A group of activists for an information commons and open access have sent a public letter to Dr. Kamil Idris, Director General of WIPO, asking WIPO to convene a meeting on "open and collaborative projects to create public goods". The appendix to the letter lists seven areas where innovation can occur without intellectual property protection or even where IP protection hampers innovation. The sixth area on the list is "Open Academic and Scientific Journals". Here's the full text of the letter, minus signatures and appendix:
Dear Dr. Idris: In recent years there has been an explosion of open and collaborative projects to create public goods. These projects are extremely important, and they raise profound questions regarding appropriate intellectual property policies. They also provide evidence that one can achieve a high level of innovation in some areas of the modern economy without intellectual property protection, and indeed excessive, unbalanced, or poorly designed intellectual property protections may be counter-productive. We ask that the World Intellectual Property Organization convene a meeting in calendar year 2004 to examine these new open collaborative development models, and to discuss their relevance for public policy.
We all have Jamie Love to thank for drafting the letter, collecting the signatures, and laying the groundwork for its reception at WIPO. Jamie is the Director of the Consumer Project on Technology. (Disclosure: I am a signatory.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/07/2003 01:51:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
