[sc-announce] Melanie Dulong de Rosnay on opening access to science -- Science Commons blog

Donna Wentworth dwentworth at creativecommons.org
Mon Jul 14 07:23:29 EDT 2008


Melanie Dulong de Rosnay on opening access to science

July 14th, 2008<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/07/14/melanie-dulong-de-rosnay-on-opening-access-to-science/>by
dwentworth

This spring, Harvard's Berkman Center
launched<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/4303>the Publius
Project <http://publius.cc/>, which
ccLearn<http://learn.creativecommons.org/>'s
Jane Park aptly called <http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8299> a "Web
2.0 version of the Federalist papers." The concept:  a diverse group of
thinkers — scholars, technologists, activists and more — would publish
essays about the "constitutional" moments shaping Internet governance. The
essays, and responses to them, would serve to seed a broader discussion
about the choices we're making as we collectively build the future of the
networked world.

Peter Suber <http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/hometoc.htm> penned an essay
entitled *The Opening of Science and
Scholarship<http://publius.cc/2008/06/04/peter-suber-the-opening-of-science-and-scholarship/>
*, asking who controls peer-reviewed research, and arguing for a future
where scholars themselves ensure it is open
access<http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm>(OA). The
latest
response<http://publius.cc/2008/06/13/melanie-dulong-de-rosnay-opening-access-in-a-networked-science/>,
written by Berkman Fellow Melanie Dulong de
Rosnay<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/mdulongderosnay>,
focuses on opening access to scientific research. De Rosnay is the legal
lead of Creative Commons France <http://fr.creativecommons.org/>, and works
with us here at Science Commons on open data policy. She
asks<http://publius.cc/2008/06/13/melanie-dulong-de-rosnay-opening-access-in-a-networked-science/>
:

How can society take advantage of the opportunities offered by digital
publishing and distributing to share scientific results more quickly and
thus facilitate the discovery of new knowledge? … Should we simply ensure
access to knowledge without paying a fee, or should we do even more to
improve that access, such as enhancing legal and technical capabilities for
finding, extracting, annotating and compiling information in order to make
better use of it?

De Rosnay's answer:  to take full advantage of OA's benefits, we should lift
all three barriers to access identified in the Budapest Open Access
Initiative definition <http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml>:
financial, legal and technical. That way, she writes, "researchers and the
public can not only access, but also redistribute and reuse materials in any
way, including ways that initial creators had not considered."

In other words, if we want more innovation and discovery to come from OA
research, we should be designing for it — publishing research and data in
open formats, with the legal rights "baked in" to make use of it.

If you'd like to hear more from de Rosnay, she'll be giving a presentation
on "Openness for Life Science Databases" tomorrow, Tuesday, July 15th, as
part of the Berkman Center's terrific luncheon
series<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon#>.
There may still be spots open if you want to join in person, but if not,
anyone is free to watch the live webcast or view the archived video when it
is posted. You can find all the details
here<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2008/07/dulong>
.

................
Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/sc-announce/attachments/20080714/fcda4b29/attachment.htm 


More information about the sc-announce mailing list