At the Open Source World Conference in Málaga, Spain, Karsten Gerloff discussed the FLOSSInclude project in a session on EU-sponsored FLOSS research projects. The presentation met with lively interest from the audience, drawing questions in particular from Latin American participants.

The session was chaired by Jesus Villasante, head of unit for the Software Technologies unit in the EU Directorate General Information Society and Media (DG Infso)

UNU-MERIT’s Collaborative Creativity Group has organised a panel on “Technologies for Access” at Yale Law Schools Third Access to Knowledge Global Conference (A2K3). The conference will take place in Geneva, Switzerland, on September 8-10. UNU-MERIT researchers Rishab Ghosh and Karsten Gerloff will be attending the event.

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Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz (Economics, 2001) and John Sulston (Physiology/Medicine, 2002) argue that the patent regime, along with other forms of intellectual monopoly powers, locks down access to knowledge rather than allowing its dissemination.

Both were speaking at the launch of Manchester University’s new Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation:

Patent monopolies are believed to drive innovation but they actually impede the pace of science and innovation, Stiglitz said. The current “patent thicket,” in which anyone who writes a successful software programme is sued for alleged patent infringement, highlights the current IP system’s failure to encourage innovation, he said.

Sulston made the privatisation of science his topic:

Reversing the trend toward privatisation of science is critical, Sulston said. The world should concentrate on the survival and thriving of humanity, and exploration of the universe, he said. The outcome, he added, depends to a great extent on “who owns science.”

via IP-Watch

How can society ensure that knowledge goods, which are both costly to create and potentially non-rival in use, can be shared freely?

There is little doubt that the current approach to rewarding the development of new medicines or diagnostic devices has severe deficiencies. Patent enforced monopolies often lead to high
prices. Critics also say that this system often fails to stimulate investment in areas of public interest and priority.

The prize system provides an appealing solution by encouraging new approaches to this thorny issue. If the incentive for innovation can be divorced from the product’s consumer price, then knowledge
goods — including the R&D for a new medicine — can be placed in the public domain immediately, so that competition among suppliersleads to low prices and greater access to new medical inventions.

Prizes can be implemented in many different ways. For donors and governments in particular, prizes might offer an alternative to marketing monopolies as the reward for successful investments in R&D.

Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and UNU-MERIT are calling for papers on the use of monetary prizes as an alternative mechanism to stimulate private investments in R&D.

Participation is open to anyone. Winners will be selected by a jury of high-profile experts. The deadline for contributions is February 15, 2008. Papers should be between four and 20 pages, and must be submitted under a licence allowing unlimited distribution, such as an appropriate Creative Commons licence.

Awards:

• Winning paper: EUR 1500.
• Two runners-up: EUR 500.-
• The three top-ranked papers will be published in the Knowledge Ecology Studies journal.

Successful papers will deal with one or more of the following questions:

1. Relation to exclusive rights of a patent: Should prizes beconsidered as a voluntary or non-voluntary alternative to the exclusive rights now associated with the patent system, or as acomplementary reward?

2. Valuation: How does one determine the size of prizes?

3. Push vs. pull: Where to use research grants (”push”), where to prefer prizes (”pull”) to finance drug development?

4. Sustainable financing: Where should the prize money come from, and will the prospect of prizes be credible?

5. Follow-on innovation: How will prizes deal with the need for incentives for follow-on innovation?

6. Transition: How can the transition from the current monopoly-based system be organized?

For questions and submissions, please send email to Malini Aisola and Karsten Gerloff <prizeprize@merit.unu.edu>. More information will soon be available at ccp.merit.unu.edu/prizeprize.

KEI and UNU-MERIT are looking forward to your contributions.

What happens to your data if your experiment fails? If the results turn out different than you thought? If there’s nothing to publish?

Don’t throw it away. Your dead end might be another person’s missing link.

Wired Magazine has an essay by Thomas Goetz on this “dark data”.

He says that while storing huge amounts of data can be an issue, the real problem is the culture of science:

More and more, research is funded by commercial entities, which deem any results proprietary. And even among fair-minded academics, the pressures of time, tender, and tenure can make openness an afterthought. If their research is successful, many academics guard their data like Gollum, wringing all the publication opportunities they can out of it over years. If the research doesn’t pan out, there’s a strong incentive to move on, ASAP, and a disincentive to linger in eddies that may not advance one’s job prospects.

But Goetz says that the dark data phenomenon isn’t limited to science:

Getting science comfortable with exposing its dark data is really just the beginning. Once you start looking for it, dark data is everywhere: It’s locked away in out-of-print books and orphaned art, the stuff that Creative Commons and Google Book Search have been bringing to light. Speaking of which: Hey, Google! Know all those research projects your employees do that the company will never green-light? How about letting the rest of the world take a crack at them?

The challenge is to find a way to share the data. How about the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network I blogged earlier?

Rufus Pollock must have had a busy week. A few days after the Open Knowledge Foundation he’s involved in launched the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, Rufus (who is a PhD candidate at Cambridge) has published a paper. From an economist’s perspective, he is looking at the optimal term for copyright:

Abstract
The optimal level for copyright has been a matter for extensive debate over the last decade. This paper contributes several new results on this issue divided into two parts. In the first, a parsimonious theoretical model is used to prove several novel propositions about the optimal level of protection. Specifically, we demonstrate that (a) optimal copyright falls as the costs of production go down (for example as a result of digitization) and that (b) the optimal level of copyright will, in general, fall over time. The second part of the paper focuses on the specific case of copyright term. Using a simple model we characterise optimal term as a function of a few key parameters. We estimate this function using a combination of new and existing data on recordings and books and find an optimal term of around fourteen years. This is substantially shorter than any current copyright term and implies that existing copyright terms are too long.

This sounds very interesting. Go get the paper here (pdf), read it, pick holes in it, and see if it holds up!

via BoingBoing, netzpolitik.org

Today, the UK-based Open Knowledge Foundation has launched the “Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network” (CKAN). What this is?

CKAN is a registry of open knowledge packages and projects — be that a set of Shakespeare’s works, a global population density database, the voting records of MPs, or 30 years of US patents.

CKAN is the place to search for open knowledge resources as well as register your own. Those familiar with freshmeat (a registry of open source software), CPAN (Perl) or PyPI (python package index) can think of CKAN as providing an analogous service for open knowledge.

[...]

we are looking for people to register ‘packages’ that is collections with some kind of structure rather than individual items. So a substantial set of photos, a datasets of all kinds, the writings of Shakespeare but not an individual blog, or your flickr photo collection (unless it is really big!).

“Open” meaning here that anyone is free to use, enhance, modify and distribute the things in this archive, similar to Free Software. The data and information contained in this archive network either has to be in the public domain (not subject to copyright), or distributed under a free licence (e.g. Wikipedia articles, which use the GNU Free Documentation Licence, or works under a free Creative Commons licence).

The discussion on how to organise knowledge best is far from ended, so this is just a basic infrastructure. Yet it already contains a few things of value:

Shakespeare’s works, a global population density database, the voting records of MPs, or 30 years of US patents.

I’m really looking forward to how this will develop. Like any self-respecting Internet innovation these days, it is a public beta, to be improved over time. But looking at how valuable similar archive networks have become as a resource – for example, the Comprehensive Tex Archive Network (CTAN) for the TeX typesetting system -, this could become really, really good.

This weekend, the international community of scholars and activists working on Access to Knowledge (A2K) will gather at Yale University. Following up on the first conference of this kind one year ago:

[t]his year, on April 27th-29th 2007, the weekend of World Intellectual Property Day, the A2K2 conference will be a pivotal event mobilizing the A2K coalition. A2K2 will further build the coalition amongst the institutions and stakeholders that crystallized at the first landmark conference, help set the agenda for access to knowledge policy and advocacy, and deepen the understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of access to knowledge issues. Developing both a theoretical framework and delving into the details of practical implementation, the program will focus on mobilizing the private sector, governments, technologists, and civil society around A2K issues. A2K2’s policy panels will be structured towards tangible legal and technological solutions and collaborative strategies for policy makers and individual institutions.

UNU-MERIT’s Rishab Ghosh will be at a panel on “Mobilizing Technologists“.

I’m very much looking forward to reading the discussions and results of this conference. If you want to get to know the field, the conference page offers a list of resources, There’s also a conference wiki here.

The European Commission (Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry) has published a research study prepared by Rishab Ghosh and his team at UNU-MERIT.

Study on the economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU

The study looks at direct as well as indirect impact and finds that FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) could help Europe reach its goal of becoming the most competitive knowledge economy by 2010.
The findings include:

• FLOSS applications are top rung products in terms of market share in several markets.
• The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally. This code base has been doubling every 18 to 24 months over the past eight years.
• The notional value of Europe’s investment in FLOSS software today is Euro 22 billion (36 billion in the US) representing 20.5% of total software investment (20% in the US)
• While the US has an edge in large FLOSS-related businesses, Europe is the leading region in terms of globally active FLOSS software developers, and leads in terms of global project leaders, followed closely by North America. Asia and Latin America face disadvantages at least partly due to language barriers, but may have an increasing share of developers active in local communities.
• By providing a skills development environment valued by employers and retaining a greater share of value addition locally, FLOSS can encourage the creation of SMEs and jobs.
• Defined broadly, FLOSSrelated services could reach a 32% share of all IT services by 2010, and the FLOSS-related share of the economy could reach 4% of European GDP by 2010.
• Though FLOSS provides ample opportunities for Europe, it is threatened by increasing moves in some policy circles to support regulation that seeks to protect old business models of creative industries, making it harder to develop new ways of doing business.
• Firms have invested an estimated Euro 1.2 billion in developing FLOSS software. Such firms represent in total at least 565 000 jobs and Euro 263 billion in annual revenue.

Download a pdf copy of the report from here. You can find current press coverage here.

[Update by Karsten Gerloff:]
When these results were first presented at a Brussels workshop at the end of September 2006, they caused quite a stir. A letter to the European Commission by lobbyist Hugo Lueders of the “Initiative for Software Choice” argued that any move by the European Commission to open the market to stronger competition by Free Software would “disrupt the entire software ecosystem”. Other than that, the reception was rather positive.

While said ecosystem remains very much undisrupted in places such as Extremadura or Andalucia, despite stronger pro-Free Software policies than the EU could dream of, the “Initiative for Software Choice” appears to be an exercise in astroturfing. Apparently, becoming a member does not take anything more than pledging allegiance to the group’s mission and statement of principles; no fees in sight, so this commitment comes rather cheap. I would also appreciate if someone could give me some background on a software company called “Jackrabbit Microwave“; if no information is forthcoming, I’ll have to assume that the group is not above accepting non-existing entities into its ranks.

MORE UPDATE:

CompTIA, the association of proprietary software makers which manages ISC, has apparently been successful in pressuring the European Commission to state that it is not favouring Free Software over proprietary programs. Richard Thurston over at ZDNet has put together a short, informative timeline.

Please note that noone has alleged that the EC favours Free Software. It has merely commissioned a study about the effects of Free Software in the European market, and this study arrived at a number of conclusions, most of them favourable towards Free Software. The EC has not distanced itself from that study, but rather pointed out that it is “technology neutral”, not favouring one software model over the other.

Rishab Ghosh, lead author of the study, has posted a detailed comment on the matter in response to the ZDNet story.

I would like to comment on the interesting take that Andy Updegrove presented and Philippe Schmidt’s view on this perspective.

First, let’s deal with the never ending story of Wikipedia vs. Brittanica. Perhaps we should re-phrase this story and ask ourselves whether Wikipedia should use the –pedia suffix. Is Wikepedia an encyclopedia? An encyclopedia contains historical and/or current factual information. Factual information is absolute. You can interpret it according to your own views, but a good encyclopedia presents its facts in an unbiased way; objective, factual! It is clear that Wikipedia is lacking in this respect. Recently it has tried to remedy this problem by locking the information down and monitoring what goes in.

Here I come to Andy Updegrove’s perception, and I agree. It is a mistake to lock the information down in an effort to emulate reference works. Wikipedia transcends the utilitarian scope of an encyclopedia. It gives us a chance to indeed look at ourselves and at other peoples’ interpretation of the facts which we look at in one way, as others might see them in a wholly different light. And it is this other way of looking at factual information that is increasingly important in today’s world. Proof of this is in all the factual information presented on the news…

However I do not agree completely with the culture part. Wikipedia at this point doesn’t have anything to do with popular culture or whatever culture. It misses the coherence that belongs to the structure of culture. This is were Philippe Schmidt’s comment comes in, in which he rightly says that only a minority uses Wikipedia, which then subsequently makes it a representation of a sub-culture at the most. For a, virtual, community to display culture it needs to have (virtual) social relationships, rules and norms and an identity. These rules and norms are of high importance as they make clear which common ground can be found between different (sub-)communities. Wikipedia is not that sort of a community at the moment (although the Community Portal displays similar characteritics, these are much more technical and superficial). Wikipedia is not a simple forum either as it has evolved way beyond the concept of forum.

It could however be seen as, or evolve further into a “platform”, a global “virtual arena” or global virtual learning locale (learner’s community) where people can learn from each other and each other’s view of the (factual) information presented on Wikipedia. For this to happen, deeper social relationships within Wikipedia will need to be created or at least it should be able to display shared values and norms (beyond the technical) to which people can adhere while interacting which each other and which will then give in-depth meaning to the different views presented.