Category Archives: oa.libre

Growth of OASPA members book output: We see different patterns between books and journals – OASPA

Posted on by
Reply

“Patterns in license usage have changed over time. Figure 1, above, shows how CC BY has become the most popular license in recent years, accounting for just over 65% of books published by OASPA members in 2020. CC BY-NC-ND was the next most commonly-used license, accounting for around 25% of books published in 2020….

5 publishers account for around 71% of OASPA members’ book output. This represents a similar level of consolidation to journals, although the top publishers are different between the two (with the exception of Springer Nature, T&F and De Gruyter). The next 5 publishers account for a further 18% of books; 12 publishers account for the remaining 11%. Full details of these additional publishers, together with the numbers of books for all publishers, can again be found in the downloadable data linked to above….”

European High Court Says Online Platforms Are Not Liable for Copyright Infringement by Users if They Take Appropriate Measures – Pearl Cohen

Posted on by
Reply

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has held that operators of online platforms to which users post copyright-protected content are not liable for copyright infringement in such user-posted content if they meet certain conditions. First, they must not contribute to giving access to such content to the public in breach of copyright, beyond merely making those platforms available. Second, they must not play an active role that gives them knowledge of or control over the content posted.

eBook Licensing in Europe and the Vanishing Library? – YouTube

Posted on by
Reply

“Unaffordable prices, an inability to buy eBooks due to a refusal to sell, bundling of unwanted titles in packages, and restrictions on research copying all affect access to eBooks in all types of libraries.

Confidentiality clauses in contracts between publishers and universities are also making understanding how the eBook market functions more challenging, and obscuring whether public money is being well-spent. The #ebooksos campaign has successfully highlighted via the BBC and the Guardian the issues faced by the education and research sectors in accessing and using e-Books. The same issues are also being faced by public libraries across Europe. This session will explore in depth the acute difficulties faced not just by higher education, but also by public libraries, caused by publishers’ pricing and licensing practices, and discuss possible solutions, including the potential to solve many of the problems with legal solutions in copyright law that allow Controlled Digital Lending. It will also include information about the Knowledge Rights 21 Programme (KR21), an initiative led by Stichting IFLA Foundation, setting out its aim to achieve and implement reforms to copyright law, regulation and practice that enable knowledge institutions to provide significantly greater possibilities to access and use copyright works. Working with public, national, educational, health and research libraries, universities and the wider access to knowledge movement, KR21 aims to promote copyright reform at the European and national levels, and through its work leave a lasting legacy that influences similar developments elsewhere in the world….”

Julia Reda – GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright

Posted on by
Reply

GitHub is currently causing a lot of commotion in the Free Software scene with its release of Copilot. Copilot is an artificial intelligence trained on publicly available source code and texts. It produces code suggestions to programmers in real time. Since Copilot also uses the numerous GitHub repositories under copyleft licences such as the GPL as training material, some commentators accuse GitHub of copyright infringement, because Copilot itself is not released under a copyleft licence, but is to be offered as a paid service after a test phase. The controversy touches on several thorny copyright issues at once. What is astonishing about the current debate is that the calls for the broadest possible interpretation of copyright are now coming from within the Free Software community.

Lebert, Marie, A short history of ebooks

Posted on by
Reply

Table of contents:

1. Project Gutenberg, a visionary project

2. The milestones of Project Gutenberg

3. PDF, a pioneer format created by Adobe

4. Gabriel, a portal for European national libraries

5. The British Library and its treasures

6. From PDAs to smartphones

7. The first e-readers

8. E Ink, an electronic ink technology

9. Online dictionaries and encyclopedias

10. Experiments by best-selling authors

11. From OeB to EPUB as a standard format

12. Wikipedia, an encyclopedia for the world

13. The Creative Commons licence

14. From Google Print to Google Books

15. The Internet Archive, a library for the world

16. eBooks seen by some pioneers

17. A tribute to librarians around the world

18. A timeline from 1971 until now

Fully funded PhD Position in Paris on Open Data Licensing | EURAXESS

Posted on by
Reply

“This fully funded PhD position is part of the EU Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska Curie ITN project entitled “ODECO: Towards a Sustainable Open Data ECOsystem” (see www.odeco-research.eu). ODECO is a four-year project involving 15 PhD projects covering each a specific part of the open data ecosystem. The central aim of the ODECO consortium network is to train the next generation of creative and innovative early stage open data researchers, to unlock their creative and innovative potential to address current and future challenges in the creation of user driven, circular and inclusive open data ecosystems.

Current developments in the field of open data are characterised as highly fragmented. Open data ecosystems are often developed in different domains in isolation of each other and with little involvement of potential users, resulting in approaches that significantly limit open data reusability for users. This reduces innovation and the ability to create new valued added goods and services. Isolated domains also undermine interoperability for users acting as a barrier to data sharing. Efforts are also uncoordinated in open data training and research, where multidisciplinary approaches are scant….”

Know your rights: the key to eBook access – CILIP: the library and information association

Posted on by
Reply

“Maintaining the status quo for public libraries – to build collections, preserve and lend them – is now seen as a radical and frightening mission, according Ben White, PhD researcher at the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management, Bournemouth University and co-founder of KnowledgeRights21. Here he speaks to Rob Mackinlay about why not challenging the methods used by publishers to protect their content will damage not only libraries, but also threatens research and innovation.

“Publishers can’t refuse to sell paper books to libraries, but they can and do refuse to sell them eBooks. And all we want to do is to be allowed to do what we’ve always done, to keep the status quo, to be allowed to build collections, preserve and lend, so it is strange that the solution sounds a bit frightening and radical,” says Ben White who has been immersed in the legal minutiae of intellectual property across Europe for decades….”

Finding and Using the Good Stuff: Open Educational Practices for Developing Open Educational Resources | Christian Hilchey

Posted on by
Reply

Finding and Using the Good Stuff : Open Educational Practices for Developing Open Educational Resources by Christian Hilchey

part of book:  Open Education and Second Language Learning and Teaching (Feb. 2021, De Gruyter)

Abstract: “Open educational resources (OER) are the concrete products of various open educational practices (OEP). As such, OER are typically more visible and better understood than OEP. Thus, the goal of this chapter is to make the hidden, tacit knowledge of OEP more apparent to L2 specialists who may wish to design their own OER. In particular, this chapter seeks to describe and demonstrate two OEP that are central to the development of OER: (1) how to find high-quality open content; and (2) how to adapt open content for the creation of user-generated materials. The chapter begins by demonstrating effective methods for finding rich and usable open media. This section summarizes the a ordances of different search engines and media repositories (e.g. Google, Flickr, Forvo, Pixabay, YouTube, Vimeo). Next, useful strategies for developing elements of a language curriculum based on openly licensed content are described. The chapter ends with a discussion of the pros and cons of technologies for the creation of OER content….

this chapter describes the various OEP that I learned through trial and error during the development of Reality Czech, an OER developed at the University of Texas at Austin under the auspices of the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL)….”

 

AAAS Plan S Compliance Policy: Staying Committed to Subscriptions – The Scholarly Kitchen

Posted on by

“Back in January, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announced a pilot to allow authors funded by cOAlition S organizations that have adopted the Plan S Rights Retention Strategy to place a CC BY or a CC BY-ND license on their accepted manuscripts and to share them without embargo. 

Specifically, the AAAS License to Publish states that 

“AAAS licenses back the following rights to the Author in the version of the cOAlition S Funded Work that has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, (the “Accepted Version”) but not the final, copyedited and proofed version published by AAAS (the “Final Published Version”): The right to self-archive and distribute the Accepted Version under either a CC BY 4.0 license or a CC BY-ND license, including on the Author’s personal website, in the Author’s company/institutional repository or archive, and in not for profit subject-based repositories such as PubMed Central, without embargo but only following publication of the Final Published Version.” …

The announcement of the pilot policy was widely reported on and was welcomed by cOAlition S in a special statement. Since that time, representatives of cOAlition S have repeatedly praised the AAAS policy in webinars and the like. This celebratory response has been a bit puzzling to me. Plan S aims to flip the publishing system to gold open access, with its various leaders often decrying the lack of progress in the two decades since the Budapest Open Access Initiative statement. Specifically, Plan S states that, “the subscription-based model of scientific publishing, including its so-called ‘hybrid’ variants, should therefore be terminated.” 

Yet in this case, cOAlition S is praising a publisher that is holding fast to the subscription-based model of closed publishing. And doing so even though this AAAS pilot policy is not a comprehensive route to compliance for Plan S since not all funders in the coalition have adopted the Rights Retention Strategy. Elsewhere I’ve observed that, over time, the implementation of Plan S has been marked by policies that “rehabilitate” journals into compliance. Is this another case of rehabilitation? …”

 

 

Advancing open access in the Netherlands after 2020: from quantity to quality

Posted on by

The purpose of this article is to explore options to further open access in the Netherlands from 2021. Its premise is that there is a need to look at the qualitative aspects of open access, alongside quantitative ones. The article first takes stock of progress that has been made. Next, we suggest broadening the agenda by involving more types of actors and other scholarly formats (like books, chapters, proceedings, preprints and textbooks). At the same time we suggest deepening the open access agenda by including several open access dimensions: immediacy, diamond open access, open metadata, open peer review and open licences. To facilitate discussion, a framework is proposed that allows specifying these actions by the a) aspects of open access they address (what is made open access, how, when and where it is made open access, and copyright and rights retention), b) the actors that play a role (government, research institutions, funders) and c) the various levels at which these actions can be taken: state as goal, set as policy, legalize and promote, recognize and reward, finance, support with infrastructure. A template is provided to ease the use of the framework.

IFLA signs the WikiLibrary Manifesto

Posted on by

“IFLA has endorsed the WikiLibrary Manifesto, aimed at connecting libraries and Wikimedia projects such as Wikibase in order to promote the dissemination of knowledge in open formats, especially in linked open data networks….”

SPARC Statement on Public Access Provisions in the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act – SPARC

Posted on by

“We are pleased to see the U.S. Senate endorse language that strongly supports providing faster access to taxpayer-funded research results with today’s passage of the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (S. 1260). 

Section 2527 of the bill, formerly the Endless Frontier Act, (titled “Basic Research”) includes language originally written by Senator Wyden and supported by Senator Paul that directs federal agencies funding more than $100 million annually in research grants to develop a policy that provides for free online public access to federally-funded research “not later than 12 months after publication in peer-reviewed journals, preferably sooner.” 

The bill also provides important guidance that will maximize the impact of federally-funded research by ensuring that final author manuscripts reporting on taxpayer funded research are:

Deposited into federally designated or maintained repositories;
Made available in open and machine readable formats; 
Made available under licenses that enable productive reuse and computational analysis; and
Housed in repositories that ensure interoperability and long-term preservation. …”

When free access is not open access | CCSD

Posted on by

“You have downloaded your article from the website of the journal and you think that, since it is available free, you can deposit this published version in HAL. Well, sometimes it is true but …. sometimes it is not.

Does the mention “Open Access” or “Open” is included in your file? or a Creative Common license (CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, etc) ? If so, you can deposit this publisher’s version in HAL. You sometimes need good eyes to find the licence: in the Elsevier’s files, it is at the bottom of the first page (example); idem for the articles published by Oxford University Press (example). On the other hand, for articles in journals published by Nature Publishing Group and MDPI, the licence is on the last page of the file (example).

But if these mentions are not included in the file, you cannot deposit the published version without first checking if the publisher approves it….”

Primer on the Rights Retention Strategy | Zenodo

Posted on by

Abstract: The rights retention strategy (RRS) is a new tool to help academic authors retain rights over their manuscripts. This will allow you to freely share your author accepted manuscript at any time. The RRS is simple and elegant; authors need follow only two steps. (1) Add the following text, e.g. to the cover page, or acknowledgements, to your manuscript before submission to a journal: “A CC BY or equivalent licence is applied to the AAM arising from this submission.” (2) Once your article is accepted for publication, you can deposit your version of the manuscript in a public repository. This strategy has been developed by cOAlition-S, but can be used by all authors, irrespective of funding. Here I describe pros and cons of this  approach, but recommend its adoption by scholars as a way to retain ownership of their own content.