Open Access: Looking Back, Looking Forwards - Open Enterprise

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at a conference celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Berlin declaration on open access. More formally, the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" is one of three seminal formulations of the open access idea: the other two are the Bethesda Statement (2003) and the original Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002). I entitled my talk 'Half a Revolution'; the slides are embedded below, and can also be freely downloaded.  I began by sketching the pre-history of open access - that is, the key developments before the three definining declarations mentioned above. For example, I noted that the preprint repository arXiv.org was set up in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg, who through his brother knew of Richard Stallman's early work onGNU. Thus one of the ideas behind arXiv.org, with its free access to high energy physics preprints, was precisely Stallman's idea of sharing knowledge freely.  Interestingly, arXiv.org began on 19 August 1991; on 23 August 1991, the World Wide Web was released publicly; and then on 25 August 1991, Linus announced the start of Linux. What a week that was....I also pointed out that the late Michael Hart, the creator of Project Gutenberg, was ahead of them all: he first realised the power of sharing digital artefacts back in in 1972 - a decade earlier than GNU, and three decades before open access really started.  But the main part of my talk looked at a key section in the Berlin Declaration:  'The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship'  Of course, all those are familiar enough from open source, but as I pointed out, open access still has some way to go in meeting them. That's because the concept of 'open access' has been diluted to include things like CC-NC and CC-ND: the first forbids commercial use, while the second forbids changes. Those both fail to meet the open access definition I quote above, and I urged people to move on to licences that were compatible: CC-BY,CC-SA, CC-BY-SA, CC0. These are precisely the licenses that meet the Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Definition.  I also emphasised that the trigger for articles to be released as open access is public funding: it's generally accepted that if the public helps to pay for research with its taxes, then it has a right to access the fruits of that research - the papers - free of charge. But I noted that implies immediate access to open access papers - not with an embargo, as is frequently the case. I therefore suggested that people should adopt what I called the ZEN approach: Zero Embargo Now ... I also noted that open access is inherently digital, which means that it must also concern itself with the digital data associated with research - not least because it is becoming more and more important. Again, we need to be careful about licensing - particularly since in Europe we have to take account of the benighted 'sui generis database right.' The best way to do that, I suggested, was to turn to the Open Definition again, which requires one of the following licences for data: Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL); Attribution Licence (ODC-BY); Open Database Licence (ODC-ODBL) ... However, there's one glaring omission there: software. Academic work today is almost inconceivable without software. Of course, not all of it will be written specifically for the task in hand, but often that's the case in scientific work, for example. If that software is not available for others to use, its data cannot be reproduced independently - hardly the scientific method. Similarly, if the software is closed source, there is no way to check its logic and workings. The optimal solution is releasing all software produced as the result of public funding as open source: that allows others to check it, and build on it.  Finally, I pointed out that there was a big problem with patents, where they were applicable. Since the US Bayh-Dole Act was passed in 1980, the dogma has been that encouraging universities