MIT - Credit: mysid on Wikipedia (R)

MIT has adopted a university-wide open access policy.

MIT Faculty Open-Access Policy

Passed by Unanimous of the Faculty, March 18, 2009

The Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author, who informs MIT of the reason.

To assist the Institute in distributing the scholarly articles, as of the date of publication, each Faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the Provost’s Office in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office.

The Provost’s Office will make the scholarly article available to the public in an open- access repository. The Office of the Provost, in consultation with the Faculty Committee on the Library System will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty.

The policy is to take effect immediately; it will be reviewed after five years by the Faculty Policy Committee, with a report presented to the Faculty.

The Faculty calls upon the Faculty Committee on the Library System to develop and monitor a plan for a service or mechanism that would render compliance with the policy as convenient for the faculty as possible.

It’d be nice if instead of this, they just said you must license your work under <insert CC license here>.  I prefer that over custom licensing policies.  This is great.  I hope other universities follow suit.  Oh, and sorry I haven’t been around lately.  I was offline the last week or so.

• Open Access News

Illustration of Human Skull. Credit: "65-5376-2" by otisarchives1 on Flickr (PD)

Mike Rhode, the chief archivist at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, a medical museum run by the US Army, has released hundreds of photographs from their digital archives on Flickr under a CC-BY license:

“You pay taxes. These are your pictures,” Rhode said. “You should be able to see them.”

The collection includes images of injured veterans, medical treatments (like the hernia operation above), the first airplane crash investigation, and public health warnings about the dangers lice posed to World War II soldiers.

[...]

“We have pictures from all types of military conflicts and all different types of medicine and issues in medicine,” Rhode said. “We love the stuff that we’re able to play with and want to bring it to everyone else in the world.”

While this is a great thing, there are some problems. First, if these photos were taken by US government personnel in the course of their duties — like, say, military archivists — shouldn’t these photos be in the public domain, not CC-BY? Also, why Flickr? There are better places to archive these public domain digital photos — the Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons both come to mind.

Again, this is a good thing, but the execution seems poor.

• Flickr page for archives
• Wired Blog article

Looks like YouTube is testing allowing users to post their work to their site under a Creative Commons license. Only official registered partners can participate in the pilot. They are also working on downloadable content, both gratis and for a fee paid with Google Checkout. It looks like the videos won’t be encumbered with digital restrictions management. I can certainly imagine the awful irony of CC’d works being put under the lock and key of DRM when you download them.

Will the downloads be subject to digital rights restrictions management (DRM)?
- For this pilot test, all videos will be downloaded in MP4 format, which is not DRM-managed.  Users will be subject to certain legal restrictions, dependent on the license a partner has chosen for their downloads.

They are offering four licensing options:

1. BY-NC-ND
2. BY-NC-SA
3. BY
4. PD

In an effort to promote the sharing of information, we are testing free downloads of YouTube videos from Stanford, Duke, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCTV (broadcasting programs from throughout the UC system). YouTube users who are traveling or teachers who want to show these videos in classrooms with limited or no connectivity should find this particularly useful.

I’ve always been annoyed when teachers show us grainy YouTube videos in class, and sometimes when the network is congested buffering can take a while. Maybe the downloadable videos will fix this.

• YouTube blog post
• Creative Commons blog post
• Information about becoming part of the pilot program

Green Tech -- Credit: jurvetson on Flickr (CC BY)

Two weeks ago, Representative John Conyers (D-MI14), along with 4 other Democrats in the US House of Representatives, introduced a bill that would bar federal agencies funding research from making open access a condition of federal funding, like has been done at the NIH:

If passed, the bill would essentially bar agencies of the federal government from requiring the transfer of copyright, whole or in part, as a condition for receiving public funding. That would prohibit measures like the recently enacted NIH public access policy, which requires investigators who accept taxpayer funds to deposit their final papers in the PubMed Central repository and give the agency a non-exclusive right to offer free access within a year.

HR 801, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, is a reintroduction of a House bill from last year, which was left to expire after committee hearings in Congress. The argument for that bill — which has changed little since last year — goes like this:

In his testimony, former Register of Copyrights Ralph Oman, said he didn’t “have a dog in this fight,” but clearly had a favorite breed: Oman bluntly told lawmakers that in his opinion, the NIH mandate would “destroy the market” for commercial scientific journals, and cause a “dilution” of copyright. Oman said that Congress directed the NIH to provide access “consistent with copyright law,” a phrase lobbied for and added to the NIH mandate by publishers, which the current policy does not do. Perhaps Zerhouni “misunderstood,” Oman said, noting that Congress directed him to address “public access” not “free public access.” In written testimony worthy of a presidential campaign TV commercial, Oman suggested that “the hairy snout” of government be kept out of science publishing, drawing a good-natured rebuke from Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).

Open access policies benefit everyone, and the American taxpayer should have the right to see the fruits of their investment in the scientific community. The argument saying that this bill would bring open access policies into harmony with copyright law is nonsense; if the policy was violating copyright law, why didn’t the publishing companies sue for a remedy? This is a gimme for the publishing companies, and the people involved in sponsoring this bill should be ashamed of themselves. Why is it, with things like this, that the argument is always about the damage to business and never the damage to the public?

• Open Access News
• LibraryJournal.com
• LibraryJournal.com on last year’s hearings
• Bill Status at OpenCongress.org

Harvard Library - Credit: samirluther on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

Harvard has decided to terminate their relationship with Google Booksearch because the terms of Google’s recent settlement with publishers.

Harvard’s concerns center on access to the scanned texts — how widely available access would be and how much it might cost. “As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher-education community and by patrons of public libraries,” Harvard’s university-library director, Robert C. Darnton, wrote in a letter to the library staff.

He noted that “the settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable, especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.” He also expressed concern about the quality of the scanned books, which “in many cases will be missing photographs, illustrations, and other pictorial works, which will reduce their utility for research.”

Thanks for leading the way Harvard.  It’s nice to see an entity that can afford to take the hits, do it.

• Chronicle
• Futurismic

Obama has released a video that covers his plans for technology.  Many of them seem to be very pro-freeculture, such as making government records available in “universally accessible formats”.

Obama's plans for technology - Credit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INo69f7f8bo

I’m interested to see what actually happens.  For a campaign that’s into “universally accessible formats”, why can’t I download an ogg of this video?  Haha, ok I expect too much.

• YouTube

Open Access Day

Today is Open Access Day.

October 14, 2008 will be the world’s first Open Access Day.

The founding partners are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science.

Open Access Day will help to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public.

I think things are looking up for open access, especially since that seems to be a target for this your for SFC and other orgs.

• Open Access Day

Most of you know about or have used Blackboard. Blackboard has been actively involved in pursuing and enforcing aggressive patent and IP policies. Thankfully, there are several open-source alternatives that provide similar functionality: Moodle and Sakai.

The Sakai Community develops and distributes the open-sourceSakai CLE, an enterprise-ready collaboration and courseware management platform that provides users with a suite of learning, portfolio, library and project tools.

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) – a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 200,000 students.

Most surprisingly, our very own Virginia Tech has been working on a customized implementation of Project Sakai. It’s called Scholar and is accessible to anyone with a VT pid. At least one person I talked to had used this CMS in their classes. Does anyone else know more about this project?

Scholar is an innovative and robust collaboration and learning management system. Designed by higher education for higher education, it offers tools in support of teaching and learning, research and collaboration, and assessment/accreditation projects.

An example of open clipart. Credit: Chrisdesign

The Open Clipart Library is a very interesting project that contains artwork and clipart licensed under CC or PD.  From the site:

This project aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used. All graphics submitted to the project should be placed into the Public Domain according to the statement by the Creative Commons.

I think this is a compelling add-on to the OpenOffice suite if someone is interested in writing one.  Using clipart from the site would a be very nice way to encourage use of CC’ed material.

• Open Clipart Library

Ars Technica reports that the House of Representatives have introduced a bill which could roll back open access in the name of copyright.

The House of Representatives has seen the introduction of legislation, HR 6845 that, depending on its final format, may significantly curtail or eliminate the NIH’s ability to continue its open access policy. The current bill would prevent any arm of the federal government from making research funding contingent upon “the transfer or license to or for a Federal agency of… any right provided under paragraph (1) or (2) of section 106 in an extrinsic work, to the extent that, solely for purposes of this subsection, such right involves the availability to the public of that work.” Those Section 106 rights include the reproduction of the work.

Although that would seem to rule out the existing NIH policy, there is a certain amount of legal wiggle room there. For example, the NIH could fund a private entity to maintain PMC, and thus have the right to reproduction transferred to an independent entity. Nevertheless, the bill would appear to directly target the prior legislation that put the NIH in the business of mandating public access in the first place.

If you want the public to fund your research, then the public should have free (libre) access to your publications.  If profit is your motive, you can fund the research yourself.

• Ars Technica
• Slashdot