Post Tagged with: "open access"

The Year in Open Access

Peter Suber provides a great review of open access developments in 2010 that highlight institutional commitments, new mandates, and innovative practices from around the world.

January 5, 2011 — 1 comment — News

CanLII Board of Directors Appointment

I am honoured to be a new board member of CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute. Maintained by the Federation of Law Societies, CanLII is focused on free access to law.

October 28, 2010 — Comments are Disabled — News

Liberals To Launch Major Open Government Policy Initiative

For months, Canadians have been pointing with envy to open data/open government initiatives in the U.S., U.K., and Australia as those countries push forward with strong commitments to open data and Canada sits quietly on the sidelines. While the federal government has been very slow to move, sources say that the opposition Liberal Party will be unveiling its commitment to open government today. [update: policy posted] The four part commitment will include:

A commitment to make as many government datasets as possible available to the public online free of charge at opendata.gc.ca in an open and searchable format, starting with Statistics Canada data, including data from the long-form census;
A commitment to post all Access to Information requests, responses, and response times online at accesstoinformation.gc.ca
A commitment to make information on all government grants, contributions and contracts available through a searchable, online database at accountablespending.gc.ca
A commitment to immediately restore the long-form census

The open government/open data commitment is particularly noteworthy since it will apparently include a direction to all federal departments and agencies to adopt an open government principle where the default position is to provide information to the public. The plans for access to information would also be enormously helpful, including restoring the CAIRS database and following the recent UK lead by making all documents released under ATI available online.

October 21, 2010 — 15 comments — News

Open Access Week

This week is Open Access week. I’m pleased to be speaking today at the University of Manitoba on copyright and open access. For a look at the remarkable growth of open access, see Heather Morrison’s most recent update on the numbers.

October 18, 2010 — Comments are Disabled — News

Commercialization of IP In Canadian Universities: Barely Better Than Break Even

Last week, Statistics Canada released its latest report on the commercialization of intellectual property in Canadian universities. Canada spends billions of public dollars on research funding each year and the government has been increasingly focused on how best to commercialize the results. While there are several possible approaches to doing this, the government and some universities have been focused on building patent and IP portfolios as part of a conventional commercialization strategy. The alternative could be an open access approach – encourage (or require) much of the intellectual property to be made broadly available under open licences so that multiple organizations could add value and find ways to commercialize. The universities might generate less income but would better justify the public investment in research by providing the engine for larger economic benefits.

Which approach is better? The full commercialization approach has been tried in the U.S. with legislation known as Bayh-Dole and studies (here and here) have found that patents to universities have increased, but the increase has been accompanied by harm to the public domain of science and relatively small gains in income.

The Canadian Science and Technology Strategy similarly places its faith in commercialization through IP portfolios and licencing, yet the Statscan data suggests that this has also been ineffective.

August 31, 2010 — 18 comments — News