Union for the Public Domain

The New Scientist is reporting that the UK government has not taken up the tentative recommendation from a group of MP's to favour open-access publishing. Naturally, the traditional publishing industry is quite happy.

However, Stevan Harnad, an open access pioneer in the UK, reports that the UK Research Councils are free to require that the scientists self-archive their publications so that all potential readers can access them.

Twenty-five Nobel Prize winners have written an open letter in support of the U.S. Congress' recommendation to the National Institutes of Health that manuscripts reporting on work funded with public NIH dollars be made publicly available.

Full text here.

The justification for granting more control over the commons is often that property rights are the best way to foster innovation. That control is often granted through copyright, patents, trade secrets and trademarks.

However, there is a contrary view that openness is the best way to foster innovation. The Union for the Public Domain believes that the follow-on inventions and collateral social benefits that come from open information are often more valuable to society than granting more private control over information.

This comes down to an empirical question which requires both objective study and individuals and organizations willing to share valuable information. On this page we will track advances in the state of our knowledge about the value of open systems and initiatives promoting these systems. Please e-mail us if you have suggested links.

• The Microsoft Killers, Azeem Azhar, Prospect, 2/04
• "An open-source shot in the arm?", The Economist
• The Free & the Unfree, Wired Magazine

Open Source Medicine

• Finding Cures for Tropical Diseases: Is open source an answer?, Stephen Maurer, Arti Rai and Andrej Sali
• Open Source Biotechnology site, Janet Hope
• Bioinformatics.org, Open source bioinformatics
• Trade Framework for Funding Research and Development, CPTech
• WHO Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health

In Practice

• International HapMap Project
• Alliance for Cell-Signaling
• Oxford Structural Genomics Consortium

Open Source Text

• Creative Commons
• "The Information Commons", Nancy Kranich, The Free Expression Policy Project

In Practice

• Open textbooks
• Open Access Journals

Free Software

• Free Software Foundation
• MIT Open Source Research Community
• Open Source Initiative

Open Source Agriculture

• First Seeds, Now Software?, James Grimmelman

The National Alliance for Autism Research has just give a major grant to Translational Genomics Research Institute to conduct a genetic analysis of families with kids who have autism. The findings will be released into the public domain. Biotech companies will then be able to use the research to competitively develop treatments.

From The Arizona Republic:

TGen, a not-for-profit research institute, will make its findings available to other researchers in the public domain. It does not plan to file a patent based on its findings.

"This is an altruistic endeavor," he said. "Someone needs to figure out what causes autism, and I'd rather it be us because we can be sure it's done right."

Link to TGen press release. (Thanks to James)

SUPPORT THE WEATHER SERVICE'S EFFORTS to keep weather data free and available to the public....

"The National Weather Service wants to update a 1991 policy that limits what data it can put on the Internet. The proposed new policy makes putting free data on the Internet official. The Private Weather Sector wants NWS to provide its new digital forecasts only in specialized data formats and would like NWS to shut down new XML data feeds. Barry Myers (MS Word doc), president of Accuweather wants you to have pay before using Kweather and other similar tools. Myers is asking friends to comment against the new NWS policy by June 30. Should we have to pay twice to get weather forecasts?"

Source: Slashdot