Here some thoughts which came up whilst preparing for the TDWG meeting [Biodiversity Information Standards Annual Conference 2007] next week.
TDWG is about making data interoperable, thus leading, in the best case, to a seamless system of our knowledge linked to those of other domains.
This is a huge technical challenge, but by getting closer to technical solutions, other issues become relevant, such as who is generating content, how is content acknowledged and how is copyright and IPR handled.
This is especially important, since we now face for the first time a system, which aims at being the mother of all the biodiversity information, the Encyclopedia of Life which is playing the same game as the publishers of our scientific knowledge. Being corporate, they care about the copyright and IPR, and thus send out forms to transfer your rights to them. These are individual licenses which often lead to the situation, that you lose all rights, and thus we can not access our publications in an open way, be it as open access or via self archiving.
Our community has to be more vigilant the way we operate in this realm. We need to define what we want, and act accordingly. If we want to be able to have open access to our data, we should not sign contract which do not allow this....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/14/2007 12:02:00 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.
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.
