Copyright Future Copyright Freedom Interviews now available

Last month, I blogged about the Copyright Future Copyright Freedom conference run by Professor Brian Fitzgerald of QUT Faculty of Law and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI). I mentioned that during the course of the conference, my colleague Nic Suzor and I had the task of interviewing some of the conference delegates about how they first became involved in copyright law and what their perspectives are on the future of copyright. These interviews are now available online, thanks to Jimmy Ti who has helped us build the website around the conference recordings.

We will continue to add to the interviews on this page. As part of the Copyright Futures project, we are hoping to generate a bulk of interviews (ideally around 50) from copyright experts around the world.

The video and audio of the full presentations at the conference will also be made available online in the coming weeks.

Copyright Future: Copyright Freedom conference 2009 - central themes

Some of the central themes and key points to come out of the conference were:

[Note - these are my notes and paraphrasing, not direct quotes]

• Australia has typically followed UK and US movements in copyright law, often to our detriment. However, in some areas we are able to make independent copyright laws without offending international law (e.g. we could advocate for compulsory licensing of material for developing countries or for a thorough explanation of the Berne 3 step test). But will we do it? - Benedict Atkinson

• The Berne three step test may have been interpreted wrongly - the steps, "do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work" and "do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rights holder", are not necessarily as broad as we think, and normal exploitation and legitimate interests do not always have to mean monetary compensation. Authors have many different interests in their work. Maybe we should think about them - Professor Susy Frankel

• We need to get our minds around the true justification of copyright law, and the true interests of creators. These are often different to what the closed-access and permission-based model would have us think - Professor Adrian Sterling and many other conference delegates

• Professor Adrian Sterling suggested a motto for the conference - "Easy Access; Easy Licensing"
• The Hon. Michael Kirby amended this to "Easy Access; Justifiable Licensing"

• We are creating a generation of criminals ("copyright pirates") in our kids, who are used to downloading things from the internet and don't see why this shouldn't be allowed - we need to find a solution that prevents our children from being "criminals". We need to do this in such a way that copyright is still respected, because otherwise we run the risk of revolution - having our children revolt against copyright law and call for its abolition - Professor Lawrence Lessig

• In the digital environment, we need to give up our obsession with "the copy". In an online environment, everything is a copy. Therefore, under the current copyright system, nothing can be done without permission and usually the payment of a fee. This is unsatisfactory. We need to focus on meanigful use as the reason for giving rise to the operation of copyright law requiring permission and/or payment - Professor Lawrence Lessig

• We need to consider the cultural impact of copyright law, particularly for indigenous persons - Maroochy Barambah, Ade Kukoyi and Professor Susy Frankel

• The key to innovation is information flows, especially within government and the public sector. To enable this, we need to free up copyright in public sector materials - Dr Terry Cutler

• We need to look for new models of copyright and revenue-generation from copyright. One such model may be a benefit-sharing model, rather than a fee-based model - Professor Brian Fitzgerald

• We need to rethink nearly everything we know about copyright law. We need to recognise that the idea/expression dichotomy is problematic. We need to recognise that users are situated within cultural and material spaces and limits and they use creative material in many, many different ways. We should acknowledge that copyright plays a relatively small role in the creative process, and that often creativity relies on the interplay between whatever is available and familiar (mass culture) and "play" or "serendipity". Copyright serves goals that are primarily economic and which promotes predictability. This is important because it enables the production of mass culture. But the focus on economic fixity can frustrate the creative process of situated users. There needs to be logical gaps in the law to permit play, serendipity and freedom - Professor Julie Cohen

[Update: my colleague, Elliott Bledsoe, has done what I could not and blogged pretty much the entire conference. See the "Creative Commons Through the Looking Glass" blog]

Copyright Future: Copyright Freedom conference 2009 - why I am lame and did not blog

I returned last night from the Copyright Future: Copyright Freedom conference hosted in Canberra on 27-28 May 2009 [program available here]. I was hoping to live blog the conference (seeing as it was so interesting!), but unfortunately due to the historic nature of the venue (Old Parliament House) there were very few wired internet connections and no wireless connectivity. Peter Black (PeterBlackQUT) and Elliott Bledsoe (elliottbledsoe), who had their own internet connections (courtesy of some "dongles"), were tweeting during the day. You can follow their tweets at #copyrightfuture09.

I did take some notes during the day, but I have decided not to blog extensively on the individual presentations. Mainly because I feel that the fairly mediocre notes that I took do not do the presentations justice. There are some brief notes here, but nothing substantial.

QUT (which hosted the conference, convened by Professor Brian Fitzgerald), will be making the audio and video recordings of each presentation, and the relevant slide sets, available online under CC licences in the very near future (subject to presenter permission). I will post here when they are uploaded, so watch this space. The recordings are probably the best way to access the presentations for any who are interested. And I would highly recommend it, because most were brilliant.

Another reason I did not have much time to take detailed notes (excuses, excuses), was that (along with my colleague, Nic Suzor) I spent a great deal of my time running around with a low-quality mp3 recorder taking short (3-5 minute) interviews with some of the conference delegates. The interview questions centred around how each interviewee first became involved with or interested in copyright law; what they see as some of the main challenges and issues in copyright law; and what they see for the future of copyright. The interviews will also be made available online as podcasts, subject to interviewee permission. Interviewees included (among others):

• The Hon. Michael Kirby AC CMG;
  
• Professor Lawrence Lessig and Senator Kate Lundy;
  
• Professor Julie Cohen;
  
• Dr Terry Cutler;
• Dr Nicholas Gruen;
• Professor Graham Greenleaf;
• Professor Susy Frankel;
  
• Dr Prodromos Tsiavos and
  
• Dr Matthew Rimmer.

Again, watch this space for notification of when the podcasts are available.

Conference - Copyright Future: Copyright Freedom

On 27 and 28 May 2008, Professor Brian Fitzgerald of QUT will host a conference, in Canberra, on the history and future of copyright. I will be attending this conference, and I am very excited about it! Details are below -

This conference - Copyright Future: Copyright Freedom – will be held at Old Parliament House (OPH) in Canberra on Wednesday 27th May and Thursday 28th May 2009. The month of May in 2009 marks 40 years since the commencement of the Australian Copyright Act of 1968.

Program Chairs: Professor Brian Fitzgerald and Benedict Atkinson
QUT Law Faculty and ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation

The conference will consider the history of copyright law with special focus on the excellent work of Benedict Atkinson on the True History of Australian Copyright Law (2007). It will also chart the path of copyright law since that time and give special focus to future possibilities.

The conference will be opened by the Honourable Robert McClelland Attorney-General for the Commonwealth of Australia and our Keynote Speaker will be Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University Law School.

Speakers include:

• Professor Julie Cohen, Faculty of Law Georgetown University Washington DC
• Professor Tom Cochrane DVC QUT
• Maroochy Barambah, Songwoman for Turrbal People
• Professor Adrian Sterling, Queen Mary College London
• Dr Terry Cutler, Cutler and Co Melbourne
• Professor Susy Frankel, Faculty of Law Victoria University of Wellington NZ
• Professor Anne Fitzgerald, Faculty of Law QUT
• Dr Prodromous Tsiavos, London School of Economics London
• Professor Phillip Graham, Director of iCi QUT

For further information on this conference please contact Professor Brian Fitzgerald
at QUT via email: bf.fitzgerald@qut.edu.au

Part of the conference will be held in the House of Representatives Chamber in Old Parliament House. As we are restricted as to the number of people that can be present in the House of Representatives Chamber the conference audience will be limited to 100 people.

Unlocking IP 2009 Conference – National and global dimensions of the copyright public domain

On 16 April, I will be attending the Unlocking IP 2009 Conference in Sydney, titled, "National and global dimensions of the copyright public domain". Together with Professor Anne Fitzgerald, I will be presenting a paper on the intersection of IPR and standards. The abstract of our paper can be read on the Unlocking IP conference papers webpage.

Details of the conference are:

Unlocking IP 2009 Conference –

National and global dimensions of the copyright public domain

16-17 April 2009 - UNSW Sydney

UNSW's Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre invites you to register now for an international conference from the 'Unlocking IP' ARC research project, which investigates how Australia's digital commons, both the public domain and public rights created by open content and open software licensing, can be expanded and protected. It focuses on 'self help' actions within the existing statutory context, in Australia's distinct legal and cultural context, and on comprehensiveness - we offer preliminary results from the first survey of Australia's digital commons, with data from National Library of Australia.

The conference includes reports and case studies from the front line, where new models for sharing and trading intellectual property meet the reality of business, government and educational demands, new technological opportunities and lessons learned from implementation of licences like Creative Commons and Free for Education. Book publishing under hybrid business models at Sydney University Press, online user generated content using Wikimedia, and international initiatives like the US ‘Reboot.gov’ and China's IP abuse rule are featured, alongside detailed analysis of emerging legal and policy directions.

A highlight of the conference will be the launch of the 2009 Consumers International IP Watch List. Arising from the CI Access to Knowledge project, the list identifies countries whose IP policies and practices are harmful to consumers. It is used as a counterbalance to the United States' "Special 301" Report, which is an annual report highlighting countries that supposedly do not provide strong enough protection for the interests of US intellectual property owners.

The venue is Law Faculty of UNSW, Kensington Sydney, close to beaches, parks and Sydney CBD.

For details of speakers and the program: http://cyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip/2009/program.htm

Register at: http://cyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip/2009/registration.htm

CRC-SI Annual Conference 2008

This morning I attended the CRC for Spatial Information (CRC-SI) 2008 Annual Conference. The morning plenary was entitled, "Innovation in Australia" and was chaired by Peter Woodgate, CEO, CRC-SI. The session was opened (via video link) by Senator The Hon Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, who noted the increasingly important role of spatial information and who expressed a desire to "restore public good as funding criteria" when the Australian Government is funding research and development.

In this session, I found Dr Nicholas Gruen's talk on Innovation in Australia especially interesting. My notes from his talk are below. They are a little rough - my apologies.


Dr Nicholas Gruen: Innovation in Australia

Information in the economy

What is the economy?

We used to think of the economy as “a thing which makes things”. But we now understand that there is more to economic policy than that. The economy is a “giant trading machine” – trade is important in our (new) concept of the economy. In economic policy reform over the last 30 years – including competition policy – trade is the basic theme.

But the economy is more than THAT.

It is also a “giant risk management machine” and a “giant information management machine”.

We have a mixed/hybrid economy – an ecology of public and private goods = markets are always this, they are not just private goods.

Firms compete according to standards, which are a public good (language, more, property rights and other laws, technical and trading standards); then firms compete in the private goods that fall within the gaps of the public goods.

“It is silly to talk of the internet as a private thing; it is not.”

Information is special – we need markets to harness distributed information and provide incentives.
Frederik Hayek – one of the more important things of a capitalist economy is its capacity to deal with distributed information

But markets dont handle information ideally either – Arrow, Akerlof, Stigliz – Information is a potential public good (reproduction is often costless) – best way for information to circulate in principle is for nothing (in cost) – standards are crucial to the passage of information (in ways that are much more integral than markets for trading for goods) – and standards themselves are a public good

Top down innovation in Government

We’ve been relatively good at it – e.g. secret ballot; HECS etc
We (here I think Nick is referring to the Innovation Review Panel as “we”?) recommended that we should further extend such innovative platforms – for instance HECS

Bottom up innovation in Government

This is the hard part
We looked at mechanisms to maximize the contribution of all levels of public sector innovation and also from the outside
Bottom up Innovation in the states (Vic) – e.g. Policy Idol – emerged from strategy workshop in the Premier’s Department – policy competition for junior officers – has been a very successful program

Then there’s government facilitating innovation elsewhere – the UK is pioneering various “challenge based” means of seeking to foster innovation

How to promote services innovations? -


The inadequacy of the tax concession

R&D tax concession works badly for services – to make it work you need to broaden the definition of R&D, then what happens is that firms in practice work out how to make their perfectly regular business activities fit within the new definition = not fair

Services innovation is often heavily regulated – finance, health, education – e.g. Rismark International

Permission to innovate?

regulation makes innovation difficult

We need innovation facilitation – we have major projects facilitation – we proposed something similar – Advocate for Government Innovation:

• operate an Enterprise Challenge program
• be a shopfront for “permission to innovate” processes
• be bureaucratic champion for highly innovative firms and projects
• help disseminate information about public sector information
• provide resources to promote more flexible tendering

Innovation is often hard, but freeing up information is harder – e.g. Joshua Gans project to locate public toilets on iPhone – asked Department for permission to use information (which is available online) to make available on iPhone – Department said no because of contractual obligations; copyright issues etc.

The problem of serial veto – information has many hurdles to jump:

• IP;
• Contract;
• permission hurdles;
• “we see IP as a property law rather than some form of economic policy (like we now see competition policy)”;
• compatibility of formats and systems,;
• lawyers professional cultural of risk aversion and control maximization

Fragility in the face of serial veto - e.g. Patents v Open Source; open information v cultural of public service, legal profession and the media

Fragility amongst robust hazards – like trying to coordinating systems within houses: security alarm, lighting, sound, ventilation and air conditioning – we are still not very good at this, still seems like a “futuristic” concept

ANDS Workshop at eResearch Australasia Conference

On Thursday 2 September, I attended the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) Workshop at the eResearch Australasia Conference 2008. This was a full day workshop, but the ANDS team did a great job of keeping the workshop interesting and highly interactive, and the day went very quickly.

In the morning, there were a few brief presentations – notably from Andrew Treloar of Monash University and the ANDS Establishment Project and Tracey Hinds from CSIRO. I particularly enjoyed Tracey’s presentation, which at a conference that seemed dominated by IT issues, focused on the social issues and the governance issues involved in data management and sharing research data. My notes from Tracey’s talk are below.

The rest of the day was spent in small round-table discussions. The most lively discussion surrounded questions about what institutions and research bodies need to help them in managing and sharing their data, and how ANDS could help. The group found that there was a need for:

• an openly accessible registry of ontologies for metadata of datasets, so that institutions can start using common and enduring metadata to describe their data;
• training for researchers, repository managers, research management staff, librarians, archivists and IT staff about data management (including the legal issues surrounding data management), database/repository infrastructure (how to make the database easy to use and sustainable), open access (why should you share your data?) and metadata. It was agreed that the training materials might have a generic introduction component that could be used by all groups, but then there should be different kinds of training materials that provide relevant detail to different groups (e.g. research management staff will have different concerns to IT staff; science researchers may have different concerns humanities researchers);
• developing conventions for the citation of data, so that researchers can get credit for sharing their data; and
• proper and comprehensive data management plans (DMP).

There was a consensus that data management plans were particularly important and that it would be useful to develop template DMPs which included specific sections that could be added or deleted as appropriate (for example, a section about compliance with privacy laws might be relevant to medical research but not to astronomy research). It was also thought that ANDS could select a few research projects from different disciplines and assist these projects in formulating a DMP. The resulting DMPs could then be made available online for other projects to use and adapt.

In relation to ANDS selecting particular projects to assist, in a broader way, with their data management and release (“engagement targets”) in the hope that these projects might then appear as “exemplar projects” for other groups, it was considered that appropriate selection criteria might be:

• broadness of audience and impact;
• potential for reuse of data and the ongoing reusability/sustainability of the data;
• the project’s willingness to assist others to develop their data management skills;
• wide inter-disciplinary appeal;
• willingness to transfer data around; and
• projects which will have good exemplary value to attract other communities.

I believe that ANDS will make the notes taken from the workshop available online.


Here are my notes from Tracey’s talk:

Tracey Hind – CSIRO

• ownership of data should stay with researcher
• but still need to manage CSIRO’s data at a higher level – maybe provide an “enabling” service for this rather than dictate a “one size fits all” approach
• As of now, CSIRO still does not formally recognise the idea of data management
• Real challenges are not technology – it is the human factors – issues of acceptance, understanding, people being prepared to share their data, IP etc
• High demand for storage, but storage is not management
• Scientists are not working as well across disciplines as the Flagship vision as hoped, much of this is because “you don’t know what you don’t know” – and it’s hard getting insight into other research disciplines
• Making data easily discoverable is the key to achieving multi-disciplinary outcomes
• Lesson is that data is a complex issue – especially when researchers don’t understand the potential benefits – you need exemplar projects to demonstrate the benefits of data management to get buy in.
• CSIRO’s data management vision (eSIM) – CSIRO scientists will be able to…gather, analyse and share scientific information securely and efficiently, leading to greater scientific outcomes for Australia
• Four layers – people, processes, technology and governance
• People challenges = incentives for deposit into a repository;
• Processes challenges = making sure that the work flows created actually support the technology and make things easy
• Governance = making sure all of this is properly funded and that data management is a part of the decision making (i.e. make sure researchers have a DMP before they are awarded funding)
• CSIRO’s exemplar projects = Auscope project; Atlas of Living Australia; Corporate Communications

eResearch Australasia Conference 2008 - Tuesday morning (30 September)

John Wilbanks – Uncommon Knowledge and e-Research

Once again, John Wilbanks gave an informative and dynamic presentation. It was geared towards the audience in attendance here at the eResearch Australasia Conference (who are somewhat more IT and science focused than the audience at the OAR conference last week) and so described in detail many aspects of the NeuroCommons Project. If you are interested, I suggest that you see the Neurocommons website. I don’t think any summary that I could provide here would do the project justice. But here are some notes from the beginning of John’s presentation:

Why “eResearch”?

1. eResearch is a requirement imposed on us by the flood of data

• the web doesn’t give us the same results for science as it does for culture
• so what can we do?
• We can…collaborate
• Eg - Watson and Crick – their success was composed, by building on a series of blocks of knowledge that were available to them from a range of sources
• But humans can’t build models to scale anymore
• We need to utilize digital resources

One way to think about eResearch is that it is about:

• Finding the right collaborator;
• making big discoveries;
• getting credit for one’s work

2. We need to convert what we know into digital formats that support model buildings

• “the web” – no organising topics – hyperlinking allows us to organise things in a dynamic way
• all the data and all the ides: building blocks
• open access attempts to solve the legal problems – giving credit where credit is dues; allows humans to read the papers; allows publicly funded research to be accessed by the public
• but it doesn’t solve the technical problem of paper-based formats that cannot be read by machines
• we need to develop machine-searchable formats

Kerstin Lehnert, Columbia University – New Science Communities for Cyberinfrastructure: The Example of Geochemistry

Kerstin described eResearch as a vision to provide a genuine infrastructure of highly reliable, widely accessible ICT capabilities to assist researchers in their work – ultimately about people

She discussed the cultural issues involved in sharing data. She identified data citation (what I would call “attribution”) as a big problem. How can all scientists and contributors be cited? Many want to be attributed personally (not just by a project), but there are so many contributors and this quickly becomes a big and messy problem. This observation reflects the problem that we at the OAK Law and Legal Framework to eResearch Projects identified in assessing whether Creative Commons licences could be applied to data compilations. Attribution is an important condition of the CC licence. Researchers and research projects need to decide and identify (before applying a CC licence) how the data compilation is to be attributed, otherwise users could run into all sorts of problems and confusion.


Jane Hunter (UQ) - National Committee for Data in Science (NCDS)

A committee of the Australian Academy of Science – established in February 2008; member of CODATA

Mission – to promote enduring access to Australia’s scientific data assets in order to drive national research and innovation
And to provide a National Data Science voice
Encourage and facilitation cross-fertilisations, between specific science disciplines and other data generation/management disciplines

Future activities include engaging with Chairs of other national committees, including looking at what role they can play within ANDS (Australian National Data Service) to support their goals.

eResearch Australasia Conference 2008 - Cloud Computing

Monday – Plenary: Cloud Infrastructure Services Panel Session

Chair: Nick Tate, UQ
Tony Hey – Microsoft Research
Peter Elford – Cisco
Kevin Mayo – Sun Microsystems
Anne Fitzgerald – QUT


Tony – A Digital Data Deluge in Research

- outsourcing of IT infrastructure
- minimize costs
- small businesses have access to large scale resources
- eg – Virtual Research Environment run by British Library: content management; knowledge management; social networking; online collaboration tools
[similar presentation to at OAR conference]


Peter –

- is cloud computing really a new idea?
- don’t think so – still just software as a service
- so what is the “cloud”?
- do researchers struggle to get access to machines? – probably no
- but do they have problems managing them well – probably yes
- balance between technology, people and processes
- it is a natural evolution and another opportunity
- but not a disruptive technology


Kevin –

From point of view of building these systems:
- need a successful business model
- need to consider privacy and security in a global world
- need to understand technical considerations
- there are a number of services out there at the moment because they have managed to deal with the business model problems….
- …but they may not have effectively dealt with the other issues
- e.g. how you get your data to and from the service
- in the future – we might see: automating the collection and analysis of census data; climate data etc – with barely any interference by people



Anne –
- when we think of cloud computing, many legal issues come to mind: privacy, data security etc
- so far, adapting the law to the digital environment has developed in a very ad hoc manner
- so maybe we would be better to approach it from principles, I prose the following principles:

1. establishing trust in the online environment
- cloud computing = applications that can be accessed anywhere by anyone
- so issues of data security, privacy, reliability of the data and the service
- not much on this (beyond some privacy restrictions) in Australia at the moment

2. equivalence of traditional and online transactions
- need a set of rules to apply to online activities that are equivalent to traditional activities
- at the moment, attempt to transpose current laws in online environment = copyright, electronic transactions act
- but when we look at cloud computing we see this principle is not being applied in a consistent way
- need for clarification of concepts of ownership of data stored on someone else’s equipment
- vast difference between copyright licence given to Google for Google Docs – vs rights that would be given to someone in the real world who is storing and managing someone else’s documents (i.e. they would be given virtually no rights) – why the immense difference just because the storage and management occurs online?

3. Participation of Government in regulating online activities
- would enactment of legislation help or hinder here?

4. We need openness in this environment
- open standards and maybe also open source
- affordability of cloud computing can help to overcome the digital divide
- expectation of users is that they can access the service where and when they like

Development of laws and policies in this environment has occurred primarily at an international level (e.g. OECD – Seoul Declaration), but there is still no international body charged with regulating online commerce



Questions:

Q: Ashley Buckle – Monash: not convinced that this is a solution for him running a small research lab – this is the problem: convincing people that this is for them, especially when they don’t want to be guinea pigs for new projects that may not work

A: Tony – you can only be convinced by something that works for you. There will be a variety of academic cloud services. But the real test is that it is easy to use, can be acquired easily and cheaply, and it should work for you and if it doesn’t work then you shouldn’t use it.

Q: If Microsoft and Google etc operate cloud computing services outside of the USA, does the Patriot Act still apply to them?

A: Not an expert on Patriot Act, but - we need to establish a uniformity or conformity throughout the world, after discussion among countries, and not just have one country’s law dominate, otherwise this could actual be a barrier to trade etc.

eResearch Australasia Conference 2008

I am currently in Melbourne for the week, attending the eResearch Australiasia Conference 2008, hosted by the Australian Government Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) at the Sebel and Citigate Hotels, Albert Park. The conference runs from Monday 29 September - Wednesday 1 October, then there are two days of workshops on Thursday 2 and Friday 3 October. I will be here until Friday. I will try to blog my notes as I go (subject to internet availability) and I will post my overall comments at the end.

OAR conference notes - Andrew Treloar

Dr Andrew Treloar – ANDS Establishment Project

Blue print for ANDS = Towards the Australian Data Commons (TADC) – developed during 2007 by ANDS Technical Working Group

TADC: Why data? Why now? – increasing data-intensive research; almost all data is now born digital; “Consequently, increasingly effort and therefore funding will necessarily be diverted to data and data management over time”

TADC: Role of data federations – with more data online, more can be done; increasing focus on cross-disciplinary science

Changing Data, Changing Research – e.g. Hubble data has to be released 6 months after creation

ANDS Goal = to deliver greater access, easier and more effective data use and reuse

ANDS Implementation assumptions:

• ANDS doesn’t have enough money to fund storage, and so is predicated on institutionally supported solutions
• Not all data shared by ANDS will be open
• ANDS aims to leverage existing activity, and coordinate/fund new activity
• ANDS will only start to build the Australian Data Commons
• ANDS governance and management arrangements are sized for the current funding

Realising the goal – need to:

• Seed the commons by connecting existing stores
• Increase (human) capability across the sector in data management and integration

ANDS structure = four programs:

1. Developing Frameworks (Monash) - about policies, national understandings of data management, and research intensive organisations = assisting OA by encouraging moves in favour of discipline-acceptable default data sharing practices
2. Providing Utilities (ANU) – Services Roadmap, national discovery service, collection registry, persistent identifier minting and management = assisting OA by improving discoverability particularly across disciplines (ISO2146)
3. Seeding the Commons (Monash) – recruit data into the research data commons = assisting OA by increasing the amount of content available, much of it (hopefully) OA
4. Building Capabilities (ANU) – improving human capability for research data management and research access to data – esp. early career researchers teaching them good data management practices from the beginning = assisting OA by advocating to researchers for changed practices

OAR conference notes - Maarten Wilbers

Session Six: A Legal Framework Supporting Open Access

Maarten Wilbers – Deputy Legal Counsel, CERN

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – switched on 10 September

SCOAP = Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in particle physics

Fundamental research mandate in particle physics – in a good place to move to full OA publishing of their scientific data and publications – this might be the “tipping point” for scientists in other disciplines

CERN founded in early 50s – OA in high energy physics was “in the cards” from the beginning…because OA is so logical

If you walk around CERN you can see the enormous tools constructed from public funds to help scientists gain greater understanding of small particles – the case for OA can almost be made without a word being spoken

OA in publishing is the future

CERN’s 1954 Convention has laid the foundation for a culture of openness in the dissemination of the organisations scientific work: CERN must perform fundamental research for non-military purpose and make the results of its work generally available

This requirement of openness has helped in the shaping of a string of sequential milestones:

• Scientific collaboration across national (and political) boundaries;
• Preprint culture and peer review;
• World Wide Web;
• Computing Grid and Open Source software;
• And most recently: promotion of OA publishing.

The legal frameworks governing these activities are supportive rather than restrictive in nature and adapted to collaboration involving multiple participants. Legal issues mostly concern copyright and are generally uncontroversial.

OA is a logical application of the web.

SCOAP aims to convert high quality particle physics journals to OA

Scientific experiments at CERN reflect CERN’s requirement of openness

Collaboration usually laid down in MOU - IPR vested in creating party, wide licensing between all parties involved

Publication of CERN’s work: particle physics pioneered the pre-print culture in the 1950s, scientific manuscripts circulated between scientists for peer review before publication

Main milestone was the creation of the World Wide Web at CERN by Tim Berners Lee

1992 – CERN released the WWW software in the public domain – “CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it”

Why OA (from CERN’s perspective)?

• High quality journals, offering peer-review, are the [High Energy Physics] HEP’s community’s “interface with officialdom”;
• Depending on definition of HEP, between 5000 and 7000 HEP articles published each year, 80% in 6 leading journals by 4 publishers
• Subscription prices make the current model unsustainable. Change is required
• HEP is a global undertaking and OA solutions should reflect this.

CERN’s potential solutions for OA publishing:

• Articles free to be read for all
• Tender process will result in price of article; linked to quality
• ….

Legal issues – keep things as simple as possible!

A strong example if OA publishing – the design of LHC published in OA journal (Journal of Instrumentation..?) just recently

OAR conference notes - Richard Jefferson

Richard Jefferson – Opening the innovation ecology

• Public good is not an abstract

Yochai Benkler Stack: Physical-Code-Content-Knowledge

We should ask the question: if we are successful in that everything is made OA – what then? We must make sure that the knowledge we generate will enable people to act on this knowledge and use it for benefit

The post-Yochai Benkler Stack = Physical-Code-Content-Knowledge; Capability to Act

We now have a system that is so opaque and has embedded in it intrinsic “inpermissibility” that it is not useful and capability to act on it is restrained

CAMBIA – focused on innovation system reform


BiOS Initiative – launched early 2005 with an article in Nature, biology open source (biological innovation for open society);

Patent system – actually a system based on open disclosure
This is not about rhetoric – it is about the practical goal of efficiency

OS – open source; open science; open society (need inclusiveness)

Used example of “golden rice” – which was once “poster child” of biological engineering - development of rice for third world areas where there was vitamin A deficiency in food so children were going blind, but the result used so many different products and processes that were patented that eventually the golden rice was not able to go ahead

Patent Lens – develop harmonized structure and infrastructure for searching patents; embedded metadata about patents; web 2.0 quality decision support about patents;

Efficiency = minimise tainting of product from incorporating other people’s IP (usually unknowingly) and maximise capacity for adoption – can try to do this by improving people’s knowledge about what IP is incorporate and enhance decision-maker’s ability to make good decisions for public good

Persistent, pervasive, jurisdiction agnostic activity = platform for community collaboration and transparency

Proper parsing, visualization and decision-making

Initiative for Open Innovation – increasing the equity, efficiency and effectiveness of science-enabled innovation for public good

Defining open innovation:
Open = transparent
Open = inclusive

Web based tools for scientists funding agencies, public sector and innovation enterprises to mine the patent world

Build patent lens into Nature and PLoS biology – to show, where readers are reading an article about a particular invention, whether the author has filed a patent on this

OAR conference notes - John Wilbanks

John Wilbanks (of Science Commons) – The Future of Knowledge

Knowledge is a set of building blocks – value is not that much until you start to put it together with other ideas and knowledge

Ideas and knowledge want to be connected

2 futures – we get to choose which we build – (1) only the people who have money have access to the knowledge (2) one in which there is an open network


(1) Knowledge brings revolutions

The past of knowledge = “Human-scale knowledge” – the scholarly canon (journals) – knowledge was human-organised and human-structures
How did this knowledge bring a revolution?

Moving to a world where knowledge acquisition is faster, smaller, cheaper and more robotic. Moving from a world where humans generate the scale of knowledge to a world where machines generate the scale

We have an implicit network that is already there for knowledge, but because we are generating it so quickly and on such a large scales, we are coming up against barriers - legal (copyright, DRM), technical (still use paper based formats online that cannot be searched by machines – i.e. PDF), business (publishers make money from closed access and we don’t yet know how they can make money or build business models around open access), social (scientists still get rewarded for being closed) - that we never encountered before

Over-atomised knowledge – smaller and smaller questions – primary output is a paper – John argues that these are not the primary vehicles for knowledge in a digital world

Incremental advances via technology – no big risks to achieve great advances anymore because you don’t get rewarded for making these risks, in fact you come up against huge legal barriers that prevent you using other research to take these risks


(2) We need to make systemic changes that connect knowledge

e.g. “the commons” – a number of different meanings: (1) land we hold in common e.g. public footpath; right to do research – rights of way across private property; (2) no copyright – things we all own

we are coming from a world where it was hard to be a creator and disseminate your work. We are not in that world anymore. There is now a disconnect between the copyright laws that Disney wants and the copyright laws that we as individual creators want. This is where the commons can make a systemic change.

Systemic change about the way we think about how we share knowledge – not just paper-based formats in a digital form – forces us to use technologies that are immediately outdated – what kinds of technology can we used instead? – a network of devices (layers: physical; code; content – there has been many developments of openness in these layers, but we have also seen an imposition of control in these layers (copyright)) – do we need new layers? Knowledge layers; graph layers etc. Info atomization kind of forces our hand to do this. Knowledge accessed needs to support the questions being answered (eg – when you type a query into Google – it tells you to read thousands of papers – this is not the ideal answer)

Copyright is incompatible with ideas connecting to each other.


(3) The disruptive force of connected knowledge

“guild” culture (as in historical sense of guilds, where the crown put limits on people not in the guild from weaving etc)

the way we do science actively discriminates against crowds and the wisdom of crowds

knowledge can be democratized: programming; creativity; buying and selling
it is easy, cheap and free

there are no office superstores for science; there are no internet marketplaces for science…but they are coming

destroying a guild culture of knowledge…what will come after it?

Creating a network culture for knowledge

• are we going to “watch” the knowledge like tv, or do something with it? – in the future of knowledge, we should do stuff with our knowledge rather than just consume it


Commentators: Dr Terry Cutler and Prof Mary O’Kane

Dr Cutler –

proud of the focus in Innovation Review on open access; however, first an apology and explanation – there is a difference between web version and print version – both supposed to be released under CC but were not (copyright assertion for Dr Cutler instead) – now attempting to have this rectified for the web version.

Key assertions from the report = about investment in people; global integration; flows of information and the freedoms to innovate

2% challenge of Australia – at best, we have a 2% share of global knowledge generation, and we don’t pay enough attention to the other 98% and how we access this – as a country we will always have an interest in an open network because we derive the most benefit from it

flows of information = communications. Communications theory and legal principles around communications were always based on connectivity. Open access is really just an extension of these principles.

Challenge – who really “owns” this problem of driving solutions (particularly at a government level)? – we need the government to address accessibility issues and articulate a national innovation policy – someone needs to take responsibility for this at the centre of government

Too much emphasis on “protectable” knowledge and not enough on informal networks and social networks that underpins the generation of an innovative community – need to open up access to that tacit knowledge and put social networks back into science and technology

Professor Mary O’Kane –

(1) is the future that John is talking about possible? How do we get to participatory science?

Can Australia lead this move into a participatory culture? We need to change the incentives for scientists. We need to change the social culture and drivers generally. So what are the drivers? Usually the intrinsic values are strongest (i.e. solving problems) not money. So how can we celebrate these intrinsic values? Across the university sector we need to reward people for open publishing.

(2) Issues that arise if you start to get the participatory culture going?

Problems that arise when you use the networks that have been built automatically, is that it is very hard to “probe the node” and know what is in the network. But does the human need to know or can we leave this to the machine? Do we need to know the knowledge? And at what level?


Questions/comments

[John: we need to lower the cost of failure to increase the rate of innovation (i.e. in the context of start-ups)]

(1) Richard Jefferson: the power of the guild is building value, trust and quality control and we shouldn’t erode that

John (response): we don’t need to get rid of guild completely, but we need to build another layer where we can build on the knowledge of everyone – but we can still have trademarks etc to control quality

Mary (response): I’ve always wondered why we don’t use the internet more for structured, controlled discussion about things – there is no reason why we couldn’t and that would also help control quality – by generating discussion

(2) Roger Clarke – referring to the “tacit knowledge problem” seems to assume that the way the human mind works can be reduced to a computer-based system and the problem is that the mind does have a generic model that we can all grasp but we just haven’t transferred it over to the computer yet. But everyone thinks differently.

John (response): I don’t think we can actually encode how the mind works, but we need to make information available. That is the importance of openness – you need to be able to read, criticize and comment on what I put up, and that is how we see the reflection of the many different minds at work. Getting it into the computer means we can start accessing that information and competing on it using our brains rather than competing on our access to computers.

Update: conferences

This is just a reminder of the upcoming conferences at which I will be presenting:

Open Access and Research Conference

hosted by the OAK Law Project and QUT Faculty of Law, at the Stamford Plaza Hotel, Brisbane, Queensland, 24-26 September 2008

I am leading a workshop, with Scott Kiel-Chisholm and Anthony Austin, on Friday 26 September, 9:00am - 12:00pm, entitled, "Practical steps for handling copyright, IP and other legal issues.

Register here


eResearch Australasia 2008

Sebel and Citigate Hotels, Albert Park, Melbourne, Australia, 29 September - 3 October 2008

I am presenting in a workshop on Friday 3 October, entitled, e-Research in the Arts, Humanities and Cultural Heritage. My presentation will be on "Academic Authors, Publishing and Open Access in an e-Research Environment".

Register here

APSR Workshop – The Data Management Plan: Putting Policy into Practice

On Friday 8 August 2008, I attended the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) Workshop, “The Data Management Plan: Putting Policy into Practice” at the University of Melbourne.

Professor Anne Fitzgerald, with whom I work at QUT, gave an excellent and very well received presentation on the legal issues surrounding data management. Her slides can be viewed here.


Here are my notes from the workshop (made roughly during the day):


Data management plans: from idea to reality (10:15am – 10:45am)

Dr Markus Buchhorn (ANU) for Karen Visser

• We need enduring systems that outlive projects and programs
• Individuals are human – seven deadly fears:

1. fear of missed “nuggets” in their data – milk it for everything, for ever and veer
2. fear of missed errors
3. fear of unknown custodians/stewards
4. fear inappropriate leaks (privacy/ethics) – can ruin trust relationships with others
5. fear the cost of effort
6. fear lack of recognition
7. fear trusting someone else's data

Plan ahead – help researchers to help themselves as far as possible
Build relationships of trust with researchers – engage with researchers as early as possible


Mark Euston (ANU – Information Literacy Program)

• tasked with developing a training course, workshop and online, for early to mid career researchers, on Data Management Plans (DMP)
• Objectives of the course -

1. what is Data Management (DM)?
2. benefits and requirements
3. raising awareness of DM services
4. DMP

• Manual based on Guidance on Data Management (UK) and Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving
• get researchers in by stressing how they can work with their data more effectively and efficiently

What's happening at... (11:10am – 12:30pm)

Belinda Weaver (UQ)

Issues for the data survey:

• no 'joined up' services
• no help
• inequity – not fair – nothing works etc.
• costs
• lack of training (people felt insecure about what they were doing)
• uncertainty
• no incentive, no rewards

Recommendations from focus group:

• standardised DM template for funding applications
• legal advice centralised and accessible
• service focused support teams for research projects – specific to the discipline
• survey of all existing data
• central data storage system
• develop a clear UQ data management policy
• templates

Central management of research data - issues:

• trust
• data integrity
• accidental disclosure
• control
• sharing
• re-use (want to know what use has been made of their data – auditing – and if they give data to a person for a particular purpose, they want to know if the person doesn't end up using the data or not using it for the particular purpose)
• the long term

Wish-lists:

• clear policy and guidelines
• account manager
• specialists on teams (want to know who to go to for advice)
• career path?
• rewards
• templates for everything
• funding to do it properly
• advice and consultancy
• institutional support
• tools (but they want to be told only when they want to be told, and be told how they want to be told)

presentations from workshop available at: http://www.library.uq.edu.au/escholarship/orca.html
UQ developing a expert curation advice service


Lyle Winton (Uni of Melbourne)

• Uni of Melbourne have a research DMP template
• looking at training for undergrad students
• looking at how to keep this up to date
• possible data management registries
• from 500 charges of research misconduct, 40% could have been avoided by good data management

http://www.esrc.unimelb.edu.ay/dmp/references.html


Suzanne Clarke (Monash)

• Monash has a Data Management Committee
• Research Data Management Toolkit for librarians so they know what to talk about to researchers
• Identified needs: more education required for researchers on statutory requirements for data, IP and the ownership of research data

Gillian Elliot (University of Otago – NZ)

• As far as she is aware, NZ has no policies surrounding data management
• so NZ in quite a different position to Australia
• Survey in 2007 - researchers in NZ had a lot of data and a lot of stuff loosely stuck together that were unpublished and hard to classify – need help with data management
• data management and copyright concerned researchers – 48% of survey respondents
• Atlas of Living Australia; Convention on Biological Diversity; Department of Conservation and Land Information New Zealand; Land Care NZ; National Vegetation Survey Databank

Dr Ashley Buckle (TARDIS – Monash University)

• TARDIS is a multi-institutional collaborative venture that aims to facilitate the arching and sharing of raw X-ray diffraction images
• Protein Data Bank – growing exponentially – too much data?
• Benefits to making raw data available – experiment reproducability/validation

Discussion Groups: Group 2 – Processes for Data Management Planning (1:15pm-2:45pm)

How do we make DM part of the usual research practice?

How can we make raw data count as a citation? - for funding etc. - this is very important, if there is greater recognition of the value data in itself as a citable object then researchers will be more willing to manage their data properly.

Ashley Buckle – we need “data journals” - essentially the same as a database but greater recognition

DM needs to give you a reward at the end that is at the same level as rewards from publication

Better tools – build the researchers tools that are so good that they do not actually realise that they are managing their data.


Reporting back to main group and discussion (2:45pm-4:00pm)

1. Roles, rights and responsibilities

• Anne Fitzgerald's domains of responsibility
• Policy plus principles
• disseminate research data as widely as possible
• develop practical toolkits
• risk management for universities
• simple for universities to completing
• ongoing legal and policy advice
• insert data management requirements into research proposals and grants
• get recognition via NHMRC, ARC and ERA to provide regulatory and reward structure
• need for national centre for legal policy and advice in regard to the data lifecycle including reuse
• universities to incorporate data management into risk management strategies
• provide pragmatic family of licences/responsibility statements (like CC) to identify roles and policies
• DMPs to be built into research project formulation and management

2. Processes for data management planningbetter tools and incentives: build better workflows

• allowing data management in their modelling: harness tools onto repositories
• citation: make sure that citation of datasets happens and is rewarded, as incentive for researchers to create good data
• persuade ARC to make explicit expression of intent in ERA eventually to credit data citation (at least down the road). This as formal submission from this workshop
• infrastructure: development of a COHERENT NATIONAL NETWORK of repositories, emphasis on discipline specific repositories (though institutionally supported) as a centre for research activity

3. Making it work

• know what you don't know
• each institution needs to:

1. identify the needs of its researchers (possible role for ANDS here)
2. map the available services (needs to happen locally)
3. strategically target the gaps
4. identify candidate services to drop to fund this

• Make it easy
• provide a visible point of contact for the users
• not necessarily through one channel only
• not necessarily a one size fits all solution
• embed regular formal training in how to use services
• needs to be as easy to use as “MyFlickBook”
• outreach, marketing, publicity
• Start small and scale

1. seed the service and gradual expand it as understanding grows
2. start with young researchers and use peer group pressure over tie
3. get good examples going first to generate some quick wins
4. use growth in tandem with policy

• Reward innovators in shared services

1. provide annual performance incentives for going beyond meeting strategic goals
2. encourage shared services staff to learn new skills
3. create new job descriptions for new people in management

Notable presentations at the CCI Conference

Graham Vickery from the OECD presented on the Participative Web.

He described the participative web in the following terms -

New web services, readily available software and high speed broadband enable:

• development and customisation of content
• commercial and non-commercial use of the “collective intelligence” of internet users
• users contribute to developing, rating, collaborating and distributing Internet content and interacting with other

He spoke about the new business models that are emerging in response to the participative web. He identified five basic business models:

1. voluntary contributions/giving away
2. charging viewers for user created content (UCC) services – pay per item or subscriptions (including bundling)
3. advertising-based
4. licensing to third parties
5. selling other goods and services online

The question for the future (and the present!) will be: how do we remunerate creators? By revenue sharing or content payment or...?


Jessica Coates from Creative Commons Australia (Ccau) spoke about issues surrounding how “commercial” and “non commercial” are defined in relation to Creative Commons licences.


Oli Wilson from the New Zealand band, Knives at Noon gave an enlightening presentation about how his band used Creative Commons licences to distribute their music and gain notoriety. You can read more about this or view a video of Knives at Noon speaking about their use of Creative Commons on NZ TV here.


Professor Brian Fitzgerald from QUT Law Faculty gave a comprehensive overview of the many legal issues still inherent in the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) and areas of copyright law that are sorely in need of consideration, including:

• authorisation of copyright infringement by ISPs etc;
• wider exceptions to copyright infringement, include for transformative use;
• the application of fair dealing exceptions to the online environment;
• orphan works;
• the overlap of copyright law with other areas of the law, such as designs;
• TPMs, circumvention devices and region-locking;
• [And a bunch of others which I wrote down and then lost, and I can't for the life of me remember now. ..If I do, I will amend this post].

[Any or all of these topics would be excellent for a Masters or PhD thesis].

Professor Fitzgerald suggested four fundamental reforms that would go a long way to making Australia a leader in copyright and innovation policy, being the introduction of clear rights to:

• reuse copyright material for non-commercial purposes in circumstances where there is no financial detriment to the copyright owner;
• engage in transformative and fair uses, including the right to communicate derivative works;
• reuse Crown copyright material for non-commercial purposes; and
• undertake format shifting in consistent circumstances for all copyright materials.

Nic Suzor from QUT Law Faculty had a very interesting presentation about the enforceability of EULAs and Terms of Use purporting to regulate virtual communities. Nic has written extensively about this topic on his blog.


Professor Christoph Antons, a Professor of Compartive Law and Director of the Centre for Comparative Law and Development Studies in Asia and the Pacific (CLDSAP) spoke about the internet and freedom of expression in Asia. His talk focused on a number of cases involving YouTube in countries including Thailand, India, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia. In these countries, it can be a crime to insult the King, the State, the national religion, or other traditional figures or leaders. As Professor Antons explains, videos screened over YouTube can be potentially more powerful tools for insulting than text messages, and messages conveyed via videos are immediate and reach a wider international audience. The conflict between internet tools such as YouTube and laws that forbid insulting – especially where the laws are phrased so that “insulting” is a subjective test [a huge concern!] - can be immense.


Ben Atkinson, a Research Fellow in the QUT Law Faculty and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Innovation, looked at the evolution of intellectual property law by reference to the revolutions involving real property, such as the French Revolution. Ben has just released a book entitled, The True History of Copyright: The Australian Experience 1905-2005, which can be purchased from the Sydney University Press website here.

CCI Conference: Overview

I thoroughly enjoyed the CCI conference. I thought it was well done and involved many incredible people from a wide range of disciplines, including law, journalism, creative industries (creative writing and literature, music, and the arts), education, cultural science and the humanities.

The conference structure consisted of a number of plenary sessions to the whole audience, and then a number of concurrent sessions broken down by “streams”. I was in the law stream (legal issues for social networks and creating public value) the entire time and while it was certainly very interesting, I was a little disappointed that I missed some of the sessions on citizen journalism, creative industry development agendas, broadband innovations and the creative economy, and creative capital and workforce futures that were running in the other streams. It would have been nice to mix things up a bit and truly have everyone intermingling.

The conference kicked off with a plenary from Baroness Susan Greenfield CBE, a renowned neuroscientist from the UK. The Baroness spoke about the impact of environment over genetic disposition and considered whether children today might hold shorter attention spans because of the influence of digital technologies such as videos and games in their lives - a theory that was somewhat provoking to the largely tech-centric crowd (particularly the educators). However, the talk set a good tone for the rest of the conference – a point made by Henry Jenkins – that all opinions could be voiced here, no matter how controversial. The conference ended with an audience feedback session which further cemented the ideals of openness that had been prevalent throughout the conference.

Overall, an excellent experience.

My Conference Presentation: CCI Conference

At the CCI Conference, Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons, on Thursday 26th June, I presented a paper entitled, Promoting Open Access to Knowledge in a Web 2.0 World.

You can access the abstract of my paper here and my slideshow presentation here.

The subject of my paper was the new publication just released by the OAK Law Project (and authored by me), Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors. The guide is available on the OAK Law Project website, the OAKList website, or here.

I did take notes at both the CCI conference and the Creative Commons conference on Tuesday 24th June, which I intend to blog as soon as I have a spare moment. Things have been busy!

Upcoming Conferences

I will be attending all of these conferences in Brisbane in June and the coming months. They will be interesting and worthwhile experiences, and I encourage you to attend.

Building an Australasian Commons

Creative Commons Australia (Ccau) is hosting the conference, “Building an Australasian Commons” at the State Library of Queensland on 24 June 2008.

From the website:

The event provides an opportunity for those interested in the free internet to come together to exchange ideas, information and inspiration. It brings together experts from Australasia to discuss the latest developments and implementations of Creative Commons in the region. It aims to be an open forum where anyone can voice their thoughts on issues relating to furthering the commons worldwide.

The conference will be followed at 5:30pm by the second Australian ccSalon, which will showcase local talent.

The conference and ccSalon are free, but registration is required.


Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) will be hosting the “Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons” conference from Wednesday 25th to Friday 27th June 2008 at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, South Bank.

From the website:

This conference showcases some of the CCI's own research projects, and features papers from academic, business, creative or public policy specialists on many aspects of value-creation in the context of creative industries and innovation.

I will presenting a paper at this conference, entitled, “Promoting Open Access to Research in a Web 2.0 World”.

Rates apply. For more information and to register, visit the CCI website.


Open Access and Research Conference

The OAK Law project (for which I work) is hosting the international “Open Access and Research Conference” on Wednesday 24th to Thursday 25th September 2008 at Stamford Plaza, Brisbane. Post-Conference Workshops will be held on Friday 26th September at Stamford Plaza.

Keynote speakers and distinguished commentators include:

• John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons
• Alma Swan, Founder of Key Perspectives: Consultants to the scholarly information industry
• Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President of the External Research Division of Microsoft Research
• Dr Terry Cutler, Principal, Cutler & Company
• Professor Mary O’Kane, Director and Executive Chairman of Mary O’Kane & Associates Pty Ltd
• Dr Peter Crossman, Assistant Under Treasurer (OESR) and Government Statistician
• Stevan Harnad, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
• Dr Richard Jefferson, CEO & Founder, CAMBIA and the BiOS Initiative
• Professor Tom Cochrane, DVC QUT Division of Technology, Information and Learning Support
• Professor Brian Fitzgerald, OAK Law Project and QUT Law Faculty
• Dr Rhys Francis, Executive Director, Australian eResearch Infrastructure Council
• Maarten Wilbers, Deputy Legal Counsel, CERN Legal Services

To register or for more information, including the conference program, visit the Official Website.