Free Culture @ NYU

The Foundations of Open Access

Tuesday, 01.09.2007  –  Category: Events & Recaps, General, News

So, this weekend is the Open Access summit and I wanted to share some thoughts on how to help bring this on a widespread basis.

Closely tied to open access is encouraging funding organizations to include language in their grant proposals which promotes open access, for code and content. This is in the foundation’s best interest – call it “philanthropic ROI”.

On the educational institution’s side of the fence, funding pressure could really tip the scale in favor of opening their work. Until now there has always been the potential to monetize many research initiatives, even though few actually are. Still, the guy with the purse-strings could always make a case that one day the university might be able to make money buy keeping the artifacts of their research under proprietary lock and key. Funding pressure changes everything. Now the actual revenue stream is tied to openness, and actual funds trumps potential funding.

Already, the Hewlett Foundation is moving in this direction, but if/when others follow it could be very decisive force in the campaign for Open Access.

The Hewlett Foundation’s Education Division provides grants in the area of Open Educational Resources, and all grant applications have to describe their approaches to
intellectual property in the terms below (these are copied directly
from the grant application).

There’s more at Open Educational Resources.

“Intellectual Property Rights. In every grant where Foundation
resources are used to create products, agreement about the
licensing of these products must be made explicit in the grant
application. Products include but are not limited to reports,
papers, publications, content, and software.

If you are developing content or producing articles, reports,
white papers, or other written materials, please identify which of the
Creative Commons licenses you will use to license the content.
See http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses for more information.

If you are developing software, please identify which of the Open
Source Initiative-approved licenses you will use to license the
software. See http://opensource.org/licenses/ for more
information.

If your work involves the creation of data sets, please see
http://sciencecommons.org/data/dbfaq and be prepared to discuss
the open license plans with program staff.”

So, one way to put pressure on folks is to convince more funding agencies to begin stipulating for Open Access. Or at least a comprehensive copyright/patent/license policy
(jeez – Stallman doesn’t like the phrase IP, but what are we supposed to call this?).