In late 2006 or early 2007, I was looking for ways to get students interested in open access. I had started to become versed in the topic myself a few months earlier, after my library announced it planned to cut subscriptions around the same time the Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced for the [...]
Posts under ‘Politics’
AcaWiki launches: free summaries of academic papers
As I reported at Open Access News, AcaWiki launched yesterday. The idea is free (gratis, libre), editable (wiki) summaries of academic papers. These summaries might be useful to scan during a literature review or when studying for a class, or they might help make an article comprehensible to a non-specialist (a researcher in another discipline, [...]
Advice on email for political campaigns
Email addresses are the coin of the realm nowadays in political campaigning. More political efforts — whether candidates, partisan groups, or advocacy organizations — ask for your email address than probably any other piece of contact information. And email addresses matter — at least, people are starting to suspect they do. Recently, I heard a [...]
Age and eligibility for office: a curious intersection of civil rights and democracy
No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years …
No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years …
No person [...] shall be eligible to the Office of President [...] who shall not have attained to the Age [...]
Australia gets it right: going beyond just lawyers
From Australia’s Review of the National Innovation System, released last fall:
[I]ntellectual property policy is being managed as a legal issue, whereas although this area like any other must operate through the legal system, intellectual property policy is most fundamentally an aspect of economic policy. … [T]he consideration of policy with regard to both [copyrights and [...]
Guest post on 1 year of NIH open access
The NIH Public Access Policy took effect on April 7, 2008. I have a guest post at Science Progress looking at the policy after a year in implementation.
On making sausage: the NIH policy becomes permanent
Update. I want to reiterate a few points for clarity.
This post, and everything on this blog, represents my opinion alone, not that of my clients. I did not write this post at their behest nor am I adding this update for that reason.
The NIH policy is wonderful (the only way it could be better is [...]
On jurisdiction; or, letting copyright trump science
Rep. John Conyers has released his response to the widely-circulated open letter by Lawrence Lessig and Michael Eisen criticizing Conyers’ anti-open access bill, H.R. 801. Eisen, Steven Harnad, and Peter Suber have already responded ably to Conyers’ response. There’s one thing I would add:
[Conyers:] My bill would restore longstanding federal copyright policy in this area. [...]
