Open Access News

But what is also clear is that achieving this potential [for a superior online environment] requires overcoming some daunting barriers --insufficient training, outdated policies, unsatisfactory tools, incomplete resources, inadequate access. The barriers to this possibility are not primarily technological, but economic, legal, and institutional. The effort required to realize this potential is not insignificant, but these limitations are small compared to the potential benefits. This report calls for an investment not just of money but also of leadership --from commerce, education, government, and foundations-- in order to realize the promise of cyberinfrastructure for the cultural record....We need public and institutional policies that foster openness and access. Because humanists and social scientists study society and culture, their use of the cyberinfrastructure inevitably has social, economic, and political implications and limitations. Laws, policies, and conventions surrounding copyright and privacy are, thus, also an implicit part of the cyberinfrastructure in the social sciences and humanities. We must align current intellectual property laws and privacy policies with the new realities of digital knowledge environments. Policies and the laws that support them must take account of the characteristics of digital content and the practices that make that content productive. The recent effort of the Copyright Office to address the problem of “orphan works” --works whose copyright status is uncertain and, hence, cannot be used by scholars and others-- is a welcome sign of a key agency in this debate taking an appropriate leadership role....We think it particularly important to explore more nuanced notions of intellectual property rights, supported by more sophisticated tools, so that the increasing capacity of digital technologies to mine, process, and analyze massive collections of texts not be nullified by laws intended to restrict republication. We support the work of groups like “Creative Commons” that are exploring innovative and nuanced ways to ensure the widest dissemination of works of the human imagination....And while scholars advocate public and legal policies of openness and access, they must similarly urge these policies within their own communities: universities need to consider the impact of their technology transfer and intellectual property policies; university presses and scholarly societies need to envision dissemination models that reflect academic values and lobby for the resources they need to live up to those values; museums need to make their digitized surrogates freely available. All parties should work energetically to ensure that the fruits of scholarly research and analysis are accessible to all those who might use them....Scholars, academic leaders, librarians should work with policy-makers toward [these access] goals and they should work within their own communities to ensure the widest possible access to scholarship, research, and creativity.