Blog archive for January, 2010

Puneet Kishor is a Science Commons Fellow, specializing in geospatial issues and open data, and a guest blogger here at Science Commons.

Starting Jan 28, 2010, MichiganView is making available all of its more than 93 Gigabytes of Landsat 5 and 7, and NAIP imagery data in the public domain using the new CC0 Waiver provided by Creative Commons. The MichiganView consortium makes available aerial photography and satellite imagery of Michigan to the public for free over the Web. As part of the AmericaView consortium, MichiganView supports access and use of these imagery collections through education, workforce development, and research. CC0 (pronounced CC-Zero) 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 here, and the reasoning behind the protocol is described here. Further questions about MichiganView may be directed to Dr. Tyler Erickson, Director, MichiganView at tyler.erickson@mtu.edu and questions about the CC0 waiver may be directed to Puneet Kishor, Science Commons Fellow (Geospatial Data) at punkish@creativecommons.org.

Science Commons needs a new t-shirt design. Sure, the “e=mc(shared)” shirts are great – mine gets worn more than any other shirt in the dresser – but after years of having that design, we think it would be nice to have a new one. We are turning to the crowd to find a great new design and giving away a prize to the person with the winning design.

We’re calling on all of the science-minded Commons fans out there – from the design savvy to the slightly more artistic engineers and bench scientists. All are welcome to submit, so why not take a break from the lab and research, and take a stab at t-shirt design? Get geeky. We dare you.

The person with the winning design will win a trip to Seattle and a ticket to attend Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest where the new t-shirt will be officially launched. The symposium is an exhilarating event that you don’t want to miss! It will be a full day of stellar speakers presenting on: data accessibility and sharing, open access publishing, social norms of the scientific community, web-enabled research and other exciting ideas. Click here to check out the speaker list.

Submit your entries via email by Friday February 12th. More details on the rules below.

Rules:
Prize consists of round trip airfare from a US city to Seattle, two night hotel and a ticket to Science Commons Symposium. If you are from outside of the US and would like to participate, let us know and we can work out a different prize for you. Image files must be formatted as .jpg .png .ai .psd or .svg Entries must be received by Friday February 12th at 5pm PST. An image of the Science Commons logo can be downloaded at our Logo Page Contest submissions and any questions can be directed to Lisa Green.