Greetings wikiresearchers,
As many of you know (and as we've discussed on this list before), the
copyright licensing of academic papers about communities like
Wikipedia is a huge issue. I've just written up a blog post about
this, but the tl;dr is that I have a bit of a solution, be it a
partial one. The gist is basically that asking academics to release
*papers* under a free license is the wrong strategy. Instead, we
should encourage academics to release *research* under a free license,
and that this can be done in such a way that still makes it complies
with most of the contradictory obligations we have found ourselves in.
It is quite possible to document a research project, its motivations,
its methods, its background, its findings, and even all those charts
and graphs on Meta, using the new Research: namespace and
corresponding templates that were *just* launched -- which everyone
should check out anyway. And while I'd love some legal non-advice on
this, I think we can do this in such a way that whenever it comes time
to assign copyright to the ACM, all of the CC-BY/CC-BY-SA licensed
graphs can be "used with permission" in a published research paper.
Anyways, the link is below, and I'd love to get some feedback on it:
http://www.stuartgeiger.com/wordpress/random-thoughts/2011/06/12/closed-sou…
Thanks!
Stuart Geiger