On Tuesday July 29th, Jon Ippolito and John Bell of the University of Maine’s Pool project spoke at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society on Can Creativity be Crowdsourced? Jon Ippolito is assistant professor of New Media; John Bell is a devotee of open web culture and web designer at the university. POOL is an open source community and avenue for artistic collaboration, artistic exhibition, criticism, and a means of observing and tracing the artistic process. Artists, interpreted broadly, can post their work and have others reuse it, build on it, collaborate on it, or they may post their work and reserve all rights to it.
What was most interesting in the crowdsourcing creativity discussion was the issue of licensing, reuse, and tracing of the artistic process. The gentlemen from Maine did not simply support the concept of total freedom to use and remix other’s work, but instead emphasized their preferred mode of building relationships, of building community, acknowledging a debt to work that came before – the key point being community and relationships. Thus, their POOL Choosing Rights page offers access ranging from “all rights reserved” through Creative Commons licenses to public domain.
If you click on Orient Yourself on the Pool homepage, you will be offered a walkthrough of how POOL functions.
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Copyright news, Copyright resources, Creative Commons and Open Licenses, Open Access, Public domain
Creative Commons and Open Licenses, Open Access, Public domain, user generated content
Catherine Candee, Executive Director of Publishing and Strategic Initiatives at the University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication, recently spoke at Harvard on the topic of “Whose Knowledge Is It? UC Takes On IP.” Ms. Candee spoke of universities’ need to fulfill their mission to disseminate scholarship and create knowledge [in a timely manner]. In order to do this, the UC system must create economically sustainable alternatives to highly costly licensing agreements with outside publishers. Those agreements grant outside publishers the copyright to faculty scholarly articles and research.
After wobbly opening steps, the University of California has now regrouped to begin to establish a clear Open Access Policy through which the university’s faculty retain copyright to their work, work which will be deposited in a UC open access repository (unless faculty opt-out under straightforward guidelines). The university would then distribute the scholarly work worldwide and manage copyrights on behalf of faculty.
Ms. Candee also spoke of other innovations in scholarly communication. She spoke of an evidence-based approach in determining research and open access needs, emerging publishing needs and ways the UC Press (and by extension other university presses) together with the university can evaluate non-traditional means of disseminating information and generating knowledge. Ms. Candee also spoke of the recent vote of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences to proceed with establishing an Office of Scholarly Communication to widely disseminate the scholarly work of Harvard faculty, while retaining copyright for faculty. Ms. Candee concluded that if Harvard can do this, so assuredly can the University of California.
The presentation was given on March 17, 2008.
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Academic libraries, Copyright news, Open Access
Academic libraries, Copyright news, Open Access, Uncategorized
