Richard Poynder's Blog (10)

Over the past twenty years or so we have seen a rising tide of alternative copyright licences emerge — for software, music and most types of content. These include the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) licence, the General Public Licence (GPL), and the range of licences devised by Creative Commons (… Continue

As more and more of the world’s population has gained access to the Internet so a growing number of free and open movements have appeared — including the free and open source software movements, free culture,…

Continue

Jean-Claude Bradley is an organic chemist at Drexel University in Philadelphia. As with most scientists, Bradley used to be very secretive. He kept his research under wraps until publication and frequently applied for patents on his work in nanotechnology and gene therapy.However, he asked himself a difficult question 5 years…

Continue

If you are interested in the Open Data (OD) movement but unclear about the issues, or what scientists can do to support the movement, what better way of finding out than by talking to

leading OD advocates Peter Murray-Rust of the University of Cambridge and Jordan Hatcher of…

Continue

The open data movement is growing apace. What better demonstration of this than news that the UK coalition government is making its Combined Online Information System (COINS) freely available on the Internet, inviting people not only to access the data but to re-use it…

Continue

Indian Open Access (OA) advocate Professor Subbiah Arunachalam (Arun) recently organised a letter to the top management of CGIAR — the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. The letter speaks of the… Continue

There will soon be a big new beast in the IP jungle. And while the creature comes with the seemingly innocuous acronym of ACTA, cyber activists and copyright mavens fear that it will pave the way for a Global DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) that will significantly impact on…

Continue

Some Open Access (OA) advocates shocked by the shooting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) may not be aware of the OA link to the story: The last paper authored by Amy Bishop — the researcher charged with killing three of her colleagues – was published in the International Journal of General Medicine, an OA journal published by New Zealand-based OA publisher Dove Medical Press. Since Bishop cited three of her teenage daughters as co-authors… Continue

In their efforts to derail the onward march of Open Access (OA) opponents have conjured up a number of bogeymen about Open Access publishing. First, they maintain, asking authors to pay to publish could turn scholarly publishing into a vanity press.Second, they say, OA publishing will in any case inevitably lead to lax or… Continue

On 14th January the Christian Democratic Union and its Union partner in the German government the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CDU/CSU) proposed setting up an Enquete Commission to examine the implications of the Internet on society. Amongst other things, the Commission will be asked to look at initiatives for providing free access to publicly-funded research. Could this announcement be connected with the e-petition in support of Open Access (OA) launched in Germany last November? Does it… Continue