- LIS-Forum - ncsi.iisc.ernet.in

Documentation Research Center/Information Centers or Special libraries
by Mailing List Manager 14 Mar '05

14 Mar '05

Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 12:44:06 +0530 From: Seshu Sripada <seshu.sripada(a)softprosys.com> Dear colleagues Please provide Url link of Documentation Research Center/Information Centers or Special libraries list in the world. Seshu

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Newsletter for Publishers and Booksellers from the Max Mueller Bhavan, Regional Information Centre
by Seth, Renu 14 Mar '05

14 Mar '05

Dear Colleagues and Friends, The Max Mueller Bhavan Regional Information Centre (MMB RIC), New Delhi welcomes you to the first issue of its newsletter aimed at Publishers and Booksellers. This will apprise you of the latest happenings in the field of books and publishing in Germany as well as in the other parts of Europe. To access the newsletter please click on the following link: http://www.goethe.de/su/ned/bib/newsletters/publ/march_05/news.htm If you would like to continue receiving the next issues of this newsletter please subscribe by clicking on the following link: mailto:info.manager.mmb@delhi.goethe.org?subject=subscribe-Publnews Yours sincerely, Renu Seth Librarian In-Charge Max Mueller Bhavan Regional Information Centre & Library 3, Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 110001 Telephone +91-11-23329506 librarian.mmb(a)delhi.goethe.org www.goethe.de/newdelhi

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Re : Russian Patent
by Lakshmi Ravishankar 14 Mar '05

14 Mar '05

Dear Ms. Jayalaxmi, Following are the websites for purchasing Russian Patents. http://PatentsFromRU.com - Russian patent and trademark search services http://www.iliac.org/production/patent.html http://www.delphion.com (subscription required) http://www.mospatent.ru/ (Moscow Patent Bureau) This site is in Russian Language. You can contact at info(a)mospatent.ru Hope this info is helpful to you. Regards Lakshmi Ravishankar Manager - Information & Knowledge Services Jubilant Biosys Limited 450, 12th Cross, 4-D Cross Mahalakshmipuram, Bangalore - 560 086 Ph : +91 80 2349 5461 - 65 (O) 98458-31382 (M) Fax : +91 80 23449 4118 E-mail : Lakshmi_Ravishankar(a)jubilantbiosys.com www.jubilantbiosys.com ================================================== Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 04:40:03 +0000 (GMT) From: jayalaxmi m <jayalaxmim(a)yahoo.co.in> Subject: [LIS-Forum] Procurement of Russian Patent To: lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Message-ID: <20050311044003.77577.qmail(a)web8510.mail.in.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Sir, We are looking for one Russian Patent, it will highly appreciated if you can suggest us the source from where it can procured. Please guide at your earliest. Details of the Patent: V.A. Smirnov, I.E. Crasnitscaya, Patent of Russia, 2066892.6.09 1993 Regards, Jayalaxmi. M MTRDC,DRDO Bangalore Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

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Re: [LIS-Forum] Query
by Mailing List Manager 14 Mar '05

14 Mar '05

Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2005 22:02:34 -0800 (PST) From: vani rao <vanimysore(a)yahoo.com> Dear Mrs. Vishnav, The Psychometric testing evolved trough time and experience used by Ma-Foi HR Consultancy company (http://www.mafoi.com/)is by far the industry accepted norm and method. Vani P Rao Librarian St.Joseph's college of Education Mysore --- Mailing List Manager <mailman(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in> wrote: > Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 14:03:51 +0530 > From: Mrs. Vaishnav <ytv(a)godrej.com> > > Dear All, > > A guidance needed -Has there been standardized norms > for psychological > Testing in Indian industries? Please guide at your > earliest, With > regards & thanks, > > Mrs. Y.T.Vaishnav=0D > (Consulting Librarian-Godrej-Mumbai)

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Bibliometric theory/Biblio metric laws and Cybermetrics.
by Mailing List Manager 14 Mar '05

14 Mar '05

Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 17:45:08 +0530 From: Seshu Sripada <seshu.sripada(a)softprosys.com> I would like to know complete tutorial of "Bibliometric Introduction to Bibliometric laws and also Cybermetrics', could you please provide information or url link for getting that information. Thanks Seshu

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NCSI: Talk on DSpace@Cambridge by Jim Downing (16th March 2005 11.30 AM)
by Dr. T.B. Rajashekar 14 Mar '05

14 Mar '05

National Centre for Science Information (NCSI) Indian Institute of Science Bangalore Cordially invites you to a talk on "DSpace@Cambridge: Digital Repository Project at University of Cambridge, U.K." By Mr. Jim Downing DSpace@Cambridge Project Group Cambridge University Library University of Cambridge Cambridge, U.K. On 16th March 2005 (Wednesday) Time: 11.30 A.M. Venue: NCSI Lecture Hall, NCSI, IISc Coffee: 11.00 11.30 A.M. Note: DSpace@Cambridge Project - http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dspace/ DSpace@Cambridge Repository - http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/ ------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. T.B. Rajashekar Associate Chairman Tel: +91-80-23600271, 23601427 National Centre for Science Fax: +91-80-23601426, 23600683 Information (NCSI) E-Mail: raja(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Indian Institute of Science URL: http://144.16.72.189/raja/ BANGALORE-560012 (India) ------------------------------------------------------------- SciGate: http://www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/ The IISc Science Information Portal

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NET clearence compulsory for Librarian posts in Academic Libraries
by Dr.P.V.Konnur 13 Mar '05

13 Mar '05

Dear Friends, It is because the Academic Librarians always claim themselves equivalent to the Teaches and demand the academic status. If you claime the equivalent status and salary you should also possess the similar qualification. I think it is a right expectation. thanks, Konnur. --- Aman Jha <aman.jha(a)ciionline.org> wrote: > Friends, > > I want to know: > > 1. The logic of having NET qualification for the > recruitment of Librarian/Deputy Librarian/Assistant > Librarian. > 2. Whether NET qualification for Librarian (not for > library teachers) really add any value to their > profession? > > Thanks and regards, > > Aman Jha > Librarian > Confederation of Indian Industry > Plot No 249-F, Udyog Vihar, Phase IV > Sector 18, Gurgaon 122015 (Haryana) > Tel: 0124-5014060-67 * Fax: 0124-5014080 > > > _______________________________________________ > LIS-Forum mailing list > LIS-Forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum > Dr.P.V.Konnur, University Librarian, Goa University Library, Taleigao Plateau, Goa - 403 206. Phone: 0832-2456031 (O) 0832-2451008 (R) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/

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Fw: Re: Science Commons, a new project of Creative Commons (fwd)
by Subbiah Arunachalam 13 Mar '05

13 Mar '05

Friends: Here is a message I received from Stevan Harnad in response to my three-line note alerting him about the Science Commons. Arun ------------------------------- > Dear Arun (and colleagues): > > Science Commons is a wonderful, important project, but *please* don't > mix it up (or in) with Open Access! Here is the understanding that we > have (I think) reached with Larry Lessig on this topic: > > (1) OA is first and foremost about published journal articles. > > (2) A CC License is *always* desirable and beneficial if it can be > successfully negotiated with the journal publishers. > > (3) A CC License, however, is not *necessary* for OA via > self-archiving. (92% of journals already endorse self-archiving, > and there are ways to self-archive the remaining 8% without either > first having to seek permission or to successfully renegotiate a > copyright agreement with the publisher). > > (4) On the contrary, as authors are still not providing OA via > self-archiving in anywhere near sufficient numbers (only 10-20%) > it would be a great mistake to ask or imply that they first try > to negotiate a CC license with their publishers: They should just > self-archive. No need for CC. > > So the CC license is a blessing -- and should be strongly supported -- > wherever it is readily feasible; but seeking it is an unwelcome extra > handicap where it is unnecessary and where even without being burdened > with having to try to renegotiate copyright, authors are already far too > sluggish about self-archiving (partly because they are afraid it is too > burdensome and time-consuming, which it is not, partly because they think > it might somehow jeoparize their chances of being published in their > journal of choice, which it does not -- *except* if they negotiating a > CC license is erroneously recommended as a prerequisite for it!). > > What is needed to facilitate Green OA is further information > and incentives (about impact advantages), sytematic institutional > self-archiving policy (based on record keeping for institutional research > output and reseearcher performance evaluation) and clear reassurances > (about the absence of any problem with peer review or copyright or > preservation) -- *not* unnecessary further burdens such as CC. > > The CC License (or something equivalent to it) is intrinsic to the Golden > road to OA but *not* to the Green road. We have already had 3 years of > needless delay in OA because of one-sided preoccupation with the far > narrower, slower and more uncertain Golden road. Please let us not now > let the CC license provide a similar distraction and deterrent! > > See: > > Re: Free Access vs. Open Access > "On the Deep Disanalogy Between Text and Software and Between Text > and Data Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned" > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2967.html > > "Apercus of WOS Meeting: Making Ends Meet in the Creative Commons" > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3797.html > > Re: Open Access vs Copyleft? > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4377.html > > "Cloture on public-domain solution" (2001) > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1713.html > > "Copyleft" article in New Scientist (2002) > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1818.html > > Open Access vs Open Source/Software (2003) > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2967.html > > "Public Access to Science Act (Sabo Bill, H.R. 2613)" (2003) > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2977.html > > "Open Access Does Not require Republishing and Reprinting Rights" > (2004) > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3444.html > > Best wishes, > > Stevan Harnad

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free softwarefrom Egypt for building repositories
by Subbiah Arunachalam 12 Mar '05

12 Mar '05

Library of Alexandria releases FreeScience software The Biblioteca d'Alessandria (BdA) has released FreeScience v. 1.1.0, free software for building OAI-compliant repositories and accessing OAI-compliant content elsewhere online. FreeScience also creates a P2P network of participating scientists and supports direct communication among them through instant messaging and text conferencing. Although FreeScience is free software, it is not apparently open source. Library of Alexandria releases FreeScience software [A] The http://www.bdaweb.net/ Biblioteca d'Alessandria (BdA) has released http://www.bdaweb.net/freescience_learnmore_it.php FreeScience v. 1.1.0, free software for building OAI-compliant repositories and accessing OAI-compliant content elsewhere online. FreeScience also creates a P2P network of participating scientists and supports direct communication among them through instant messaging and text conferencing. Although FreeScience is free software, it is not apparently open source.

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Science Commons, a new project of Creative Commons
by Subbiah Arunachalam 12 Mar '05

12 Mar '05

Friends: Are you all aware of the "Science Commons"? I got to know about it through a message I received from Dave Pentecost in today's mail and I thought I must alert you all immediately. Arun http://science.creativecommons.org/ Welcome to Science Commons Science Commons is a new project of Creative Commons and will launch early 2005. The mission of Science Commons is to encourage scientific innovation by making it easier for scientists, universities, and industries to use literature, data, and other scientific intellectual property and to share their knowledge with others. Science Commons works within current copyright and patent law to promote legal and technical mechanisms that remove barriers to sharing. Background The sciences depend on access to and use of factual data. Powered by developments in electronic storage and computational capability, scientific inquiry is becoming more data-intensive in almost every discipline. Whether the field is meteorology, genomics, medicine, or high-energy physics, research depends on the availability of multiple databases, from multiple public and private sources, and their openness to easy recombination, search and processing. The American Traditions In the United States, this process has traditionally been supported by a series of policies, laws, and practices that were largely invisible even to those who worked in the sciences themselves. First, American intellectual property law (and, until recently, the law of most developed countries) did not allow for intellectual property protection of "raw facts." One could patent the mousetrap, not the data on the behavior of mice, or the tensile strength of steel. A scientific article could be copyrighted. The data on which it rested could not be. Commercial proprietary ownership was to be limited to a stage close to the point where a finished product entered the marketplace. The data upstream remained for all the world to use. Second, US law mandated that even those federal government works that could be copyrighted, fell immediately into the public domain - a provision of great importance given massive governmental involvement in scientific research. More broadly, the practice in federally funded scientific research was to encourage the widespread dissemination of data at or below cost in the belief that, like the interstate system, this provision of a public good would yield incalculable economic benefits. Third, in the sciences themselves, and particularly in the universities, a strong sociological tradition - sometimes called the Mertonian tradition of open science - discouraged the proprietary exploitation of data (as opposed to inventions derived from data) and required as a condition of publication the availability of the datasets on which the work was based. Innovation in Technology and Legal Friction Each of these three central tenets evolved from concepts that existed even before the Industrial Revolution--at the innately slow rate of change of the legal system. Similarly, scientific publication has a long-standing tradition. Modern technologies, especially the evolving use of the World Wide Web as a library, have forever changed the mechanisms for delivery and replication of documents. In many fields, results are published nearly as quickly as they are found. But copyright law has evolved at a different rate. Progress in modern technology combined with a legal system designed for a different technology-based environment is now leading to some unintended consequences. One of these is a kind of legal "friction" that hinders reuse of scientific discoveries and could lead to discouraging innovation. To counterbalance, a large and vibrant community has joined together in support of the concept of Open Access for scientific literature - "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions". The U.S. National Institutes of Health have proposed mandated Open Access to all NIH-funded research starting six months after the print date, and there is support for the initiative in the U.S. Congress. Most major journals have granted authors the right to self-publish versions of their peer-reviewed papers. But the legal questions - how can an author make her work available to the public, while taking comfort that she retains some rights to it - have yet to be answered. The different rates of change between modern technology and the law create friction in other places as well. For example, in the genetic realm, patent law has moved perilously close to being an intellectual property right over raw facts - the C's, G's A's and T's of a particular gene sequence. In other areas, complex contracts of adhesion create de facto intellectual property rights over databases, complete with "reach through agreements" and multiple limitations on use. Legislatively, the US is considering and the EU has adopted a "database right" which actually does accord intellectual property protection to facts - changing one of the most fundamental premises of intellectual property: that one could never own facts, or ideas, only the inventions or expressions yielded by their intersection. The Federal government's role is also changing. Under the important and admirable Bayh-Dole statute, federally funded researchers are encouraged to look for potential commercial use of their research. Universities have become partners in developing and reaping the fruits of research. This process has yielded amazing results in many cases by converting raw, basic science into useful products in many industries. But as a consequence, the quest to commercialize has moved upstream in some cases, to the fundamental levels of research and data, and that has created complex legal requirements. While the details can get complex when the intellectual property at hand is a novel "method" for assaying biological activity, there are even more questions about patents covering the genes, proteins and their inferred functions. The sheer cost in terms of time and money of such complex, multi-party legal work can take intellectual property "out of play" - it is simply more expensive to do the lawyer work than the product might reap on the open markets after the legal work is done. This hinders scientific innovation, as the value of scientific information increases exponentially in connection with other scientific information, and is of the least possible value when segregated by law. The Search for a Solution These facts have not gone unnoticed. Numerous scientists have pointed out the irony that, at the historical moment when we have the technologies to permit worldwide availability and distributed processing of scientific data, legal restrictions on transfer make it harder to connect the dots. Learned societies including the National Academies of Sciences, federal granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation, and other groups have all expressed concern about the trends that are developing. Any solution will be need to be as complex as the problem it seeks to solve, which is to say it will be interdisciplinary, multinational, and involve both public and private initiatives. Enter Science Commons Science Commons is an exploratory project to apply the philosophies and activities of Creative Commons in the realm of science. 1) Science Publishing /Open Access Journals & Archives Here Science Commons continues the traditional Creative Commons role as public interest lawyer. Existing Creative Commons licenses have immediate relevance in the field of scientific publishing. We cite as an example the Public Library of Science (PLoS) which has agreed to adopt CC attribution license as its standard license - enabling anyone to make and distribute translations, as long as they give credit to the original authors. But there are many more issues; the legal side has been slow to evolve, creating unnecessary pain, expense and barriers to innovation. We believe that, in addition to the CC licenses already created, scientific publication creates other areas for licenses, such as: a.. Licenses in other journals b.. Licenses on pre/postprints c.. Licenses for author self-archiving d.. Mechanisms for author self-archiving e.. Legal implications of Open Access business models f.. Application of machine-readable licenses to documents 2) Licensing and Technology Transfer Some barriers to the flow of scientific data or scientific discoveries are necessary; used the right way, patents, for example, can give the incentives necessary to fund future research. The question is whether there are unnecessary barriers to the flow of scientific data and discovery that Science Commons can help solve. This effort is exploratory. It contemplates the traditional role of public interest legal group, but extends beyond copyright into the realms of patents, technology transfer and intellectual property licensing. We are interested in exploring questions such as: a.. How to use collective action to keep upsream data flowing? b.. Would standard, open licenses reduce transaction costs in intellectual property licensing? c.. What value would standard, open licensing bring for orphan diseases and diseases of the global poor? d.. What would a realistic "technology trust" require in terms of standard licenses? e.. How can funding organizations and universities utilize standard, open licenses? f.. How to preserve the traditional public domain nature of databases? 3) Inefficient Data Economy Another trend in the sciences is towards the parallelization of data generation - more simply, machines are taking over the role of creating the data points, while humans remain the primary interpreters of data. Under Bayh-Dole, it is precisely these interpretations that are typically of the highest value: the mechanisms of action by which cancer operates, or the inferred function of a gene. Only a small percentage of the raw data is actually used to support such interpretations. The innovators also utilize only a small portion of the raw data, with the first step in analysis being a statistical reduction of data. After all, what scientist can store and interrogate a mental model of over 25,000 genes? This represents a massively wasteful data economy, in which valuable information about the state changes and contextual behavior of biology, chemistry, physics and other sciences simply spills onto the floor. Signigicant efforts to archive such sets online exist, but there are many legal and technical issues to consider. Science Commons is exploring both the legal mechanisms that govern raw datasets online and technological approaches to publishing those datasets that make them more useful. The World Wide Web Consortium's Semantic Web for Life Sciences effort is a key part of this exploration, as is the MIT DSpace project in digital archiving. We intend to ask such questions as: a.. How many combinations have been tested just because they were implicit on the design of the experiment as a massively parallel array? b.. How many of those hypotheses were actually contemplated by the creators of the experiment? c.. How have these 50 genes been observed to behave in a given tissue, across all public experiments? d.. What are the contractual terms that could govern such datasets? Links Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture BIOS Alliance for Taxpayer Access Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain Public Library of Science BioMedCentral NIH Open Access Resource Peter Suber's NIH Open Access FAQ Open Archives Initiative Budapest Open Access Initiative SPARC Institute for One World Health Friends: Are you all aware of the "Science Commons"? I got to know about it through a message I received from Dave Pentecost in today's mail and I thought I must alert you all immediately. Arun http://science.creativecommons.org/ http://science.creativecommons.org/ Welcome to Science Commons Science Commons is a new project of http://www.creativecommons.org/ Creative Commons and will launch early 2005. The mission of Science Commons is to encourage scientific innovation by making it easier for scientists, universities, and industries to use literature, data, and other scientific intellectual property and to share their knowledge with others. Science Commons works within current copyright and patent law to promote legal and technical mechanisms that remove barriers to sharing. Background The sciences depend on access to and use of factual data. Powered by developments in electronic storage and computational capability, scientific inquiry is becoming more data-intensive in almost every discipline. Whether the field is meteorology, genomics, medicine, or high-energy physics, research depends on the availability of multiple databases, from multiple public and private sources, and their openness to easy recombination, search and processing. The American Traditions In the United States, this process has traditionally been supported by a series of policies, laws, and practices that were largely invisible even to those who worked in the sciences themselves. First, American intellectual property law (and, until recently, the law of most developed countries) did not allow for intellectual property protection of "raw facts." One could patent the mousetrap, not the data on the behavior of mice, or the tensile strength of steel. A scientific article could be copyrighted. The data on which it rested could not be. Commercial proprietary ownership was to be limited to a stage close to the point where a finished product entered the marketplace. The data upstream remained for all the world to use. Second, US law mandated that even those federal government works that could be copyrighted, fell immediately into the public domain - a provision of great importance given massive governmental involvement in scientific research. More broadly, the practice in federally funded scientific research was to encourage the widespread dissemination of data at or below cost in the belief that, like the interstate system, this provision of a public good would yield incalculable economic benefits. Third, in the sciences themselves, and particularly in the universities, a strong sociological tradition - sometimes called the Mertonian tradition of open science - discouraged the proprietary exploitation of data (as opposed to inventions derived from data) and required as a condition of publication the availability of the datasets on which the work was based. Innovation in Technology and Legal Friction Each of these three central tenets evolved from concepts that existed even before the Industrial Revolution--at the innately slow rate of change of the legal system. Similarly, scientific publication has a long-standing tradition. Modern technologies, especially the evolving use of the World Wide Web as a library, have forever changed the mechanisms for delivery and replication of documents. In many fields, results are published nearly as quickly as they are found. But copyright law has evolved at a different rate. Progress in modern technology combined with a legal system designed for a different technology-based environment is now leading to some unintended consequences. One of these is a kind of legal "friction" that hinders reuse of scientific discoveries and could lead to discouraging innovation. To counterbalance, a large and vibrant community has joined together in support of the concept of Open Access for scientific literature - " http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions ". The U.S. National Institutes of Health have http://grants1.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html proposed mandated Open Access to all NIH-funded research starting six months after the print date, and there is support for the initiative in the U.S. Congress. Most major journals have granted authors the right to self-publish versions of their peer-reviewed papers. But the legal questions - how can an author make her work available to the public, while taking comfort that she retains some rights to it - have yet to be answered. The different rates of change between modern technology and the law create friction in other places as well. For example, in the genetic realm, patent law has moved perilously close to being an intellectual property right over raw facts - the C's, G's A's and T's of a particular gene sequence. In other areas, complex contracts of adhesion create de facto intellectual property rights over databases, complete with "reach through agreements" and multiple limitations on use. Legislatively, the US is considering and the EU has adopted a "database right" which actually does accord intellectual property protection to facts - changing one of the most fundamental premises of intellectual property: that one could never own facts, or ideas, only the inventions or expressions yielded by their intersection. The Federal government's role is also changing. Under the important and admirable http://www.cogr.edu/docs/Bayh_Dole.pdf Bayh-Dole statute , federally funded researchers are encouraged to look for potential commercial use of their research. Universities have become partners in developing and reaping the fruits of research. This process has yielded amazing results in many cases by converting raw, basic science into useful products in many industries. But as a consequence, the quest to commercialize has moved upstream in some cases, to the fundamental levels of research and data, and that has created complex legal requirements. While the details can get complex when the intellectual property at hand is http://www.signalsmag.com/signalsmag.nsf/0/8F89A41E7971F90888256EA9006A99DE a novel "method" for assaying biological activity, there are even more questions about http://www.forbes.com/2004/02/17/cx_mh_0217pfe_print.html patents covering the genes, proteins and their inferred functions . The sheer cost in terms of time and money of such complex, multi-party legal work can take intellectual property "out of play" - it is simply more expensive to do the lawyer work than the product might reap on the open markets after the legal work is done. This hinders scientific innovation, as the value of scientific information increases exponentially in connection with other scientific information, and is of the least possible value when segregated by law. The Search for a Solution These facts have not gone unnoticed. Numerous scientists have pointed out the irony that, at the historical moment when we have the technologies to permit worldwide availability and distributed processing of scientific data, legal restrictions on transfer make it harder to connect the dots. Learned societies including the National Academies of Sciences, federal granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation, and other groups have all expressed concern about the trends that are developing. Any solution will be need to be as complex as the problem it seeks to solve, which is to say it will be interdisciplinary, multinational, and involve both public and private initiatives. Enter Science Commons Science Commons is an exploratory project to apply the philosophies and activities of http://www.creativecommons.org/ Creative Commons in the realm of science. 1) Science Publishing /Open Access Journals & Archives Here Science Commons continues the traditional Creative Commons role as public interest lawyer. Existing Creative Commons licenses have immediate relevance in the field of scientific publishing. We cite as an example the http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/ Public Library of Science (PLoS) which has agreed to adopt CC attribution license as its standard license - enabling anyone to make and distribute translations, as long as they give credit to the original authors. But there are many more issues; the legal side has been slow to evolve, creating unnecessary pain, expense and barriers to innovation. We believe that, in addition to the CC licenses already created, scientific publication creates other areas for licenses, such as: Licenses in other journals Licenses on pre/postprints Licenses for author self-archiving Mechanisms for author self-archiving Legal implications of Open Access business models Application of machine-readable licenses to documents 2) Licensing and Technology Transfer Some barriers to the flow of scientific data or scientific discoveries are necessary; used the right way, patents, for example, can give the incentives necessary to fund future research. The question is whether there are unnecessary barriers to the flow of scientific data and discovery that Science Commons can help solve. This effort is exploratory. It contemplates the traditional role of public interest legal group, but extends beyond copyright into the realms of patents, technology transfer and intellectual property licensing. We are interested in exploring questions such as: How to use collective action to keep upsream data flowing? Would standard, open licenses reduce transaction costs in intellectual property licensing? What value would standard, open licensing bring for orphan diseases and diseases of the global poor? What would a realistic "technology trust" require in terms of standard licenses? How can funding organizations and universities utilize standard, open licenses? How to preserve the traditional public domain nature of databases? 3) Inefficient Data Economy Another trend in the sciences is towards the parallelization of data generation - more simply, machines are taking over the role of creating the data points, while humans remain the primary interpreters of data. Under Bayh-Dole, it is precisely these interpretations that are typically of the highest value: the mechanisms of action by which cancer operates, or the inferred function of a gene. Only a small percentage of the raw data is actually used to support such interpretations. The innovators also utilize only a small portion of the raw data, with the first step in analysis being a statistical reduction of data. After all, what scientist can store and interrogate a mental model of over 25,000 genes? This represents a massively wasteful data economy, in which valuable information about the state changes and contextual behavior of biology, chemistry, physics and other sciences simply spills onto the floor. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/ Signigicant efforts to archive such sets online exist , but there are many legal and technical issues to consider. Science Commons is exploring both the legal mechanisms that govern raw datasets online and technological approaches to publishing those datasets that make them more useful. The http://www.w3.org/ World Wide Web Consortium's Semantic Web for Life Sciences effort is a key part of this exploration, as is the MIT http://www.dspace.org/ DSpace project in digital archiving. We intend to ask such questions as: How many combinations have been tested just because they were implicit on the design of the experiment as a massively parallel array? How many of those hypotheses were actually contemplated by the creators of the experiment? How have these 50 genes been observed to behave in a given tissue, across all public experiments? What are the contractual terms that could govern such datasets? Links http://www.pipra.org/ Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture http://www.bios.net/ BIOS http://www.arl.org/ata/ Alliance for Taxpayer Access http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/ Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/ http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/ Public Library of Science http://www.biomedcentral.com/ BioMedCentral http://www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess/index.htm NIH Open Access Resource http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm Peter Suber's NIH Open Access FAQ http://www.openarchives.org/ Open Archives Initiative http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ Budapest Open Access Initiative http://www.arl.org/sparc/ SPARC http://www.oneworldhealth.org/ Institute for One World Health

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