The Canadian government has been “painfully slow” to adopt and promote open-access software and research, which facilitate knowledge transfer, an expert in Internet and e-commerce law told an international conference Friday.
“Canada has the potential to show some leadership here,” said Michael Geist, holder of the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa.
“But … at least in the public sector, our government has been painfully slow in adopting any kind of open source software, preferring instead to spend our tax dollars on proprietary software licences,” he told the first general meeting of the Emerging Dynamic Global Economies Network, hosted by the University....
He also put the onus on researchers to adopt Creative Commons licences instead of more restrictive copyright provisions, to ensure their research is readily available around the world.
Despite promises by some federal funding agencies to promote open-access publication, most granting agencies have not yet made it a requirement that the researchers they finance make their results available to the general public in a timely fashion, Geist added in an interview.
“At the moment, we’ve got what strikes me as a ridiculous proposition where we fund the research and then spend thousands of dollars to purchase that research within our own institutions, and the public isn’t even granted broad access to it.”
He called for an open-source repository where researchers, after publishing their work in peer-reviewed journals, would make it publicly accessible.
As part of its broader accountability agenda, the Conservative government should also eliminate the outdated Crown copyright provisions that stipulate that all public work belongs to the Crown and taxpayers must seek permission to access it, Geist said.
“There’s something fundamentally wrong about that,” he said....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/25/2006 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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
