Geoffrey C. Bowker, On the Web, everything except sharing, Mercury News, April 21, 2005. Excerpt: 'Creating a digital commmons for data would help us tackle global problems....Take a problem like climate change: a problem hitting close to home this year, with floods as far south as San Diego and a sunny California winter in Seattle. It would be great if we could all just share our data and work out whether this global issue called for global management. However, the global community has a conflicting and confusing array of policies around data sharing. The European Directive on Databases recognizes producers of databases as adding creative content, which means that even if the underlying data is freely available, use of the database can be restricted to those who are willing and able to pay the access fee. So if an organization in the Bay Area wants to answer that climate change question, they had best be prepared to ante up. We need to be able to share our knowledge, wisdom and insights. We need a digital commons, which can bring together accessible data, technology to use it and an institutional framework for deploying it to best advantage. There is no simple market fix here: Markets don't think very well in 20- to 200-year time frames -- just the frames we need to be thinking in to address our urgent global problems. A digital commons, properly designed, can be a key tool for the protection of our great common heritage: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/21/2005 10:26:00 AM.
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.
