Four Big Battles for EU Openness Happening Now

Something seems to be going on in the European Union. Over the next few weeks a range of really important debates and votes are taking place, all connected with openness in some way. Quite why everything is happening at once is not entirely clear - unless politicians are trying to get everything out of the way before their summer hols, perhaps....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Beyond Open Access: Open Source Scientific Software

Although the traditional image of a science laboratory typically consists of a room full of test tubes or microscopes, the reality is that computers now play a central role there, just as they do for business and life in general. 

On Techdirt.

Harvard And MIT Back Open Education With $60 Million Online Learning Project

News that Harvard University is the latest to join the growing revolt against the exorbitant pricing of academic journals caused something of a stir recently -- although it has been pointed out that its case would be stronger if it followed its own advice and made the Harvard Business Review open access, or at least cheaper.

On Techdirt.

Re-Inventing Public Libraries For The Digital Age

It would be something of an understatement to say that the world of public libraries is undergoing rapid change at the moment. On the one hand, the rise of open access means that people are increasingly able to find information online that was formerly held in serried ranks of volumes stored on library stacks. On the other, publishers' reluctance to allow ebooks to be lent out puts a key traditional function of libraries under threat. So what exactly should public libraries being doing in the digital age? Eric F. Van de Velde has written a a fascinating exploration of that question, along with a few suggestions. 

On Techdirt.

Even Harvard Can't Afford Subscriptions To Academic Journals; Pushes For Open Access

Techdirt has published several posts recently about the growing anger among scholars over the way their work is exploited by academic publishers. But there's another angle to the story, that of the academic institutions who have to pay for the journals needed by their professors and students. Via a number of people, we learn that the scholars' revolt has spread there, too: 

On Techdirt.

Open Access And The Art Of Contract Hacking

Open Access continues to gain momentum, as more and more researchers seek to make their work freely available online. One way of doing that is by modifying the contract that academic publishers routinely send to potential authors, inserting a clause that allows digital copies to be distributed. 

On Techdirt.

UK Publishers Association Outraged It Wasn't Consulted Ahead Of The Public Over Open Access To Publicly-Funded Research

While the global boycott of Elsevier by academics continues to gain momentum and signatures – at the time of writing, the number is approaching 9000 – there's an open access storm in a teacup brewing in the UK. 

On Techdirt.

USPTO Says Copies Of Academic Articles Submitted As Prior Art Are Covered By Fair Use

With all the heat that publishers are starting to feel from the academic community, you might have thought that they'd avoid upsetting anyone else. But it seems that some publishers have decided to go after lawyers who make patent applications that include copies of academic articles as prior art. As the PatentlyO blog explains: 

On Techdirt.

Will Academics' Boycott Of Elsevier Be The Tipping Point For Open Access -- Or Another Embarrassing Flop?

It's now widely recognized that the extreme demands of SOPA/PIPA catalyzed a new activism within the Net world, epitomized by the blackout effected by sites like Wikipedia on January 18. But as Techdirt has reported, SOPA and PIPA are not the only attacks by the copyright industries on the digital commons: another is the Research Works Act (RWA), which attempts to remove the public's right to read the articles written by tax-funded researchers in open access journals form. 

On Techdirt.

Do We Really Need Copyright For Academic Publishing?

QuestionCopyright has an interesting article about the role that open access might play in opening up China to new ideas. But what really caught my attention was the following section: 

On Techdirt.

Open Access Is Spreading -- But Is It Really Open Access?

The latest big boost to open access has come from in UK government's "Innovation and research strategy for growth" (pdf), which says: 

On Techdirt.

From Open Source to Open Research: Horizon 2020

Last week I took part in a meeting at the European Parliament entitled “Horizon 2020: Investing in the common good”. Here's the background:

On Open Enterprise blog.

UK Publishers Moan About Content Mining's Possible Problems; Dismiss Other Countries' Actual Experience

One of the recommendations made by the Hargreaves Review in the UK was that a text- and data-mining exception to copyright should be created, with the following explanation of why that made sense (PDF): 

On Techdirt.

Academic Publishing Profits Enough To Fund Open Access To Every Research Article In Every Field

The arguments against open access have moved on from the initial "it'll never work" to the "maybe it'll work, but it's not sustainable" stage. That raises a valid point, of course: who will pay for journals that make their content freely available online? 

On Techdirt.

Open Source, Open Science, Open Source Science

One of the key inspirations for the free software movement was the scientific tradition of sharing information and building on the work of others. That arose a few hundred years ago, at a time of rapid scientific progress:

On The H Open.

How Should We Liberate Knowledge?

Here's an interesting situation at the online academic repository JSTOR:

Last fall and winter, JSTOR experienced a significant misuse of our database. A substantial portion of our publisher partners’ content was downloaded in an unauthorized fashion using the network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of our participating institutions. The content taken was systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems.

On Open Enterprise blog.

How Should We Liberate Knowledge?

Here's an interesting situation at the online academic repository JSTOR:

Last fall and winter, JSTOR experienced a significant misuse of our database. A substantial portion of our publisher partners’ content was downloaded in an unauthorized fashion using the network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of our participating institutions. The content taken was systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Source's Kith and Kindred

One of the things that interests me is the way that the ideas underlying open source are being applied in other fields. That's something that I normally cover in my other blog, but sometimes things happen in those other domains that have ramifications back in the world of open source, and so may be of interest here.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Source and Open Research Computation

Free software was inspired in part by the scientific method, but it is only now that science is starting to apply free software's key insights. For example, opening up the source code would imply that scientific papers should be made freely available for anyone to read and use. And yet it is only in the last few years that this open access approach, as it is called, has made significant headway against the prevailing proprietary system, which says that you have to pay - often handsomely - if you want to read a paper.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Unacceptable Face of Copyright

Open access is about making copies of publicly-funded research available freely online. This stems from the belief that (a) having paid for it, the public has a right to see it and (b) a general view that access to knowledge should not be restricted to those that can pay for it (not least because it is precisely those that *cannot* pay who need it most).

Against that background, and of the growing success of open access in bringing knowledge to the developing countries, this is disgusting:

From 4 January Elsevier Journals withdrew access in Bangladesh to 1610 of its publications, including the Lancet stable of journals, which had been available through the World Health Organization’s Health Inter-Network for Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) programme. HINARI was set up in 2002 to enable not for profit institutions in developing countries to gain access online to more than 7000 biomedical and health titles either free or at very low cost.

Springer has withdrawn 588 of its journals from the programme in Bangladesh and Lippincott Williams and Wilkins 299 journals. The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society for Animal Science have withdrawn access to, respectively, two and three of their journals.

To add insult to injury, some of the articles published in those titles are by researchers who now cannot read them:

Tracey Koehlmoos, head of the health and family planning systems programme at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Dhaka, said, “We are a little less than 300 scientists eking out world class research on a shoestring budget without the purchasing power capacity of a big university in the West. HINARI has been our lifeline. My colleagues publish in many of these journals, and now we won’t even have access to our own papers.”

Companies publishing academic journals typically enjoy a profit margin of 30%; providing them free to scientists in *non-profit organisations* in developing countries will have an infinitesimal effect on their bottom lines.

It's sheer, unadulterated greed that seeks to squeeze some money out of those that have precious little of it, in effect stopping them spending it elsewhere where it is sorely needed. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that people will die as a knock-on consequence of that diversion of resources.

I do wonder how the well-paid fat-cats running these huge publishing conglomerates (disclosure: I once worked for part of Reed-Elsevier, so I have some experience of these things) look at themselves in the mirror after making decisions like this.

But at least their selfish and callous action does helpfully underline one of the big problems with copyright: the fact that it allows companies that didn't even produce the research that they publish, and to which they very often add very little value themselves, to decide who gets to read what ought to be the common heritage of humanity. In other words, it's an intellectual monopoly that is wielded with only profit maximisation in mind.

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