The Open Defintion

Terminology

The term knowledge is taken to include:

1. Content such as music, films, books
2. Data be it scientific, historical, geographic or otherwise
3. Government and other administrative information
   

Software is excluded despite its obvious centrality because it is already adequately addressed by previous work.
The term work will be used to denote the item or piece of knowledge which is being transferred.
The term package may also be used to denote a collection of works. Of course such a package may be considered a work in itself.
The term license refers to the legal license under which the work is made available. Where no license has been made this should be interpreted as referring to the resulting default legal conditions under which the work is available (for example copyright).

 

The Definition

A work is open if its manner of distribution satisfies the following conditions:

 

1. Access

The work shall be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably downloading via the Internet without charge. The work must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form.
Comment: This can be summarized as ‘social’ openness – not only are you allowed to get the work but you can get it. ‘As a whole’ prevents the limitation of access by indirect means, for example by only allowing access to a few items of a database at a time (material should be available in bulk as necessary). Convenient and modifiable means that material should be machine readable (rather than, for example, just human readable).

 

2. Redistribution

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the work either on its own or as part of a package made from works from many different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale or distribution.

 

3. Reuse

The license must allow for modifications and derivative works and must allow them to be distributed under the terms of the original work.
Comment: Note that this clause does not prevent the use of ‘viral’ or share-alike licenses that require redistribution of modifications under the same terms as the original.

 

4. Absence of Technological Restriction

The work must be provided in such a form that there are no technological obstacles to the performance of the above activities. This can be achieved by the provision of the work in an open data format, i.e. one whose specification is publicly and freely available and which places no restrictions monetary or otherwise upon its use.

 

5. Attribution

The license may require as a condition for redistribution and re-use the attribution of the contributors and creators to the work. If this condition is imposed it must not be onerous. For example if attribution is required a list of those requiring attribution should accompany the work.

 

6. Integrity

The license may require as a condition for the work being distributed in modified form that the resulting work carry a different name or version number from the original work.

 

7. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
Comment: In order to get the maximum benefit from the process, the maximum diversity of persons and groups should be equally eligible to contribute to open knowledge. Therefore we forbid any open-knowledge license from locking anybody out of the process.
Comment: this is taken directly from item 5 of the OSD.

 

8. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the work in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the work from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Comment: The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent open material from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it.
Comment: this is taken directly from item 6 of the OSD.

 

9. Distribution of License

The rights attached to the work must apply to all to whom it is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.
Comment: This clause is intended to forbid closing up knowledge by indirect means such as requiring a non-disclosure agreement.
Comment: this is taken directly from item 7 of the OSD.

 

10. License Must Not Be Specific to a Package

The rights attached to the work must not depend on the work being part of a particular package. If the work is extracted from that package and used or distributed within the terms of the work’s license, all parties to whom the work is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original package.
Comment: this is taken directly from item 8 of the OSD.

 

11. License Must Not Restrict the Distribution of Other Works

The license must not place restrictions on other works that are distributed along with the licensed work. For example, the license must not insist that all other works distributed on the same medium are open.
Comment: Distributors of open knowledge have the right to make their own choices. Note that ‘share-alike’ licenses are conformant since those provisions only apply if the whole forms a single work.
Comment: this is taken directly from item 9 of the OSD.

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original source:  http://opendefinition.org/od/

Copyright and Open Access 2014

This week has been proclaimed Copyright week by the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and today, Wednesday Jan 15, is Open Access Day 2014. It is almost exactly 1 year ago that Aaron Swartz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz) died in the middle of his struggle for open knowledge and it would be a good thing to make this week and in particular Open Access Day, a recurring event in his honor.
The open access movement has gained momentum in the past year and too much has happened to list every thing. Instead lets focus on a few key events and developments.
In 2013 the White House has issued a directive stating that all publicly funded research should be made publicly available in repositories. The reaction of the scientific publishers has been to allow this, but under the condition that there is an embargo time of 6 months or 1 year. Many have thought that this would be a necessary transition measure, but recently they have been proven very wrong in this assumption because a powerful lobby of publishers is now even demanding for embargo times of up to 3 years!
In our opinion any embargo time for making publications open access is the wrong thing to do: it is not in the interest of science, not in the interest of society, it seems designed only to protect the rights of the publishers in order to maintain their profits. Any paper, especially in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths disciplines, refers to work done at least 1-2 years previously. Combined with the inherent fast pace of science, any embargo period – especially prolonged embargo periods – will make sharing of the information less useful and less efficient by prolonging this time span further. Instead we should strive for Zero-embargo publication and push for SHORTER review and handling times, which can sometimes be as long as 6 months!
We should remember Open Access is not only about having information freely available to view. People should also be able to reuse the information freely with no restrictions other than the requirement to attribute. Instead of traditional copyright rules and property rights open access publishers increasingly use a set of licenses developed by Creative Commons. These licenses provide a basic choice of rules for the usage of the work, in combination with the stringent demand for attribution of the work to the original author(s). In this way copyright remains (forever) with the author while allowing for unrestricted (or in other cases somewhat restricted) use of the information.
The original copyright rules that evolved around 1700 (Statute of Anne) were developed to protect the right of the owner of a work for a limited time (2x 14 years) in exchange for having the work in the public domain after this time period. So in a sense these rules were aimed at allowing to share the information. Because information did not travel that fast in those days, this ‘embargo period’ was then considered enough. When through technical advancements information started to move more quickly the copyright period was gradually extended to 70 years and more (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988). However, in the process the copyright ownership had shifted from individual copyright to corporate copyright owned by publishing businesses. The ultimate goal of the copyright laws no longer reflected the ultimate goal of sharing information after a short period of time, but instead have a new role of defending business interests for as long as possible.
Today, thanks to the invention of the Internet, we see the making of a sharing economy. Many sharing communities exist already, but the community of sharing scientists is slow in coming. Although the internet was developed by scientists to exchange information the public has been much more quick in seeing and using the possibilities for sharing ideas, goods and information. Sharing of scientific information is still in its infancy, not in the least because of the ongoing efforts of traditional publishers to shield information for as long as this is profitable, but open science communities have started to form all over the world. This can be seen by the rapid growth of the Open Knowledge Foundation, with over 40 local open knowledge communities worldwide, many more than only two years ago. And it is also illustrated by the steady growth of older open access publishers like PLoS, BioMedCentral, as well as the very successful introductions of new journals like eLife and PeerJ.
Political and scientific support is also growing. The next European research program Horizon2020 aims at 100 % open access for all publicly funded research. And a scientific society like the Max Planck society has just organized its tenth anniversary Berlin conference on open access in Berlin.
However not only political and scientific support is important. We want to have citizens, students, entrepreneurs, and everyone else who needs (specific) information to push for global open access to all academic literature. And we need your help to do this.

• You can contact the Open Knowledge Foundation by registering on the website
• You can subscribe to any of the mailing lists of the OKF for instance the open access list and take part in discussions
• You can share your stories on difficulties or success with accessing information on the website WhoNeedsAccess
• You can download the OpenAccessButton and start registering where you hit paywalls when trying to access information
  

Tom Olijhoek and Michelle Brooks from the Open Access Working Group/ OKF
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Original source published here under a CC by 3.0 license (January 15, 2014).