Category Archives: conference

OAR conference notes – Andrew Treloar

Dr Andrew Treloar – ANDS Establishment Project

Blue print for ANDS = Towards the Australian Data Commons (TADC) – developed during 2007 by ANDS Technical Working Group

TADC: Why data? Why now? – increasing data-intensive research; almost all data is now born digital; “Consequently, increasingly effort and therefore funding will necessarily be diverted to data and data management over time”

TADC: Role of data federations – with more data online, more can be done; increasing focus on cross-disciplinary science

Changing Data, Changing Research – e.g. Hubble data has to be released 6 months after creation

ANDS Goal = to deliver greater access, easier and more effective data use and reuse

ANDS Implementation assumptions:

  • ANDS doesn’t have enough money to fund storage, and so is predicated on institutionally supported solutions
  • Not all data shared by ANDS will be open
  • ANDS aims to leverage existing activity, and coordinate/fund new activity
  • ANDS will only start to build the Australian Data Commons
  • ANDS governance and management arrangements are sized for the current funding

Realising the goal – need to:

  • Seed the commons by connecting existing stores
  • Increase (human) capability across the sector in data management and integration

ANDS structure = four programs:

  1. Developing Frameworks (Monash) – about policies, national understandings of data management, and research intensive organisations = assisting OA by encouraging moves in favour of discipline-acceptable default data sharing practices
  2. Providing Utilities (ANU) – Services Roadmap, national discovery service, collection registry, persistent identifier minting and management = assisting OA by improving discoverability particularly across disciplines (ISO2146)
  3. Seeding the Commons (Monash) – recruit data into the research data commons = assisting OA by increasing the amount of content available, much of it (hopefully) OA
  4. Building Capabilities (ANU) – improving human capability for research data management and research access to data – esp. early career researchers teaching them good data management practices from the beginning = assisting OA by advocating to researchers for changed practices

OAR conference notes – Maarten Wilbers

Session Six: A Legal Framework Supporting Open Access

Maarten Wilbers – Deputy Legal Counsel, CERN

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – switched on 10 September

SCOAP = Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in particle physics

Fundamental research mandate in particle physics – in a good place to move to full OA publishing of their scientific data and publications – this might be the “tipping point” for scientists in other disciplines

CERN founded in early 50s – OA in high energy physics was “in the cards” from the beginning…because OA is so logical

If you walk around CERN you can see the enormous tools constructed from public funds to help scientists gain greater understanding of small particles – the case for OA can almost be made without a word being spoken

OA in publishing is the future

CERN’s 1954 Convention has laid the foundation for a culture of openness in the dissemination of the organisations scientific work: CERN must perform fundamental research for non-military purpose and make the results of its work generally available

This requirement of openness has helped in the shaping of a string of sequential milestones:

  • Scientific collaboration across national (and political) boundaries;
  • Preprint culture and peer review;
  • World Wide Web;
  • Computing Grid and Open Source software;
  • And most recently: promotion of OA publishing.

The legal frameworks governing these activities are supportive rather than restrictive in nature and adapted to collaboration involving multiple participants. Legal issues mostly concern copyright and are generally uncontroversial.

OA is a logical application of the web.

SCOAP aims to convert high quality particle physics journals to OA

Scientific experiments at CERN reflect CERN’s requirement of openness

Collaboration usually laid down in MOU – IPR vested in creating party, wide licensing between all parties involved

Publication of CERN’s work: particle physics pioneered the pre-print culture in the 1950s, scientific manuscripts circulated between scientists for peer review before publication

Main milestone was the creation of the World Wide Web at CERN by Tim Berners Lee

1992 – CERN released the WWW software in the public domain – “CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it”

Why OA (from CERN’s perspective)?

  • High quality journals, offering peer-review, are the [High Energy Physics] HEP’s community’s “interface with officialdom”;
  • Depending on definition of HEP, between 5000 and 7000 HEP articles published each year, 80% in 6 leading journals by 4 publishers
  • Subscription prices make the current model unsustainable. Change is required
  • HEP is a global undertaking and OA solutions should reflect this.

CERN’s potential solutions for OA publishing:

  • Articles free to be read for all
  • Tender process will result in price of article; linked to quality
  • ….

Legal issues – keep things as simple as possible!

A strong example if OA publishing – the design of LHC published in OA journal (Journal of Instrumentation..?) just recently

OAR conference notes – Richard Jefferson

Richard Jefferson – Opening the innovation ecology

  • Public good is not an abstract

Yochai Benkler Stack: Physical-Code-Content-Knowledge

We should ask the question: if we are successful in that everything is made OA – what then? We must make sure that the knowledge we generate will enable people to act on this knowledge and use it for benefit

The post-Yochai Benkler Stack = Physical-Code-Content-Knowledge; Capability to Act

We now have a system that is so opaque and has embedded in it intrinsic “inpermissibility” that it is not useful and capability to act on it is restrained

CAMBIA – focused on innovation system reform

BiOS Initiative – launched early 2005 with an article in Nature, biology open source (biological innovation for open society);

Patent system – actually a system based on open disclosure
This is not about rhetoric – it is about the practical goal of efficiency

OS – open source; open science; open society (need inclusiveness)

Used example of “golden rice” – which was once “poster child” of biological engineering – development of rice for third world areas where there was vitamin A deficiency in food so children were going blind, but the result used so many different products and processes that were patented that eventually the golden rice was not able to go ahead

Patent Lens – develop harmonized structure and infrastructure for searching patents; embedded metadata about patents; web 2.0 quality decision support about patents;

Efficiency = minimise tainting of product from incorporating other people’s IP (usually unknowingly) and maximise capacity for adoption – can try to do this by improving people’s knowledge about what IP is incorporate and enhance decision-maker’s ability to make good decisions for public good

Persistent, pervasive, jurisdiction agnostic activity = platform for community collaboration and transparency

Proper parsing, visualization and decision-making

Initiative for Open Innovation – increasing the equity, efficiency and effectiveness of science-enabled innovation for public good

Defining open innovation:
Open = transparent
Open = inclusive

Web based tools for scientists funding agencies, public sector and innovation enterprises to mine the patent world

Build patent lens into Nature and PLoS biology – to show, where readers are reading an article about a particular invention, whether the author has filed a patent on this

OAR conference notes – John Wilbanks

John Wilbanks (of Science Commons) – The Future of Knowledge

Knowledge is a set of building blocks – value is not that much until you start to put it together with other ideas and knowledge

Ideas and knowledge want to be connected

2 futures – we get to choose which we build – (1) only the people who have money have access to the knowledge (2) one in which there is an open network

(1) Knowledge brings revolutions

The past of knowledge = “Human-scale knowledge” – the scholarly canon (journals) – knowledge was human-organised and human-structures
How did this knowledge bring a revolution?

Moving to a world where knowledge acquisition is faster, smaller, cheaper and more robotic. Moving from a world where humans generate the scale of knowledge to a world where machines generate the scale

We have an implicit network that is already there for knowledge, but because we are generating it so quickly and on such a large scales, we are coming up against barriers – legal (copyright, DRM), technical (still use paper based formats online that cannot be searched by machines – i.e. PDF), business (publishers make money from closed access and we don’t yet know how they can make money or build business models around open access), social (scientists still get rewarded for being closed) – that we never encountered before

Over-atomised knowledge – smaller and smaller questions – primary output is a paper – John argues that these are not the primary vehicles for knowledge in a digital world

Incremental advances via technology – no big risks to achieve great advances anymore because you don’t get rewarded for making these risks, in fact you come up against huge legal barriers that prevent you using other research to take these risks

(2) We need to make systemic changes that connect knowledge

e.g. “the commons” – a number of different meanings: (1) land we hold in common e.g. public footpath; right to do research – rights of way across private property; (2) no copyright – things we all own

we are coming from a world where it was hard to be a creator and disseminate your work. We are not in that world anymore. There is now a disconnect between the copyright laws that Disney wants and the copyright laws that we as individual creators want. This is where the commons can make a systemic change.

Systemic change about the way we think about how we share knowledge – not just paper-based formats in a digital form – forces us to use technologies that are immediately outdated – what kinds of technology can we used instead? – a network of devices (layers: physical; code; content – there has been many developments of openness in these layers, but we have also seen an imposition of control in these layers (copyright)) – do we need new layers? Knowledge layers; graph layers etc. Info atomization kind of forces our hand to do this. Knowledge accessed needs to support the questions being answered (eg – when you type a query into Google – it tells you to read thousands of papers – this is not the ideal answer)

Copyright is incompatible with ideas connecting to each other.

(3) The disruptive force of connected knowledge

“guild” culture (as in historical sense of guilds, where the crown put limits on people not in the guild from weaving etc)

the way we do science actively discriminates against crowds and the wisdom of crowds

knowledge can be democratized: programming; creativity; buying and selling
it is easy, cheap and free

there are no office superstores for science; there are no internet marketplaces for science…but they are coming

destroying a guild culture of knowledge…what will come after it?

Creating a network culture for knowledge

• are we going to “watch” the knowledge like tv, or do something with it? – in the future of knowledge, we should do stuff with our knowledge rather than just consume it

Commentators: Dr Terry Cutler and Prof Mary O’Kane

Dr Cutler –

proud of the focus in Innovation Review on open access; however, first an apology and explanation – there is a difference between web version and print version – both supposed to be released under CC but were not (copyright assertion for Dr Cutler instead) – now attempting to have this rectified for the web version.

Key assertions from the report = about investment in people; global integration; flows of information and the freedoms to innovate

2% challenge of Australia – at best, we have a 2% share of global knowledge generation, and we don’t pay enough attention to the other 98% and how we access this – as a country we will always have an interest in an open network because we derive the most benefit from it

flows of information = communications. Communications theory and legal principles around communications were always based on connectivity. Open access is really just an extension of these principles.

Challenge – who really “owns” this problem of driving solutions (particularly at a government level)? – we need the government to address accessibility issues and articulate a national innovation policy – someone needs to take responsibility for this at the centre of government

Too much emphasis on “protectable” knowledge and not enough on informal networks and social networks that underpins the generation of an innovative community – need to open up access to that tacit knowledge and put social networks back into science and technology

Professor Mary O’Kane –

(1) is the future that John is talking about possible? How do we get to participatory science?

Can Australia lead this move into a participatory culture? We need to change the incentives for scientists. We need to change the social culture and drivers generally. So what are the drivers? Usually the intrinsic values are strongest (i.e. solving problems) not money. So how can we celebrate these intrinsic values? Across the university sector we need to reward people for open publishing.

(2) Issues that arise if you start to get the participatory culture going?

Problems that arise when you use the networks that have been built automatically, is that it is very hard to “probe the node” and know what is in the network. But does the human need to know or can we leave this to the machine? Do we need to know the knowledge? And at what level?

Questions/comments

[John: we need to lower the cost of failure to increase the rate of innovation (i.e. in the context of start-ups)]

(1) Richard Jefferson: the power of the guild is building value, trust and quality control and we shouldn’t erode that

John (response): we don’t need to get rid of guild completely, but we need to build another layer where we can build on the knowledge of everyone – but we can still have trademarks etc to control quality

Mary (response): I’ve always wondered why we don’t use the internet more for structured, controlled discussion about things – there is no reason why we couldn’t and that would also help control quality – by generating discussion

(2) Roger Clarke – referring to the “tacit knowledge problem” seems to assume that the way the human mind works can be reduced to a computer-based system and the problem is that the mind does have a generic model that we can all grasp but we just haven’t transferred it over to the computer yet. But everyone thinks differently.

John (response): I don’t think we can actually encode how the mind works, but we need to make information available. That is the importance of openness – you need to be able to read, criticize and comment on what I put up, and that is how we see the reflection of the many different minds at work. Getting it into the computer means we can start accessing that information and competing on it using our brains rather than competing on our access to computers.

Update: conferences

This is just a reminder of the upcoming conferences at which I will be presenting:

Open Access and Research Conference

hosted by the OAK Law Project and QUT Faculty of Law, at the Stamford Plaza Hotel, Brisbane, Queensland, 24-26 September 2008

I am leading a workshop, with Scott Kiel-Chisholm and Anthony Austin, on Friday 26 September, 9:00am – 12:00pm, entitled, “Practical steps for handling copyright, IP and other legal issues.

Register here

eResearch Australasia 2008

Sebel and Citigate Hotels, Albert Park, Melbourne, Australia, 29 September – 3 October 2008

I am presenting in a workshop on Friday 3 October, entitled, e-Research in the Arts, Humanities and Cultural Heritage. My presentation will be on “Academic Authors, Publishing and Open Access in an e-Research Environment”.

Register here

APSR Workshop – The Data Management Plan: Putting Policy into Practice

On Friday 8 August 2008, I attended the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) Workshop, “The Data Management Plan: Putting Policy into Practice” at the University of Melbourne.

Professor Anne Fitzgerald, with whom I work at QUT, gave an excellent and very well received presentation on the legal issues surrounding data management. Her slides can be viewed here.

Here are my notes from the workshop (made roughly during the day):

Data management plans: from idea to reality (10:15am – 10:45am)

Dr Markus Buchhorn (ANU) for Karen Visser

  • We need enduring systems that outlive projects and programs
  • Individuals are human – seven deadly fears:
  1. fear of missed “nuggets” in their data – milk it for everything, for ever and veer
  2. fear of missed errors
  3. fear of unknown custodians/stewards
  4. fear inappropriate leaks (privacy/ethics) – can ruin trust relationships with others
  5. fear the cost of effort
  6. fear lack of recognition
  7. fear trusting someone else’s data

Plan ahead – help researchers to help themselves as far as possible
Build relationships of trust with researchers – engage with researchers as early as possible

Mark Euston (ANU – Information Literacy Program)

  • tasked with developing a training course, workshop and online, for early to mid career researchers, on Data Management Plans (DMP)
  • Objectives of the course –
  1. what is Data Management (DM)?
  2. benefits and requirements
  3. raising awareness of DM services
  4. DMP
  • Manual based on Guidance on Data Management (UK) and Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving
  • get researchers in by stressing how they can work with their data more effectively and efficiently

What’s happening at… (11:10am – 12:30pm)

Belinda Weaver (UQ)

Issues for the data survey:

  • no ‘joined up’ services
  • no help
  • inequity – not fair – nothing works etc.
  • costs
  • lack of training (people felt insecure about what they were doing)
  • uncertainty
  • no incentive, no rewards

Recommendations from focus group:

  • standardised DM template for funding applications
  • legal advice centralised and accessible
  • service focused support teams for research projects – specific to the discipline
  • survey of all existing data
  • central data storage system
  • develop a clear UQ data management policy
  • templates

Central management of research data – issues:

  • trust
  • data integrity
  • accidental disclosure
  • control
  • sharing
  • re-use (want to know what use has been made of their data – auditing – and if they give data to a person for a particular purpose, they want to know if the person doesn’t end up using the data or not using it for the particular purpose)
  • the long term

Wish-lists:

  • clear policy and guidelines
  • account manager
  • specialists on teams (want to know who to go to for advice)
  • career path?
  • rewards
  • templates for everything
  • funding to do it properly
  • advice and consultancy
  • institutional support
  • tools (but they want to be told only when they want to be told, and be told how they want to be told)

presentations from workshop available at: http://www.library.uq.edu.au/escholarship/orca.html
UQ developing a expert curation advice service

Lyle Winton (Uni of Melbourne)

  • Uni of Melbourne have a research DMP template
  • looking at training for undergrad students
  • looking at how to keep this up to date
  • possible data management registries
  • from 500 charges of research misconduct, 40% could have been avoided by good data management

http://www.esrc.unimelb.edu.ay/dmp/references.html

Suzanne Clarke (Monash)

  • Monash has a Data Management Committee
  • Research Data Management Toolkit for librarians so they know what to talk about to researchers
  • Identified needs: more education required for researchers on statutory requirements for data, IP and the ownership of research data

Gillian Elliot (University of Otago – NZ)

  • As far as she is aware, NZ has no policies surrounding data management
  • so NZ in quite a different position to Australia
  • Survey in 2007 – researchers in NZ had a lot of data and a lot of stuff loosely stuck together that were unpublished and hard to classify – need help with data management
  • data management and copyright concerned researchers – 48% of survey respondents
  • Atlas of Living Australia; Convention on Biological Diversity; Department of Conservation and Land Information New Zealand; Land Care NZ; National Vegetation Survey Databank

Dr Ashley Buckle (TARDIS – Monash University)

  • TARDIS is a multi-institutional collaborative venture that aims to facilitate the arching and sharing of raw X-ray diffraction images
  • Protein Data Bank – growing exponentially – too much data?
  • Benefits to making raw data available – experiment reproducability/validation

Discussion Groups: Group 2 – Processes for Data Management Planning (1:15pm-2:45pm)

How do we make DM part of the usual research practice?

How can we make raw data count as a citation? – for funding etc. – this is very important, if there is greater recognition of the value data in itself as a citable object then researchers will be more willing to manage their data properly.

Ashley Buckle – we need “data journals” – essentially the same as a database but greater recognition

DM needs to give you a reward at the end that is at the same level as rewards from publication

Better tools – build the researchers tools that are so good that they do not actually realise that they are managing their data.

Reporting back to main group and discussion (2:45pm-4:00pm)

  1. Roles, rights and responsibilities
  • Anne Fitzgerald’s domains of responsibility
  • Policy plus principles
  • disseminate research data as widely as possible
  • develop practical toolkits
  • risk management for universities
  • simple for universities to completing
  • ongoing legal and policy advice
  • insert data management requirements into research proposals and grants
  • get recognition via NHMRC, ARC and ERA to provide regulatory and reward structure
  • need for national centre for legal policy and advice in regard to the data lifecycle including reuse
  • universities to incorporate data management into risk management strategies
  • provide pragmatic family of licences/responsibility statements (like CC) to identify roles and policies
  • DMPs to be built into research project formulation and management

2. Processes for data management planningbetter tools and incentives: build better workflows

  • allowing data management in their modelling: harness tools onto repositories
  • citation: make sure that citation of datasets happens and is rewarded, as incentive for researchers to create good data
  • persuade ARC to make explicit expression of intent in ERA eventually to credit data citation (at least down the road). This as formal submission from this workshop
  • infrastructure: development of a COHERENT NATIONAL NETWORK of repositories, emphasis on discipline specific repositories (though institutionally supported) as a centre for research activity

3. Making it work

  • know what you don’t know
  • each institution needs to:
  1. identify the needs of its researchers (possible role for ANDS here)
  2. map the available services (needs to happen locally)
  3. strategically target the gaps
  4. identify candidate services to drop to fund this
  • Make it easy
  • provide a visible point of contact for the users
  • not necessarily through one channel only
  • not necessarily a one size fits all solution
  • embed regular formal training in how to use services
  • needs to be as easy to use as “MyFlickBook”
  • outreach, marketing, publicity
  • Start small and scale
  1. seed the service and gradual expand it as understanding grows
  2. start with young researchers and use peer group pressure over tie
  3. get good examples going first to generate some quick wins
  4. use growth in tandem with policy
  • Reward innovators in shared services
  1. provide annual performance incentives for going beyond meeting strategic goals
  2. encourage shared services staff to learn new skills
  3. create new job descriptions for new people in management

Notable presentations at the CCI Conference


Graham Vickery
from the OECD presented on the Participative Web.

He described the participative web in the following terms –

New web services, readily available software and high speed broadband enable:

  • development and customisation of content
  • commercial and non-commercial use of the “collective intelligence” of internet users
  • users contribute to developing, rating, collaborating and distributing Internet content and interacting with other

He spoke about the new business models that are emerging in response to the participative web. He identified five basic business models:

  1. voluntary contributions/giving away
  2. charging viewers for user created content (UCC) services – pay per item or subscriptions (including bundling)
  3. advertising-based
  4. licensing to third parties
  5. selling other goods and services online

The question for the future (and the present!) will be: how do we remunerate creators? By revenue sharing or content payment or…?

Jessica Coates from Creative Commons Australia (Ccau) spoke about issues surrounding how “commercial” and “non commercial” are defined in relation to Creative Commons licences.

Oli Wilson from the New Zealand band, Knives at Noon gave an enlightening presentation about how his band used Creative Commons licences to distribute their music and gain notoriety. You can read more about this or view a video of Knives at Noon speaking about their use of Creative Commons on NZ TV here.

Professor Brian Fitzgerald from QUT Law Faculty gave a comprehensive overview of the many legal issues still inherent in the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) and areas of copyright law that are sorely in need of consideration, including:

  • authorisation of copyright infringement by ISPs etc;
  • wider exceptions to copyright infringement, include for transformative use;
  • the application of fair dealing exceptions to the online environment;
  • orphan works;
  • the overlap of copyright law with other areas of the law, such as designs;
  • TPMs, circumvention devices and region-locking;
  • [And a bunch of others which I wrote down and then lost, and I can’t for the life of me remember now. ..If I do, I will amend this post].

[Any or all of these topics would be excellent for a Masters or PhD thesis].

Professor Fitzgerald suggested four fundamental reforms that would go a long way to making Australia a leader in copyright and innovation policy, being the introduction of clear rights to:

  • reuse copyright material for non-commercial purposes in circumstances where there is no financial detriment to the copyright owner;
  • engage in transformative and fair uses, including the right to communicate derivative works;
  • reuse Crown copyright material for non-commercial purposes; and
  • undertake format shifting in consistent circumstances for all copyright materials.

Nic Suzor from QUT Law Faculty had a very interesting presentation about the enforceability of EULAs and Terms of Use purporting to regulate virtual communities. Nic has written extensively about this topic on his blog.

Professor Christoph Antons, a Professor of Compartive Law and Director of the Centre for Comparative Law and Development Studies in Asia and the Pacific (CLDSAP) spoke about the internet and freedom of expression in Asia. His talk focused on a number of cases involving YouTube in countries including Thailand, India, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia. In these countries, it can be a crime to insult the King, the State, the national religion, or other traditional figures or leaders. As Professor Antons explains, videos screened over YouTube can be potentially more powerful tools for insulting than text messages, and messages conveyed via videos are immediate and reach a wider international audience. The conflict between internet tools such as YouTube and laws that forbid insulting – especially where the laws are phrased so that “insulting” is a subjective test [a huge concern!] – can be immense.

Ben Atkinson, a Research Fellow in the QUT Law Faculty and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Innovation, looked at the evolution of intellectual property law by reference to the revolutions involving real property, such as the French Revolution. Ben has just released a book entitled, The True History of Copyright: The Australian Experience 1905-2005, which can be purchased from the Sydney University Press website here.

CCI Conference: Overview

I thoroughly enjoyed the CCI conference. I thought it was well done and involved many incredible people from a wide range of disciplines, including law, journalism, creative industries (creative writing and literature, music, and the arts), education, cultural science and the humanities.

The conference structure consisted of a number of plenary sessions to the whole audience, and then a number of concurrent sessions broken down by “streams”. I was in the law stream (legal issues for social networks and creating public value) the entire time and while it was certainly very interesting, I was a little disappointed that I missed some of the sessions on citizen journalism, creative industry development agendas, broadband innovations and the creative economy, and creative capital and workforce futures that were running in the other streams. It would have been nice to mix things up a bit and truly have everyone intermingling.

The conference kicked off with a plenary from Baroness Susan Greenfield CBE, a renowned neuroscientist from the UK. The Baroness spoke about the impact of environment over genetic disposition and considered whether children today might hold shorter attention spans because of the influence of digital technologies such as videos and games in their lives – a theory that was somewhat provoking to the largely tech-centric crowd (particularly the educators). However, the talk set a good tone for the rest of the conference – a point made by Henry Jenkins – that all opinions could be voiced here, no matter how controversial. The conference ended with an audience feedback session which further cemented the ideals of openness that had been prevalent throughout the conference.

Overall, an excellent experience.

My Conference Presentation: CCI Conference

At the CCI Conference, Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons, on Thursday 26th June, I presented a paper entitled, Promoting Open Access to Knowledge in a Web 2.0 World.

You can access the abstract of my paper here and my slideshow presentation here.

The subject of my paper was the new publication just released by the OAK Law Project (and authored by me), Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors. The guide is available on the OAK Law Project website, the OAKList website, or here.

I did take notes at both the CCI conference and the Creative Commons conference on Tuesday 24th June, which I intend to blog as soon as I have a spare moment. Things have been busy!

Upcoming Conferences

I will be attending all of these conferences in Brisbane in June and the coming months. They will be interesting and worthwhile experiences, and I encourage you to attend.

Building an Australasian Commons

Creative Commons Australia (Ccau) is hosting the conference, “Building an Australasian Commons” at the State Library of Queensland on 24 June 2008.

From the website:

The event provides an opportunity for those interested in the free internet to come together to exchange ideas, information and inspiration. It brings together experts from Australasia to discuss the latest developments and implementations of Creative Commons in the region. It aims to be an open forum where anyone can voice their thoughts on issues relating to furthering the commons worldwide.

The conference will be followed at 5:30pm by the second Australian ccSalon, which will showcase local talent.

The conference and ccSalon are free, but registration is required.

Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) will be hosting the “Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons” conference from Wednesday 25th to Friday 27th June 2008 at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, South Bank.

From the website:

This conference showcases some of the CCI’s own research projects, and features papers from academic, business, creative or public policy specialists on many aspects of value-creation in the context of creative industries and innovation.

I will presenting a paper at this conference, entitled, “Promoting Open Access to Research in a Web 2.0 World”.

Rates apply. For more information and to register, visit the CCI website.

Open Access and Research Conference

The OAK Law project (for which I work) is hosting the international “Open Access and Research Conference” on Wednesday 24th to Thursday 25th September 2008 at Stamford Plaza, Brisbane. Post-Conference Workshops will be held on Friday 26th September at Stamford Plaza.

Keynote speakers and distinguished commentators include:

  • John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons
  • Alma Swan, Founder of Key Perspectives: Consultants to the scholarly information industry
  • Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President of the External Research Division of Microsoft Research
  • Dr Terry Cutler, Principal, Cutler & Company
  • Professor Mary O’Kane, Director and Executive Chairman of Mary O’Kane & Associates Pty Ltd
  • Dr Peter Crossman, Assistant Under Treasurer (OESR) and Government Statistician
  • Stevan Harnad, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
  • Dr Richard Jefferson, CEO & Founder, CAMBIA and the BiOS Initiative
  • Professor Tom Cochrane, DVC QUT Division of Technology, Information and Learning Support
  • Professor Brian Fitzgerald, OAK Law Project and QUT Law Faculty
  • Dr Rhys Francis, Executive Director, Australian eResearch Infrastructure Council
  • Maarten Wilbers, Deputy Legal Counsel, CERN Legal Services

To register or for more information, including the conference program, visit the Official Website.