"The Journal of Digital Humanities is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features the best scholarship, tools, and conversations produced by the digital humanities community in the previous quarter."

"Upon the close of the May 1 comment period, it is our intention to begin posting these 73 standards in HTML and begin the process of providing a unified, easy-to-use interface to all public safety standards in the Code of Federal Regulations. It is also our intention to continue this effort to include all standards specifically incorporated by reference in the 50 states. That the law must be available to citizens is a cardinal principle of law in countries such as India and the United Kingdom, and we will expand our efforts to include those jurisdictions as well."

"Libraries are a recognition that scholarship and culture are more than the business of creating and consuming. They are a human conversation, and libraries provide common ground where that conversation can take place and be remembered. By taking aim at the right for the public to maintain this conversation and its memory, publishers have shown us what we have to lose. It’s time we resisted the outsourcing of our common heritage by occupying the library."

What is the biggest impact Open States has had to date?

I suppose it depends on what kind of impact we're talking about. Governments are slowly coming to terms with this and we've seen states like Minnesota and Kansas start to move towards machine-readable access of their data—and I think we can take some of the credit for that. A big part of it is that they just have smart people working there that get the importance of making this data available in as many ways as possible.

I'm particularly partial to the impact that the project has had on individuals. Sunlight open sources everything we do, and as a result, we have over 130 projects on GitHub. Most of these projects aren't things that the average developer uses, so they don't see a ton of attention from outside developers. Open States has been a real success in a unique way—it has gotten developers that were otherwise unaware of open government involved. We've had contributions from approximately 50 developers, ranging from minor tweaks to a parser to fix an error that a user noticed to entire states contributed. I think it has made a real impact in providing a gentle introduction for developers looking for a way to contribute.

"  Q: As your answer indicates, there is more to OA than green and gold alone; there is also gratis and libre OA. In 2008, you produced a grid demonstrating the four-way relationship among the different types of OA. Can you expand on this, and outline the relative merits of gratis and libre OA? 

A: Gratis OA is simply free of charge. But it’s not more free than that. Gratis literature may stand under all-rights-reserved copyrights and give users no more rights than they already had under fair use (or fair dealing).

Libre OA is free of charge and free of at least some copyright and licensing restrictions. Libre literature stands under some-rights-reserved copyrights, at most, and permits uses that exceed fair use. The advantage of libre OA is that researchers needn’t slow down to ask permission for legitimate scholarly uses that exceed fair use, needn’t take the risk of proceeding without permission, and needn’t err on the side of non-use. By the way, the grid you mentioned was merely a preview of a longer article, which explained the gratis/libre distinction in much more detail."

"Below, the book is available for PDF download in a variety of languages. Check back soon, as more languages are on the way."

"So it seems the specific words in a journal policy that requires data archiving doesn’t matter much, though policies that include a general statement about data sharing and request the sharing of other datatypes have higher rates of data archiving.  The highest-impact journals that require data archiving have slightly higher archiving rates than those with impact factors between 4 and 7.  Mentioning exceptions in a journal policy may be associated with increased rates of archiving.  Core clinical journals tend toward high rates of data archiving (likely overlap with the high impact factor journals).

Disheartening to see again that studies about cancer are least likely to publicly archive data, even when required.  Some disciplinary trends:  studies on bacteria more likely to follow journal mandates.  Perhaps related:  studies that archived other types of data were more likely to also archive gene expression microarray data."

"The idea is to create an open-access online philosophy journal (and then journals in other disciplines), with the peer review process crowd sourced. As many reviewers as want to read a paper can vote to accept/reject, with brief comments. Accepted papers will immediately be published online.

From what I can see, the open access will be free for authors. They are now recruiting reviewers.

Interesting idea."

"The new PLoS Search API gives developers access to rich data that can be flexibly integrated into applications for the web, desktop or mobile devices. It allows PLoS content to be queried using any of the fields in the PLoS Search engine. By opening the PLoS content and data through this API, we hope to encourage the development of tools that will improve the way PLoS users discover and interact with our (and their) content."

"Here are five to start us off:

Like: Twitter / Don’t like: Facebook. The first thing we have to mention, which we have mentioned a few times already, is Twitter. The reasons we like Twitter are complex and I won’t pretend to understand them all, but I’ll throw out a few suggestions. First, its “follow” rather than “friend” model is more open, allows for the collaboration and non-hierarchy that the Internet and digital humanities values. Second, and related to this, Twitter is the place where content-creators—journalists, writers, artists, web developers, etc.—tend to hang out. We overlap with those communities, or at least seek to overlap with them, in productive ways. They are the distant nodes from which we hope new innovations will come. Third, Twitter, in the way we use it, is mostly about sharing ideas whereas Facebook is about sharing relationships. Scholars are good at ideas, maybe less so at relationships.
Like: Agile development / Dislike: long planning cycles. The second thing I’ll mention is agile development, the philosophy of “releasing early and often,” which we do not only with software/code but also with our ideas and writing when we Tweet, blog, and chat. We do this as good neighbors but also in the hope that releasing our code and ideas will improve with contributions from end points of our networks.
Like: DIY / Dislike: Outsourcing. Most of the most successful digital humanities projects are those done by scholar/technologists not those imagined by scholars and implemented by technologists. Likewise, the most successful digital humanists are scholars who know the technology, often those who are self-taught, not ones who seek a client-vendor relationship with technologists. We take this insight to heart in our hiring at CHNM, looking for people with formal training in the humanities and self-taught tech skills.
Like: PHP / Dislike: C++. Fourth, and following from the last point, we like PHP not C++. This is another way of saying we like the transparent, easy-to-learn, and simple (if sometimes ham-handed) technologies of the Web more than the more powerful, more sophisticated, more elegant, but less approachable compiled code of the desktop. A focus on getting the most out of simple, transparent, vernacular technologies allows us to keep the door to the field open to new entrants.
Like: Extramural funding / Dislike: Intramural funding. In one respect, this may seem obvious: everybody likes grants. In another respect it’s probably going a little too far to say we don’t like intramural funding: it is essential to building and maintaining capacity for our centers and staff. But it seems to me the most successful digital humanities projects are those that result from competitive grant making processes, especially the federal grant making process. Why is this? I can point to at least three reasons: 1) Attracting grant money keeps us innovating, which, like it or not, is a premium in our business. Grants are given for new work, not for more of the same. 2) Writing grants and serving on panels keep us in conversation with the field. We have to keep current and keep in touch with one another to justify our projects to grantmakers and to recommend others’ projects for funding. Increasingly, funding guidelines themselves require collaboration. 3) Unlike much traditional scholarship, which often requires one big deliverable (a book) after years of close-kept study, research, and writing, grant work requires defining and meeting a set of closely timed, concrete deliverables, a mode of work which encourages the kind of agile development so valued by the Internet and digital humanities community."

"Political FORCE offers a robust data analysis platform for campaigns, and is offering full access to its file of 182 million registered voters as a free service to all NationBuilder subscribers, in compliance with applicable laws limiting access to authorized entities for political purposes. Starting immediately, candidates can sign up for NationBuilder with full, free access to their voter data at NationBuilder.com."

Going back in history, until February 2009 ATOC licensed train departure information under commercial terms to a very small number of organisations, mostly within the rail industry. Kizoom published the only smartphone app at that time, the free MyRailLite for iPhone. Then a dispute arose between ATOC and Kizoom, and ATOC withdrew Kizoom’s licence to use the train departure information. Kizoom complained to the ORR, who conducted an investigation (PDF) into whether ATOC had abused a dominant position under competition law. ORR decided that ATOC did have a dominant position in the supply of train departure information, but they “found no evidence that ATOC’s conduct in granting access to Darwin had prevented a new product from coming to market or hampered the emergence of new technology” in November 2009. When the free MyRailLite from Kizoom was taken off the market, it was immediately replaced by a £5 iPhone app from Agant which was marketed under the National Rail Enquiries brand.

"Weather data didn’t come to be because of an Open Government Directive. It wasn’t created because of a White House mandate. Government did not release the data and then enterprising people built companies on top of it. It’s more accurate to make the argument that we have a national weather service because of one man’s deep desire to keep his job and to get promoted to colonel in the Army. It could be a vast network of lobbyists to help that man get promoted, or the vast network of lobbyists from shipping companies trying to get access to data already being created. Or it could be that it was just pretty obvious that access to weather data would save lives."

"Because sharing data resulted in a citation, I wonder how long will it take for Open Data advocates to start using this “open data citation advantage” as an argument for sharing data?"

"Google and the USPTO have entered into an agreement to make the following USPTO products available to the public at no charge:

Patents (grants, applications, assignments, classification information, and maintenance fee events)
Trademarks (grants, applications, assignments, and TTAB proceedings)

All data originated from the USPTO. Google is hosting this data unchanged, except for repackaging into zip files."

"They attempt to co-opt nascent OER initiatives by directing them toward commercial enterprise, arguing that resources must allow commercial licensing, and directing production toward enterprises and initiatives that must receive see funding and draw a return on that investment through the conversion of OERs into commodities.

And they foster a sense of incapacity in opinion and the media to suggest to students themselves that they are incapable of independent action without the comforting support of corporations and institutions, that they are simply not capable of learning form themselves. From the first utterance that "OCW is not an MIT education" the suggestion has been that education must need be a high-priced endeavour, available, really, only to those willing to pay the price."

"There's plenty to argue about here and he presents in black and white some issues that are full of grays, but chances are you won't spend 20 minutes today with a smarter person. It's worth watching and thinking about …"

"Readers are encouraged to fight RBP as they read it, rather than just soaking up the information. Although I claim this book is about “Best Practices”, the only reason that is true is that it’s a result of countless conversations with folks who are deep in the Ruby trenches getting stuff done. The only way for RBP to remain current and relevant is to continue these discussions, using its content as a jumping off point for fresh ideas."

"I don't know about you, but for most of us "the best solution available in the market" is the one that costs the least and does what I want it to. If it's free, even better. Can we say "Google"?"

"What does this mean to you?

If you currently receive Time Inc. or Forbes periodical content electronically from Gale or any provider other than EBSCO, you and your patrons will lose access to that content over the next year. While there will remain alternative, high-quality titles in all information providers' products, there will be an impact on users, especially those who access content through long-term statewide subscriptions."

"I can understand why a retailer would want to use my copyright as bait to lock in readers—but exactly how is this good for me? This is why I'm not selling digital downloads of the professional readings of With a Little Help. With so much friction and goofiness in the marketplace, I'd rather give the MP3s away under a Creative Commons license and solicit donations through PayPal. My listeners don't want DRM. They want to get their books with a minimum of hassle. But, for the record, I'd put my books in Audible and the iTunes Store in a hot second if only they'd sell them on the same terms that I'd be willing to buy them: no DRM and no license agreement except “don't violate copyright law.”"

"The MPAA has successfully shut down an entire town's municipal WiFi because a single user was found to be downloading a copyrighted movie. Rather than being embarrassed by this gross example of collective punishment (a practice outlawed in the Geneva conventions) against Coshocton, OH, the MPAA's spokeslizard took the opportunity to cry poor (even though the studios are bringing in record box-office and aftermarket receipts)."

"It makes a huge difference who can say "take it or leave it" in a negotiation. Right now publishers tend to hold that privileged position. But as prices and cancellations keep rising, the positions are reversing. Even apart from the average balance of bargaining power, slowly shifting to universities, there is the bargaining power over specific titles. The desirability of journals is a matter of degree, despite the binary sound of "must-have". Some high-demand journals may be unthreatened by all recent developments. But the set of unthreatened journals is shrinking, and set for which universities could modify basic terms to better serve research and researchers is growing. For a growing number of journals overall, universities could cancel, threaten to cancel, or bargain effectively, if they wanted to. "

"In a CouchDB-enabled web, data-flows don't have to be centralized, which means friends can communicate without going through a fixed domain. This makes the web more efficient. It also means I can make data available to my social network without relying on 3rd-party services."

"DFA is an innovative 501(c)(3) organization with a unique business model combining elements of a non-profit organization with those of a biotech company."

"The following groups strengthen Open.Michigan through related efforts, resources, input, and ongoing discussion around the initiative."

"The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) – suggesting that ending academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a copyright-free world. "

"We asked the city of Ann Arbor for all the electronic deliverables from Davey. And we provide the following data with a caveat: On Monday evening, city staff stressed that they were still doing some quality control work on the initial data set – so the data provided to The Chronicle is a snapshot of the city’s trees as assessed by the Davey Resource Group. The city’s inventory will presumably be maintained as a frequently updated data set that changes as trees are pruned, removed, or planted."

"We need more than the passive ideal of easy access to published knowledge; we need the active ideal of improved methodologies for advancing knowledge. In the Enlightenment Francis Bacon had the boldness to call for a Novum Organum, a "new instrument" of knowledge (in contrast to Aristotle's old Organum); similarly, we must devise new instruments of knowledge to match our cyber environment. Ours is a knowledge revolution on par with the introduction of empirical research itself or even the codification of the scientific method. But are we conceptualizing and establishing the new methodologies to the same degree that we are fighting for the free circulation of traditional materials? We are not. That's why we need Scholarly Inquiry Optimization."

"But, now more than ever, OCLC must end its attempts to restrict and monopolize library data. It was ugly and unfair for OCLC to claim ownership over what is largely public data. It is obscene to leverage that data monopoly into a software monopoly."

"OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources. We provide access to these digital resources by "harvesting" their descriptive metadata (records) using OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). The Open Archives Initiative is not the same thing as the Open Access movement."

"Most of the ag trials that I have read about seem woefully incomplete. They seldom do a competent job of characterizing initial conditions, and seldom do a complete analysis of the interventions they try. For example, they may amend soil with manure or compost, but don't have an accurate analysis of the materials applied, as if all manure or compost was the same.

Use of a SRB for trials could make the trials more useful, but offering biochar testing services might be even better. It would complicate subsequent cross-trial comparison and analysis, but would also yield information about the value of various char formulations. All of the trials would be improved by the use of competent testing to characterize soils, water and even seeds. Records of local micro-climates during the test period would be of value too. Not all places are the same and not all years are the same."

"After a bit of work we believe we have solved most of the practical problems that have to be taken care of before starting a free journal. This is probably the easy part. Now we have to decide if it is a good idea or not.

The aim is to have a high quality journal for the CG community that is run by the CG community and free to everyone (really free, no cost to publish and no cost to access). Obviously such a journal needs the support of the CG community to be successful. The work should be shared among the community, i.e., the editorial board and editorial manager(s) should be replaced regularly. "

"What Dave Winer says here about the news applies as well to scientific publishing. The arguments about open access and about review quality are but a sideline to a much more fundamental one: how to create sustainable mechanisms that will increasingly open up the process of writing up new ideas, reviewing them, and publicly building a consensus for or against their scientific soundness and importance."

"Open Everything is a global conversation about the art, science and spirit of 'open'. It gathers people using openness to create and improve software, education, media, philanthropy, architecture, neighbourhoods, workplaces and the society we live in: everything. It's about thinking, doing and being open."

"Nowadays there is a common agreement about how our society needs to be able to change and adapt to the fast changes that happens in the economical, social and environmental dimensions. We are interested not in single and few changes, but in the ability to continuously introduce new ideas in our products, processes and organizations in order to maintain our conditions or improve them. We are interested in the ability to innovate our activities in what they do and how they do it."

"Call to Action: We therefore urge every U.S. law school to commit to ending print publication of its journals and to making definitive versions of journals and other scholarship produced at the school immediately available upon publication in stable, open, digital formats, rather than in print."

"It's time for OCLC to recognize they made this mess, not others. They have perpetrated some astouding missteps—from attempting to sneak through a major rewrite of the core member policy in a few days without consultation, to a comic series of rewrites and policy reversals, culminating in withdrawing the policy entirely for discussion. (It now seems clear they did so on the heels of a member revolt, whether general or just of some key libraries.)"

"Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.

Take a moment and think about that."

"The Mechanics’ Institute sprang up in 19th century England for the ostensible purpose of imparting upon the working class mechanic knowledge of the sciences, literature, and arts. In actuality, a myriad of purposes shrouded the creation of these institutes, which were ultimately appropriated by the middle class when it became apparent that the working class was not as receptive as had been anticipated. ... As the middle class began to move in, the working class retreated to the Institute’s libraries and reading rooms, where they were free to discuss topics that interested them. One of the unintended consequences of the failed Mechanics’ Institutes was the aiding in the creation of a democratic infrastructure for working class access to printed materials.... In short, despite being borne from a desire to regulate, they were an important precursor to the establishment of public libraries and a liberated mass reading public."

"Conclusion: don’t wait. Lots of things need to happen before all this becomes real! If we wait until all the problems are solved, the commons won’t have what it needs to explode. But people aren’t watching IR space, which is the best time to create an open, disruptive system! Use existing ontologies. Work around problems rather than tackling them head-on."

"[WorldCat rep] insists that "OCLC welcomes collaboration with Open Library", which seems a funny way of putting it. As I said last time, they've played hardball: trying to cut off our funding, hurt our reputation, and pressure libraries not to cooperate. When we tried to make a deal with them, they dragged their feet for months, pretended to come to terms, and then had their lawyers send us an "agreement" to sign that would require we take all OCLC-related records off our site."

"My father the anthropologist and I are alike in one way at least: we don’t suffer fruitless systems in silence. In one way at least, we are different: I cannot content myself with complaining to the powerless and uninvolved."

"We think they [Google] are doing great stuff," Kahle said in a 2006 interview with CNET. "If the materials would be made available for broad public search and educational use we'd be all for it."

"This decision has confirmed what was already obvious from a plain reading of the statutes, that Minnesota cities can use their bonding authority for deploying the essential infrastructure of the next century."

"The Center for History and New Media release "a new beta version of Zotero to the general public" on July 8. Reuters adds, "A significant and highly touted feature of the new beta version of Zotero, however, is its ability to convert - in direct violation of the License Agreement - Thomson's 3,500 plus proprietary .ens style files within the EndNote Software into free, open source, easily distributable Zotero .csl files.""

"When the editors raise prices we don't like it. But when the lower them or agree to put things online, thats a bribe. They can't win. Well- if they just put EVERYTHING online and cheap then we will stop complaining and threatening. If they can't find a way to do that and make a profit they should not be in the business."

"PLoS is simply going through the natural progression of a startup. It has solved the first puzzle: making something people want, which is open access journals."

No LibraryThing for old book cataloging. CANNOT use LibraryThing except via manual entry of entire records!

via Peter Suber

"If adding value gives one a claim to control access to the result, then at least two stakeholder organizations have that claim, and one of them has a much weightier claim than the publisher."

Entire print run of Journal of Cel Science available online for free.

Any academic authors care to join a collective action?

If the AAP represented me, I would fire and disavow. Right now. Damned morons.

A good appraisal. "Grow up, people. Smile, put on your grownup undies, and stop throwing good money down the rathole of an already-lost fight."

Didn't actually know that camera RAW formats were closed.

open... open... open

"A piece of knowledge is open if you are free to use, reuse, and redistribute it"

"Law is the operating system of our society and today's agreement means anybody can read the source for a substantial amount of case law that was previously unavailable."

Summary of OK vs. CC similarities and differences

API for arXiv

e.g., "We take their rights FOR THEIR PROTECTION."

"Negotiators from the House and Senate are expected to meet to reconcile their respective bills this fall. The final, consolidated bill will have to pass the House and the Senate before being delivered to the President at the end of the year."