knowledge sharing in the
sciences
kaitlin thaney
program manager, science commons
“symposium on common use licensing of publicly funded scientific data and publications”
taipei, taiwan - 27 march 2009
This presentation is licensed under the CreativeCommons-Attribution-3.0 license.

the “research web”
making the web work better for science
integrating disparate knowledge sources
make better use of existing information
in the digital form

the research web
Open Access Content
Open Access Research Open Source Knowledge
Materials Management

the research web
Open Access Content

scientific revolutions occur when a
sufficient body of data accumulates to
overthrow the dominant theories
we use to frame reality
a so-called paradigm shift
- from thomas kuhn

step one
... it all starts with access to the
scientific content and data ...

scholarship entrenched in idea of
transmitting knowledge via paper
mentality reflected even in the way we
describe “papers”
static, one-dimensional documents

in the digital world, “papers” can
become living, breathing works
no longer static PDF documents
linking to data sets, other relevant
papers, information, plasmids, genes

need to change the way we think of
scholarly publishing
paradigm shift
begin thinking of “papers” as
containers of knowledge

content needs to be legally and
technically accessible

thinking of “papers” more as containers of
knowledge
copyright locks that container

Open Access (OA)

Budapest Open Access Declaration
“ By open access to the literature, we mean its free
availability on the public internet, permitting users to
read, download, copy, distribute. print, search, or link to
the full texts of the articles, crawl them for indexing,
pass them as data to software, or use them for any
other lawful purpose, without financial, legal or
technical barriers other than those inseparable from
gaining access to the internet itself.”
Image from the Public Library of Science, licensed to the public, under
CC-BY-3.0
<http://www.soros.org/openaccess/>

“The only constraint on reproduction and distribution,
and the only role for copyright in this domain, should
be to give authors control over the integrity of their
work and the right to properly acknowledged and
cited.”

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

legal
implementation

provide tools and resources for those to
go Open Access:
(1) publishers
(2) academics
(3) institutions

(1) publishers:
... of scientific data
... of scientific journals and publications

Open Access journals
>1000 journals under CC-BY
>3600 journals OA journals in DOAJ
image from the public library of science
licensed to the public under CC-BY 3.0

early adopters:
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
BioMedCentral (BMC)
Hindawi
also ...
Nature Publishing Group:
CC-BY for Nature Precedings
seeing the benefit of openness, transparency, access

(2) academics:
via addenda and policy to help retain
rights to self-archive their works

traditional transfer of copyright agreement

promote
author’s
rights
web tool
MIT,
Carnegie Mellon,
ARL

(3) institutions
looking to implement OA policies
OA policy guides, white papers
<< in collaboration with the
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) >>

• Open Doors and Open Minds: What faculty authors can do to
ensure access to their work at their institutions
• Complying with the NIH Public Access Policy - Copyright
Considerations and Options
can be found at:
http://sciencecommons.org/resources/readingroom

open access to scientific literature
is key ...
open data work
facilitating data sharing

legal issues:
“it’s complicated”
makes Open Access to literature
look easy

copyright and databases
what’s protected? is it legal?
facts are free
to what extent is there creative expression?

database protections based on jurisdiction
sui generis,
“sweat of the brow”
Crown copyright
the list goes on ....

social issues:
protection instinct / culture of control
public domain relinquishes much of this
control, even control in the service of
freedom
“my data”, interpretation issues

issue of license propagation
whatever you do to the least of the
databases, you do to the integrated system
(the most restrictive wins)

need for a legally accurate and
simple solution
reducing or eliminating the need to make the
distinction of what’s protected
requires modular, standards based approach
to licensing

our solution :
reconstruction of the public domain
create legal zones of certainty for data
attribution through accompanying norms

3.1 The protocol must promote legal predictability
and certainty.
3.2 The protocol must be easy to use and understand.
3.3 The protocol must impose the lowest possible
transaction costs on users.
For the full text:
http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/

CC Zero waiver + SC norms
waive rights public domain
attribution / citation through
community norms, not a contract

a protocol, not a license

calls for data providers to waive all rights
necessary for data extraction and re-use
requires provider place no additional
obligations (like share-alike) to limit
downstream use
request behavior (like attribution) through
norms and terms of use

public domain is the natural state of data
examples:
human genome, geographic data,
NASA photographs

early adopters,
committing to make their data open
using CC0
(1) Tranche - free, open source
(2) Personal Genome Project

public domain = license, cannot be made
“more free” - only less free
PD = the original commons
no “one size fits all” solution
at least make metadata open,
if can’t make data itself open

design for maximum reuse
ensure the freedom to integrate
all built on a commons
allows for snap together integration of
the tools, data, research literature

thank you
kaitlin@creativecommons.org
sciencecommons.org
neurocommons.org