[T]he high-profile nature of the digital music wars has overshadowed another debate taking place as a consequence of the impact of digital technologies on protected materials. This debate surrounds the access to scientific and academic research, teaching tools, and data. Creative Commons and its recently launched Science Commons project aim to promote balance in both debates....PLoS Director and co-founder Michael Eisen explained that PLoS adopted the Creative Commons Attribution License “because it ensures the optimal accessibility and usability while preserving the one thing that scientists value the most: attribution for their work.”1 Finally, another educational institution, Rice University, made its Connexions project available under a Creative Commons Attribution License. The Connexions project provides free scholarly materials and free software tools to create an online environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content....Science Commons focuses on three areas: (1) licensing; (2) publishing; and (3) data. For each area, Science Commons has established a working group and a public listserv discussion group for participation by interested members of the community....In publishing, Science Commons is working to develop and support open-access publishing. Its first project is the recently launched Open Access Law Program, which is designed to make legal scholarship “open access”—freely available online to everyone, without undue copyright and licensing restrictions. The Open Access Law Journal Principles and the Open Access Law Author Pledge also enable both journals and authors to declare their commitment to open access....In the scientific and academic communities, the benefits that digital technologies offer in terms of facilitating the greater and more efficient dissemination of research and knowledge have not yet been fully harnessed....Science Commons is working to educate scientists; to provide standard contracts and technologies for institutional sharing and archiving; and to generally assist in reversing a lengthy, unintentional erosion of knowledge-sharing in the sciences and academia.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/09/2005 08:41:00 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.
