News

Free online access to UK academic works. [27jul10]

Open Book is an independent publisher run by academics for academics and for the readers of academic work. This UK-based Social Enterprise company publishes high quality, peer-reviewed monographs in the humanities and social sciences and ensures the widest possible distribution of its publications.

The Open Book website provides free online access to read digital versions of all publications, along with download of printable digital versions of both the entire book and individual book chapters, while allowing authors to maintain copyright on their own works.

More details: Openbookpublishers.com

Survey on practices and attitudes towards Open Access publishing. [20jul10]

This anonymous survey is being conducted by the SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project, co-funded by the European Commission under the FP7 Grant Agreement Nr. 230220 (Science in Society Programme). The study is investigating publishing practices and attitudes towards Open Access publishing. More information about the SOAP project can be found on the project's public website.

This survey is primarily aimed at active researchers in public and private organisations, from all fields of the research in the sciences and humanities. It focuses on publication of research articles in peer-reviewed journals. It should take about 10-15 minutes to complete. Results will be made publicly available in the second half of 2010.

Click here to take the survey.

A scoping study by COMMUNIA member Prof. Severine Dusollier. [14jun10]

Within the activities of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the Thematic Project on Intellectual Property and the Public Domain has just released a “Scoping Study on Copyright and Related Rights and the Public Domain” by COMMUNIA member Prof. Severine Dusollier (University of Namur, Belgium). The English version is now available as a PDF file.

The final recommendations, in particular, are focused on fostering a "positive protection of that could preserve Public Domain against privatisation", stressing the need to reinforce the existing protection of public domain works and to finalise key objectives for a robust public domain across the world.

Click here for more information.

A study on a 2005 UNESCO Convention for the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. [09jun10]

The conclusions of a study completed by a Geneva-based lawfirm, which summarises the state of implementation of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (ratified by the EC in 2007), was presented to the Culture and Education Committee (CULT). The study focused on fields where the EU would be expected to provide leadership. A good deal of attention is paid to the regulatory implications of digital media and the research team adopts an emphatically critical approach to the idea of enhancing copyright.

During the workshop, the head of the study, Christophe Germann, said that while some copyright is necessary, the research team had come to the conclusion that too much copyright “is detrimental to diversity of cultural expression” and that policy-makers in the EU are generally overly exposed to lobbyists that “repeat the prevailing dogma about the need for better copyright law”. According to the assessment, policy-makers who only listen to the loudest and strongest voice fail to implement the parts of the Convention they consider most valuable; diversity of cultural expression is particularly threatened by IPRs “in markets that are dominated by big corporations exercising collective power as oligopolies”.

The study considered selective state aid mechanisms in the audiovisual field risky insofar as they not only represent an incentive to clientelism but also serve as a bad model for authoritarian regimes with regard to the possibility of covert censorship and inhibiting cultural entrepreneurship.

The UNESCO Study on EU implementation of the 2005 UNESCO Convention is available here, while a summary of the same study is available here. Additional material and more information are also available on the diversitystudy.eu website, with a French and German translations of its short version and the high level discussants' contributions to be released at the end of June 2010.

Research project on public data openness in EU local administrations. [07jun10]

The project -- managed by Italian expert Marco Fioretti -- has three main phases. The first part will produce a report that discusses the role of fully accessible and reusable digital raw data in a truly open society, based on examples both from the European Union and the rest of the world. The second part of the project consists of an online survey to be launched this summer on the L.E.M website, to find out how many EU municipalities and regions are already making their raw data and procedures available in open formats and under open licenses. The final result will be another report, that analyzes the results of the survey and provides some guidelines and best practices for improving full access to public digital data.

Along with any comments or feedback, the author is primarily looking for real world stories of local businesses that:

- (worldwide) started and are sustainable just because the public data they need was made available by some public administration
- (preferably, but not only in the EU) cannot start at all, or have higher, unnecessary expenses, just because they need public data that are not publicly available at no cost.

Click here for more details.

EP adopts "Enforcement of intellectual property" report.[05jun10]

On Tuesday, June 1st, the JURI committee of the European Parliament, adopted the Gallo report on the "Enforcement of intellectual property". As explained on La Quadrature du Net, this "ultra-repressive, dogmatic approach of a continued war against the sharing of cultural works over the Internet has prevailed in the JURI committee of the European Parliament."

Though the Gallo report is a non-legislative text, it shows that the Parliament may be unable to appreciate the need to reform copyright and its enforcement in a direction that serves the development of a creative economy and society. Whether or not the final report is adopted in its present form, citizens will express their views on the upcoming legislative projects and value policy makers who demonstrate their independence and forward thinking.

"The Gallo report shows how powerful the lobbying of a few anachronic industries can be on the European Parliament. Their influence on policy-making runs counter to the general interest and prevents the EP from exploring paths to a new creative economy. It must be offset in the next fights: the upcoming discussion of the ACTA agreement, the discussions on new criminal sanctions with the future revival of the IPRED2 directive, etc. Measures designed to enforce obsolete business models at the expense of fundamental freedoms won't bring any good to authors or to their public and must be continuously opposed", concludes Jérémie Zimmermann, spokesperson for citizen initiative La Quadrature du Net.

Read more at La Quadrature du Net.

How to make every European "digital"? [02jun10]

Recently the the European Commission launched the Digital Agenda for Europe, an ambitious action plan for a digital economy. The Digital Agenda will contribute significantly to the EU's economic growth and spread the benefits of the digital era to all sections of society.

The Digital Agenda for Europe proposes a number of collective actions which must start now and continue over the next decade if we are to make "every European digital" – a digitally-empowered individual, with secure online rights and privacy protection, equipped to benefit from a vibrant and integrated digital EU market-place. Making this happen will require the active involvement of national, regional and local actors from all parts of society: government and business, citizen groups in all sectors from health and education to transport and energy, thinkers and - above all - doers.

The European Commission office in each country will be holding at least one session on the Digital Agenda for Europe.

More info: Digital Agenda for Europe.