Page:The digital public domain.pdf/162

Rh what we already know into a way that works better. Three steps need to be taken to achieve this: first, one has to address the legal issues around accessing the content (be it raw data or scholarly literature); secondly, one has to address the legal, social, and technical issues that surround the physical tools; and thirdly, one has to begin some sort of Open Access knowledge management process. The goal: to go from the old way of collaborating—which was based on the idea of transmitting knowledge through paper, of reading the canon on paper and querying single-access databases—to a new way of collaborating using machines and standardised distribution. Those three areas are critical to building a research Web.


 * 2. Open Access content

Our Scholar’s Copyright project began with the promotion of CC licenses to peer-reviewed journals. The most notable adopters are the Public Library of Science, BioMed Central and Hindawi. To date, there are more than 350 peer-reviewed journals using the CC Attribution license for their content. Other adopters include Nature Precedings, the preprint server run by the Nature Publishing Group, in conjunction with the Wellcome Trust, the British Library and Science Commons.

The second part to this project supports the self-archiving route to making scholarly literature freely available. In early 2007, Science Commons released a set of “author addenda” that could be printed, filled in and submitted along with the author’s manuscript. This allowed authors to retain certain rights dictated in the text of the addenda and to mark their research for reuse. We took this one step further and created a Web tool that allows authors to fill in the form online, choose an addendum that best suits their needs, and auto-generate the form. The tool can easily be dropped into a university’s website and is currently running on the sites of Carnegie-Mellon University, MIT and the Association of Research Libraries. This tool is called the Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine (SCAE). Since its launch in mid-May 2007, over 900 addenda have been generated.

The SCAE allows a user to plug in very basic publication information and generate a document that can be attached to a copyright transfer agreement in order to reserve a number of rights over their work. All versions reserve the basic right for an author to reuse their work in their own teaching and professional activities as well as in future works. Beyond that basic requirement, each addendum grants the author a variety of rights,