Open license + an iPad mini

At the end of Open Access Week, I'd like to salute the library of Leiden University for living up to the goal of making open access the norm in scholarship.  If you work in its very pleasant setting, there are no restrictions on how you make use of out-of-copyright material.

When I visited Leiden earlier this year, I had an iPad mini with me, so I took a few quick snaps of Codex Vossianus  Graecus 1, a set of maps (perhaps sixteenth century) to accompany Ptolemy's Geography.  Thanks to the library's policies, I can make images like available as citable scholarly resources.

Leiden University, Codex Voss.Gr. 1: world map in Ptolemy's first projection

When the phone or tablet you happen to be carrying gives you photos rivaling or surpassing anything published in print, the technology is not much of a barrier.  When the default policy is that you can use your photographs as you see fit, neither is legal licensing.
 

(To see what's legible in a quick and poorly lit snap from an iPad mini,  see this zoomable image of folios 2-3.)

Access to scholarly work

Members of Princeton University's faculty have unanimously voted for a policy guaranteeing open access to their scholarship (blogged with quotation of the key passage here).

Contrast with that the capital campaign of the American Philological Association (a professional organization purporting to represent the discipline of Classics). The APA's "Campaign for Classics" plans to offer access to digital resources, but in many cases that access will be restricted to APA members.

If the contrast is not pointed enough, think of it this way: as of September, 2011, Princeton faculty members risk violating their university's policy if they contribute scholarly work to the APA project.

If you believe that consistent principles should guide our behavior, then Princeton faculty members who are dues-paying members of the APA face a real ethical dilemma: how can they support the work of an organization that directly conflicts with the policies unanimously adopted by their university?

MIT faculty mandate open access to publication

Blogged here by Hal Abelson, chair of the committee that composed the resolution: the MIT faculty have voted unanimously to adopt a resolution that includes these phrases:

[E]ach Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium

and

The policy is to take effect immediately

Think that's clear enough for any of the hair-splitting legalists out there?

I believed there was time when humanists set the moral direction for the academy. We're lucky that our scientists' pursuit of truth seems to be generating enough of a draft to pull us along.

Open access to federally funded research

Linked from Slashdot today: tucked into the appropriations act just signed by President Bush, a requirement that the NIH must provide online access to research it has funded. This is a tremendous precedent, the first time that the US federal government has made open online access a condition of receiving federal funding for research.

The NIH is the focus, not the NEH, in part because people understand that medical research matters (as the respective budgets of the NIH and NEH also show). But the NIH was also in the Congressional spotlight because of the sustained advocacy of leading scientists, such as the open letter to Congress signed by 25 Nobel laureates in 2004 and by 26 Nobel winners in 2007.

Meanwhile, the American Philological Association, the professional organization that purports to represent classical studies, has inaugurated a multimillion dollar fundraising campaign to establish a "Digital Portal" centered on subscription-based access to a bibliography of print publications.

fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium