What do we mean by “open” access…? (The “Open Knowledge Definition Version 1.0 “)
In this case, the Open Knowledge Foundation has gone a long way toward clarification…
See specifically SEE: http://opendefinition.org/
From the the “Open Knowledge Definition” home page:
“In the simplest form the definition can be summed up in the statement that ‘A piece of knowledge is open if you are free to use, reuse, and redistribute it’. “
In detail the definition suggests: [for sake of clarity, I have here deleted –- marked
- Access: The work shall be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably downloading via the Internet without charge. The work must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form.
- Redistribution: The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the work either on its own or as part of a package made from works from many different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale or distribution.
- Reuse: The license must allow for modifications and derivative works and must allow them to be distributed under the terms of the original work. The license may impose some form of attribution and integrity requirements: see principle 5 (Attribution) and principle 6 (Integrity) below.
- Absence of Technological Restriction: The work must be provided in such a form that there are no technological obstacles to the performance of the above activities. This can be achieved by the provision of the work in an open data format, i.e. one whose specification is publicly and freely available and which places no restrictions monetary or otherwise upon its use.
- Attribution: The license may require as a condition for redistribution and re-use the attribution of the contributors and creators to the work. If this condition is imposed it must not be onerous. For example if attribution is required a list of those requiring attribution should accompany the work.
- Integrity: The license may require as a condition for the work being distributed in modified form that the resulting work carry a different name or version number from the original work.
- No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups: The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
- No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the work in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the work from being used in a business, or from being used for military research.
- Distribution of License: The rights attached to the work must apply to all to whom the work is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.
- License Must Not Be Specific to a Package: The rights attached to the work must not depend on the work being part of a particular package. If the work is extracted from that package and used or distributed within the terms of the work's license, all parties to whom the work is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original package.
- License Must Not Restrict the Distribution of Other Works: The license must not place restrictions on other works that are distributed along with the licensed work. For example, the license must not insist that all other works distributed on the same medium are open.”
Newsweek Article on the Statistical Abstract
I was pleasantly surprised to see an article about the wonders of the Statistical Abstract in the Jan. 18, 2010 issue of Newsweek, entitled "Suicide, Sex, and SUVs: This book covers them all—and more." The author, Robert J. Samuelson, states:
I confess to being an avid fan of the Statistical Abstract, published annually by the Census Bureau, because it tells so much so quickly. The just-published 2010 edition, as always, bulges with information. For me, the Stat Abstract is often the first go-to source for a story, because it substitutes evidence for speculation.Of course, in the print version of the magazine's article, the author doesn't mention where you can find this document at your local library and/or Federal Depository Library and he doesn't mention that it is also available online for free via the federal government, and the online article links to a copy of the Statistical Abstract that you can purchase at Amazon. Huh?! I made a comment with the link to the free online version and provided a link to the FDLP Directory for those that want to look at a print copy of the document at their local FDL. But it is good to see government documents in the news! Continue reading
What do we mean by “free” access to data?
Thomas Jefferson said: "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea." And also --as noted in a previous blog -- "The field of knowledge is the common property of all mankind." A century or so later US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (in the 1918 decision, International News Service v. Associated Press] wrote: "…the general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—became, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use." “Information wants to be free…” (while also noting that information is “expensive” creating an inevitable tension…) When we call for "free" access to knowledge resources (used here to stand for data, information and knowledge [for some working definitions SEE: Moritz, Building the Biodiversity Commons Appendix 3 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june02/moritz/06moritz.html ] ), we are saying that access to knowledge should not be a privilege with access granted only to those that can afford the current market price. Knowledge should not be placed behind “pay walls”. To assert this right to free access is to urge that as a national and global community our common welfare demands the free access to knowledge. The creation of mechanisms of impedance to the free flow of knowledge has tremendous societal costs. Consider the “transaction costs” entailed every time any writer or researcher must simply contact an author or publisher for permission to use any resource. (I estimate that at the American Museum of Natural History, early in the last decade, we invested about $25,000 just to perform due diligence to secure our right to freely disseminate our own scientific publications.) Consider the transaction costs implied by the "inter-library loan" industry? Add to transaction costs the possibility that additional charges may be assessed before an article can be actually used. As an independent researcher, without a current institutional base, I was forced to pay Nature/ MacMillan $32 US for access to the "Commonwealth of Science"(1941) article cited in a previous blog. Could I have found ways to circumvent? Yes, of course, that is hardly the point -- I intend to act in good faith as do most people.) Consider the plight of any teacher ambitious enough to seek use of original source materials – or of any public school student or parent for that matter… Consider costs associated with health care information...? Having asserted this right to access we are obliged to address the question of cost and of fair compensation for the creation of knowledge. Since the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher the Anglo-American polity has been in a kind of thrall – a few years ago when I proposed an alternative system of public compensation for knowledge creation – a colleague – very highly place in a professional scientific society asked me with incredulity – “you mean pay for it with taxes”? Well, yes. It has become almost an a priori article of faith that public investment is somehow bad (except, I can not help adding, when required to bail out major financial institutions and insure exorbitant bonuses for financial executives). Market fundamentalists (and “casino economists”! SEE: JM Keynes), notwithstanding, the United States has always depended upon public investment to insure the viability of our economy. Whether by investment in postal service, energy, public schools/libraries/museums, the Interstate Highway system, the National Science Foundation or the Internet, it has been public investment that has created the infrastructure for our economic success and for innovation. And it has been the economic opportunities created for individuals by public investment that have continued to draw to our shores the ambitious and the energetic, the innovative and the productive. It is the rich diversity of America’s population that is our greatest asset and that holds our greatest hope for meeting 21st Century challenges. Freeing “government information” is a fine starting point but all knowledge must be free… I believe that we need an Andrew Carnegie for the 21st Century – assets that have been locked away behind pay walls should be placed in the public domain. And we need new paradigms that sustainably support and fairly compensate research and intellectual work but require release of knowledge products for free public use. (The open access publishing model suggests one such strategy…) Next, "open"? And effective? Continue reading
Live blogging Stanford law.gov workshop
Hi all. Shinjoung and I (and hopefully others!) will be live blogging the law.gov workshop at Stanford. The twitter hashtag is #law.gov. feel free to post comments or tweet questions with that hashtag. Hope you can follow along. Agenda is below the liveblog box.
- 9AM - Coffee available for early arrivals
- 10AM - Welcome and Overview
- 10:30AM - The National Inventory of Primary Legal Materials
Discussion of how to define primary legal materials.
Discussion of how to structure the national survey, including what information to collect. - 11:15AM - General Discussion of Legal Issues
Discussion of issues such as copyright over primary legal materials, enabling legislation, and other issues of the law. - 12PM - Lunch
- 1PM-2PM - Public Presentation, Room 290
"Law.Gov - A Revolution in Legal Affairs"
Anurag Acharya (Google), Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org), Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard) - 2:15-3:30 - Technical Discussion
Discussion of technical challenges, including specification of a core open source system, issues of markup and citation, issues of privacy, issues of ingestion, issues of authentication.
What is NOT “science”? Why we have a right to “data” as “evidence”…
Most of us accept a priori the institutionalized distinction between the sciences and the humanities. If asked, we can tick off the names of “disciplines” that are “scientific” and those that constitute “the humanities”… (The “social sciences” are somehow less centrally – more vaguely? -- “scientific” -- but what do we mean essentially by these distinctions?) [It's worth noting that novelist CP Snow famously posited this distinction in his Cambridge lecture and subsequent book "The Two Cultures" -- ca. 1959.] We might say that science is “empirical” meaning that it is based upon real, physical evidence? Or perhaps that it’s “inductive” – its theories or “laws” flowing from observations of facts… Or perhaps that it is “quantitative” or "technical" – its conclusions determined by the use of sometimes very complex mathematical logic or by complex apparatus. We might also say that it employs a rigorous methodology that includes exact logical provisions for “falsifiability” [SEE: Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Investigation – and elsewhere], for open peer review – including test by replication – and for validation by demonstration of predictive power… Science also is systematically accretive and depends on careful citation and documentation, building upon itself like a coral reef… But, it strikes me that any humanist should feel uncomfortable at the assumption that the humanities do not – or are incapable of – meeting these standards at least most of them in most cases? (I'll leave it to the reader to assess what is most essentially “humanist” – but I often have the uncomfortable sense that the humanities may too often depend for their esoteric authority upon the incoherence of their evidentiary base or upon the imprecision of language or between languages…?) I attribute "beauty" as a primary motive/value to “the arts”… (The American poet Randall Jarrell once said: “Criticism is the poetry of the prosaic.”) And I heard, anecdotally, a few years ago that the performance artist, Laurie Anderson, was invited to a discussion about “the arts” and “the sciences” and before too long was asking “What are we doing here?” I understood this to be an intuitive recognition that the arts and the sciences are on very similar tracks… I believe that artists are able to operate more spontaneously, intuitively and imaginatively -- perhaps more "aesthetically"? but less "systematically" ? Scientists often operate on that same frontier but with the requirement that they test their intuitions using the scientific method and then publicly disclose their “tests”. "Belief" is ultimately the subjective preserve of the individual -- and the institutional preserve of religion. Maintaining the distinction between "belief" and reason (or logic) is a fundamental value of the Enlightenment -- particularly in public discourse. OK so what am I getting at here? And why? Ultimately all policy -- whether "scientific" or not -- and all human decisions should be based on logical analysis and on evidence. Both evidence and analysis are susceptible to testing, to evaluation and thus to reasoned discussion. Our civil discourse will always be improved by clear specification of analytical logic and by free, open and effective disclosure of empirical evidence or DATA. Respecting data there are a series of fundamental criteria that must be satisfied to validate it’s “authenticity” and its probative value (its effectiveness as evidence). As citizens, we have the right to demand that public policy and public decisions be based on well-formed logic and on valid evidence… Discussion that occurs in our public fora should always distinguish between matters of logic and fact and matters of belief. We’ll pursue these notions – in the context of free, open effective access to data and in the context of science literacy – in future posts… Continue reading