Biweekly links for 06/12/2009

  • Doctors Without Borders: blogging from the frontlines
    • The remarkable blogs reporting from Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). There are ten in total – check them out, you’ll be glad you did. The photo blog is a good place to start.
  • MSF blogs « The naked nonprofit
    • Brief overview of ten amazing blogs from Medicines Sans Frontiers, or Doctors without Borders.
  • Martin Blume on licenses versus copyright transer
    • Blume is [ed: was!] Editor-in-Chief at the American Physical Society. He makes an interesting point: “The reverse situation, where the author retains copyright but gives a license to the publisher, would be acceptable to us if the license were sufficiently broad to allow us to do, in future, whatever we want to do with the article. We have just put on line all of Physical Review back to 1985 (100,000 articles!), and expect eventually to go back to 1893. We would not have been able to do this if we had a license to publish these earlier works but no mention had been made in that license of electronic distribution. We need to be able to do the unforeseen as well as the foreseen in order to assure the widest possible distribution of the information, which is ultimately the goal of any scholarly publisher. This must be done while we, at the same time, recover our costs for added value. We have to date managed to do this, but must be imaginative in the future as the world changes. “

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2 comments

  1. Note that Marty Blume (no longer E in C) made those comments on copyright more than 10 years ago. The thinking on copyright at APS has definitely evolved, and Creative Commons licensing would likely satisfy at least the concern about future reuse.

  2. Arthur – Edited the post (no idea what I was thinking, I knew Blume was no longer E in C). I think the broad thrust of Blume’s remarks is very interesting, and contains an important truth. For example, regarding CC licensing, a choice of CC-NC would have quite a restrictive effect down the road, a point John Wilbanks of Science Commons has made often. Personally, my preference would be CC-0, with the expectation that concerns about attribution be enforced normatively (as has always been the case), not legally.

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