The European Parliament could entrench a policy of charging citizens for information they have already paid to collect, enforced by state copyright over geographic information.
Stevan Harnad. "My text is not like data or software, to be modified, built upon, and then redistributed (perhaps as your own). You may use its content, but you may not alter it and then distribute the altered version, online or on-paper. "
ScientificCommons.org aims to provide the most comprehensive and freely available access to scientific knowledge on the internet. Core functions and aims of the project fare to provide the identification of repositories, the indexing of full-text document
dedicated to improving the scholarly and public quality of research. brings together faculty members, librarians, and graduate students dedicated to exploring whether and how new technologies can be used to improve the professional and public value of sc
a registry of open knowledge packages and projects (and a few closed ones). CKAN is the place to search for open knowledge resources as well as register your own.
a novel browsing interface designed for freebase, an open database of the world’s information, including Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC archives...
“insanely useful Web sites” for government transparency. They provide a broad range of information available to track government and legislative information, campaign contributions and the role of money in politics.
DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, and to link other data sets on the Web to Wikipedia data.
a "ning" community designed strictly for the media, open government communities, journalists, non-profits, and others seeking transparency in our government.
a not-for-profit organization with the aim of promoting (and protecting) open knowledge -- any kind of content, information or data: genes to geodata, sonnets to statistics. strong emphasis on decentralized collaboration. primary aim is to help others develop open knowledge. Also develops specific projects (for example Open Shakespeare)
allows you to thread together 'factlets' into narratives which can be re-organized in a number of ways, at the click of a button. product of the open knowledge foundation
Sunlight Foundation. This bipartisan, collaborative initiative will study the Senate’s current information-sharing practices to recommend how to improve public access to the Senate’s work on the Web. This project is modeled off of Sunlight’s parallel initiative, the Open House Project.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
here's a lot of great information out there about politics — votes, lobbying records, campaign finance reports. Unfortunately, it's split across a dozen different web sites and often hidden behind confusing interfaces. We're pulling all of that together and letting you explore it in one elegant, unified interface. (Plus, we're sharing all the results so you can come up with new ways to explore it.)
designed to provide quick and easy access to a wide range of data on tax rates, collections and overall tax burdens. All data are posted in Excel when available.
Open access to 506,563 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology and Statistics. Now hosted by Cornell University Library.
BASE is a multi-disciplinary search engine for scientifically relevant web resources harvested from OAI scientific repository servers. In addition to OAI metadata the library indexes selected web sites and local data collections, which can be searched via one single search interface in one go. created and developed by Bielefeld University Library. BASEsearch
The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large. OAD is hosted by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College and supervised by an independent editorial board.
SHERPA is investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication. services include: RoMEO - Publisher's copyright & archiving policies, JULIET - Research funders archiving mandates and guidelines, OpenDOAR worldwide Directory of Open Access Repositories, SHERPA Search - simple full-text search of UK repositories, DRIVER - developing a cross-European repository network infrastructure, and more
Humanities E-Book is a digital collection of 2,200 full-text titles offered by the ACLS in collaboration with nineteen learned societies, nearly 100 contributing publishers, and librarians at the University of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office. The result is an online, fully searchable collection of high-quality books in the Humanities, recommended and reviewed by scholars and featuring unlimited multi-user access and free, downloadable MARC records. HEB is available 24/7 on- and off-campus through standard web browsers.
Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources. These aggregations, sometimes called compound digital objects, may combine distributed resources with multiple media types including text, images, data, and video. The goal of these standards is to expose the rich content in these aggregations to applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation.
Through this site you can stay connected to all Federal Communication Commission activities on the issue, and share your thoughts and ideas on open Internet.
the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. Developed by the Association of Research Libraries, SPARC has become a catalyst for change. Its pragmatic focus is to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communication models
The "The Ranking Web of World repositories" is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain. The aim of this Ranking is to support Open Access initiatives and therefore the free access to scientific publications in an electronic form and to other academic material. The web indicators are used here to measure the global visibility and impact of the scientific repositories. Using as basis the data from the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) and The Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpendOAR) we have compiled a list of repositories with an autonomous web domain or subdomain
Imagine a world where anyone can instantly access all of the world's scholarly knowledge - as profound a change as the invention of the printing press. Technically, this is within reach. All that is needed is a little imagination, to reconsider the economics of scholarly communications from a poetic viewpoint. Heather Morrison, MLIS
openpub - Project Hosting on Google Code. an application of the Atom Syndication Format intended to enable content creators and distributors to distribute digital books via a simple catalog format. The mechanism through which compatible Reading Systems access the distributed catalog has three components: eBook content, XML catalog metadata, and an HTTP transport for the catalog. OPDS-compatible Reading Systems must support IDPF EPUB, and may optionally support additional formats.
The mass digitization of books promises to bring tremendous value to consumers, libraries, scholars, and students. The Open Book Alliance will work to advance and protect this promise. And, by protecting it, we will assert that any mass book digitization and publishing effort be open and competitive. The Open Book Alliance will counter Google, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors’ Guild’s scheme to monopolize the access, distribution and pricing of the largest digital database of books in the world. To this end, we will promote fair and flexible solutions aimed at achieving a more robust and open system. Leadership: Peter Brantley, Gary Reback
Hindawi is a rapidly growing academic publisher with 150+ Open Access journals covering all major areas of science, technology, and medicine, and a book publishing program that spans all scholarly disciplines.
Peter Suber, Open Access to Science and Scholarship. News and discussion on the migration of print scholarship to the internet and efforts to make it available to readers free of charge.
a participatory and grassroots campaign exposing DRM-encumbered devices and media for what they really are: Defective by Design. working together to eliminate DRM as a threat to innovation in media, the privacy of readers, and freedom for computer users. oppose drm.
The public domain, as we understand it, is the wealth of information that is free from the barriers to access or reuse usually associated with copyright protection, either because it is free from any copyright protection or because the right holders have decided to remove these barriers. It is the raw material from which new knowledge is derived and new cultural works are created.
The partnership brings together faculty members, librarians, and graduate students dedicated to exploring whether and how new technologies can be used to improve the professional and public value of scholarly research. Its research program is investigating the social, economic, and technical issues entailed in the use of online infrastructure and knowledge management strategies to improve both the scholarly quality and public accessibility and coherence of this body of knowledge in a sustainable and globally accessible form. It continues to be an active player in the open access movement, as it provides the leading open source software for journal and conference management and publishing.
The objectives of this initiative are to establish easier access to scientific research data on the Internet, to increase acceptance of research data as legitimate, citable contributions to the scientific record, and to support data archiving that will permit results to be verified and re-purposed for future study. DataCite will promote data sharing, increased access, and better protection of research investment.
Founded in 2004 we're a not-for-profit organization promoting open knowledge: that's any kind of information – sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata – that can be freely used, reused, and redistributed.
OPUS is an attempt to collect translated texts from the web, to convert and align the entire collection, to add linguistic annotation, and to provide the community with a publicly available parallel corpus. OPUS is based on open source products and is also delivered as an open source package. We used several tools to compile the current corpus.
The OATP is a social tagging project to capture new OA developments comprehensively and in real time. Participants tag new developments using Connotea. The resulting feed is OA, for reading or mashing up with other feeds and online services.
We've made it easy for you to make enquiries to data holders about the openness of the material they hold -- and to record publicly the results of those efforts. A vast amount of data is produced today by government, researchers and others. In practice it is often unclear whether data is openly available i.e accessible and freely re-usable without additional permission.
Academic Commons is a community of faculty, academic technologists, librarians, administrators, and other academic professionals interested in two interlocking questions: how do creative uses of new technology and networked information support the current project of liberal education, and, perhaps more interestingly, how do they force us to re-think what it means to be liberally educated?
Open Data Commons is the home of a set of legal ‘tools’ to help you provide and use open data. Open Data Commons exists to provide legal solutions for open data. In March 2008 it launched the first ever open data license: the Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL). Open Data Commons is an Open Knowledge Foundation project run by its Advisory Council and like the Foundation is a not-for-profit effort working for the benefit of the general open knowledge community.
This a guide to licensing data aimed particularly at those who want to make their data open. The first section deals with the practical question of how to license your data. The second section discusses what kinds of rights (intellectual property or other) exist in data in various jurisdictions.
This memo provides information for the Internet community interested in distributing data or databases under an “open access” structure. There are several definitions of “open” and “open access” on the Internet, including the Open Knowledge Definition and the Budapest Declaration on Open Access; the protocol laid out herein is intended to conform to the Open Knowledge Definition and extend the ideas of the Budapest Declaration to data and databases.
The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP), funded by the Governments of Colombia, Denmark, Norway, and the United States Department of State, presents a current snapshot of the status of Open Access (OA) to scientific information around the world. For countries that have been more successful implementing Open Access, the portal highlights critical success factors and aspects of the enabling environment. For countries and regions that are still in the early stages of Open Access development, the portal identifies key players, potential barriers and opportunities.
OAPEN is an initiative in Open Access publishing for humanities and social sciences monographs. The project will find useful, exciting and beneficial ways of publishing scholarly work in Open Access, enhancing access to important peer reviewed research from across Europe. Most importantly it will find a financial model which is appropriate to scholarly humanities monographs, a publishing platform which is beneficial to all users and create a network of publishing partners across Europe and the rest of the world.