Timothy Vollmer

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Council of the European Union calls for full open access to scientific research by 2020

A few weeks ago we wrote about how the European Union is pushing ahead its support for open access to EU-funded scientific research and data. Today at the meeting of the Competitiveness Council of the European Union, the Council reinforced the commitment to making all scientific articles and data openly accessible and reusable by 2020. In its communication, the Council offered several conclusions on the transition towards an open science system:

European Union Pushing Ahead in Support of Open Science

April saw lots of activity on the open science front in the European Union. On April 19, the European Commission officially announced its plans to create an “Open Science Cloud”. Accompanying this initiative, the Commission stated it will require that scientific data produced by projects under Horizon 2020 (Europe’s €80 billion science funding program) be made openly available by default. Making open data the default will ensure that the scientific community, companies, and the general public can enjoy broad access (and reuse rights) to data generated by European funded scientific projects. 

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Global Coalition Pushes for Unrestricted Sharing of Scholarly Citation Data

This week a coalition of scholarly publishers, researchers, and nonprofit organizations launched the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a project to promote the unrestricted open access to scholarly citation data. From the website: "Citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an explanation for how we know facts. They allow us to attribute and credit scientific contributions, and they enable the evaluation of research and its impacts. In sum, citations are the most important vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge"...

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RightsCon Redux: Working Toward A Progressive Copyright Framework For Europe

RightsCon is an annual conference that focuses on awareness-raising, organising, and advocacy on global issues at the intersection of technology and human rights. The event is produced by the international nonprofit organization AccessNow. RightsCon participants include members of digital rights organisations, legal experts, civil society, government, and business representatives. Creative Commons, Mozilla, and the Wikimedia Foundation organized a panel discussion on the work being done to reform the European Union copyright rules...