UK Parliament issues report on Open Access to Scientific Information

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:

The full report is available here.



COMMUNIA responds to PSI Directive proposals

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

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

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

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:

 



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