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As a Berkman Center alum, I’m especially excited to share the news that the faculty of Harvard Law School has voted unanimously to implement an open access mandate (full text here).

The Berkman Center is the wellspring of Creative Commons, and here at Science Commons, we work to make legal scholarship open and accessible to all. The decision, which comes in the wake of the historic vote for open access by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, makes Harvard Law School the first law school to enact an open access mandate.

Here, a brief round-up of commentary:

Peter Suber, open access leader: “This is not only another university OA mandate, and the first for a law school, but another unanimous faculty vote for an OA mandate. The unanimous faculty support makes a very good development positively beautiful.“

John Palfrey, the Berkman Center’s executive director and newly appointed Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, who proposed the mandate to the faculty: “The acceptance of open access ensures that our faculty’s world-class scholarship is accessible today and into the future.”

Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library: “That such a renowned law school should support Open Access so resoundingly is a victory for the democratization of knowledge. Far from turning its back to the outside world, the HLS is sharing its intellectual wealth.”

Tim Armstrong, a former Berkman fellow and current Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law: “As John Willinsky has explained, open access is a force multiplier for scholarship: it correlates with increased influence (as measured by citations) and broader scholarly impact as compared with work published only in closed or proprietary fora.”

Gene Koo, a Berkman fellow and Director of Online Training at Legal Aid University: “[Legal] scholarship has the potential to leap forward by large bounds with policies like Harvard’s in place.”

We agree with David Weinberger: Yay! Congratulations to everyone involved.

The National Cancer Institute will soon be using Tranche to store and share mouse proteomic data from its Mouse Proteomic Technologies Initiative (MPTI). Tranche, a free and open source file sharing tool for scientific data, was one of the earliest testers of CC0. Many thanks to Tranche for providing us with such valuable early feedback on CC0.

From GenomeWeb News:

The MPTI collects tissue and serum measurements from mouse models of different types of cancers using analytical techniques such as mass spectrometry. Tranche researchers, along with University of Michigan researcher Philip Andrews, deposited nearly 1 terabyte of MPTI raw data into the Tranche network, where it can be shared between participating researchers.

The dataset is now being released in publicly accessible formats as well and is available to others in the research community. Because of the encryption used on the site, data on Tranche can be privately used by labs with access to the information until it is ready to be released to the public.

Congratulations to everyone over at Tranche and keep up the good work!

Even among those who follow developments in the open access (OA) movement closely, there is sometimes confusion over definitions. Does open access publishing mean placing the work online without price barriers (for free) — or must you also remove permission barriers (for instance, by adopting a Creative Commons license that permits reuse without permission)?

Earlier this week, open access leader Peter Suber and “archivangelist” Stevan Harnad reached consensus on terms to describe these two forms of open access: “weak” OA (removing price barriers alone) and “strong” OA (removing price and permission barriers). Explains Suber:

There are two good reasons why our central term became ambiguous. Most of our success stories deliver OA in the first sense, while the major public statements from Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin (together, the BBB definition of OA) describe OA in the second sense. […]

We have agreed to use the term “weak OA” for the removal of price barriers alone and “strong OA” for the removal of both price and permission barriers. To me, the new terms are a distinct improvement upon the previous state of ambiguity because they label one of those species weak and the other strong. To Stevan, the new terms are an improvement because they make clear that weak OA is still a kind of OA.

On this new terminology, the BBB definition describes one kind of strong OA. A typical funder or university mandate provides weak OA. Many OA journals provide strong OA, but many others provide weak OA.

Forging agreement on the terms “weak” and “strong” OA is a promising development. Not only could it bring more clarity to the discussion about open access in the community, it could also help more people understand intuitively that there is a spectrum of openness, and choices you can make to maximize the value of that openness.

For further discussion, check out Why weakOA and strongOA are so important, What is strongOA? and Klaus Graf on what is strongOA over @ Peter Murray-Rust’s blog.

Update (May 6): Stevan Harnad: “[We] are looking for a shorthand or stand-in for ‘price-barrier-free OA’ and ‘permission-barrier-free OA’ that will convey the distinction without any pejorative connotations for either form of OA.”

Peter Suber: “Stevan is right.  Last week we introduced terms (’weak’ and ’strong’ OA) to describe an important and widely recognized distinction.  But the terms were infelicitous and we’re still looking for better ones…The effort here is not to make any kind of policy recommendation, but simply to achieve new clarity in talking about different policy options.”

Leading by example, the Rockefeller University Press has issued a bold challenge to other non-OA publishers to find new ways to strike a balance between sustainable publishing and advancing authors’ freedoms and the public interest. The Press adopted a new copyright policy that returns essential freedoms to authors and extends permissions to the public that are vital to advancing science. This new policy covers its journals, which include the prestigious Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine and The Journal of General Physiology.

Under the policy, there are two license periods. An initial license, available during the first six month period after publication, permits sharing and reuse of the work, but prohibits distribution through mirror sites (whether commercial or non-commercial). After this six months, the Press grants the public a standard Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. These two licenses differ only in the mirroring prohibition clause — otherwise, the conditions are essentially similar.

The new policy covers all of the Press’s archives as well. This opens up a rich resource to text-mining and knowledge integration, using technologies such as our Neurocommons project. This allows the corpus of scientific knowledge to be upgraded to take advantage of the Web. That opportunity that been largely missed for vast tracts of the scientific literature, not due to lack of interest or technological means, but due to the lack of access and copyright permission.

The significance of this announcement lies not only in the importance of the journals involved, but also in demonstrating that we need not yield to the false dichotomy between sustainability and access. Finding ways to strike a reasonable balance requires forward-thinking leadership. By going beyond what the NIH Public Access Policy requires and using Creative Commons licenses to remove not only access but permission barriers, the Press is demonstrating that leadership and its commitment to the interests of the community that it serves.

Here’s an excerpt from the terrific editorial by Emma Hill, Executive Editor, The Journal of Cell Biology and Mike Rossner, Executive Editor, The Rockefeller University Press:

Preying on authors’ desire to publish, and thus their willingness to sign virtually any form placed in front of them, scientific publishers have traditionally required authors to sign over the copyright to their work before publication. […]

At The Rockefeller University Press, we have followed this tradition in the past and obtained copyright from authors as a condition of publication. Several years ago, however, we recognized that the advent of the internet had irrevocably changed the nature and mechanisms of knowledge distribution, and we returned some of those rights to authors. Since July 2000, we have allowed our authors to freely distribute their published work by posting the final, formatted PDF version on their own websites immediately after publication.

With the growing demand for public access to published data, we recently started depositing all of our content in PubMed Central. In a further step to enhance the utility of scientific content, we have now decided to return copyright to our authors. In return, however, we require authors to make their work available for reuse by the public. Instead of relinquishing copyright, our authors will now provide us with a license to publish their work. This license, however, places no restrictions on how authors can reuse their own work; we only require them to attribute the work to its original publication. Six months after publication, third parties (that is, anyone who is not an author) can use the material we publish under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0). […]

We are pleased to finally comply with the original spirit of copyright in our continuing effort to promote public access to the published biomedical literature.

When he gives talks for research foundations about ways to spur innovation, John Wilbanks often shares the story of John Snow, the anesthesiologist who in the mid-1800s used maps to figure out how a series of cholera epidemics were spreading. By marking the precise locations where the outbreaks occurred, Snow was able to demonstrate that they clustered around water sources, showing that the “morbid poison” was spreading through tainted water.

What does this have to do with modern-day research foundations? If you envision research outcomes as pieces of a map — in biomedical research, a map of the human body — you can easily see the advantages of ensuring that when they are published, they are published openly. A single research paper may not hold the answer to stopping an epidemic or curing a disease; placed in context, however, it could make finding the solution trivial.

On that note, below is the first profile in our series on people and organizations working at the frontiers of open science: a look at the pioneering work of the UK-based Wellcome Trust.

The Wellcome Trust, a global leader among charity organizations, is working to keep the results of the research it funds “widely and freely available to all.” Importantly, it defines this freedom explicitly in terms that embrace the advantages that computers and network technology give us. The most recent update to its position statement on open access encourages — and in cases where it has paid an open access fee, requires — that funded research is licensed so that it can be “freely copied and re-used (for example for text and data-mining purposes), provided that such uses are fully attributed” (emphasis, mine). This might read as a minor parenthetical; in fact, the explicit freedom to use computer technology to derive value from the literature can help make the difference between having a map and continually, painstakingly redrawing it.

This is just one example of the smart choices the Wellcome Trust has been making to cultivate what it calls a “richer research culture.” Below is a brief overview of the Trust’s trail-blazing work over the past five years (with thanks to Peter Suber for his meticulous documentation of the work in the Timeline of the Open Access Movement):

• 2003: The Wellcome Trust commissions a report asking how the economics of scientific publishing impact the long-term interests of the research community. The findings are released in tandem with a landmark position statement supporting open and unrestricted access to the published output of research. Writes Suber: “When a foundation awards a research grant, it is showing its belief that the results of that research will be useful to the wider world. With its commitment to open access, WT is showing its belief that open access to those research results will make them even more useful.”
• 2004: The Trust announces its intention to establish a European PubMed Central, and to require that its grantees deposit an electronic copy of research publications in PubMed Central no later than six months after publication.
• 2005: The Trust makes history by becoming the world’s first research funding agency to implement an open access mandate.
• 2007: In January, the UK PubMed Central (UK PMC) is launched, a collaboration among of the Trust and nine other leading UK organizations. Wellcome Trust Director Mark Walport promises that the launch is “only the start” of an effort to develop the site as the resource of choice for the international biomedical research community. In the spring, the Trust signals its support for sharing preliminary research and findings, joining the British Library, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and Science Commons as a partner in Nature Precedings.
• 2008: The UK PMC holds a workshop on further developing the site. Its workshop report [PDF] hints at future developments to enhance the usefulness of the literature; in a summary of a discussion about text mining, Dr. Sophia Ananiadou explains that semantic markup helps text mining tools work “optimally,” and would allow researchers to “use a simple natural language query that will retrieve specific facts matching that query, rather than just a set of whole documents to be read.”

The Trust shows no signs of stopping pushing the envelope, making strategy and policy decisions that reflect its ongoing commitment to maximizing the “downstream” impact of research.

We can’t wait to see what’s next.

Science Commons and SPARC today released a new guide for faculty who want to ensure open access to their work through their institution.

The how-to guide, Open Doors and Open Minds, is aimed at helping institutions adopt policies to increase the practical exposure to the scholarly works being produced, such as that adopted by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences in February. It provides information on copyright law, offers specific suggestions for licensing options and provides a ten-point list of actions people can take to craft and implement a policy that maximizes the impact of research.

From the SPARC media release:

“The Harvard policy is a recognition that the Internet creates opportunities to radically accelerate distribution and impact for scholarly works,” said John Wilbanks, Vice President of Science at Creative Commons. “As more universities move to increase the reach of their faculty’s work, it’s important that faculty members have a clear understanding of the key issues involved and the steps along the path that Harvard has trail-blazed. This paper is a foundational document for universities and faculty to use as they move into the new world of Open Access scholarly works.”

“Everyone - faculty, librarians, administrators, and other advocates - has the power to initiate change at their institution,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. “By championing an open access policy, helping to inform your colleagues about the benefits of a policy change, and identifying the best license and most effective path to adoption, it can be done.”

The guide is available both at the SPARC site and in the Science Commons Reading Room.

SPARC Europe and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have announced the launch of the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access Journals.

The seal is aimed at increasing the usefulness and “discoverability” of open access (OA) journals, clarifying the kinds of reuses that are allowed and using metadata to make the content easier to find. To qualify for the seal, a journal must use the Creative Commons By (CC-BY) license and provide metadata for all their articles to the DOAJ, which will then make the metadata OAI-compliant. From the media release:

“Legal certainty is essential to the emergence of an internet that supports research. The proliferation of license terms forces researchers to act like lawyers, and slows innovative educational and scientific uses of the scholarly canon,” said John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons. “Using a seal to reward the journals who choose to adopt policies that ensure users’ rights to innovate is a great idea. It builds on a culture of trust rather than a culture of control, and it will make it easy to find the open access journals with the best policies.”

Bravo to SPARC Europe and DOAJ for setting a standard that can help spur innovation by expanding the zones of legal certainty for research.

You can find additional notes and commentary by Peter Suber @ Open Access News.

In the wake of Creative Commons’ announcement last week that the beta CC0 waiver/discussion draft 2 has now been released, Science Commons Counsel Thinh Nguyen has written a short paper to help explain why we need legal tools like the waiver to facilitate scientific research. Writes Nguyen:

Any researcher who needs to draw from many databases to conduct research is painfully aware of the difficulty of dealing with a myriad of differing and overlapping data sharing policies, agreements, and laws, as well as parsing incomprehensible fine print that often carries conflicting obligations, limitations, and restrictions. These licenses and agreements can not only impede research, they can also enable data providers to exercise “remote control” over downstream users of data, dictating not only what research can be done, and by whom, but also what data can be published or disclosed, what data can be combined and how, and what data can be re-used and for what purposes.

Imposing that kind of control, Nguyen asserts, “threatens the very foundations of science, which is grounded in freedom of inquiry and freedom to publish.” The situation is further complicated by the fact that different countries have different laws for protecting data and databases, making it difficult to legally integrate data created or gathered under multiple jurisdictions. Using a “copyleft” license doesn’t mitigate the difficulty, since any license is premised on underlying rights, and those rights can be highly variable and unpredictable.

Finding a solution to these problems was the impetus behind the Science Commons Open Data Protocol, which Nguyen describes as “a set of principles designed to ensure that scientific data remains open, accessible, and interoperable.” In a nutshell, the idea is to return data to the public domain, “relinquishing all rights, of whatever origin or scope, that would otherwise restrict the ability to do research (i.e., the ability to extract, re-use, and distribute data).” The CC0 waiver and the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL) are tools to help people and organizations do that, implemented under the terms of the Protocol.

Of course, there are many existing initiatives to return data to the public domain. What the Protocol aims to do, however, is bring all of these initiatives together. Explains Nguyen:

What we seek is to map out and enlarge this commons of data by seeking out, certifying, and promoting existing data initiatives as well as new ones that embrace and implement these common principles, so that within this clearly marked domain, scientists everywhere can know that it is safe to conduct research.

You can read the entire paper, Freedom to Research: Keeping Scientific Data Open, Accessible, and Interoperable [PDF], in the Science Commons Reading Room.

Last spring, Science Commons participated in a workshop in Brazil aimed at identifying strategies for ensuring open, permanent access to scientific information in Latin America, with a particular focus on access to health and environmental information for sustainable development. Organized by the international Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) and Brazil’s Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental (CRIA), the workshop featured sessions on topics ranging from ways to overcome barriers to open access in countries around the world to the challenges of successfully integrating environmental, geospatial and biodiversity data.

The workshop report is now online and available at the conference website. Our thanks to CRIA Director Dora Ann Lange Canhos for passing it along.

A few weeks ago, I asked you for your ideas for people and organizations to profile here at Science Commons, with the goal of highlighting efforts to open new frontiers for innovation and discovery in science. I got some great responses, including a marvelously detailed, thoughtful email from Valentin Zacharias, a doctoral student and researcher at FZI who identified groups in five broad areas of open science:

• broad efforts to bring more scientific knowledge online, such as E.O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life project
• initiatives to define open access (OA) and develop resource sites, such as the Directory of OA Journals (DOAJ) and the Registry of OA Repositories (ROAR)
• efforts to share pre-publication research — science as it happens — including everything from preprint servers to open notebook projects
• initiatives to create evaluation mechanisms and bibliometrics
• efforts to integrate and make scientific content understandable by computers, such as the Semantic Web approaches we use at Science Commons

This is, of course, only the tip of the proverbial iceberg — or to use a more apropos metaphor, the stack. There is an incredibly diverse range of projects that use “open” approaches to building knowledge and accelerating discovery. In the profiles I’ll be publishing here, a connecting thread will be the question of whether and how we can enable independent contributions to feed into one another. Or to put it another way, how do we build an integrated commons of research and tools that’s truly useful for scientists?

I hope you’ll stay tuned. And if you’re part of an open science project and you haven’t yet sent me a pointer, please do. I’d love to hear from you.