Weblog

As of July 1, WisconsinView, an effort to make available a variety of types of imagery for the state of Wisconsin, will make their data available in the public domain via CC0. This news was brought to us by Puneet Kishor, a Science Commons fellow.

From the press release:

“Since 2004, WisconsinView  has made aerial photography and satellite imagery of Wisconsin available to the public for free over the web. As part of the AmericaView consortium, WisconsinView supports access and use of these imagery collections through education, workforce development, and research. Starting June 30, 2009, WisconsinView is making available all of its more than 6 Terabytes of imagery data under the new CC0 Protocol provided by Creative Commons. The CC0 (pronounced CC-Zero) Protocol waives any rights in a dataset, ensuring that all of the dataset is available to anyone without encumbrance of any kind. More information on CC0 is available at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0, and the reasoning behind the protocol is described here. Further questions about WisconsinView may be directed to Dr. Sam Batzli, Director, WisconsinView at sabatzli@wisc.edu or Puneet Kishor, Science Commons Fellow (Geospatial Data) at punkish@creativecommons.org.”

We applaud Batzli and Kishor for their ongoing work in making information available to the public and dedicating such a rich resource to the public domain.

A new editorial on the sharing of biological materials, specifically lab mice, is now available in Nature. The editorial “The sharing principle” addresses the conclusion of a recent workshop in Rome hosted by CASIMIR - a EU project working to “coordinate and sustain mouse resources internationally.”

The May meeting focused on sharing scientific knowledge - in this case mouse lines and resources, a tacit form of knowledge critical to the scientific research cycle. Our legal counsel, Thinh Nguyen joined the event, presenting our position on data sharing for genetic mouse material and our Materials Transfer work. The event brought together a wide array of participants, from various continents and organizations (funding agencies, academics, publishers, mouse repositories, etc.)

Their conclusion - the sharing problem needs to be addressed immediately if we are to make use of the genomic output and data, increasing exponentially as efforts become more coordinated, technology advances, and the process becomes cheaper and more efficient.

This should start with the journals and funding agencies, the author posits, by putting in place stricter policies requiring authors as a condition of publication / funding to make mice available in a public repository, or at the very least, freely available to other labs.

The facilities, coordination and technology all exist to make this happen. Our Materials Transfer work plays a part in this, allowing for those materials to be tagged, discovered and seamlessly transfered using standard, modular contracts that help clear up some of the clutter in the technology transfer system. All with the same goal in mind - to further lower the barrier and transaction cost to transferring scientific materials. All it takes are users willing to share.

For more information about our Materials Transfer work, visit its project page, where you can read the background on this, access the MTA chooser, and view the latest video.

The latest talk from Science Commons John Wilbanks on “Knowledge Interoperability” is now online, made available on “Beyond the Book”, an educational program out of the Copyright Clearance Center. The presentation was given at the annual Council of Science Editors Annual Meeting, held in Pittsburgh from May 1-5.

In Wilbanks’ talk he details the need for an open approach when it comes to knowledge sharing in the digital world, necessary to really see network effects on available information and explosions of innovation. He argues that the ability to create and distribute is now ubiquitous, and that the digital commons presents a different opportunity for sharing, if allowed. Our work at Creative Commons aims to facilitate that sharing ecosystem,  better leverage the power of the network, and enable sharing that’s legally sound, easy and scalable.

EMBL - the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, has made part of their SIDER Side Effect Resource available to the public free of restriction via CC0, placing it in the public domain.

The database, SIDER, contains information on marketed medicines and their recorded adverse side effects and drug reactions. Included in this dataset is information on the frequency of these drug reactions, other drug and side effect classifications as well as links to other relevant resources. To date, 888 drugs are listed in the database, a tremendous resource for research and drug discovery.

The mapping of labels and euphoria-related side effects are now public domain, with some other side effect information available for download under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.

Have you made your information available using CC0? We’d love to hear about it. Drop us a note.

For more information about our data policy and reasoning, see our Database Protocol or “Freedom to Research” available for download over at our Reading Room.

Worldchanging.com has a new piece up on the GreenXchange, a project of Nike and Creative Commons, housed at Science Commons. The article, “Green Xchange:  Creating a Meta-Map of Sustainability” details the underlying concepts for the project, the obstacles and includes a look into the future. The project, announced at last January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, pairs together the Creative Commons licensing structure (metadata, human readable aspect, legalese) with the right technology to allow companies to share their patents related to sustainability. The goal - to bring the efficiencies of open collaboration and innovation to the problems of sustainability.

As Agnes Mazur put it,

“While competitors in the same market may not be keen to share research done on improving product performance, companies in vastly different fields may benefit from the very same research without posing a threat. If a company like Nike, for example, has performed extensive research on maximizing the efficiency of air pressure in sneaker design, a company that manufactures truck tires may apply the patent in a way that saves materials and money, creates a more eco-friendly product, and does not harm Nike’s sales. But in a case like this, Nike may choose to draft the terms of the patent’s use to exclude other apparel companies.

Competitive companies may find it useful to collaborate on parallel research aimed at a common goal, such as reducing their environmental impact. For example, several companies in the apparel industry may be conducting their own research on creating a more eco-friendly shoebox. By sharing this type of research, companies can cut unnecessary costs and achieve results more quickly.”

The collaboration, as Mazur says, is still in its infancy, and seeking founding partners, people to contribute and those that are interested in the concept. For more information about the project, visit the GreenXchange Web site at sciencecommons.org.

The radio program “A World of Possibilities” has a fantastic new piece up on “Open Source science” and Health Commons. The podcast explores the Health Commons approach of creating a more open system for the exchange of medical information that cuts across sectors, medical professionals, cultural boundaries, etc to leverage the power of the network and accelerate the pace of drug discovery. The segment also takes a look at the personal reasons behind this collaboration and the benefits of an “Open Source” approach to sharing biomedical knowledge. Featured in this segment are representatives from two of Health Commons partners: Marty Tenenbaum, the chairman and chief scientist for CollabRx; and Gavin Yamey and Peter Jerram from the Public Library of Science.

We encourage you to give it a listen and let us know your thoughts. For more information about the Health Commons project, visit its Web site (also hosted on the SC site here).

The folks over at Talis recently announced a new free data-hosting service for open data, the “Talis Connected Commons”.

The service provides free data hosting up to 50 million RDF triples and 10Gb of content for “qualifying” data sets, as specified by their Web site.  To qualify for entry, the data and content must be made available to the public domain either under CC0 - a waiver we recently released that allows for one to waive all rights over their work, or the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License.

I further bore into the details regarding hosting public domain data, inquiring whether or not data naturally in the public domain and not marked by CC0 or the PDDL would be allowed in the system. Talis’ Leigh Dodds, after a few email exchanges, expressed their desire to have the data clearly marked via CC0 or PDDL, but assured me that data already in the commons — for example, the human genome — would not be excluded.

Confusion clarified.

We commend Talis for using CC0 as a means to clearly mark and identify public domain data, and look forward to see what fruit this tree will bring for the open data / linked data communities.

For more information, visit their Web site and FAQ.

The Wall Street Journal has a wonderful piece on director and producer Jesse Dylan, detailing his journey from Elvis Costello videos and film to his connection with Creative Commons and Science Commons. The article looks at Jesse’s personal impetus for his latest work and his desire to better explain complex issues in the sciences in simplified terms.

Dylan was recently recognized for his Emmy award winning “Yes We Can” video from President Obama’s campaign, with musical artist will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas, that quickly became an Internet hit. The Science Commons team first met Dylan in spring of last year, and after a few conversations with John Wilbanks, planning for the first Science Commons informational video began. The video was launched in December as part of the Creative Commons annual campaign and can be seen here, as well as on our home page.

Back in December when we asked Dylan about the video, he said, “I believe Science Commons represents the true aspiration of the web, and I wanted to tell their story. They’ve changed the way we think about exploration and discovery; the important and innovative ideas need to be shared.  I believe it’s vital to revolutionizing science in the future. I hope this is just the beginning of our collaboration.”

We hope so too. Thanks again to Jesse and his team for their work on these videos and ongoing support. For more information about the Science Commons video or “A Shared Culture”, click here and here, also accessible from the WSJ Web site.

Yesterday, by unanimous vote, MIT faculty adopted an Open Access resolution (text here) that will make scholarly articles available at no charge, freely to the public through DSpace - MIT’s repository service.

The way this policy works is that faculty authors grant the university non-exclusive permission to make their scholarly works available in a repository, with the right for MIT and its faculty to publicly disseminate for all uses except commercial. The resolution is believed to be the first faculty-driven, university-wide policy, and joins other similar initiatives recently adopted at Harvard, Stanford and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

This follows on our Addendum Generator, created by Science Commons as part of the Scholar’s Copyright project, which hosts the MIT Addendum, among others. The MIT Addendum helps scholars to negotiate with publishers for rights to comply with this new policy, as well as the NIH mandate. Authors can use our Addendum Engine to easily generate a one page document to attach to their submissions to the publishers, stating which rights they’d like to retain.

We applaud the university for passing this resolution, which is a great step forward for Open Access, and also encourage members of the MIT faculty to consider using one of our addenda to ensure their work can be publicly accessed and shared post-publication.

Also, for more information on how to comply with these policies, read our white paper, “Open Doors and Open Minds:  What faculty authors can do to ensure open access to their work through their institution.”

The NIH Public Access Policy, which was due to expire this year, has now been made permanent by the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, signed into law last week.

Last year, Science Commons, SPARC, and ARL jointly released a White Paper authored by our board member Mike Carroll called “Complying With the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy,” explaining the new NIH-mandated PubMed deposit requirement and questions that grant recipients should consider in designing a program to comply with it. At that time, the new mandatory policy had just taken effect, and many recipients were still learning how to comply. Nevertheless, the results were dramatic. Prior to NIH’s mandatory deposit requirement, under a voluntary policy NIH began in 2005, the compliance rate in terms of deposits in PubMed had been very low (4%, as published in an NIH report to Congress in 2006). Shortly after the adoption of the new mandatory policy, submissions spiked to an all time high, prompting an NIH official to project compliance rates of 55-60%. Just take a look at this NIH chart, and note the sharp rise after the policy took effect in early 2008.

In a subsequent White Paper that Science Commons and SPARC jointly issued, our recommendations included looking beyond compliance with the new policy and taking this opportunity to develop comprehensive institutional deposit and public access policies, such as Harvard’s open access policy.

Making the NIH Public Access Policy permanent will provide scholars and institutions with much needed certainty and impetus to focus on implementing these requirements within their institutions. It also creates a opportunity for scholars, universities, and the research community to take a broader look at their institution’s scholarly publishing and open access policies, not only as it applies to deposit in PubMed, but also as it applies to their own institutional repositories and scholarly communities.

We will work with our collaborators to develop further policy and legal briefings for university and public research institutions who are studying these issues. Look for that this summer.