David Wiley of Iterating Toward Openness has been blogging up a storm about open content licensing:

• Noncommercial Isn't the Problem, ShareAlike Is
• ShareAlike, the Public Domain, and Privileging
• Copyleft and Fish in Water
• Open Education License Draft
• Assymetry, Hypocrisy, and Public Domain
• Why Not CC By?

That's a lot to read, but it's all good stuff. David makes one very strong argument that I want to emphasize here, because it points up the difficult distinction between data and (creative) work.

In the post introducing his draft Open Education Licence, he provides a very useful outline of the aims of open content:

• Reuse - Use the work verbatim, just exactly as you found it
• Rework - Alter or transform the work so that it better meets your needs
• Remix - Combine the (verbatim or altered) work with other works to better meet your needs
• Redistribute - Share the verbatim work, the reworked work, or the remixed work with others

I really, really like that. David's "four R's" resemble the four fundamental freedoms of the Free Software Foundation but do a better job of discriminating between Rework and Remix. The Four R's make immediate sense to me and I will certainly be Reusing and Redistributing that idea.

David goes on to quote some believable numbers and points out that:

Since half of all CC licensed materials are licensed using a copyleft clause and all GFDL licensed materials are licensed using a copyleft clause, this means that over half of the world's open content is copylefted. And while the CC and GFDL copyleft clauses guarantee that all derivative works will be "open," they also guarantee that they can never be used in remixes with the majority of other copylefted works. You can't remix a GFDL work with a By-NC-SA work when the licenses require that the child be licensed exactly as the parent. Each parent had one and only one license - which license would the derivative use? It's just not possible to legally remix these materials; copyleft prevents this remixing. [see David's earlier explanation for details of the incompatibilities among various copyleft licenses]

While promoting rework at the expense of remix - in other words, taking the copyleft approach - is fine for software, it is problematic for content and extremely problematic for education. As educators, we are always remixing materials for use in our classrooms both in the "real" world and online. Your mileage may vary, but over my last 15 years of teaching I would estimate that my remixing activities outnumber my reworking activities 10:1 or more. If other teachers are like me in this regard, then, copyleft is a huge problem for open education.

...exciting new developments in text-mining and data-mining are beginning to show what can be done to create new, meaningful scientific information from existing, dispersed information using computer technologies. Research articles and accompanying data files can be searched, indexed and mined using semantic technologies to put together pieces of hitherto unrelated information that will further science and scholarship in ways that we have yet to begin imagining.

I am not in favour of copyleft for data. I have no fundamental objection to creating a copyrighted work from data as long as there is significant added value. And copyleft is viral - deliberately. If any item in a system/collection/program etc. is copyleft, then the whole is (at least by the algorithm). [...]
I would argue that if I get factual information from WP [wikipedia] then it cannot carry a copyleft. I need the fundamental physical constants and get them from WP. I don't think that my data and programs are thereby copyleft. All algorithms are now slightly fuzzy.

See also (this was a note to myself in the draft, so caveat lector!):

CC-NC considered harmful (Kuroshin)
When is OA not OA? (Catriona MacCallum in PLoS Biology)
CC, OA and moral rights (Thinh Nguyen, Science Commons blog)
Open Data and Moral Rights (Peter Murray-Rust)

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In the interests of full disclosure, I have a personal statement for this blog which I hope places the content squarely in the public domain, and for my columns on 3QuarksDaily I use CC-BY so that, if those pieces generate any interest, 3QD might at least get some traffic out of having generously offered me a spot on their roster.

The public domain is not an "unlicensed commons". The public domain does not equal the BSD. It is not a licensing option.

It is the natural legal state of data.

It is a damn shame that we no longer think of the public domain as an option that is attractive. It's a sign of the victory of the content holders that the free licensing movements work against that something without a license -- something that is truly free, not just just free "as in" -- is somehow thought to be worse. We've bought into their games if we allow the public domain to be defined as the BSD. The idea of the public domain has been subjected to continuous erosion thanks to both the big content companies and our own movements, to the point where we think freedom only comes in a contract.

The public domain is not contractually constructed. It just is. It cannot be made more free, only less free. And if we start a culture of licensing and enclosing the public domain (stuff that is actually already free, like the human genome) in the name of "freedom" we're playing a dangerous game.

There's a lot more to get at here.

So. Fwiw, there it is. Hat tip, again, to Andrew and Ralf.

A comment to bloggers. I do my best to credit blog posts by the author's real name. However, if you blog under a psuedonym [sic] and don't make it easy to find your actual name, I may not. Unless you want me to attribute your writings to your silly Internet handle, you should include your name somewhere prominent (if not on every page, on the "About" or "Contact" page).

I realise that netonyms have been passé among the hipsterati for some time now, and my impression is that it's a good thing, due mainly to being more comfortable online than crusty old luddites like me. Nonetheless, that you haven't been online long enough to have a nick that half your friends use instead of your "real" name is no reason the rest of us should subscribe to your particular view of how the internets should work. You can quote me on that -- you can even use my "real" name if you want.

Damn kids, get off my lawn, mutter grumble mutter mutter...

"Open science" is liberated from methodological naturalism (MN), even though it begins with an MN position. That is, all scientists start their work in pursuit of natural explanations for events or natural solutions for problems. If evidence and logic point to an end of the road for natural explanations, on rare occasions a scientist using open science would be willing to consider an explanation which does not force him to a naturalistic conclusion. For instance, the genetic code stored in the DNA molecule has no precedent in naturalism, since all codes are the product of a mind. Open science would allow possible supernatural causation as a topic for further research. The scientist would not be restricted to naturalism as the only explanatory option. But alas! Professional scientists do not practice open science. They practice "closed science."

I was wondering about this section in the CC license of much of the PMC content, such as our paper on userscripts (section 4a of the CC-BY 2.0):

You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement.

CC-BY 3.0 reads differently, but has similar aims. [...] Peter indicates that the NIH has put in place 'technological measures to control access' to the distribution of our work on userscripts (the PMC entry). That is in clear violation of the CC license. [...] What the PMC website should indicate, instead, is that text mining is allowed for the PMC OAI subset, but that they would highly prefer to use the PMC OAI or PMC FTP routes. This is the least they have to do.

No matter what, I still have the feeling that any technical obstacles are disallowed by the CC-license. Any legal expert here, that can explain me if the CC license allows controlling how people have access to my material?

Open Access must include access by machines:

* At minimum one must allow crawls of the site/content or (to reduce the impact of badly configured crawlers) create a compressed XML file containing all metadata and either content, or direct links to content and make it available for download (and if bandwidth is still an issue put it on a P2P network like BitTorrent).
* Preferable is to offer some kind of API (OTMI) or protocol (OAI-PMH) to get at content and metadata and citations.
* Better is to offer access to the XML of the articles in addition to the PDF and/or HTML; if the XML actually has some semantic content, then we are approaching the optimum.

The end goal is to support and encourage text mining and analysis of the full-text (preferably semantically rich XML), metadata and citations to allow literature-based exploration and discovery in support of the scientific research process.

I do, however, have a nitpick to make. Heather makes no comment on Glenn's idea that this is an addition to the definition of OA, but in fact I think it's already built in to the accepted BBB definition. Peter Suber refers to the removal of price and permission barriers, to distinguish Open from "merely" free access, which removes only price barriers; I've quoted him on this before, so here he is again:

The best-known part of the BBB definition is that OA content must be free of charge for all users with an internet connection. However, the BBB definition doesn't stop at free online access. It adds an extra dimension that isn't as easy to describe, and consequently is often dropped or obscured. This extra dimension gives users permission for all legitimate scholarly uses. It removes what I've called permission barriers, as opposed to price barriers. The Budapest statement puts the extra dimension this way:

By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

The Bethesda and Berlin statements put it this way: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship".

All three tributaries of the mainstream BBB definition agree that OA removes both price and permission barriers. Free online access isn't enough. "Fair use" ("fair dealing" in the UK) isn't enough.

I'll go even further: can anyone point me to a single Open Access repository? I don't know of even one such site that removes both price and permission barriers. Surely there must be some, but the Big Names (PubMed Central, arXiv, Cogprints, CiteSeer, RePEc, etc -- see ROAR) don't seem to qualify, because digital objects in these repositories carry their own copyrights, rather than being covered by a blanket license provided by the repository.

Can this be true? Five years after the BBB definition came together, more than ten years since Stevan Harnad's subversive proposal and on the first day of the NIH mandate -- widely referred to as an OA mandate! -- can it be that we really don't have a single truly OA repository in all the world? And if it is true, would it help to make the official definition more explicitly machine-friendly?

Rob's also right in that you won't hear much about this in the "mainstream" media, and whatever you do hear will be propaganda -- which is why I'm pointing to his entry.

I know, I know -- politics is bad for me, not least because if I blog this there are quite literally a thousand other stories I should blog. But I'm not going to fall into that trap; I just wanted to say "Rob's right", because this particular story resonated with me. We now return to our usual semi-silence.

I\'m pleased to announce the introduction of two products, the latest is the Ice Cold New Marketer Seminar Series for internet marketers who are just starting out and looking for solid counseling on tools, resources, and services without all the techni...

Andy, you're a disease with opposable thumbs. You're a plague, a pox, a parasite on all that is good and useful. Other people are making the internet into the greatest library that ever was, a scholarly resource, a tool for science, a home for the arts, a conversation, a force for social change -- but you, you're out there shilling. And you're not even selling anything real, you're selling the idea of selling. You mammon-worshipping maggot. You're sucking down bandwidth and making all sorts of worthwhile endeavours more difficult by the day, just to push yourself into people's faces and scream "give me money". You are greed made flesh. You're the reason we have to have CAPTCHA and Bayesian spam filters and blacklists. Blind unmitigated selfishness like yours is why we can't have nice things: it's people like you who piss in fountains and spraypaint inanities on grand buildings and carve their initials into ancient trees.

Andy, you're a soulless meat puppet with the red right hand of a sick, materialistic culture jammed forearm-deep in your pliant rectum. There just aren't enough curses in the world for you -- there aren't enough bad things I can hope will happen to you.

Andy, Bill Hicks has some advice for you.

So, this entry is just to round up a couple of NUTs -- Nagging Unfinished Tasks.

NUT the first: 2008 Science Blogging Conference -- I never did get around to posting about it, but I have left comments on other people's entries saying most of what I had to say. Mostly, it was a blast and I wish I could have that kind of experience more often, as it really recharges my enthusiasm.

The one thing I meant to do, and didn't get around to, was pointing to the sponsors. I hate advertising, and was even a little put off by the "swag bags" given out at the conference (very much a minority opinion there) -- but sponsorship seems different to me. Provided the recipients do their bit, the sponsors can make a real contribution and raise their profile in a "target market" without having to spam anyone. So, I wanted to do my bit to promote those individuals, businesses and organizations who helped Anton, Bora & Co. to make the conference such a success: if you have a moment, click through to that link and check a few of 'em out.

I also want to highlight the contribution made by the Radisson Research Triangle Park, who weren't exactly sponsors but made a big difference to my stay. It's a very nice hotel, much swankier than my usual budget-driven choices, and they provided a special attendee rate for the conference weekend which made them the cheapest alternative within any reasonable distance of the conference. This was great, because they are in fact walking distance from the Sigma Xi Center where the conference was held, and quite a lot of the attendees took them up on their offer. This made transport easy to figure out, and the after-conference bar sessions lively and fun. I really like not worrying about transport to and from conference venues, and I really like being able to walk from the bar to my room after staying up way too late talking to interesting people, so thanks to the Radisson RTP for making my stay so enjoyable. If you're going to stay in NC, keep them in mind. On the right is a picture of my room there -- yup, two double beds all to myself, same cheap rate. (On the left is a DNA-inspired sculpture that hangs in the central stairwell of the Sigma Xi Center.)

NUT the second: Whatever happened to those letters I was thinking about sending? Well, in the end, I decided not to send them. The bottom line is that, as Peter Suber pointed out to me in email, it's a given that almost none of the recipients of such a letter would respond. I finally decided that such a predictably low response rate would reduce the exercise to little more than muck-raking, since no useful data would come of it. It would take a lot of work to find the appropriate contact person at each company and tailor the letters to their public position on OA, and in the end nobody would gain from it. I hope this is not a great disappointment to the few people who came forward to say they'd sign such letters -- if it is, let me know, and we can discuss possible ways to resurrect the idea or alternative ways to find out the same target information. It's not so much dead as buried under the weight of other, more pressing (and, I hope, more productive) commitments.

One thing that would really help outside of the proposal itself is to have actual letters of support. That way the organizers will know there is serious interest and commitment for a session on Open Science - it's a gamble for them, frankly, but much less of one if there is a good crowd on board.

So if you would like to support this proposal and are willing to commit to participating should it get accepted, please send me an email to that effect (with as many details of your anticipated participation as you can provide at this time), and I will include all the emails as "supplementary material" next Friday.

So anyway, if you can come up with an idea for a presentation or can simply commit to attending, please drop Shirley a line. She's another graduate student who's caught the Open Science bug, and the more of them we have -- and the more we can do to help and encourage them -- the better.

Last year's was tremendous fun; I'm looking forward to an unbroken attendance record down the years. You can still add ideas to the conference wiki, join in virtually via chat room, and watch at least one of the sessions online.

Update: Bora has further details on how you can participate even if you're not there in meatspace.

Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in "networked journalism," in which readers -- you --get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form.

The article, below, is a particularly apt candidate for such an experiment: it's my feature story on "Science 2.0," which describes how researchers are beginning to harness wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies as a potentially transformative way of doing science. The draft article appears here, several months in advance of its print publication, and we are inviting you to comment on it. Your inputs will influence the article's content, reporting, perhaps even its point of view.

So consider yourself invited. Please share your thoughts about the promise and peril of Science 2.0. -- just post your inputs in the Comment section below.

On a personal note, I'm pleased but a little embarrassed to have been quoted by name in an article for which I know Mitch interviewed a lot of people who are actually *doing* Science 2.0, not just cheering from the sidelines like me.  It's hard to be critical of choices made in the face of space constraints (the article is destined for print), but there's no such limit online.  I wonder whether Mitch and his SciAm editors would consider putting a longer version online? 

In a similar vein, in comments here Bora asks whether we (John's "usual suspects") couldn't put together a longer article for publication somewhere.  I think I might have a better idea (though it's hardly original with me).  From my point of view, the best thing about my 3Quarks Open Science articles from about a year ago is that they are already wildly out of date.  The -- to me -- obvious way to update them and keep them up-to-date is to turn them into a wiki (probably starting from the Nodalpoint wiki's Open Science page).  I think the articles cover most of the main bases, and each section could relatively easily be turned into a wiki page; with a little attention to style, it should then be fairly easy to re-write the articles from the updated information.  I am, as usual, swamped with work, so I won't be able to wiki-ize anything any time soon -- I do intend to get to it eventually, but in the meantime the articles themselves are all CC-BY and my Simpy bookmarks, which should help with updating, are pub dom and I'd be happy to help if anyone else wanted to take a stab at it. 

Finally, if you enjoyed the SciAm article, you might also enjoy more of Mitch's writing: he has a blog, a new gig at Nature and has written three books to date: The Dream Machine (2001), Complexity (1992) and Man-Made Minds (1987). (I swiped his affiliate links, I hope they still work.)