Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog

Over the past week or so there has been a flurry of posts about ’strong’ and ‘weak’ open access, including the following:

• Strong and weak OA, Peter Suber
• What’s in a Name? Strong and Weak Open Access, Glyn Moody
• The Two Forms of OA Have Been Defined: They Now Need Value-Neutral Names, Stevan Harnad
• Lower Bound Needed for Permission-Barrier-Free Open Access, Stevan Harnad
• Peter Suber on what is strongOA, Peter Murray-Rust
• Further discussion on strongOA and weakOA, Peter Murray-Rust
• How many forms of OA are there now?, Peter Murray-Rust
• Peter Suber’s comments on strongOA/weakOA, Peter Murray-Rust
• Suber-Harnad strongOA/weakOA borderline, Peter Murray-Rust
• More clarification from Stevan Harnad, Peter Murray-Rust

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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We’ve just added a Basque translation of the Open Knowledge Definition - thanks to Gotzon Egia.

If you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, or if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info at the OKF’s domain name.

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Following on from a spate of fresh translations of the Open Knowledge Definition last week, we’ve just added translations in Spanish and Catalan - thanks to Ignasi Labastida i Juan of CC Spain and CC Catalonia.

Once again - if you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, of if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info at the OKF’s domain name.

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We’re on a bit of a roll with translations of the Open Knowledge Definition! We’ve now got a Polish translation thanks to Jarosław Lipszyc.

Again - if you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, of if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info at the OKF’s domain name.

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We’ve now added a Danish translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) to opendefinition.org - thanks to Peter Froberg.

We look foward to adding more translations in the near future. If you would like to help out translating the Definition into another language - please don’t hesitate to get in touch on our discuss list.

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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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We are pleased to announce the launch of an Advisory Council for opendefinition.org. The Council will be formally responsible for maintaining and developing the Definitions and associated material found on the Open Definition site - including the Open Knowledge Definition and the Open Service Definition. As many of you will know, these definitions aim to provide clear and succinct sets of conditions for ‘openness’ in knowledge and services.

Jordan Hatcher of opencontentlawyer.com has kindly agreed to be Chair of the Council, which includes:

• Paul Jacobson, iCommons
• Paul Miller, Talis
• Peter Murray-Rust, Cambridge University
• Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation & Cambridge University
• Rob Styles, Talis
• Peter Suber, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) & Earlham College
• Luis Villa, Columbia Law School, GNOME Foundation & Open Source Initiative
• Jo Walsh, Open Knowledge Foundation & Open Source Geo-Spatial Foundation
• John Wilbanks, Science Commons

More detailed biographies are available on the Advisory Council page.

It is our intention that the overall development of the material on the site will continue in the same community based and collaborative manner. The Council’s role will be to provide oversight, guidance and input into this process, not to replace it.

This is fantastic news for the definitions projects!

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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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Last week I attended the Jornadas gvSIG, the developer/user gathering for the open source GIS project supported by the regional government in Valencia. There seems to be a very supportive climate towards free software and open licensed data in Spain. I was impressed to hear people from commercial consultancies and local government information and infrastructure departments talking so strongly about software libre and the need to compartir el conocimiento, where tecnologia proprietaria has no place in a proyecto cooperativo. Government is increasingly moving toward an explicit Creative Commons based open licensing approach to public data and its Spatial Data Infrastructure - census data, political and administrative shapes, street networks and aerial imagery - all kinds of geographic information, open and libre.

Our household only knows about Indo-European languages, but can’t think of another language than English where a distinction between libre (free) and gratis (free) isn’t explicitly made. Talk of datos libres or freie daten has both rhetorical strength and public plausibility in a way in which free, in English, hasn’t. The term “open source software” originally came about as a softening of the term “free software”, in an attempt to introduce a non-radical plausibility. Free and Open Source software can be essentially the same thing, under a different name, open licensed in the same way.

In the last few weeks I’ve heard of Google’s launch of “OpenSocial” and its bootstrapping of the “Open Handset Alliance”. The latter, certainly, is based on patent/license-encumbered hardware and not offering an “Open Platform” that will run on more truly libre telephony hardware platforms such as OpenMoko. How libre is “open”, in these cases? How libre can a system be that relies on data formats and hardware recipes that require royalties and/or membership of a consortium in order to use it?

In such circumstances I am very glad an effort like opendefinition.org, attempting to describe a yardstick by which the libre qualities of open data, data service, data format, works can be assessed. I hope that, in helping to keep the definition of usefully “open” clear, this may help to keep open free.

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This chemspider blog post expresses considerable uncertainty as to the respective roles and relationship of the Open (Knowledge/Data) Definition and Creative Commons. This kind of uncertainty, particularly as to whether the OD and CC are in some way competing ’standards’, is something I’ve increasingly encountered over the last year or so. I therefore really think this is something that it is important to clarify. Below is my effort to do so.

1. The Open Knowledge/Data definition is (like it says) a definition. It is not a license. In this respect it resembles the open source definition (on which it is modelled).

2. Its aim is to lay out a set of simple principles that make it clear what we mean when we say a ‘work’ (be it a dataset of a sonnet) is ‘open’. Informally this involves providing freedom of access, reuse and redistribution to the work (or rather providing freedom of access under a license that permits these things). The full set of principles can be found in the definition.

3. Like the open source definition it has a list of ‘conformant/compatible’ licenses. These may be found at: http://opendefinition.org/licenses/.

4. This is unlike Creative Commons whose explicit aim is to provide licenses. While all of the CC licenses are more ‘liberal’ (or ‘open’ even) than traditional copyright not all of the licenses are ‘open’ in the sense of the Definition.

5. This is not surprising — CC is about providing license choice and flexibility, not about providing a consistent set of licenses embodying a particular approach. In particular it is not the case that a particular CC license is ‘compatible’ with a given other CC license in the sense that one can intermix material made available under the different licenses. For example, any CC non-commercial license is incompatible with the CC Attribution-ShareAlike (by-sa) license.

6. By contrast one would hope and expect that any license which is conformant with the Open Knowledge/Data Definition would be compatible with any other such license — in the sense that one could freely combine two separate works made available under (different) open licenses together. This is important as one of the major benefits of an openness is to permit freedom of sharing and reuse in the open knowledge ‘commons’. Again this is very similar to the situation with the Open Source Definition.

7. Thus, in my opinion, the Definition is not a rival to Creative Commons but a complement which seeks to do something different. In particular the Definition does not develop licenses but CC does (many of which are conformant with the Definition). CC does not attempt to define a ’standard’ but the Definition clearly does. By linking to a CC license you are saying: my stuff is available under this specific license. When you link to the Open Definition you are saying: my stuff meets this general standard.

As an aside: I think this is where some people may get misled by the Creative Commons name since the set of CC licenses do not (necessarily) result in the creation of a “commons” — works made available under different CC licenses cannot necessarily be mixed together. (This is not a criticism of CC, by the way. At lease in terms of licenses, CC is about a wide choice. However it is noteworthy that recent CC project’s such as ccLearn have, I belive, explicitly focused on a particular (open) license — in ccLearn’s case CC Attribution).

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