[sc-announce] Microsoft Research launches new tools for knowledge sharing -- Science Commons blog

Donna Wentworth dwentworth at creativecommons.org
Fri Aug 1 16:06:19 EDT 2008


Microsoft Research launches new tools for knowledge
sharing<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/08/01/microsoft-research-launches-new-tools-for-knowledge-sharing/>
August
1st, 2008  Big news:  Microsoft Research has
unveiled<http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/jul08/07-28SoftwareToolsPR.mspx>new
add-ins for some of the most popular Microsoft products to make them
more useful for the scientific community — including tools for creating,
sharing and preserving research in the formats used by scientific publishers
and digital archives. The suite of add-ins, described in detail
here<http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/tc/scholarly_communication.mspx>,
includes the Creative Commons Add-in for Office
2007<http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D1DDBDC8-627F-415A-9B0A-97362BC9B480&displaylang=en>,
which lets anyone embed a Creative Commons license directly into their
documents. Using the Creative Commons Add-in,  you can choose from among the
licenses available on the CC site to express your intentions regarding the
use of your work. The embedded license links directly to its online
representation at the CC site, while a machine-readable representation is
stored in the Office Open XML document.

*The Chronicle of Higher Education*, reporting on the
launch<http://chronicle.com/free/2008/07/4049n.htm>
:
Saying it wants to help scholars and publishers write, edit, and publish
academic articles, this week Microsoft Corporation rolled out a set of new
software tools to perform those tasks, as well as to navigate thorny
copyright issues and find and share scholarly data. …

For example, the Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables authors to
structure and annotate their documents according to formats that publishers
and digital archives require. The articles can then be converted easily to
formats that facilitate their digital storage and preservation. The company
is offering the new software free to licensed users of Word and other
Microsoft products.

The tool allows users to create documents in the widely used format
developed by the National Library of Medicine's free digital archive of
peer-reviewed biomedical and life-sciences journal literature, PubMed
Central. But users will also be able to shape the software to suit other
formats because the code for the tool is openly accessible and freely
adaptable. …
 "We've never before addressed what we could put around Office, Excel,
SharePoint, and our other programs to make them more useful for science,"
said Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft's external-research
division. "For example, Word was not tailored for scientific papers. But we
decided to see, Can we make it more useful in that way?"

He said the company is also responding to the demand for researchers to
provide greater access to their findings, and even their research data.
Already the National Institutes of Health requires that any publications
from research it finances be placed in PubMed Central within one year of
publication. The National Science Foundation has a similar requirement, as
do Harvard University's faculties of law and of arts and sciences.

Such developments have increasingly raised concerns about copyrights and
fair reuse of archived materials. So to help authors, publishers, and
databases embed information about copyrights and licenses in Microsoft
Office documents, the company released another free product, called the
Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007.

Science Commons visited the development team working on the add-ins in
Seattle last year, and we're excited to support this initiative.

"There are fundamental shifts taking place in how we manage the flow of
scientific knowledge, and they bring demand for new tools that expand our
choices for knowledge sharing and collaboration," says John
Wilbanks<http://creativecommons.org/about/people/#34>,
Vice President of Science at Creative Commons. "We're thrilled that
Microsoft has taken these important steps to meet that demand."

Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
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