Right to information

[Donna Scheeder]

Dear Colleagues,

Perhaps looking at this as an issue of access to information may help this converation move forward. The library community on this list may find this approach very familiar.The person who brought up the sustainable development goals was in my humble opinion on target. Take a look at this.  I hope it will help .

https://www.ifla.org/ES/node/7408

Best regards,

Donna Scheeder, Past President
IFLA
donna_s...@comcast.net
202-744-0818

[David Wojick]

Unfortunately this prescription is hopelessly vague when it comes to actual policy: "The Lyon Declaration is an advocacy document signed by more than 600 organisations, calling upon United Nations Member States to make an international commitment on ensuring that everyone has access to, and is able to understand, use and share the information that is necessary to promote sustainable development and democratic societies."

That any specific information is "necessary," is debatable, especially scientific information.

On the other hand, one might argue that copyright is immoral, on the grounds that no one can own their words, once they are written or spoken. How could they? Expressed thought is as public as anything gets.

David

.

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[Glenn Hampson]

Thanks Donna---brilliant stuff. And congrats Jason---wow! We should definitely all pitch in and see what we can do to help with this project.

 

Donna---with regard to the Lyon Declaration and echoing what David said but a little softer, how can we identify more specifically what types of information are necessary to promote sustainable development and democratic societies? And then, how can we identify what types of minimal public (free) access are needed in order to do this?

 

For instance, consider newspapers. They’re dying because people expect to get news for free off the Internet. But they are foundational to an informed citizenry. How can we be informed without access to reliable, objective information? So, should governments subsidize newspapers (and reporting in general)? Or would this make them beholden to governments and therefore less likely to be critical (NPR in the US and the BBC in the UK seem to be good examples of organizations that can receive some modicum of support and yet still be critical and objective; Fox News in the US is a good example of organizations that, because their private funding source is conservative, tilt their coverage in the conservative direction, so private funding is no guarantee of objectivity either).

 

Does anyone know of any work in this space that attempts to identify what should be public and why? Take a look at the attached diagram. The black circles, in the “private information” sphere, are types of information protected by legal statute; the dark grey circles are types of information protected by intellectual property agreements; and the light grey circles are types of information protected by convention more than anything----a mix of copyright and IP and contract, but largely (it seems) just because this is the way things have always been done. And we’re arguing here that these two classes of info should be made wholly public, not just partly. Whether there’s a solid moral/ethical foundation for this argument I don’t know---this is just an attempt to picture whether this class of information is an outlier and if so, why.

 

We’ve discussed this here before but to resurrect these points, what if an historian receives a government grant to study the history of the Roman Empire, and then publishes a book on her research, and this book is sold on Amazon. Is this contravening our principles of making publicly-funded research publicly available? Or what if a cancer study receives some funding from NIH, and some from Merck (partnerships like this happen all the time). Who “owns” the product that is produced? The Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center here in Seattle has formulas for figuring all this out, but it isn’t a simple matter than public funding in equals public ownership out.

 

So, getting really specific about what information deserves to be public and why, as well as what information needs to be public and why, is probably a pretty foundational exercise here---whether this is approached from a moral angle, a legal one, or one that works backward from our desired endpoints and then maps out what’s even possible.

 

Best,

 

Glenn

 

 

Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)

2320 N 137th Street | Seattle, WA 98133
(206) 417-3607 | gham...@nationalscience.org | nationalscience.org

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[David Wojick]

One can also argue that only artistic writing needs to be owned and thus protected. This is why I like John Willinsky's idea that copyrighting research reports is a colossal historic blunder.

David