Request for Comments
December 7-8, 2007—This weekend, 30 open government advocates gathered to develop a set of principles of open government data. The meeting, held in Sebastopol, California, was designed to develop a more robust understanding of why open government data is essential to democracy.
The Internet is the public space of the modern world, and through it governments now have the opportunity to better understand the needs of their citizens and citizens may participate more fully in their government. Information becomes more valuable as it is shared, less valuable as it is hoarded. Open data promotes increased civil discourse, improved public welfare, and a more efficient use of public resources.
The group is offering a set of fundamental principles for open government data. By embracing the eight principles, governments of the world can become more effective, transparent, and relevant to our lives.
CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright-protected content to waive copyright interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright.
In contrast to CC’s licenses that allow copyright holders to choose from a range of permissions while retaining their copyright, CC0 empowers yet another choice altogether – the choice to opt out of copyright and the exclusive rights it automatically grants to creators – the “no rights reserved” alternative to our licenses.
Koha is the first open-source Integrated Library System (ILS). In use worldwide, its development is steered by a growing community of libraries collaborating to achieve their technology goals. Koha's impressive feature set continues to evolve and expand to meet the needs of its user base.
Why ‡biblios?
A rich internet application
Though browser-based, ‡biblios has a very rich user interface and takes advantage of JavaScript toolkits like YUI, ExtJS, Google Gears for local storage of bibliographic records.
Built-in metasearch
Much of cataloging consists of copy-cataloging and so ‡biblios ships with built-in metasearch capability using a web services layer built on the Pazpar2 federated search library. Users can set up and perform cross-database searches on any Z39.50 targets.
Built around library standards
The ‡biblios record editor currently supports MARC21/MARCXML records and utilizes a plugin architecture to easily allow expansion to other formats such as MODS, Dublin Core, etc.
Library Standards Compliant
Built in support for MARC21, MARCXML, Z39.50
Free and Open Source
‡biblios is available under the terms of the GPL software license, which ensures free and open access to use, modification and redistribution.
Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. Among other features, it provides robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution, and is queryable and indexable using a table-oriented view engine with JavaScript acting as the default view definition language.
CouchDB is written in Erlang, but can be easily accessed from any environment that provides means to make HTTP requests. There are a multitude of third-party client libraries that make this even easier for a variety of programming languages and environments.
PUBLIC ACCESS MANDATE MADE LAW
President Bush signs omnibus appropriations bill,
including National Institutes of Health research access provision
Washington, D.C. – December 26, 2007 – President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.
A diverse and growing alliance of organizations representing taxpayers, patients, physicians, researchers, and institutions that support open public access to taxpayer-funded research.
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP)
Executive Editors:
Ulrich
Pöschl
,
Ken Carslaw
,
Thomas Koop
,
Rolf Sander
&
William Thomas Sturges
Open Access – Public Peer-Review & Interactive Public Discussion – Personalized Copyright under a Creative Commons License
This project, funded for two years starting September 2008 by the NSF Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) Program will develop a suite of tools and services to encourage formation of virtual organizations in scientific communities of various sizes, such as conference groups and departmental research groups, and allow such organizations to filter out relevant documents from various input streams, select and enhance the quality of bibliographic data associated with the organization, and attract students, teachers and researchers to contribute to activity of the organization.
The New Opportunities Made Possible Through Ease of Access to Scholarly and Research Data and Information
Summary: The ever-greater online availability of data and information is tending to what we might characterize as syntactic completeness. That is to say, we have an ever-better knowledge of all possible data and ensuing information in the particular domain of scholarly research. In this position statement, we note how the mathematical and computational modelling of data and information are crucial for semantic completeness. Use of data and information implies a well-elaborated understanding of both their syntax and their semantics. More transparent and hence better quality evaluation of both product and process is made possible.
"Under the terms of the agreement, articles
by UC-affiliated authors accepted for
publication in a Springer journal beginning in 2009 will be published
using Springer Open Choice with full and immediate open access. There
will be no separate per-article charges, since costs have been factored
into the overall license
BRII – Berkeley Research Impact Initiative
co-sponsored by UC Berkeley's Vice Chancellor for Research and the University Librarian
BRII home
New Program Announcement (PDF)
Program Description
Frequently Asked Questions
Instructions for Application and Reimbursement
UCB Scholarly Communication website
Contact Us
Frequently Asked Questions
What is BRII?
The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) supports faculty members who want to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication. An 18-month pilot program, BRII will subsidize, in various degrees, fees charged to authors who select open access or paid access publication. The pilot will also yield data that can be used to gauge faculty interest in — as well as the budgetary impacts of — these new modes of scholarly communication on the Berkeley campus.
The Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) sets out principles to define the 'open' in open knowledge. The term knowledge is used broadly and it includes all forms of data, content such as music, films or books as well any other type of information.
In the simplest form the definition can be summed up in the statement that "A piece of knowledge is open if you are free to use, reuse, and redistribute it".
Generic Model Organism Database project, a collection of open source software tools for creating and managing genome-scale biological databases. You can use it to create a small laboratory database of genome annotations, or a large web-accessible community database. GMOD tools are in use at many large and small community databases.