October 14, 2008 is the world’s first Open Access Day.  The founding partners are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science.  Open Access Day will help to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public.

SPARC has released 6 videos on why Open Access matters:

* Barbara Stebbins, science teacher at Black Pine Circle School in Berkeley
* Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, London, U.K.
* Sharon Terry, CEO and President of the Genetic Alliance, Washington, DC
* Ida Sim, Associate Professor and a practicing physician at the University of California, San Francisco
* Diane Graves, University Librarian for Trinity University, San Antonio
* Andre Brown, PhD student, University of Pennsylvania

The videos are available for the public to view, download, and repurpose under a CC-BY license at http://www.vimeo.com/oaday08.

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have jointly announced the first international Open Access Day just 2 days after the National Students for Free Culture Conference in Berkley.

Open Access Day will invite researchers, educators, librarians, students, and the public to participate in live, worldwide broadcasts of events. In North America, events will be held at 7:00 PM (Eastern) and 7:00 PM (Pacific) and feature appearances from:

Sir Richard Roberts, Ph.D., F.R.S.
Joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1993 for discovering split genes and RNA splicing, one of 26 Nobel Prize-winners to sign the Open Letter to U.S. Congress in support of taxpayer access to publicly funded research, and currently at New England Biolabs, USA. [7PM Eastern]

Philip E. Bourne, Ph.D.
Philip E. Bourne is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Computational Biology and the author of the popular PLoS Computational Biology Ten Simple Rules Series. He is Professor in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank, Senior Advisor to the San Diego Supercomputer Center, an Adjunct Professor at the Burnham Institute, and Co-Founder of SciVee. [7PM Pacific]

Librarians and student organizers are invited to host meetings around the broadcast. To see a list of participating campuses and to sign up, visit the Open Access Day Web site at http://www.openaccessday.org. Additional international events will be announced shortly.

Read more in the full press release.

Harvard Law School joins Harvard FAS in mandating OA by a unanimous vote of the faculty. From the law school announcement, May 7, 2008:

In a move that will disseminate faculty research and scholarship as broadly as possible, the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously voted last week to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the second law school to commit to open access. (Duke went open access in 2005)

“The Harvard Law School faculty produces some of the most exciting, groundbreaking scholarship in the world,” said Dean Elena Kagan ‘86. “Our decision to embrace ‘open access’ means that people everywhere can benefit from the ideas generated here at the Law School.”

Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit.

“This exciting development is something in which the whole Harvard Law School community can take great pride,” said John Palfrey ‘01, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and newly appointed vice dean of library and information resources. “The acceptance of open access ensures that our faculty’s world-class scholarship is accessible today and into the future. I look forward to the work of implementing this commitment.”

The vote came after an open access proposal was made by a university-wide committee aimed at encouraging wider dissemination of scholarly work. Earlier this semester, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to adopt a policy similar to the Law School’s new initiative….

Comments By Gavin Baker:

• This is not only another university OA mandate, but another unanimous faculty vote for an OA mandate. The unanimous faculty support makes a very good development positively beautiful. As I pointed out in my article on the Harvard FAS mandate: “The publishing lobby has often argued that the call for OA mandates is a sign that researchers oppose OA and must be coerced. This argument always flew in the face of the evidence, but the unanimous Harvard vote should be the last nail in the coffin in which we bury the idea. For the same reason, the Harvard vote decisively confirms Alma Swan’s finding that the overwhelming majority of researchers do not resent OA mandates and would willingly comply with one from their funder or university.”
• Kudos to all involved, especially Stuart Shieber, Robert Darnton, Terry Fisher, and John Palfrey.
• It’s the same as the policy adopted by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The text of the motion approved by the law school faculty is now online (also on John Palfrey’s blog). The new policy is voluntary until September 1, 2008, when it will become mandatory.

Comments By Brian Rowe

• This is a large step moving forward the Open Access movement. It will challenge a lot of the publishing contracts in force at law reviews. Only about 30 law reviews are currently set up in a way that allows all authors to contribute to this type of open access repository. Over the short run law reviews will likely make exceptions for articles from Harvard faculty and still try to keep all rights reserved from other writes. Over the long run this could be the beginning of a move to an open access legal publishing model driven by schools them selfs.
• This could have an impact on the adoption of Scientific Commons Open Access Legal Program. Journals that are members of the program have already agreed to allow authors to make copies like those required by the open access initiative.

Remixed from Gavin Bakers post at FOS

Edited to add notes on Duke’s open access repository which predates Harvard’s by three years.

Stanford’s copyright and fair use blog posted a great short interview which points out that one of the main opponents of open access publishing is law students?!! Unlike almost all other academic professions, where journals are peer reviewed and often run by faculty and students, in law the journals are student edited and student run. If law students stand up for open access they can change the citation standards, the norms and even the access to their own journals.

Here is the full interview from Stanford’s Faily Used Blog:

Quick conversation with Erika V. Wayne, Deputy Director of the Stanford Law Library and Lecturer in Law

Minow: Erika, what are your thoughts as a law librarian about the role of law students in suppressing the use of free legal sources, such as court cases and laws that are clearly in the public domain.

Wayne: Authors of law journal articles, like many authors, rely on the vast array of online resources to write and research their works. Yet the student editors on law school journals typically insist on citing to the hard copy of the commercial sources. This is due to the preferences laid out in the Bluebook.

So silly really – student editors insisting on getting their hands on paper copies of sources that the original authors almost certainly only used in e-form — a fiction. What is so tricky and painful for a lot of law libraries is that we end up purchasing certain sources in hard copy only to support this. Indeed, our own faculty and students, when not wearing their editor-hats, will almost all go to the online versions for their own research.

Minow: Who actually writes the Bluebook that imposes the print sources requirement?

Wayne: It’s the students who create the Bluebook - that is the law journal editors at a few top schools.

Minow: What would be your recommendation to law students, and Bluebook editors in particular?

Wayne: The editors could easily loosen the citation preferences and give equal weight to online sources.

All of this being said: the Bluebook isn’t a court’s citation guide. Lawyers practicing in a given court need to comply with a court’s citation rules. The Bluebook is really just a guide or standard for law journals.

But if we talk about changing the way courts and legislatures open up, accept and provide free legal information — about providing new lower cost alternatives for research — the student editors of the Bluebook could lead the charge and rewrite the fiction of citing to paper sources and help train the next crop of lawyers to look to the newer or free legal resources, by giving them the same authority as the traditional commercial research services.

FFIP just signed The Cape Town Open Education Declaration(CTOED). The CTOED is the next step in Open Access Education. The CTEOD identifies three strategies to increase the reach and impact of open educational resources:

1. Educators and learners: First, we encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement. Participating includes: creating, using, adapting and improving open educational resources; embracing educational practices built around collaboration, discovery and the creation of knowledge; and inviting peers and colleagues to get involved. Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly.

2. Open educational resources: Second, we call on educators, authors, publishers and institutions to release their resources openly. These open educational resources should be freely shared through open licenses which facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone. Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet.

3. Open education policy: Third, governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources. Accreditation and adoption processes should give preference to open educational resources. Educational resource repositories should actively include and highlight open educational resources within their collections.

One of the most progressive parts of this declaration is the understand that “Whenever possible, [resources] should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet” This is an important step towards embracing Human Rights and working to close the digital divide. The CTOED builds on the Budapest Open Access Initiative by expanding the focus and including collaboration which empowers communities to educate and learn cooperatively.

Take Action:
READ the full Cape Town Open Education Declaration
SIGN the Declaration as an Organizations or an Individual
ACT to implement the strategies

Related Stories:
FFIP Signs Budapest Open Access Initiative

SPARC has started their own Innovator Awards to recognize students who are helping move scholarly communication towards an open access model. SPARC, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. This years SPARC awards were heavily pervaded by students in the Free Culture movement.

Here are this years winners:

* “The Technologist,” Benjamin Mako Hill, Graduate of the MIT Media Lab, current Researcher at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, Fellow in the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, and engineer of the 2007 “Overprice Tags” project at the MIT library.

* “The Professional,” Gavin Baker. Political Studies graduate of the University of Florida, Open Access Director for Students for Free Culture, and co-mastermind of the National Day of Action for Open Access, February 2007.

* “The Politician,” Nick Shockey. Current undergraduate and Student Senator at Trinity University in San Antonio and author of the second-ever student senate resolution in favor of public access to publicly funded research results.

* “The Diplomat,” Elizabeth Stark. Student of Law at Harvard University, Affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, founder of Harvard Free Culture, and architect of one of the first student free thesis repositories.

* “The Evangelist,” Nelson Pavlosky. Law student at George Mason University, co-founder of Students for Free Culture, and ally of the Student Global AIDS Campaign and Universities Allied for Essential Medicines.

Read the full Story at SPARC:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator/students.html

The Budapest Open Access Initiative was drafted in December of 2001 and was clearly ahead of its time. This last week, while prepping for a meeting with the Seattle Journal for Social Justice, I went back and read this document again and was amazed at how simply it states the principles and reason for open access. I also realized that FFIP and myself personally had not officially signed the document. I fixed that oversight today and urge everyone else committed to open access scholarship to do the same.

The first paragraph of the initiative follows:

“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.”

Read and sign the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

“Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase have reached an agreement for the release of a totally unencumbered repository of 1.8 million pages of federal case law, including Courts of Appeals decisions back to 1950.” Carl Malamud Public.Resource.org

This is a huge win for open access law. For too long case law, which is in the public domain, have been locked away by Westlaw and Lexis (Wexis).

Last Summer when we (Sarah and I) visited CC this was one of our major topics we discussed with Jon Phillips. I am ecstatic to see CC and EFF involved in the process of liberating case law. Although I do find it a bit odd that the press release lists a “brand-new Creative Commons mark—CC-Ø—which will allow us to affirmatively certify that this information is public domain.” It is more accurate to say they are resurrecting an old CC mark with possibly an new look. The upper left hand of Freedom for IP has been sporting a CC PD mark for the last 2 years.

To illustrate how important it is that this case law is in the public domain one can look to CC description of what can be done with materials in the public domain the case law “may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.”

The next major challenge for the public and the legal community it to find the best way to make these 1.8 million pages usable. Having all the case law in the world online is only a start, the one thing that Wexis has done well is make case law usable with internal links, head notes summaries and cross references.

Here is my first thoughts on how make the case law usable:
1. XML it - Mark it up in a open format that allows other to repurpose it easily
2. Wiki it in a way the preserves the text- Wiki style case summaries
3. Tag it for current precedence - create a tagging system marking which cases are still good law and allow users to comment and change these tags as new decisions are made.
4. Cross reference it - add internal links or a way to easily move from one case to another within the documents
5. Add a uniform index of issues.
6. Add an index of facts.

The players best suited to do these things are the old guard of Wexis, the new juggernauts of Wikimedia and Wikipedia, and the new academically supported Altlaw. I am curious who will step up to the plate and how. There is so much ground to cover in making this case law usable that several groups could work together. Wexis can probably get 5-10 more years out of the locked system, but if one of them wants to open there systems they could dominate a new open market place based on alternative revenue. Ultimately I think the usability solutions will come from whoever is able to harness the power of law students, public interest lawyers and the general public in one collaborative forum.

Past articles on these issues:
Findlaw - Westlaw kills FindLaw, Remove your links
Altlaw = public domain law database

External press coverage:
Boing Boing
Official Press Release

The Entertainment Law Initiative Writing Competition, sponsored by the GRAMMY Foundation, REQUIRES authors to yield all ownership rights to their work to the Grammy foundation.

Condition 11 states:

“Each manuscript submitted shall be accompanied by a letter from the author in which he or she certifies that the article submitted has not had prior publication, that it is original work prepared by the author alone for this contest, and that the author transfers ownership to the GRAMMY Foundation.”

Ironically the Grammy Foundation will be publishing the winning articles in a Vanderbilt Law Review. Vanderbilt is listed as an adopter of the Open Access Law Journal Principles. The Principles require that

“The Journal will not interfere at any time with the author’s freedom to make his or her work available under a license as free as the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.“

The transfer of ownership clause in the Entertainment Law Initiative Writing Competition is incompatible with the Open Access Law Journal Principles. I am concerned that authors who believe in open access issues will be discouraged from entering the competition.

The default taking of ownership rights from authors to middle men is one of the largest problems in our current copyright system.

Personally I will not publish legal scholarship, or any scholarship, that is not open access. I wish Scientific Commons would open up its Open Access Law Author Pledge to non tenured professors and law students.