Last Wednesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a Request for Information on the issue of Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research. Executive action stemming from this RFI could potentially open all federally funded science research to the public for free online access.

This has the exciting potential to greatly advance the goals of your Open Education Campaign. Not only could the more than $60 billion in research the US government funds annually be made available to all, but the government would also be endorsing openness as an academic ideal, sending a strong signal to publishers, universities, and various other stakeholders that this is the new standard.

With all the work Students for Free Culture has done on the issue of expanding access to educational materials, you are in a unique position to appreciate the tremendous impact executive action could have. Opening up all federally funded research to every student in the country (and world) would break down strong barriers to access that currently force students to settle for the materials their library can afford rather than what they truly need. A student’s education should be limited only by curiosity rather than the rapidly escalating journal prices that put the complete scholarly record out of reach for students at all but the most well funded institutions.

So what can you do to make public access a reality? The answer is that you can do a lot.

• First, you can take the time to respond to the questions in the RFI (the full text can be found at here) by submitting a comment to the Federal Register by January 7th (email comments to publicaccess-at-ostp-dot-gov).
• Second, there is a rotating set of questions on the Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog which changes every ten days – you can respond thoughtfully to the questions as well as other people’s comments right in the comment section of the blog (the first round ends December 20th, so don’t wait!).
• Finally, you can encourage other students and advocates to comment as well.

A strong student response in favor of a mandatory public access policy will truly help ensure that such a policy becomes a reality and that it follows SFC’s ideals of openness as closely as possible. I can’t wait to see the impact students make on this groundbreaking process and look forward to your responses!

Nick Shockey
Director of Student Advocacy, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

In an effort to make academic publications more accessible, AcaWiki has been created. Billing itself as the “Wikipedia for academic research,” AcaWiki allows scholars to post summaries of their work on a site that aims to foster discussions. This is a great way to help build the academic commons. So, if you’re a researcher or academic, consider posting summaries of your work. If you’re a student, turn to AcaWiki when researching.

About the Open University Campaign

In October 2008, Students for Free Culture drafted and adopted the Wheeler Declaration which declared that:

“An open university is one in which:

1. The research produced is open access;
2. The course materials are open educational resources;
3. The university embraces free software and open standards;
4. The university’s patents are readily licensed for free software, essential medicine, and the public good;
5. The university’s network reflects the open nature of the Internet,

where “university” includes all parts of the community: students, faculty and administration.”

Out of this agreement has grown the Open University Campaign, of which a major goal is to produce objective, reliable indicators of individual universities’ levels of openness. A primary method through which this will be accomplished is through “report card” style profiles of leading institution of higher learning, similar to College Sustainability Report Cards. Students for Free Culture has already begun this work by defining principles of measurement, researching available resources, and developing surveys to be distributed to universities.

What Will the Open University Report Cards Entail?

Mirroring the Wheeler Declaration, the Open University Report Cards, as currently envisioned, will evaluate schools on five topics:

1. Open Access: Are faculty required to make their scholarship open access? Is the university press publish open access materials?
2. Open Educational Resources: Does the university create OERs? Does the university use OERs?
3. Free and Open Source Software and Standards: Does university computing use FOSS? Are students and faculty required to use proprietary software?
4. Intellectual Property: Is IP revenue transparent? Is IP used to promote innovation, or restrict knowledge?
5. Network Management: Is the network neutral? Is user privacy respected?

Establishing credible criteria under which schools will be assessed will be essential to creating a respected resource. For example, Which schools’ open access policies are currently lacking important criteria? Or, To what extent should a school actively support FOSS? The volunteers currently involved with the project are working through these questions on the wiki page, and we encourage you to join the conversation.

What the Open University Campaign Needs

In order to make this a successful endeavor, Students for Free Culture needs your involvement!

• Are you a student who can research official university open access policies?
• Are you passionate about FOSS and can develop a questionnaire for IT administrators about FOSS policy?
• Are you statistically-inclined and can handle data on universities?
• Are you a web developer who could create a public website for the Open University Report Cards?
• Are you a graphic designer who could create posters to raise awareness on campuses?

In Closing…

The Open University Campaign recognizes that scholastic advancement occurs most readily in an environment of sharing, openness and collaboration. By providing a cross-index of leading universities, the project will add important comparative measurements to encourage increased academic openness. Our hope is that these resources will provide a platform from which openness activists can endeavor to improve the scholastic environment.

Join us by jumping into the wiki, signing up for the Open University mailing list, or emailing board (at) freeculture (dot) org with suggestions or questions!

In this guest post, Jason Schultz, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law, examines the academic implications of poor privacy.

I’ve never seen my students more depressed than the moment they walk about of the campus bookstore. Instead of inspiration and glee, they often look like Quasimoto, the famous hunchback — dragging their bags full of thick clunky tomes behind them and bemoaning the huge hit they just took in their wallets. This is especially true today, as monumental budget cuts have driven up tuition at state universities like UC Berkeley to unprecedented heights. The cost of a college education has never been more daunting or its debt more long-lasting.

Enter Google Book Search (GBS), the half-decade-old scanning project by the popular search company in Mountain View. With GBS, the promise of affordable modern access to textbooks is at your fingertips. For example, if an academic publisher is part of Google’s Publisher Program, a large or small portion of the book may already be available depending on the publisher’s permissions. However, for other books that are still under copyright, Google will only display snippets — small 8-12 line “samples” of text that highlight what the viewer is searching for. Still, if you find a snippet that sounds good, you can often order the book via library or bookstore through a link on the side of the page.

Despite the limited size of these snippets, Google has been involved in a copyright lawsuit over its Book Search project that has now come to a head with a gigantic and important Settlement Agreement. The original lawsuit mostly concerned Google’s scanning, indexing, and snippet displays and whether or not those were copyright infringements or “fair use” of the books. The Settlement, however, covers many, many issues — open access, disability and civil rights, competition issues, metadata accuracy, and fair use just to name a few — too many to describe in a single blog post. However, I do want to highlight one of the key issues — privacy. You can check out other issues here.

When it comes to book privacy, it is important to think about it in the context of what many academics and activists call The Chilling Effect. Think about it. If you go to a library or a book store most days, you can walk around and browse fairly anonymously. If you decide you want to take a sneak peak at the somewhat embarrassing new Twilight novel, most people will never know. Or say you have a more serious concern, such as HIV or domestic violence. The privacy in physical libraries allows you to explore and understand important issues, either personally or for research and educational purposes. This privacy even extends to what you buy or check out — almost all libraries and bookstores protect these records from access by third parties as vehemently as possible. (For example, the American Library Association Code of Ethics specifically commits every librarian to protecting patron privacy.).

So the question for Google, and for the Settlement, is what kind of privacy protections will GBS offer? Well, the Settlement Agreement doesn’t say. It’s entirely silent on the issue of reader privacy. To their credit, Google has taken this concern quite seriously outside the Settlement, even going so far as to post a proposed Privacy Policy and make several comments on their blog. Yet concerns remain. For instance, despite Google’s assurances that they “take our privacy commitments to our users very seriously[,]” there are open questions about how much information they will collect on readers who use GBS, whether that information will be used in conjunction with other Google Services (such as its advertising services), how long they will keep the information, and under what circumstances they will disclose it to third parties, such as the government or those involved in civil lawsuits. These concerns are very real, as we have seen examples of subpoenas for book information in the past here, here, and here.

Moreover, there is also a concern about Google changing its mind in the future. If the settlement is approved (the Judge in the case will hold a hearing on October 7, 2009 to consider the matter), there is nothing that prevents Google from deciding at some future date to offer less privacy to readers. Locking Google into privacy as part of the Settlement ensures that readers are protected now and in the future. (I should note that I helped file a brief asking the Judge to do just that on behalf on a group of authors and publishers who share this concern.)

In sum, GBS is an amazing new opportunity to access information from books. There is no doubt about that. And the Settlement provides unprecedented additional opportunities for students to read. However, it is important to keep in mind the trade-offs that GBS and the Settlement offer and to make sure that the balance is positive before we whole-heartedly endorse this dramatic change in the future of the way we read, learn, and share information. For every student reading this, it is your future that is at stake, so pay attention. This is one test that may well be part of your permanent record for years to come.

– Jason Schultz

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google
• Rebecca Jeschke of EFF
• James Grimmelmann of NYLS
• Brandon Butler of ARL
• Ed Van Gemert of UW-Wisconsin

In this guest post, Ed Van Gemert, Deputy Director of the General Library System at UW-Madison, explains why students want to use Google Book Search.

At UW-Madison, we routinely refer students to Google Books and the University of Wisconsin Digital Collection. Several examples illustrate some of the K-12 and college use and wide adoption of electronic scholarly resources. Annual usage grows exponentially.

• “I am a college student working on a cultural tapestry for one of my courses.  My instructor wants us to save photographs of the culture we’ve chosen to study on a jpeg file and it can’t be copyrighted. I was hoping you would give me permission to use some of these pictures for my project.  She wants an e-mail sent with consent to use them.  I can’t find pictures any place that aren’t copyrighted, and have been unable to gain permission from any site.  This is strictly for my final; educational use only.  Please help!”
  – University of Wisconsin Digital Collection:  Africa Focus

“I am an eighth-grade student.  I am writing to request information for a school project.  My social studies and English classes are involved in a large research project called “History Day.”   Each year this project follows a different them that is set by the National History Day Office, and for this school year our theme is Conflict and Compromise in History.  I am investigating the 1933 Wisconsin milk strikes.  For this assignment, we are required to study the person/idea/event/issue itself, the background and context in which it happened, and the impact/influence/change it brought about.  I am writing to ask for any articles or documents you could send me with information about the three milk strikes that occurred because of the strikes, and the effectiveness of the strikes.”
University of Wisconsin Digital Collection: State of Wisconsin Collection

The State of Wisconsin collection probably has the greatest impact on K-12 students.  It contains thousands of images and hundreds of books documenting Wisconsin state history which is valuable for teaching and learning.  In this instance we were able to direct the student to primary source interviews, articles, and music of and about the milk strikes.  Many of the resources in the UW digital collection are open access.

National History Day had multiple K-12 students focusing on Harry Houdini.  Copies of his works were checked out from the library.  Campus librarians referred groups to Google Books because four books and a number of articles by Harry Houdini are available full text.  Books available include:

• Miracle Mongers and Their Methods:  a Complete Expose of the Modus Operandi,
• The Unmasking of Robert Houdini,
• Houdini’s Paper Magic:  The Whole Art of Performing with paper.

Native American History classes at UW-Madison as well as National History Day K-12 students have exhausted the available print copies of Chief Black Hawk’s autobiography.  It is available at Google Books as well as other early materials on Black Hawk. Native American History classes have been referred to Google Books to access the Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners 1820-1940.  Google Books offers a good alternative.

An undergraduate researching the Titanic needed primary source materials.  Campus print copies of the congressional hearings into the Titanic were checked out.  The U.S. Congress Hearing on the sinking of the Titanic as well as the British inquiry into the loss of the Titanic was available full text on Google Books.

Undergraduates in environmental history classes have been referred to Google Books to access full text of 19th Century County/Local Histories.

Just some of the many examples of why students find value in using the digital scholarly resources now available in Google Books and the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections.

– Ed Van Gemert

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google
• Rebecca Jeschke of EFF
• James Grimmelmann of NYLS
• Brandon Butler of ARL

In this guest post, Brandon C. Butler, Law and Policy Fellow at the Association of Research Libraries, addresses the settlement in the context of institutional equality and intellectual freedom.

First, we would like to thank Students for Free Culture for inviting us to share our thoughts on this important issue. The Association of Research Libraries has followed the Google Books litigation closely, and filed Comments with the court along with our partners the American Library Association and the Association of College and Research Libraries. These three associations collectively represent over 300,000 information professionals and thousands of libraries of all kinds throughout the United States and Canada. These associations also cooperate in the Library Copyright Alliance to address other copyright issues that affect libraries and their patrons.

Google and the authors and publishers who sued the search giant over its book-scanning activities have proposed a settlement agreement that would end the suit and govern Google’s scanning going forward. In essence, the settlement would allow Google to continue scanning, and even to offer new products based on the body of digitized books it creates, so long as it shares revenue from these services with rights-holders. More information from the Library Copyright Alliance about the Settlement is available here.

While the parties to this dispute have agreed to the settlement, the judge presiding over the case still has to approve its terms. Copyright owners and other interested parties have filed hundreds of comments with the court. Members of the LCA filed Comments in support of the settlement, but we also raised some serious concerns that we felt the court should address by careful oversight. Students for Free Culture asked us to explain two concerns we raised in our Comments: increasing inequalities between universities and limits to intellectual freedom.

Widespread access to a Google institutional subscription plan with millions of digital books would help level the playing field between elite research universities and less privileged institutions around the country. If the price of the subscription is too high, however, it will have exactly the opposite effect: Students and faculty will demand access to the Google service, but only the wealthiest institutions will be able to afford it. Paying a high price for the Google subscription would divert significant funding away from other important university priorities, creating new inequalities even among universities that have the service. Some schools could be forced to sacrifice heavily to keep up with the wealthiest institutions.

What are the chances that the settlement will have this effect? It is hard to say. If its price is modeled on increasingly exorbitant academic journal subscription prices, the Google service will be out of reach for most institutions. The authors and publishers of most books in the Google corpus are most likely academics who prize access over profits, but if the interest of rights-holders is represented solely (or mostly) by commercial writers and publishers, the price could be set too high.

Intellectual freedom is at stake in the settlement in several ways. First, concerns about user privacy could have a chilling effect on research use of the Google product. Second, the settlement only requires Google to provide access to 85% of the in-copyright, out-of-print works it has scanned. This gives Google discretion to exclude over 1 million books. Google itself may not want to “be evil,” but it will surely encounter pressure from angry partisans seeking exclusion of disfavored books. The Book Search product will give everyone, including children, access to up to 20% of any book from anywhere, and 100% of any book from free public access terminals in public libraries. How long before an angry parent demands that Google ban racy or politically edgy works? The First Amendment does not require private companies like Google to forego censorship, and there will surely be pressure on Google to choose economic expedience over political principle.

Unlike other critics who have voiced similar concerns, we do not oppose the Settlement overall. We believe its likely benefits substantially outweigh its possible harms. The parties and the court can ensure this net gain by awareness of these possible harms and reasonable vigilance against them. Thank you again for this chance to share our views.

– Brandon C. Butler

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google
• Rebecca Jeschke of EFF
• James Grimmelmann of NYLS

In this guest post, James Grimmelmann of New York Law School discusses the effects on orphan works. Interested readers should also check out the upcoming D is for Digitize Conference being hosted by NYLS.

The most important, and perhaps least appreciated, part of the Google Book Search settlement is its effects on “orphan works.”  There are hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of books that are in copyright but whose owners can’t be found. Anyone who wants to reprint them faces a catch-22.   Since the owner is unknown, there’s no way to get permission.  But if the new publisher just goes ahead without permission, it faces liability of up to $150,000.  No one wants to take that risk, so the orphan stays out of print.

The result is that orphan works languish in obscurity, hard to find and hard to consult.  If you’re not at a rich university with a huge library, you’ll have a tough time getting your hands on them. The orphan works problem is the Bermuda Triangle of the copyright system, where these forgotten books are lost to culture.

The Google Book Search settlement’s most exciting, and most dangerous, effect is on these orphan works.  Under the settlement, Google gets a license to sell copies of out-of-print books unless the copyright owners object.  For orphans, by definition, the owners are highly unlikely to show up and object.  The result is that most orphan works become will available again, both for individual purchase and as a bulk subscription to universities and libraries.

The downside, from a free culture point of view, is that only Google will be able to provide access to the orphans.  Instead of individual authors deciding on what terms to make their books available, that power is concentrated in Google’s hands.  If the database becomes a “must-have” item for research libraries, schools will compete against each other to have it, driving up the price until, once again, only the richest univerities have access.  (This might still be an improvement over the status quo, which privileges students who attend schools whose libraries have physical copies.)  Centralization also magnifies issues of scan quality, bad metadata, reader privacy (PDF), and censorship (PDF). These issues are all much bigger concerns if one company controls the only corpus of orphan works and can dictate the terms on which it’s provided.

Ultimately, the biggest reason to worry about the Google Book Search settlement  is its effects on the rule of law.  The class-action lawsuit by which Google is attempting to gain these rights is a complex, tempermental affair that pushes at the limits of the law and benefits one company exclusively.  A small group of large publishers and a self-appointed cabal of authors claim to speak for all authors worldwide.  And it will be enormously difficult for any other book-scanners to replicate the legal machinations that produced the settlement.  All of these precedents are bad for the integrity of the legal system and for the bottom-up processes of creativity, negotiation, and exchange that characterize a vibrant culture.

If the orphan works problem for books had been solved by Congress, at least there’d have been a place for everyone’s voices in the legislative process.  As it was, the settlement was negotiated in secret between a few parties, and its fate will be determined by judges weighing legal arguments rather making law for the public good.  The settlement is likely to be an enormous net positive for readers, but this is no way to run a culture.

– James Grimmelmann

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google
• Rebecca Jeschke of EFF

In this guest post, Rebecca Jeschke of Electronic Frontier Foundation discusses the implications for student privacy.

A college student’s first job is to open his or her mind to new ideas and ways of thinking, challenging personal beliefs and assumptions.  The process of intellectual discovery demands exploration into the different, the challenging, the absurd, and even the uncomfortable.  For many scholars, artists, and scientists, a rigorous look at a broad swath of ideas and theories is the foundation for a life’s work in pushing the boundaries of knowledge.

For anyone interested in this kind of intellectual journey, Google Book Search is an intoxicating idea.  The search giant’s plan to scan and digitize millions of books — and allow users to search for and read those books online — would open up the world’s libraries and bookstores to anyone with Internet access.  But without basic privacy protections, Google Book Search will never live up to its promise to change the way students and others read, research, and explore new ideas.  That’s because the “chilling effect” of Google’s tracking could stop these important journeys in their tracks.

Google will be able to monitor and track the books you browse, even knowing how long you spent on each page, and keep a permanent log of every book you’ve ever bought and what pages you’ve read.  When you purchase access to books, Google can use that information to grow its already long dossiers of Internet users — which is bad enough — but then all of that information is vulnerable to police, the government and other third parties who can seek it with a subpoena.

In the physical world, bookstores and libraries have fought for strong privacy protections, requiring the police to get a warrant before getting access to your reading records.  These strong positions were developed precisely to respect our private, personal relationship with reading and learning, and to block any “chilling effect” violating that privacy might have on Americans’ right to explore the world of ideas. That’s why Google Book Search needs a robust, enforceable privacy policy that gives readers as much privacy in online books as we already have today.

A legal settlement that would pave the way for Google Book Search to go forward without these privacy protections is pending approval from a New York federal district court.  But a group of more than two dozen authors and publishers, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and others, has filed an objection with the judge.  The coalition—including best-selling novelists Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem along with Anthony Romero of the ACLU and science fiction author Cory Doctorow—presents a list of privacy protections that would improve the settlement, including limiting tracking of users and  requiring a court order or judge-approved warrant before disclosure of the information collected, ensuring user control of personal information stored by Google, and making the system transparent to readers.

The future of books is electronic. Something like Google Book Search is what bookstores and libraries will likely look like going forward.  We can’t let reading privacy be the price we pay for opening the door to the world of knowledge.  You can learn more about the issues at stake here.  

– Rebecca Jeschke

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google

In this guest post, Derek Slater of Google explains why the settlement is a boon for students and the democratization of culture.

Google Books and our proposed settlement agreement help fulfill copyright’s core objective — opening up access to knowledge and creativity. If approved by the Southern District Court of New York, the settlement will give anyone, anywhere in the U.S., access to millions of books that today are only accessible at a few large universities. Google Books can already help students and scholars track down hard-to-find books, and under this agreement they will be able to read many of those works online as well.

In this way, “[the settlement] will help tear down the geographic and socio-economic barriers that deprive many Americans of equal educational opportunities,” as the United States Students Association stated in a letter to the court. Numerous voices from the civil rights, disability, library and education communities, representing tens of millions of Americans, also strongly support the agreement because it will help equalize access to information.

You can find more specifics about the agreement and its benefits here, but these groups and individuals — the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, National Federation for the Blind, National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, Professor Gregory Crane, and many more — explain the benefits to students better than I ever could.

I want to turn my attention to why Students for Free Culture in particular should care. SFC is among the leading voices for the born-digital generation when it comes to copyright. You have not simply pushed for legislation and hoped that Congress will eventually save the day. Instead, you’ve started campaigns to democratize culture at your own schools, and urged technology companies and content creators to build innovative, win-win solutions that meet users’ evolving values and expectations.

The settlement represents this sort of win-win, a practical way to address difficult problems. This case started when rightsholders sued Google for digitizing libraries’ collections. While Google fully believes that this is an example of fair use that would have been upheld in court (and the settlement does not compromise fair use in any way), we settled the lawsuits because it ensures greater access to out-of-print books and broad benefits for the reading public, libraries, rightsholders, and innovators. With strong privacy protections, users will be able to browse and buy digital copies of millions of books that otherwise might be left behind in the digital age.

For too long, copyright law and a thicket of legal uncertainties have locked up most out-of-print books. As copyright scholar Mark Lemley explains, the problem here is generally not that these books are “orphaned,” with rightsholders that cannot be found.  Instead, they have two findable parents – an author and a publisher – but sorting out who actually owns the rights may be hard. Because the transaction costs of licensing these books is high relative to their uncertain market value, these “neglected” works simply gather dust on libraries’ shelves.

The settlement not only enables Google to make out-of-print works accessible, but it will also make it much easier for anyone to license them. It establishes a non-profit Book Rights Registry that will actively look for rightsholders and can help resolve ownership disputes. As rightsholders come forward, the Registry will make information publicly available about which books have been claimed and by whom, and rightsholders can authorize the Registry to license third-parties, including Google’s competitors.  Over time, we believe a significant portion of books will be claimed.

Of course, a small fraction of books will remain truly orphaned. While these books will be among the least commercially valuable, there is still a strong public benefit in opening access to them, and the settlement is one step to that end.  In addition, as we said in our testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, we will let any other book retailer resell access to each out-of-print book, including orphans, that Google can provide access to under the settlement.

That said, this settlement is not a panacea for the challenge of orphan books or orphan works more generally. Google has long supported effective legislation that would make it easier for everyone to use orphan works, and this is still a top priority of ours.

Some have taken the well-intentioned position that legislative reform would be preferable to approval of the settlement. But, as David Sohn of the Center for Democracy of Technology discussed in a blogpost last week, this misconceives the settlement as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, legislation. And it would mean that these books remain locked up, as everyone waits for Congress to address not only orphans but also the far larger category of neglected books.

With the democratization of so much of our culture within reach, it would be tragic to turn the perfect into the enemy of the good.

– Derek Slater

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction

The Google Book Search settlement runs hundreds of pages and can be confusing to the most expert of legal minds, but, in either its current or a modified form, it will have profound effects on how students around the world interact with knowledge. In the interest of better informing students about the settlement, Students for Free Culture has solicited the thoughts of a variety of experts who, over the coming days, will provide guest posts reflecting on how the settlement will likely impact students.

In the meantime, we encourage you to check out the official Google website explaining the settlement and the Public Index, an initiative of New York Law School that has an authoritative collection of information ranging from briefs to forums.

Stay tuned!

[Image Credit]

Learning and inquiry are impeded when scholars lack access to fellow researchers’ work, and when students lack access to the work of scholars before them.

The full text of the statement is available at www.righttoresearch.org and will serve as a terrific starting point for discussions of Open Access issues. Forward it to your chapter members and bring it up at the next meeting. Use it in conversation with faculty at your school.

Of all the work we’re engaged with on our campuses, Open Access to research may be our nearest victory. Keep the momentum going!

Planning to participate in an Open Access Day event on your campus? Want to help promote Open Access Day? Participate in the OA Day synchroblogging competition!

There are 4 key points that we would like you to address in your post (these are the same questions that we asked the stars of the Voices of Open Access Video Series that we will also release on that day):

* Why does Open Access matter to you?
* How did you first become aware of it?
* Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?
* What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?

To enter the competition, all you have to do is blog on this topic on October 14, 2008. We’ll use Google News/Technorati to track entries – to make this easier please use the phrase “Open Access Day” in your post.

The winner gets a bag of PLoS/scienceblogs.com goodies. Remember, in order to be eligible, you have to post about it today. So get cracking!

Students for Free Culture is co-sponsoring the 2008 Sparky Awards, which asks people to make a short video to illustrate the value of information sharing. The first place winner will get a Sparky statuette and $1,000, and there will be some nifty prizes for the runners-up as well. The official list of judges isn’t up yet, but Rich Jones from our Boston University chapter will be one of the judges, and hopefully our chapter members will create some fabulous entries! The winners from last year were pretty excellent (personally I’m partial to “Pri Vetai: Private Eye”), and I’m looking forward to seeing more creative videos about the importance of open access to information Just make sure to get your entry in by the deadline of November 30th, 2008!

If you want to help promote the video contest, you can find some useful materials in the downloads section on the Sparky Awards site, or you could share this promotional video that I threw together:

If you want to download the promo video, you can try grabbing the Ogg Theora version or mp4. Enjoy!

The NIH is the world’s largest funder of scientific research (not counting classified military research). Its budget last year, $28 billion, was larger than the gross domestic product of 142 nations. As my colleague Ray English points out, it’s more than five times larger than all seven of the Research Councils UK combined. NIH-funded research results in 65,000 peer-reviewed articles every year or 178 every day. … Its OA mandate will not only free up an unprecedented quantity of high-quality medical research. It will also make a giant step toward cultivating new expectations –among researchers, funders, governments, and voters– that publicly-funded research should be OA.

Around the same time, the European Research Council also released its guidelines for open access, which affirm academia’s principles of sharing knowledge as widely as possible and make open access mandatory for all ERC-funded research.

Of course, there’s still work to be done. The federal government funds plenty of research through agencies other than the NIH, not to mention research not funded by the government at all. The yearlong embargo in getting the latest medical research is also less than ideal. But this is still a great step forward, one which will hopefully encourage other agencies and individual academics to release their research freely.

Students for Free Culture is proud to have participated, along with many of its member chapters and other organizations, in last February’s National Open Access Day of Action to raise awareness of access to research issues among students and pressure congresspeople to support HR 2764.

Read Students for Free Culture board member Gavin Baker’s analysis of the bill’s passage and the NIH’s subsequent policy changes.

Also, the winner of SPARC’s viral video contest, of which I was a judge, was announced at last weekend’s American Library Association Midwinter Meeting. Check it out:

Please show your support by adding your signature.

P.S. I don’t think I ever blogged my letter to the editor in response to the Washington Post‘s article about the National Day of Action for Open Access, but it was published and is available here.

• University of Florida (Gainesville, FL)
  Tabling: 11 am – 3 pm, Reitz Union Colonnade
  Panel: 7 pm, CSE room E221 (co-sponsored with UAEM)
  Speakers: Gavin Baker, Free Culture; Ashley Wills, UAEM; Stephanie Haas, Digital Library Center
  Contact: Gavin Baker
• University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA)
  Panel: 3 pm, Annenberg Center for Communication, 734 West Adams Blvd.
  Speakers: Cory Doctorow, Sasha Chock
  Contact: Cameron Parkins
• Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA)
  Tabling: during lunch and dinner, top of dining hall (Sharples)
  Panel: 7:30 pm, Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall
  Contact: Nicholas LaRacuente
• Emory University (Atlanta, GA)
  Event: 4:30 pm, press conference at Woodruff Library North Entrance
  Contact: Brian Pitts
• Emerson College (Boston, MA)
  Tabling: 11:30 am – 12:30 pm, around 80 Boylston St.
  Contact: Erin O’Brien
• Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)
  Event: Handing out Open Access bookmarks to students throughout the day and distributing them to Harvard’s major libraries. Holding a forum the following week and submitting an Op-ed to the Harvard Crimson.
  Contact: Elizabeth Stark
• MIT (Cambridge, MA)
  Event: Placing pricetags on journals at the MIT libraries and distributing Open Access Bookmarks to students and libraries throughout the day.
  Contact: Mako Hill
• Northeastern University (Boston, MA)
  Event: Handing out Open Access Bookmarks to students and distributing to libraries throughout the day.
  Tabling: 2-4 pm, Main Library
  Contact: Christopher Budnick
• University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA)
  Tabling: 11 am – 1:30 pm, Locust Walk
  Contact: Steve McLaughlin
• Reed College (Portland, OR)
  Tabling: 11:30 am – 2:30 pm, in front of the cafeteria
  Contact: Max Berger
• Chadwick School (Palos Verdes Peninsula, CA)
  Tabling: 12:30 – 1:45 pm, Main deck (outside Christensen)
  Contact: D. Parker Phinney
• New York University (New York, NY)
  Will publish audio/video from the Taking Action on Open Access event.
  Contact: Fred Benenson

The following chapters have also said they’d be participating — contact them for details:

• University of Evansville (Evansville, IN)
  Contact: Andy Scudder
• Franklin & Marshall College (Lancaster, PA)
  Contact: Ben DeRogatis
• Hamilton College (Clinton, NY)
  Contact: David Riordan
• Claremont Colleges (Claremont, CA)
  Contact: Karen Rustad
• Columbia University (New York, NY)
  Contact: Brendan Ballou
• University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC)
  Contact: Erin Watson

We are not radicals. Sorry Washington Post, you’ve just got us pegged wrong.

Our philosophy is founded in decades of legal scholarship. That’s why people like Larry Lessig support us. We may dramatize the issues to help them connect with students, but we are far from radical.

On the contrary, this demonstrates the breadth of the consensus in favor of public access. From the staid librarians to kooky little us. It is the publishing companies, who want something for nothing, that are the special interest, as Peter Suber points out:

Do supporters of national OA mandates like FRPAA want something for nothing? No. We want something for something. Crawford is forgetting that taxpayers have already paid for the underlying research and that publishers pay nothing to receive the written results. Yes, publishers add value to those results. But if publishers and taxpayers both make a contribution to the value of peer-reviewed articles arising from publicly-funded research, then what’s the best way to split this baby? The FRPAA solution is a reasonable compromise: a period of exclusivity for the publisher followed by free online access for the public. If the AAP wants to block OA mandates per se, rather than just negotiate the embargo period, then it’s saying that it wants no compromise, that the public should get nothing for its investment, and that publishers should control access to research conducted by others, written up by others, and funded by taxpayers. I’d call that getting something for nothing.

All Scooby Doo references aside: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

UPDATE: Note that this is exactly in line with the strategy the publishers bought from the “pit bull,” i.e. “if the other side is on the defensive, it doesn’t matter if they can discredit your statements.” It is my intent to remain on the offensive and to discredit their statements.

Together with the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, we are organizing the day to highlight students’ stake in the debate about access to research. We’re encouraging our chapters to take action on their campus to raise awareness at their school.

Read the press release here.

(FreeCulture.org is a member of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.)

FreeCulture.org has joined the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, which supports open public access to taxpayer-funded research. We join other student groups such as Universities Allied for Essential Medicines and the American Medical Student Association as members, along with a long list of universities, libraries, patients, and public interest groups.

Our reasons for joining are two-fold:

1. As the leading group of student advocates for the public interest in intellectual property and information & communications technology, we recognize access to research as a defining issue for our generation. Public access will lead to faster cures and treatments for disease, improve scholarship and research, and promote development. Whether it’s brilliant photos of space, GIS data, or scholarly journal articles, the people have a right to what they pay for. Access to publicly-funded research, and open access generally, is simply the right thing to do.
2. As students, we work with academic research all the time. After all, who isn’t required to write a research paper at some time or another? Whether it’s a term paper or a doctoral dissertation, scholarship always builds on the past. That requires access to the work of those who’ve come before us.

FreeCulture.org is proud to support the alliance’s work on behalf of the Federal Research Public Access Act and other efforts. Here at the University of Florida, we worked with the Student Senate to pass a resolution supporting FRPAA and open access — and succeeded. We hope to work with ATA to provide more information and resources to engage students on the issue in the future.

The Wikimania Awards were created to promote the creation of excellent free content around the world. The authors of such content have made millions of ad-hoc collages, designs, and art exhibits possible. Awards will be given to the best entries in each of nine categories, covering video, animation, audio, photography, and drawing.

Entries must be suitable for some Wikimedia-related project, and must be released under free licenses such as the GFDL or Creative Commons BY-SA or Public Domain Dedication. The full set of rules and submission information is available here.

The closing date for all submissions aside from those created en route to/at the conference is August 1, 2006, so don’t delay. There will be an international and (cyber) star-studded set of judges, along with some great prizes and exposure for the winning entries!

• An editorial in the estimeed science magazine Nature, “Let data speak to data”, calls for open access to research databases. Notably, they specifically suggest Creative Commons licenses for research data.
• First Monday, one of the oldest open access peer-reviewed journals, is celebrating its 10th birthday next year with a special issue and conference. The subject: “the issues involved in building sustainable models for openness in science, software and content.” Sounds hefty to me; I can’t wait to see the conclusions, and I encourage anyone interested to submit. Deadline is 6 February 2006.

Of course, Peter Suber’s Open Access News is the (in-depth) blog of record for news about open access. To learn more about open access, see Peter’s excellent overview.