It’s Open Access Week and we’re joining SPARC and dozens of other organizations this week to discuss the importance of open access to scientific research publications. An academic publisher should widely disseminate the knowledge produced by scholars, not hold it… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘Open Access’
Patents Are About Sharing Information with the Public. Don’t Shroud Them in Secrecy.
Patents give their owners the power to stop people (and companies) from doing whatever the patent claims as an “invention” for twenty years. But that power doesn’t come for free: it’s a trade. In exchange for the right to sue… Read More ›
California Can Lead the Way in Open Access
There’s a bill in the California legislature that would be a huge win for open access to scientific research. The California Assembly recently passed A.B. 2192 unanimously. We hope to see it pass the Senate soon, and for other states… Read More ›
The Fate of Text and Data Mining in the European Copyright Overhaul
The current European Digital Single Market copyright negotiations involve more than just the terrible upload filter and link tax proposals that have caused so much concern—and not all of the other provisions under negotiation are harmful. We haven’t said much about the text… Read More ›
Congress Will Finally Make Its Research Reports Public
The recent omnibus bill passed by Congress contains a nugget of good news for those interested in access to publicly funded research. Open access activists have long been asking for reports by the Congressional Research Service, or CRS, to be… Read More ›
Community Broadband: Privacy, Access, and Local Control
Communities across the United States are considering strategies to protect residents’ access to information and their right to privacy. These experiments have a long history, but a new wave of activists have been inspired to seek a local response to… Read More ›
Open Access Weathers a Governmental Sea Change: 2017 in Review
In the first few weeks of 2017, just days after President Donald Trump took office, reports emerged that the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture were instructing scientists on staff not to talk to the public or the… Read More ›
Diego Gómez Is Safe, but Threats to Curiosity Still Abound
Threat of Imprisonment for Colombian Scientist Demonstrates the Far-Reaching Implications of Copyright Policy In 2011, Colombian graduate student Diego Gómez did something that hundreds of people do every day: he shared another student’s Master’s thesis with colleagues over the Internet…. Read More ›
Another Court Overreaches With Site-Blocking Order Targeting Sci-Hub
Nearly six years ago, Internet user communities rose up and said no to the disastrous SOPA copyright bill. This bill proposed creating a new, quick court order process to compel various Internet services—free speech’s weak links—to help make websites disappear…. Read More ›
It’s Time for Congress to Pass an Open Access Law
The public should be able to read and use the scientific research we paid for. That’s the simple premise of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act, or FASTR (S. 1701, H.R. 3427). Despite broad bipartisan support on… Read More ›