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-sour...

Thanks! Stuart Geiger