UK Parliament issues report on Open Access to Scientific Information
January 27, 2012
The Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology released PostNote 397 concerning recommendations to promote wider sharing of research information. It identifies challengesas well as benefits to providing OA to publications and research data, highlights cross-cutting issues, and delivers such recommendations as:
- Open Access (OA) to scientific publications could provide more effective dissemination of research and thus increase its impact.
- The costs and benefits of different models of providing OA to publications need to be considered if a comprehensive shift to OA is to be financially sustainable.
- OA to research data could enable others to validate findings and re-use data to advanceknowledge and promote innovation.
- Sharing data openly requires effective data management and archiving. It also presents challenges relating to protecting intellectual property and privacy.
- Expanding access to scientific information requires researchers, librarians, higher education institutions, funding agencies and publishers, to continue to work together.
The full report is available here.
COMMUNIA responds to PSI Directive proposals
January 22, 2012
The COMMUNIA International Association submitted its second policy paper, this in reaction to the European Commission’s proposal to amend the Directive on re-use of public sector information (2003/98/EC).
COMMUNIA is supportive of the Commission’s suggested changes to the PSI Directive — most notably the decision to include cultural heritage institutions into the scope of the amended Directive. The paper draws attention to two issues where the proposal to amend the Directive should be improved. The first one recommends more consistent permissioning terms for use of public sector information that falls within the scope of the Directive and the second urges the inclusion of public domain content that is held by libraries, museums and archives.
iCommons Ltd is a member of COMMUNIA.
SCRIPTed moves to new host
January 16, 2012
SCRIPTed, the open access Journal of Law, Technology & Society published by the SCRIPT Centre in Edinburgh has announced a move to its own servers where it will become one of the first WordPress-based journals. The back catalog will be transferred to the new site during the next few months.
Founded by Professors Lilian Edwards and Graeme Laurie, the journal is an online, international, interdisciplinary and multi-lingual journal of peer-reviewed articles, analysis pieces, case and legislation critiques, as well as commentaries, reports, and book reviews pertaining to law, society, and technologies in the broadest sense.
SCRIPTed draws on a thriving postgraduate community of students from around the world and benefits from the close ties of that community with the Faculty of Law. The Editorial Board is assisted by an Advisory Board of internationally-renowned experts drawn from the disciplines of intellectual property, information technology, medical law, artificial intelligence, communications law and E-commerce.
Further assistance for authors and artists can be found in the Submission Guidelines.
Searching for free content with Let’s CC
January 6, 2012
Jay Yoon and the team at CC Korea have produced a new search engine to locate open content, Let’s CC at http://eng.letscc.net .
Let’s CC offers quick and easy access to search services provided by some companies from one single page like search.creativecommons.org. It makes use of the APIs provided by Fiickr, Jamendo, ccMixter, Youtube and Slideshare, so you can find CC-licensed images, sounds, videos and docs at once with just one click. Users can also save favorite contents, add tags to them, search them and check favorite contents of all users. Let’s CC also allows users to display favorites located the top of search results so as to find more relevant contents easily.
Feedback is welcome at creative@cckorea.org .
EC Open Data strategy for Europe
December 23, 2011
The European Commission has announced an Open Data strategy for Europe.
All data generated by public bodies, will be made available for re-use. Open data will be the norm, rather than the exception, and the EC aims to puts itself in “the top of the class”, Commissioner Kroes said.
The EC itself will open up its data for re-use in the first half of 2012, with a test version of the data portal to provide that access already being ready. Other agencies will be pushed to join that initiative, which is to serve as an example for individual Member States. “We will dare the Member States” to outdo the EC in opening up data, was the challenge Mrs Kroes put before other public sector bodies.
The Commission proposes to update the 2003 Directive on the re-use of public sector information (PSI Directive 2003/98) by:
- Making it a general rule that all documents made accessible by public sector bodies can be re-used for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, unless protected by third party copyright;
- Establishing the principle that public bodies should not be allowed to charge more than costs triggered by the individual request for data (marginal costs); in practice this means most data will be offered for free or virtually for free, unless duly justified.
- Making it compulsory to provide data in commonly-used, machine-readable formats, to ensure data can be effectively re-used.
- Introducing regulatory oversight to enforce these principles;
- Massively expanding the reach of the Directive to include libraries, museums and archives for the first time; the existing 2003 rules will apply to data from such institutions.
