• 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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In fact the situation is quite the opposite. Most libraries appear to implicitly or explicitly exert rights over their data with some libraries licensing access to their catalogue data for substantial sums of money. The following lists some of the examples (both closed and open) that we know of:

• Library of congress: public domain in the US (or at least free) but copyrighted outside the US. See [1] and comments in in fred2.0 readme which state:

  These data are works of the United States Government and as such are not subject to copyright within the United States. (17 U.S.C §105).

  The Library of Congress has copyrighted these data for use outside the United States. Contact the LC for permission prior to use or distribution of this data outside the United States. [http://www.loc.gov/cds/mds.html]

• fred2.0 (fred2.0 CKAN package): an excellent example of the effort to make material available but unfortunately has same restrictions as Library of Congress (from which the material is sourced).
• British Library: closed (and apparently gets sold for substantial sums).
• OCLC/Worldcat: closed. See the OCLC CKAN page.
• Barton/Simile: semi-open. Sourced from OCLC. Originally taken down but now back under CC non-commercial. See [1] for further discussion.
• OpenLibrary: in theory open (though no formal license or dump as yet and some material may have been sourced from LoC making it suspect outside of the US)
• isbndb.com: not really fully bibliographic data and status uncertain (see isbndb.com CKAN page)

• LibraryThing: closed. Does not seem to make data available and source would likely make this problematic (from the about page):

  LibraryThing uses Amazon and libraries that provide open access to their collections with the Z39.50 protocol. The protocol is used by a variety of desktop programs, notably bibliographic software like EndNote. LibraryThing appears to be the first mainstream web use.

As we continue to search for open sources of bibliographic data we’d love to hear from anyone who knows of examples not already on this list.

[1] http://www.bookism.org/open/2007/04/02/open-data-what-would-kilgour-think/

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• 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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The aim of the working group is to:

Present findings on how bibliographic control and other descriptive practices can effectively support management of and access to library materials in the evolving information and technology environment.

They will make recommendations for the library world in general, and the Library of Congress in particular. The group includes representatives from:

• the American Association of Law Libraries
• the American Library Association
• the Association of Research Libraries
• the Special Libraries Association
• Google
• Microsoft
• the Coalition for Networked Information
• OCLC

Some notes on the draft

The draft continually emphasises that our information environment is changing and that libraries must seek to keep abreast of these changes through new policies and new kinds of partnerships. Alongside urges for libraries to take heed of nontraditional third party content (e.g. book reviews, cover images), and to work towards new kinds of shared standards, there is mention of greater sharing of bibliographic material.

Paragraphs such as the following suggest that the authors are proposing new ways of ‘opening up’ silos of bibliographic data:

“The future of bibliographic control will be collaborative, decentralized, international in scope, and Web-based. Its realization will occur in cooperation with the private sector, and with the active collaboration of library users. Data will be gathered from multiple sources; change will happen quickly; and bibliographic control will be dynamic, not static. The underlying technology that makes this future possible and necessary—the World Wide Web—is now almost two decades old. Libraries must continue the transition to this future without delay in order to retain their relevance as information providers.” (p.1)

“Library bibliographic data will move from the closed database model to the open Web-based model wherein records are addressable by programs and are in formats that can be easily integrated into Web services and computer applications. This will enable libraries to make better use of networked data resources and to take advantage of the relationships that exist (or could be made to exist) among various data sources on the Web.” (p.23)

“The Working Group envisions a bibliographic infrastructure wherein data about entities of interest (e.g., works, places, people, concepts, and chronological periods) are encoded in agreed-upon ways and made available through agreed-upon Web protocols for ready and efficient use by other applications and services. LC and the library community need to find ways of “releasing the value” of the rich historic investment in semantic data onto the Web.” (p.29)

Moreover, the first of the five key recommendations made by the group is to:

“Increase the efficiency of bibliographic production for all libraries through increased cooperation and increased sharing of bibliographic records, and by maximizing the use of data produced throughout the entire “supply chain” for information resources.” (p.1)

More particularly, recommendations include:

1.1.1.5 All: Work with resource providers to coordinate data sharing in a way that works well for all partners. (p.12)

1.1.4.1 LC: Convene a representative group consisting of libraries (large and small), vendors, and OCLC members to address costs, barriers to change, and the value of potential gains arising from greater sharing of data, and to develop recommendations for change. 1.1.4.2 LC: Promote widespread discussion of barriers to sharing data. 1.1.4.3 LC: Reevaluate the pricing of LC’s product line with a view to developing a business model that enables more substantial cost recovery. (p. 13)

However, there is no specific mention of licensing policies for bibliographic data per se. While there is talk of new ways of sharing bibliographic material, there is a resounding silence regarding blanket licensing of the data - particularly open licensing - which would allow anyone to re-use the data, from technology companies to individual enthusiasts. Without further clarification, the draft might imply that sharing and collaboration with regard to bibliographic material might extend only to other libraries and companies who are willing to take a more active role in adding value to the material by developing new products or services. As the authors state:

“Once considered a public good, information access is today a commodity in a rapidly-growing marketplace.” (p. 12)

While of course cost-benefit analysis will be involved in taking licensing policy decisions, and it unsurprising open licensing of bibliographic data is not outrightly recommended for all libraries - it does seem surprising that open licensing is not even mentioned in the draft. (As an aside: surely as a US government operation, material produced by the Library of Congress is exempt from copyright - and hence effectively open by default, at least in the US?)

Open bibliographic data?

While prominent bibliographic projects such as OCLC are closed (see the oclc package entry in CKAN), projects such as The Open Library (which we’ve blogged about here and here) exemplify the benefits of an open approach. (See this post on Jay Datema’s blog for an interesting view of open licensing for bibliographic data.)

Open bibliographic data could brings about significant benefits to the general public (by allowing anyone to redistribute, re-use, and build on it), as well as to other institutions and commercial developers.

The British Library has recently released a press release in which CEO Lynne Brindley declares the current balance between private rights and the public domain is “not working”. Though their bibliographic data is closed (as are the products of their digitisation efforts), Lynne’s recent statement is germane:

“I think we at the British Library, echoing the intent of the Adelphi Charter, believe that while market economics are very important, the public interest also needs to be actively protected – this can be done in many different ways but one important, if not the most important way, is through enlightened and well informed legislation balancing the conflicting public and private interests that seek to create and inform our IP regime. There is a need for real innovation in business models and for the legislation to become fit-for-purpose for the digital age.”

We hope that the working group add explicit mention of the potential benefits of open licensing to their report. It would be great if the Library of Congress got a wealth of responses to their draft from the open knowledge community!

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Though part of the project seems to involve soliciting for feedback for what ‘public art’ is, and means, Big Art Mob also looks to endorse adopt a legal definition of ‘public art’:

The Copyright, Designs and Patents act 1988 defines Public Art as sculptures, buildings, models for buildings and “works of artistic craftsmanship” which are permanently situated in a public place or in premises open to the public. This means you cannot walk into a gallery, for example, even a public gallery, and photograph a painting to send to Big Art Mob. Likewise you cannot go to a privately owned place, say a stately home, and photograph and send pictures of art there without permission.

This is a convenient way to try to avoid possible copyright infringement, or other legal difficulties surrounding the images that users submit. In keeping with the ‘public spirit’ of the project, the terms and conditions state that images contributed will be made available to others under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

It looks like a great project, and as well as being one of the first broadcaster endorsements of mobile blogging (as many people have pointed out), its looks as if it could generate a significant collection of CC licensed images displayed on the Big Art Map. However it would be even better if their images were fully open, and if the project made raw dumps of site location data and associated tags available for others to re-use!

The potential of open heritage resources - and an anecdote

Some of us at the OKF have been brainstorming about local heritage projects like this for a while. One line of thought is that linking user-generated material (including material from Flickr, Wikipedia, and so on) to material from local museums, libraries and archives could encourage the growth of a ‘public information ecology’ for local heritage. Naturally we think open licensing would help such an ecology to flourish - and would let developers to experiment with different kinds of interfaces to enable users explore, modify, extract and reuse material they are interested in. ‘Public art’ such as architecture, sculpture, and other landmarks is ideal subject matter for this!

I started thinking about the potential of open local heritage resources after my father and I spotted a stained glass window we both liked in a country church. He sent a picture of it to me (from his mobile phone), and later I tried to find out who might have done it. I was amazed at how much enthusiast-generated information was out there. For example, Stained Glass Window Records contains over 20,000 records from one hobbyist! After finding the organisation who invoiced the church for the glass I was able to narrow down the possible artists by comparing my picture with other images available on personal websites - until I spotted a striking resemblance with another window from the same period. I was furnished with a rough biography by cross-referencing Maltese genealogy and newspaper records.

This kind of impromptu amateur research has only fairly recently become possible. Many freely available resources out there are still not open. Imagine what kinds of applications would be possible if more hobbyists and institutions allowed the fruits of their labour to be re-combined and built upon!

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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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The “Why does the DDC exist?” page states:

Data are being provided by the DDC over the World Wide Web. All research groups supplying datasets have agreed to these being in the public domain. The data are provided free of charge, but all users are requested to register to ensure both that the data are used for public scientific research rather than for commercial applications and also that they can be informed of possible modifications, additions and other new developments at the DDC.

It is unfortunate that the Centre is restricting commerical re-use of the datasets they provide - especially given that many important environmental datasets are produced by US government research groups and are effectively open.

Some datasets have more specific licensing information or terms of use, such as the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios 4th Asessment Report (SRES-AR4) Global Climate Model data page, which states:

These data are licensed for use in Research Projects only. A ‘Research Project’ is any project organised by a university, a scientific institute, or similar organisation (private or public), for non-commercial research purposes only. A necessary condition of the recognition of non-commercial purposes is that all the results obtained are openly available at delivery costs only, without any delay linked to commercial objectives, and that the research itself is submitted for open publication.

It would be great if more data producers and distributors had clearer metadata about the licensing and terms of use of their datasets! This would allow a more fine-grained approach to re-use, as opposed to the blanket approach of the IPCC DDC, and several other environmental dataset distributors.

(As an aside: we’ve started an Open Environmental Data wiki page and we’d warmly welcome any contributions to this!)

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Here are some belated jottings…

Opening talk by Natalie Ceeney, Chief Executive of The National Archives

• She described the differences between digitised and ‘born digital’ sources.
• Fine Rolls Henry III is an exemplary digitisation project. It publishes rolls from 1216-1248.
  • N.B. Access is free, but copyright page says: “© Crown copyright images reproduced by permission of The National Archives, London, England. […] Images may be used only for purposes of research, private study or education.”
• Your Archives wiki allows users to contribute their knowledge about archival sources.
  • N.B. Terms and conditions of use stipulate that material may be used for personal/noncommercial purposes, and for online sources users must link to the wiki rather than reproducing/redistributing content.
• Majority of the material the NA is currently archiving is already in digital form (e-mails, document files, etc.) - albeit dispersed in different places, and in different formats.
• There is a vast amount of material being produced. NA are soliciting for advice from historians to help predict trends in historical research in order to help them decide what kinds of material to focus on and prioritise.

Richard Boulderstone, Director of e-Strategy and Information Systems at the British Library

• Asked whether future of historical research was digital and interactive.
• Current cost of digitisation at the British Library is around £1/page.
• There are a limited number of funding sources: JISC, Google, Microsoft, Heritage Lottery Fund, patrons, international, government and EU sources.
• Procedure for digitisation includes: selection, OCR, metadata, hosting, rights clearance.
• Emphasised the importance of the ‘look and feel’ of the products of digitisation.
• Alluded to Conference of European National Libraries survey on digitisation from 2006, which said 4.7m items had been digitised of over 400m physical items held. British library has digitised 230k items and projects a figure of 17m for 2012.
  • It’d be great to see the sources for these figures. I’ve had a quick look around CENL, TEL, EDL and other sites without success.
• Newspapers account for 41% of digitisation efforts. He suggested that it could be fruitful for various EU newspaper digitisation projects to work together.
• UK has relatively little funding for digitisation projects, compared to other EU countries. Funds from JISC and Microsoft.
• Digitisation is in its infancy. Problems with storage and interoperability. Copyright issues.
• ArXiv as an example of a successful digital archive project.
• European National Libraries will have digitised 4% of holdings by 2012.
• Reiterated main issues with digitisation: funding, standards, copyright, technology, interoperability.
• Rufus asked about copyright of products of digitisation and Richard said that the British Library were asserting full copyright for economic reasons.

Tim Hitchcock, Co-author/director of Old Bailey Online

• Spoke about the impact on historical research and research methodology of different technologies of storage, retrieval and classification.
• He described how the material that is available strongly affects the kinds of areas historians choose to study and cited art history as a good example of this - increased availability of a wide variety of images has led an increase in the diversity of research.
• New ways of organising and searching material (such as tagging/keyword searching) open up research and collapse traditional disciplinary boundaries (e.g. as in Dewey/Library of Congress classification schemes).
• More possible to re-construct the biography of an ordinary individual from various digitised sources (such as Old Bailey Online).

Historians from the University of Roehampton, the Institute of Historical Research, and the Centre for Contemporary British History spoke of specific experiences using and providing digital resources for historical research.

Many of the participants I spoke to afterwords agreed it would be great to see more open digital resources for historical education and research!

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“British History Online is the digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles. Created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust, we aim to support academic and personal users around the world in their learning, teaching and research.”

Great stuff. And it looks like they are doing a fine job. For example, a quick browse indicates a recent addition was “A Catalogue of Ancient Deeds”, a digitization of a work originally produced by a Mr H. C. Maxwell Lyte in 1890. Obscure material perhaps but undoubtedly of worth and precisely the kind whose value would be maximized by being made open free for anyone to use, reuse and redistribute. In particular it’s good to remember the The Many Minds Principle (the coolest thing to do with your material will be thought of by someone else) and what it means in this context:

• Openness would permit re-presentation of the material in different formats, different layouts and even different media (you want it in plain text: no problem, you want to mark it up in fancy xml — or even RDF: no problem …).
• Openness would permit recombination of this material with other sources. After all much of this kind of material, while interesting, on its own has limited value. By interlinking, annotating and combining it with other data and content we can multiply its utility massively.
• Openness would permit redistribution, easier archiving and distributed hosting (the site’s down: no problem here’s a mirror).

But surprise, surprise what do we find at the bottom of very page:

“Copyright © 2007 University of London & History of Parliament Trust - All rights reserved”

Taking a look at their terms and conditions we find:

…

1. Licence

Unless otherwise stated, the copyright and other intellectual property rights in all material on this site, including photographs and graphical images, and the organisation and layout of the site are owned or controlled by the University of London or the History of Parliament Trust.

You are permitted to access, print and download extracts from this site on the following conditions:

• use of all material on this site is for information and for non-commercial or your own personal use only; any copies of these pages saved to disk or to any other storage medium may only be used for subsequent viewing purposes or to print extracts for non-commercial or your own personal use,

ed: do they have some kind of business model here or is this just “let’s restrict just in case”. Do they also realize that:

• (for example) hosting this material on a site which ran ads (just like they do) likely counts as commercial (and just the uncertainty as to whether or it is or not is a deal-killer)
• they’ve just excluded a large number of those who might be interested in archiving (e.g. Google) or promoting this material (producers of open educational materials for schools).

• material on this site must not be modified in any way,

ed: ok, so there goes reuse

• graphics on this site must not be used separately from accompanying text, and

ed: why?

• any use of the material for a permitted purpose must be accompanied by (i) a full source citation; (ii) the University of London and History of Parliament Trust copyright notice; and (iii) this permission notice.

No part of this site may be reproduced or stored in any other web site or included in any public or private electronic retrieval system or service without the University of London and History of Parliament Trust’s prior written permission.

ed: ok so even if I felt public-spirited and wanted to archive this — and I probably couldn’t even redistribute it — I’d need to ask permission. Really makes it an attractive proposition.

The University of London and History of Parliament Trust reserve all rights not expressly granted in these terms. [ed: one final irony is that much of the stuff on there appears to be (at least in its original unprocessed form) public domain!]

Fantastic, we’ve now pretty much disallowed all uses except plain access and printing (for non-commercial and personal purposes). Given their concern about commercial usage, one really has to wonder what revenue streams they have (or expect to develop) from the likes of “A Descriptive Catalogue of Ancient Deeds” or “Feet of fine for Sussex for 1190-1509″.

Moreover, like so many others, they just don’t get that the main benefits of making material digital is the potential for reuse, representation and distributed archiving and distribution. Let’s repeat one more time:

The Best Thing To Do With Your Material Will Be Thought of By Someone Else

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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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