I’m not arguing in my talk that copyright should not apply to the scholarly articles themselves – it’s pretty clear that articles represent creative expressions, fixed in a tangible medium, which is all it takes to get a copyright. ...
But let’s zoom in on some of the things in the article. A statement like the following is a good example.
“Transglutaminase cross-links in intranuclear inclusions in Huntington disease” (from NCBI)
Now, this statement purports to lay out a fact. Not a creative expression. Remixing this statement renders it less true and not more true. Copyright isn’t supposed to protect this statement – it’s a fact of nature, not a creative styling ...
This is what I was getting at in the talk. The copyright on the overall article, that comes from the connectors and the clause structures, is being used to control the movement of the facts of the experiment ... That seems insane to me. These are facts of nature and should be extractable separate from the copyright of the article, so that we can start to tie all the database entries about transglutaminase to all the papers mentioning transglutaminase. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 3/27/2008 04:46:00 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.
