derivative work

“I do think it’s true that the large contours of national and international policy are much harder to keep secret today,” said Steven Aftergood, who runs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “It would not be possible to conduct a secret war in Cambodia, as took place in the Nixon [...]

This is great news. The Open Humanities Press (OHP) aims to be for the humanities what many similar archives and endeavors have been for the sciences. It will begin including the following journals: Cosmos and History, Culture Machine, Fibreculture, Film-Philosophy, International Journal of Zizek Studies, Parrhesia and Vectors. link from peter suber @ open access [...]

Starting yesterday, NIH’s new open access policy is in effect, mandating deposit of NIH-funded research (no, really, this time they mean it). See A Blog around the Clock for more info, including relevant links to info about the comments — open till May 1.

I was checking out Tor’s new wallpapers and thinking about the uses of provenance in the art world. Tor is a science fiction publisher, and they’ve been doing one of those Publisher Experiments with the new digital world. (In fact, Tor released this week Farthing by Jo Walton for free — this was an amazing [...]

The awesomeness of Miro Miro is the awesome successor to the Democracy TV player. It’s open source and supports open content. It’s being developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, whose president, NAME, was recently interviewed at Groklaw. Reville had this to say about DRM: [Miro is] not [compatible with DRM], and we don’t support DRM. [...]

* Judge White withdrew his order requiring the shutdown of wikileaks.org. See also 3/1 bits blog. (NYT 3/1) * The music industry has yet to pay artists any of the money it has received in settlements and lawsuits; the artists are pissed. NY Post 2/27) * The owners of the game scrabble are pissed off [...]

open source install fest at Bay Area schools, Sat March 1 (linked at badgerbag) Liz Henry, Annoyingly sexist framing of Google VP Marissa Mayer Heather Morrison, No to author’s rights? Let your librarian know!, Poetic Economics (link from open access news) Jonathan Eisen, Editorial: PLoS Biology 2.0, 6(2): e48 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060048 (2008) – a moving essay [...]

good lord, what is wrong with arlen specter?

I’ll be watching Harvard’s A&S faculty vote today to see if they approve setting up a library-run faculty publications open access repository. (A proposal, I noted to my partner, that I first saw some 15 years ago in the library community.) The NYT covered the proposal. For-profit scholarly publishers have of course been complaining vociferously [...]

A NYT blog is reporting that Radiohead is making digital copies of its next album available for pick-your-own-price amount — and the best part is they’re DRM-free. Commenters on the post were almost all positive. A few salient points pulled out of comments: * This will generate fans for and interest in its nice physical [...]

It’s great to see more info about the rumored the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library — which will publish India’s traditional knowledge: Indian scientists say the country has been a victim of what they describe as “bio-piracy” for a long time. “When we put out this encyclopaedia in the public domain, no one will be able [...]

BoingBoing recently posted about the songs sung by male mice during courtship, linking to the PLOS Biology article, and the audio files of the actual songs. We independently verified the actual mouse-nature of the songs by performing a Spontaneous Audio Performance Test (SAPT) with a feline experimental audience.* Sure enough, four sleeping cats roused, lifted [...]