I agree with you, Stuart.

You know, the first part of your proposal is what many researchers do: they publish papers under restrictive licences, but reports, data sets used for researching and even PhD dissertation are published under a free licence.

And let me explain other strategy for getting open research: it's asking governaments to obly by law to publish under free licence the work funded by them or made by public univs. This is something WikiMedia Chapter could work on.

In this sense some countries are taking some steps. For example, Spanish Gobernament has recently approved a law so every researcher funded by them has to publish the results of his work in an open directory. More info in Spanish [1].

Best, Manuel

[1] http://oaulpgc.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/aprobada-la-ley-de-la-ciencia/

From: R.Stuart Geiger sgeiger@gmail.com Date: 2011/6/13 Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Closed-sourced papers on open source communities To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities < wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>

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

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-- Manuel Palomo Duarte Software Process Improvement and Formal Methods group (SPI&FM). Libre Software and Open Knowledge Office (OSLUCA). Department of Computer Languages and Systems. Escuela Superior de Ingenieria. C/ Chile, 1 11002 - Cadiz (Spain) University of Cadiz http://neptuno.uca.es/~mpalomo Tlf: (+34) 956 015483 Mobile phone: (+34) 649 280080 Mobile phone from University network: 45483 Fax: (+34) 956 015139

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