Tuesday, May 09, 2006

The Technological Case for Open Access

Open Access. Clifford Lynch makes another important contribution by illuminating the potential of open access in a networked age. We're trying to realize this potential with the Science Commons neurocommons project.

"As the scholarly literature moves to digital form, what is
actually needed to move beyond a system that just replicates all
of our assumptions that this literature is only read, and read
only by human beings, one article at a time? What is needed to
permit the creation of digital libraries hosting these materials
that moves beyond the "incunabular" view of the literature, to
use Greg Crane's very provocative recent characterization. What
is needed to allow the application of computational technologies
to extract new knowledge, correlations and hypotheses from
collections of scholarly literature?"

Here is the link to the piece (a chapter from a forthcoming book):
http://www.cni.org/staff/cliffpubs/OpenComputation.htm.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Current law permits copying where it constitutes a necessary intermediate step to the creation of a non-infringing use, e.g. the Sega/Accolade case. Wouldn't this law allow scholars to create copies of copyrighted works for the purpose of performing prepatory computational work that leads to transformative new articles/scholarship?

Michael W. Carroll said...

As a matter of copyright law, I think you are right. However, some publishers use licensing terms to extend their control over article beyond what copyright law grants.

We should expect to see greater attention paid to license terms that govern text mining and data mining in the future.