA. A typical funder or university mandate provides weak OA. Many OA journals provide strong OA, but many others provide weak OA.

Furthermore, Peter Suber adds:

As soon as we move beyond the removal of price barriers to the removal of permission barriers, we enter the range of strong OA. Hence, an article with a CC-NC license is strong OA because it allows some copying and redistribution beyond fair use (even if it doesn’t allow all copying and redistribution). My own preference is still for the CC-BY license, but we shouldn’t speak as if CC-NC were not strong OA or as if there were just one kind of strong OA.

According to this schema, a cost free publication counts as weak open access, and a publication licensed under a CC-NC license counts as strong open access. Stevan Harnad agrees with the distinction but suggests the need for ‘value-neutral’ terms to describe it - suggesting ‘basic’ and ‘full’.

Its worth adding to this discussion that there is also Open Definition compliant open access, which I understand is equivalent to BBB open access and which is more permissive than ’strong’ or ‘full’ open access. As we blogged a couple of weeks back - anything with the SPARC Europe Seal will be open access in this sense.

As Peter Murray-Rust comments:

Open Source has the OSI which determines whether ot not a given licence is OS. Open Knowledge after only a short time of volunteers has the OKF and has an agreed definition and a list of conformant licences.

Scholarly publications, as literary works, constitute knowledge and hence are covered by the OKD. A journal, monograph or any other publication can still be ‘open as in the OKD’ as with other forms of knowledge. Debates about open access aside, demarcating between knowledge that is ‘open’ and ‘closed’ is precisely what the OKD is there for!

It will be interesting to see what emerges as the new classificatory scheme for open access, and where OKD compliant publications sit on the spectrum. Perhaps these will be called ‘OKD/BBB compliant open access’ journals, or suchlike.

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]]> http://blog.okfn.org/2008/05/09/beyond-strong-and-weak-towards-a-typology-of-open-access/feed/ Response to ‘The Future of Bibliographic Control’ draft from the Library of Congress http://blog.okfn.org/2007/12/19/response-to-the-future-of-bibliographic-control-draft-from-the-library-of-congress/ http://blog.okfn.org/2007/12/19/response-to-the-future-of-bibliographic-control-draft-from-the-library-of-congress/#comments Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:42:57 +0000 Jonathan Gray Process Open Knowledge Metadata Policy Open Data External Open Access OKF http://blog.okfn.org/2007/12/19/response-to-the-future-of-bibliographic-control-draft-from-the-library-of-congress/ 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:

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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]]> http://blog.okfn.org/2007/12/19/response-to-the-future-of-bibliographic-control-draft-from-the-library-of-congress/feed/ Good news for open data: Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data, Open Data Commons PDDL and CCZero http://blog.okfn.org/2007/12/17/good-news-for-open-data-protocol-for-implementing-open-access-data-open-data-commons-pddl-and-cczero/ http://blog.okfn.org/2007/12/17/good-news-for-open-data-protocol-for-implementing-open-access-data-open-data-commons-pddl-and-cczero/#comments Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:21:40 +0000 Jonathan Gray News Open Geodata Open Data External Open Knowledge Definition Open Access OKF http://blog.okfn.org/2007/12/17/good-news-for-open-data-protocol-for-implementing-open-access-data-open-data-commons-pddl-and-cczero/ 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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]]> http://blog.okfn.org/2007/12/17/good-news-for-open-data-protocol-for-implementing-open-access-data-open-data-commons-pddl-and-cczero/feed/ “Open-Access” Quantitative mRNA/Protein Dataset http://blog.okfn.org/2007/10/22/open-access-quantitative-mrnaprotein-dataset/ http://blog.okfn.org/2007/10/22/open-access-quantitative-mrnaprotein-dataset/#comments Mon, 22 Oct 2007 16:07:09 +0000 Rufus Pollock Open Knowledge External Open Access Open/Closed http://blog.okfn.org/2007/10/22/open-access-quantitative-mrnaprotein-dataset/ The RIKEN Research Center for Allergy and Immunology in Japan have just released RefDic, “an open-access database of quantitative mRNA/Protein profiles specifically for immune cells”:

http://refdic.rcai.riken.jp/

A prepublication epub has been posted on pubmeb giving more information entitled Construction of an open-access database that integrates cross-reference information from the transcriptome and proteome of immune cells and we’ve also created a CKAN pacakge page for RefDIC.

While its great that the creators of RefDIC have made it available like this, as noted on the CKAN page, RefDIC isn’t actually fully open (or open-access) despite its claims. For example, its faq states:

Is all of the data in this database available for free?

Yes. All of the data in RefDIC is freely available as long as it is not used for commercial purposes. If you belong to a commercial entitiy, please contact us.

This restriction on commercial usage violates the “No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor” clause (no. eight) of the open knowledge definition and is also incompatible with the “Budapest-Bethseda-Berlin” definition of open access which requires free access for all — though whether free commercial reuse is required by BBB is unclear. (The use of the term ‘open access’ here is also a little unusual since open access has tended to focus on copyrightable material in general, and scholarly publications in particular. Here, by contrast, the material being made available is a database.)

Nevertheless its good to see people starting to putting data out there like this and we hope to see more like it.

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]]> http://blog.okfn.org/2007/10/22/open-access-quantitative-mrnaprotein-dataset/feed/ Discussion forum for PSI re-use request service http://blog.okfn.org/2007/10/12/discussion-forum-for-psi-re-use-request-service/ http://blog.okfn.org/2007/10/12/discussion-forum-for-psi-re-use-request-service/#comments Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:43:05 +0000 Jonathan Gray Policy External Open Access http://blog.okfn.org/2007/10/12/discussion-forum-for-psi-re-use-request-service/ Nick Holmes of Binary Law wrote to tell us about the Office of Public Sector Information’s forum for a new PSI re-use request service. His blog post about the forum is here.

As noted in the forum description, the service is being built in response to recommendation 8 in the Power of Information Review by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg, published in June:

Recommendation 8. To improve government’s responsiveness to demand for public sector information, by July 2008 OPSI should create a web-based channel to gather and assess requests for publication of public sector information.

In the inaugral post from 5th September, John Sheridan (Head of e-Services at OPSI) says:

The government has accepted this recommendation and OPSI would like to engage with the re-user community with setting this new web-channel up. This is why we have set up this discussion forum, to hear your views and discuss our plans.

We hope those with an interest in re-using PSI let their thoughts be known!

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]]> http://blog.okfn.org/2007/10/12/discussion-forum-for-psi-re-use-request-service/feed/ Articles in CTWatch Quarterly http://blog.okfn.org/2007/09/04/articles-in-ctwatch-quarterly/ http://blog.okfn.org/2007/09/04/articles-in-ctwatch-quarterly/#comments Tue, 04 Sep 2007 12:57:47 +0000 Jonathan Gray Process Open Knowledge Open Data External Open Access http://blog.okfn.org/2007/09/04/articles-in-ctwatch-quarterly/ As some of you many have seen, Open Knowledge Foundation advisory board members Peter Suber and John Wilbanks recently wrote two interesting articles in CTWatch Quarterly.

Peter Suber’s Trends Favoring Open Access is a broad-ranging overview of developments in publishing, research, and technology that look to support Open Access. As well as looking at how publishers and scholars are accepting and adopting OA models, he suggests that misunderstanding about OA is diminishing:

Everyone is getting used to the idea that OA literature can be copyrighted, the idea that OA literature can be peer-reviewed, the idea that the expenses for producing OA literature can be recovered, and the idea that OA and TA literature can co-exist (even for the same work).

While OA supporters have “good arguments and good trends”, he warns that we may see greater lobbying against OA policies in the US and Europe.

John Wilbanks’ Cyberinfrastructure For Knowledge Sharing looks at the way knowledge is shared in the sciences, particularly focusing on the life sciences and with respect to drug development. He says:

While the Web and email pervade pharmaceutical companies, the elusive goal remains “knowledge management:” finding some way to bring sanity to the sprawling mass of figures, emails, data sets, databases, slide shows, spreadsheets, and sequences that underpin advanced life sciences research.

He suggests that though technologies that could facilitate improved knowledge sharing already exist, the problem is that much scientific content is ‘dark’ to the web - “no one has the right to download and index with scholarly literature without burning years of time and money in negotiations”.

He goes on to look at the Neurocommons project - “an open source, open access knowledge management platform, with an initial therapeutic focus on the neurosciences” - as a good example of knowledge sharing in the sciences. Finally, he suggests a list of things that are needed to improve the situation:

We need publishers to look for business models that aren’t based on locking up the full text, because the contents of the journals – the knowledge – is itself part of the infrastructure, and closed infrastructure doesn’t yield network effects. We need open, stable namespaces for scientific entities that we can use in programming and integrating databases on the open Web, because stable names are part of the infrastructure. We need real solutions about long-term preservation of data (long-term meaning a hundred years or more). We need new browsers and better text processing. We need a sense of what it means to “publish” in a truly digital sense, in place of the digitization of the paper metaphor we have in the PDF format. We need infrastructure that makes it easy to share and integrate knowledge, not just publish it on the Web.

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]]> http://blog.okfn.org/2007/09/04/articles-in-ctwatch-quarterly/feed/ ‘Voyages into publisher copyright’ http://blog.okfn.org/2007/07/14/voyages-into-publisher-copyright/ http://blog.okfn.org/2007/07/14/voyages-into-publisher-copyright/#comments Sat, 14 Jul 2007 18:24:10 +0000 Jonathan Gray Open Access http://blog.okfn.org/2007/07/14/voyages-into-publisher-copyright/ Peter Murray-Rust of the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge, has recently been looking into the licensing practices and access policies of publishers of science journals. He has particularly focused on the publishers of chemistry journals who say they endorse Open Access publishing, or what has come to be known as ‘Open Choice’ publishing, whereby authors can pay a fee in order to make their article freely available. He has written about his findings in a series of entries on his blog.

His first post begins by arguing for the importance of Open Access in scientific publishing and data. He cites BioMed Central, PLoS and the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry as examples of good practice in open access scientific publishing - as they all display clear or well-known license agreements in all the relevant places, which state that material of access, re-use and re-distribution. It is, he emphasises, ‘instantly clear what is going on’. He says:

[…] So the practice for ‘full open access’ is simple:
  • announce the policy on the journal masthead
  • announce the policy in the TOC by each Open Access article
  • put appropriate copyright notices (i.e. NOT the publisher, but the authors) in the paper and accompany them by a clear statement of the terms of re-use. This is most easily done by a simple inclusion of a well-known and understood license. The publisher might, if they wish, create their own license with the same intent but different words, but why bother?

The second post reviews the American Chemical Society’s AuthorChoice option. He applauds the clarity of their scheme - particularly their use of the term ‘Free Access’ as distinct from Open Access (as re-distribution and re-use are limited). However he suggests that there is room for improvement in how Free Access articles are advertised - as clicking through from their abstract leads to a page asking for subscription details.

The third post reviews Blackwell’s Online Open scheme. The scheme allows certain reproduction rights to authors of the articles, and allows third parties to use the articles under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. While this means that the material is not truly open (as redistribution and re-use are restricted - especially for the author) Blackwell at least make the status of ‘Online Open’ articles clear with a footnote on the first page which contains licensing information.

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]]> http://blog.okfn.org/2007/07/14/voyages-into-publisher-copyright/feed/ Open Knowledge 1.0 Nearly Here http://blog.okfn.org/2007/03/08/open-knowledge-10-nearly-here/ http://blog.okfn.org/2007/03/08/open-knowledge-10-nearly-here/#comments Thu, 08 Mar 2007 11:23:43 +0000 Rufus Pollock News Events Open Knowledge Open Geodata Open Data Open Access http://blog.okfn.org/2007/03/08/open-knowledge-10-nearly-here/ Open Knowledge 1.0, which takes place on Saturday March the 17th at Limehouse Town Hall in London, is now just over a week away. While there are still some places left we are nearing capacity so, if you would like to come, we advise you to register as soon as possible via: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/

Open Knowledge 1.0

On the 17th March 2007 the first all-day Open Knowledge event is taking place in London. This event will bring together individuals and groups from across the open knowledge spectrum and includes panels on open media, open geodata and open scientific and civic information.

The event is open to all but we encourage you to register because space is limited. A small entrance fee of £10 is planned to help pay for costs but concessions are available.

Speakers

Open Scientific and Civic Data

  • Tim Hubbard, leader of the Human Genome Analysis Group at the Sanger Institute
  • Peter Murray-Rust, Professor in the Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics at Cambridge University
  • John Sheridan, Head of e-Services at the Office of Public Sector Information

Geodata and Civic Information

  • Ed Parsons, until recently CTO of the Ordnance Survey
  • Steve Coast, founder of Open Street Map
  • Charles Arthur, freeourdata.org.uk and Technology Editor of the Guardian

Open Media

  • Paula Ledieu, formerly Director of the BBC’s Creative Archive project and now Managing Director and Director of Open Media for Magic Lantern Productions
  • Susana Noguero and Olivier Schulbaum of Platoniq
  • Zoe Young of http://www.transmission.cc/

Open Space

Lightning talks and mini-presentations. See: http://okfn.org/wiki/okcon/

Theme: Atomisation and Commercial Opportunity

Discussions of ‘Open Knowledge’ often end with licensing wars: legal arguments, technicalities, and ethics. While those debates rage on, Open Knowledge 1.0 will concentrate on two pragmatic and often-overlooked aspects of Open Knowledge: atomisation and commercial possibility.

Atomisation on a large scale (such as in the Debian ‘apt’ packaging system) has allowed large software projects to employ an amazing degree of decentralised, collaborative and incremental development. But what other kinds of knowledge can be atomised? What are the opportunities and problems of this approach for forms of knowledge other than Software?

Atomisation also holds a key to commercial opportunity: unrestricted access to an ever-changing, atomised landscape of knowledge creates commercial opportunities that are not available with proprietary approaches. What examples are there of commercial systems that function with Open Knowledge, and how can those systems be shared?

Bringing together open threads from Science, Geodata, Civic Information and Media, Open Knowledge 1.0 is an opportunity for people and projects to meet, talk and plan things.

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]]> http://blog.okfn.org/2007/03/08/open-knowledge-10-nearly-here/feed/ Berlin Open Access Conference No. 5: From Practice to Impact: Consequences on Knowledge Dissemination http://blog.okfn.org/2007/02/28/berlin-open-access-conference-no-5-from-practice-to-impact-consequences-on-knowledge-dissemination/ http://blog.okfn.org/2007/02/28/berlin-open-access-conference-no-5-from-practice-to-impact-consequences-on-knowledge-dissemination/#comments Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:00:52 +0000 Rufus Pollock Open Knowledge Open Data External Open Access http://blog.okfn.org/2007/02/28/berlin-open-access-conference-no-5-from-practice-to-impact-consequences-on-knowledge-dissemination/ The next Open Access conference in the Berlin Declaration follow-up series (the 5th) will take place September 19 - 21, 2007 at the University of Padua. The preliminary programme includes:

…

c) Open Access and the e-science: how to support the free circulation of scientific raw data to facilitate cooperation and effective reuse;

d) e-publishing: the emerging of new strategies in scientific data dissemination; estimate of the impact in OA journals: new tools for scholarly evaluation in the growing layer of Open Access publications; the perspective of a changing landscape in the scientific journals policies; progress reports on the transition from reader-pays to author-pays models;

e) ICT developments and collaborations that support e-publishing and Open Access.

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