[DIYbio] Fwd: [open-science] [SCHOLCOMM] Libre open access, copyright, patent law, and, other intellectual property matters

I'm happy to see robust discussion on this list - we should avoid flame wars.

It's somewhat unfortunate that there seems an operational division between science and humanities. It would be nice to have a one-size-fits all for "Open Access" but the reality may evolve to be different. The Harnad-Morrison-Thatcher approach could be summed up as:
* the primary goal is that humans can somehow find a Gratis copy of the work to read with their eyes. It is of secondary importance whether the community has any rights.

The science community on the other hand wishes to make complete use of the complete scholarly literature using modern technology to discover, index, extract, re-use, recompute, re-assemble in whatever way their imagination and technology runs to. (I wish to build an artificially intelligent chemical amanuensis by semantic analysis of the complete literature, for example).
* ANY licence other than BBB-compliant prevents this ABSOLUTELY. Any publisher's contract prevents this absolutely.

It is profoundly unhelpful to this cause to have people pontificating about absolute author's rights and quasi-religious approaches to solving the problem. Harnad and Morrison know nothing about high-throughput textmining, data extraction, eigenvector-based indexing, etc. If they wish to publish their own work under NC I shan't fight it.

UK/PubMedcentral is crippled by the lack of explicit full-libre permission to re-use it. 20 million scientific articles of which about 1% are legally minable and those are extremely difficult to discover. I spent my "research" effort trying to find these, rather than actually DOING the science from them. Last week my tools read 500,000 chemical reactions from the patent literature, better as well as infinitely faster than any human on the planet. Those reactions can help to find new drugs, new ways of making drugs, new insights into chemistry.

The reality is that science can operate extremely well with CC-BY. I am yet again preparing a clutch of articles for Biomed Central (a special issue with 17 APC-based articles). BMC have been running for 10 years. As far as I know there have been no serious misuse of the literature so there is no need to "protect" CC-BY.

On a related point, institutional repositories are almost completely useless for modern literature analysis. They do not carry explicit machine-readable libre licences so we cannot by right use any of their content. They are fragmented - instead of the UK having ONE repository (say in the BL) which would be the rational thing that any scientist would do they are fragmented over 200 universities at great additional cost.

Al that leads up to me thanking the RCUK for insisting on CC-BY and - with other scientific organizations such as Wellcome, and the Libre science publishers - making BBB-OpenAccess a reality. There is a great deal more to do, but at least we have a model that works and that politicians are listening to.