SPARC Authors Addendum

February 19, 2010 at 4:44 pm · Filed under creative commons

If you have written an academic paper and wish to publish it in a journal, you are often asked to sign away your rights to that journal so that it may not be distributed in any other form. The SPARC Authors Addendum (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is one way to distribute your article in ePrints or other repositories that are based at your university or within your broader field. It is a legal device, placed as an addendum to the usual Rights form submitted with your article. Details (US Organisation) may be found here (link). Thanks to Nick T for the link.

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Ordnance Survey maps to go free online

November 18, 2009 at 12:46 pm · Filed under creative commons, data, digital humanities

The government is to explore ways of making all Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April, in a victory for the Guardian’s three-year Free Our Data campaign. The move will bring the UK into line with the free publication of maps that exists in the US.

Gordon Brown announced the change at a joint event in London today with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, who is now information tsar advising on the handing over of private government data to the public (thanks to Andy W for the link).

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Private Sheriffs in Cyberspace: Jonathan Zittrain OII Event: London, 19th May 2009

May 21, 2009 at 4:27 pm · Filed under communuity informatics, creative commons, deliberation, design, digital humanities, events, governance, humanities computing, internet, political communication, web2.0

On Tuesday evening I attended an Oxford Internet Institute sponsored lecture by Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Harvard Law School, Co-Founder and Faculty Director, Berkman Centre for Internet & Society (at the salubrious legal offices of Wragge and Co). Zittrain talked about regulation on-line by major Internet players such as Facebook and Apple and asserted that many of the regulating methods employed by them were outside of the rule of law. His contention was that many ‘Web 2’ companies have immense and increasing social and economic power within the fabric of our lives and are regulating their sites in a rather ad hoc and random way in terms of banning application developers, individuals, and groups that do not adhere to their governance structures. He used a number of examples to support his thesis, plus introduced a simple graph to illustrate emergent styles of governance:

Top-down

Hierarchy >poligarchy

Bottom-up

As an example of a ‘bottom-up’ governance structure Zittrain cited Wikipedia which includes a deliberative system to manage thorny editorial decisions. As a top-down system of governance he cited Facebook; although Facebook is beginning to include the community in decisions relating to its structure and functionality. He used the term ‘social governance’ to describe this bottom-up governance approach and suggested ways in which this approach may be designed into a system (through flagging certain tasks that help tap into the ‘reservoir of good will’ of the community). A well-designed system should have mechanisms to ask users for their input.

Although I tend to agree with many of the arguments of Zittrain, I feel there is a tendency to overstate the importance of sites such as Facebook and Youtube to the broader public. Sure they are popular, but this isn’t the British Library, the University of California, or the Library of Congress we are talking about! They are just large and fashionable web sites; a small part of the fabric of our complex lives. And commercial companies will perhaps always act in their own interests; either commercially or ideologically.

I suppose what is needed is some sort of bill of rights/responsibilities that is general to the operation of the Web within a certain geographical region balanced with the specific values of the site in question. There is nothing wrong with sites asserting behaviour norms upon users; but then again governance structures should be transparent and open; not outside of acceptable norms of the broader public sphere. A site should never assert policies that are deemed racist nor discriminatory (perhaps this is Zittrain’s anxiety when he claimed than many sites operate outside of ‘the rule of law’). The relationship between the community and the platform should always be fair and equitable; especially in large user-based sites such as Facebook. In my mind, governance structures, whether online or off, should always be open and transparent.

One of the respondents to the talk, Ian Brown, a Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (and author of the recent report Database state) asserted that the relationship between Citizen and State and Cyberspace needed to be reconsidered. He also claimed (from his experience) that that the issues raised by Zittrain are not well-known in the UK;  especially in senior government levels. As an historian (and not a legal expert), my  scepticism relates to the actual significance of the entire debate.  I suppose that the significance of the debates depends on the importance the public places on systems such as Facebook and their governance structures. I may agree with Eric Hobsbawn that Terrorism is more a perceived threat in the UK that an actual threat (to the state), but then again the public is led to believe otherwise so it now painfully significant.  So if the debates about governance are perceived to be important by the public; then they will become important. So we may have a ‘Facebook Parliament’ in the making deliberating about the rise of rudeness on Facebook . They should start with the Tube system!

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A Digital Humanities Manifesto

May 15, 2009 at 3:52 pm · Filed under collaboration, creative commons, digital humanities, humanities computing, web2.0

(everyone should have a manifesto!)

I am pleased that UCLA has discovered the Digital Humanities. Here is a manifesto that they published from the Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities (link).

Also, check out UCLA’s  White Paper on the Promise of Digital Humanities Co-authored by Todd Presner (Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature) and Chris Johanson (Classics and Digital Humanities) (link). I will respond to these positions when I get a chance but I need to concentrate on the small picture for a moment as I can’t change the user permissions on our Drupal installation. Damn!

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Press Release: Fedora Commons and DSpace Foundation Join Together to Create DuraSpace™ Organization

May 13, 2009 at 10:54 am · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, creative commons, digital humanities, digitisation, e-science, education, web2.0

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Pirate Bay…

April 18, 2009 at 1:48 pm · Filed under creative commons, gadfly, open access, open source, politics, web2.0

“It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are morons and you should sodomise yourself with retractable batons’ Pirate Bay (from the guardian).

Although the author of this blog does not condone the use of police batons for sexual pleasure, the author does believe that Copyright legislation, especially as it manifests itself in the US, does not support artistic endeavours, cultural nor technical innovation.  The balances are all wrong. I particularly recommend the work of Stanford’s Laurence Lessig and the Creative Commons initiative.

Many artists, including my good friend Andrew Garton, advocate the use of Creative Commons as an alternative means to combat the innovation lock-down of corporate bully boys.

And although this history is somewhat simplified (and US centric); do a search on the history of FM radio online.  This tragic history has many parallels with the history of file swapping (link).

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Maura Marx Named First Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance

August 27, 2008 at 9:05 am · Filed under creative commons, digital humanities, humanities computing

The Internet Archive and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced today
the appointment of Maura Marx as the first Executive Director of the Open
Content Alliance (OCA). A search committee representing OCA member
institutions made the appointment after an intensive search process. Ms.
Marx will move to the OCA from the Boston Public Library, where she most
recently founded the Digital Library Program and was instrumental in
evolving the Library’s philosophy toward Open Content principles.

The Open Content Alliance is an international alliance of leading academic
and cultural heritage institutions working to build joint digital
collections for free public access. Ms. Marx has been appointed to the
new position of Executive Director in order to expand its activities as
the preeminent center in the world for promoting the creation and open
sharing of digital content.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Digital copyright: it’s all wrong

June 11, 2008 at 9:40 pm · Filed under creative commons, internet, open source, social media

A draft treaty proposes draconian measures to protect copyright.

THE forces of reaction are fighting back. As they often do, they are carrying out their planning in secret, in the knowledge that if more people knew of their activities they would not be allowed to get away with it (link)

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Developing the UK’s e-infrastructure for science and innovation

October 12, 2007 at 1:01 am · Filed under collaboration, creative commons, digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, internet, open source, technology, tools, web2.0

Produced by the Office of Science and Innovation (OSI) e-Infrastructure Working Group, the report – Developing the UK’s e-infrastructure for science and innovation - sets out the requirements for a national e-infrastructure to help ensure the UK maintains and indeed enhances its global standing in science and innovation in an increasingly competitive world (link)

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What is HASTAC?

August 15, 2007 at 10:49 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, creative commons, social media, web2.0

A consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, social scientists, and engineers from universities across the country, HASTAC (”Haystack”) is committed to new forms of collaboration across institutions, disciplines, and communities to promote creative uses of technology. Since 2003, we have been developing tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science and information studies, virtual museums, and other digital projects. HASTAC leaders have served as consultants to U.S. and international organizations and governments on grid computing and cyberinfrastructure. Our aim is to promote expansive, innovative uses of technology in formal education and lifelong learning (link).

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FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES

August 15, 2007 at 7:50 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, creative commons, deliberation, digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, social media, web2.0

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Fedora Commons: Sandy Payette
(607) 255-9222, payette@cs.cornell.edu
http://www.fedora-commons.org
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: Greg Nelson
(415) 561-7427, greg.nelson@moore.org

FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES
(Ithaca, New York, August 10, 2007) – Fedora Commons today announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia. The Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information Science.

With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form. The software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues worldwide. With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository system, developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the new software will continue to focus on the integrity and longevity of the intellectual products that underlie this new form of knowledge work. The result will be an open source software platform that both enables collaborative models of information creation and sharing, and provides sustainable repositories to secure the digital materials that constitute our intellectual, scientific, and cultural history.

Recognizing the importance of multiple participants in the development of new technologies to support this vision, the Moore Foundation funding will also support the growth and diversification of the Fedora Community, a global set of partners who will cooperate in software development, application deployment, and community outreach for Fedora Commons. This network of partners will be instrumental for making Fedora Commons a self-sustainable non-profit organization that will support and incubate open-source software projects that focus on new mechanisms for information formation, access, collaboration, and preservation.

According to Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, “the new Fedora Commons can foster technologies and partnerships that make it possible for academic and scientific communities to publish, share, and archive the results of their own work in a free, open fashion, and make it possible to analyze and use content in novel ways.”

“Establishing a sustainable open-source software system that provides the basic infrastructure for on-line communities of scholars will have enduring impact. The unanticipated cross- disciplinary uses of this open platform are the hallmark of this revolutionary infrastructure,” said Jim Omura, technology strategist with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Payette also noted, “The open-source software that is developed and distributed by Fedora Commons can impact the entire lifecycle of what is often referred to as “e-Research” and “e-Science,” including storage of experimental data, analysis of experimental results, peer review, publication of findings, and the reuse of published material for the next generation of scholarly works. We will also continue our work with libraries and museums to facilitate the sharing of digitized collections, making previously locked away material available to wide audiences. Also, building on our attention to digital preservation in the Fedora open-source repository system, Fedora Commons will continue to stress the importance of the sustainability of digital information in applications of our work.”

About Fedora Commons
Fedora Commons is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to provide sustainable open-source technologies to help individuals and organizations create, manage, publish, share, and preserve digital content upon which we form our intellectual, scientific, and cultural heritage. Since 2001, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cornell University and the University of Virginia have collaborated on the Fedora Project which has developed, distributed, and supported innovative open-source repository software that combines content management, web services, and semantic technologies. The Fedora software has been adopted worldwide to support an array of applications including open-access publishing, scholarly communication, digital libraries, e-science, archives, and education.

Fedora Commons will initially be located in the Information Science Building at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. The Executive Director of Fedora Commons is Sandy Payette, who co-invented the Fedora architecture and led the Cornell arm of the open-source Fedora Project. The Board of Directors of Fedora Commons provides leadership from multiple communities, including open-access publishing, digital libraries, sciences, and humanities. For more information, visit http://www.fedora-commons.org.

About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in 2000, seeks to advance environmental conservation and cutting-edge scientific research around the world and improve the quality of life in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Foundation’s Science Program seeks to make a significant impact on the development of provocative, transformative scientific research, and increase knowledge in emerging fields. For more information, visit http://www.moore.org.

–
Carol Minton Morris
Communications Director
National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
http://NSDL.org

Communications and Media Director
Fedora Commons
http://www.fedora-commons.org

Cornell Information Science
301 College Ave.
Ithaca, NY 14850
607 255-2702
clt6@cornell.edu

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What is WIPO?

September 1, 2006 at 10:55 am · Filed under creative commons, internet

One of the 21st Century’s greatest battlegrounds (apart from water, energy, and enviromentalism) will be the battle over ideas; or atleast the battle over who ownes those ideas. As Western societies move towards ‘knowledge based economies’ or economies where the manufacture and consumption of ‘knowledge and culture’ become the driving force of our economies (ie. education, software, media, digital entertainment etc.) then the political tensions over who owns these ideas will become even more important. One UN organisation that attempts to set IP standards on a global scale is called WIPO. However, any organisation on the global scale must content with numerous contested and conflicting interests.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is a specialised agency of the United Nations. It is dedicated to developing a balanced and accessible international intellectual property (IP) system, which rewards creativity, stimulates innovation and contributes to economic development while safeguarding the public interest.

WIPO was established by the WIPO Convention in 1967 with a mandate from its Member States to promote the protection of IP throughout the world through cooperation among states and in collaboration with other international organizations. Its headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland.

See the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s comments on WIPO’s proposed broadcast treaty.

The World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) “Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations” is protection, all right: a protection racket for middlemen in the TV and Internet worlds.

If adopted, the WIPO treaty will give broadcasters 50 years of copyright-like control over the content of their broadcasts, even when they have no copyright in what they show. A TV channel broadcasting your Creative Commons-licensed movie could legally demand that no one record or redistribute it�and sue anyone who does. And TV companies could use their new rights to go after TiVo or MythTV for daring to let you skip advertisements or record programs in DRM-free formats (link)

Also this:

The United States delegation to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has been one of the strongest supporters of efforts to create a new intellectual property right for broadcasters and cablecasters through a new WIPO treaty. If adopted, the treaty would give broadcasters, cablecasters and potentially webcasting companies 50 years of copyright-like rights over anything they transmit, including public domain and Creative Commons-licensed works. It would also give broadcasters legal protection to use technology to lock down content, giving them control over how you use broadcasts received by your television, radio and possibly personal computer and control over how those devices are designed and built.

The new Broadcasting Treaty is likely to restrict your access to knowledge and culture, and it lets broadcasters make decisions that should be left in the hands of creators and the public (link).

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[view academic citations]

[hide academic citations]

AMA citation:

Bellamy C. What is WIPO?. craigbellamy.net. 2006. Available at: http://www.craigbellamy.net/2006/09/01/what-is-wipo/. Accessed March 14, 2010.

APA citation:

Bellamy, Craig. (2006). What is WIPO?. Retrieved March 14, 2010, from craigbellamy.net Web site: http://www.craigbellamy.net/2006/09/01/what-is-wipo/

Chicago citation:

Bellamy, Craig. 2006. What is WIPO?. craigbellamy.net. http://www.craigbellamy.net/2006/09/01/what-is-wipo/ (accessed March 14, 2010).

Harvard citation:

Bellamy, C 2006, What is WIPO?, craigbellamy.net. Retrieved March 14, 2010, from <http://www.craigbellamy.net/2006/09/01/what-is-wipo/>

MLA citation:

Bellamy, Craig. "What is WIPO?." 1 Sep. 2006. craigbellamy.net. Accessed 14 Mar. 2010. <http://www.craigbellamy.net/2006/09/01/what-is-wipo/>