As speed geeking is, well, geeky, we should consult the ultimate web geek source Wikipedia for a definition:

A large room is selected as the speed geeking venue. All the presenters are arranged in a large circle along the edge of the room. The remaining members of the audience stand at the center of the room. Ideally there are about 6-7 audience members for each presenter. One person acts as the facilitator.

The facilitator rings a bell to start proceedings. Once proceedings start, the audience splits up into groups and each group goes to one of the presenters. Presenters have a short duration, usually 5 minutes, to give their presentation and answer questions. At the end of the five minutes, the facilitator rings a bell. At this point, each group moves over to the presenter to their right and the timer starts once more. The session ends when every group has attended all the presentations.

One of the presentations that I would like to see — either at a speed geek for open access to law or for another event — is someone describing Open Journal Systems. OJS is an open source software platform for journals created and maintained by the Public Knowledge Project.

It isn’t just a website for your journal:

OJS Features

1. OJS is installed locally and locally controlled.
2. Editors configure requirements, sections, review process, etc.
3. Online submission and management of all content.
4. Subscription module with delayed open access options.
5. Comprehensive indexing of content part of global system.
6. Reading Tools for content, based on field and editors’ choice.
7. Email notification and commenting ability for readers.
8. Complete context-sensitive online Help support.

This is the kind of think that can greatly improve open access to law in the UK. There are many open access law journals that use home grown software and spend time reinventing the wheel. This kind of effort can be saved and spent where it matters — high quality content available under an open access policy.

I’d also like to see speed geek booths on:

• Open content licensing — making sure that the journal doesn’t maintain restrictive copyright policies.
• User reps — people from outwith the legal profession and the academe that want access to law articles.
• Open access — someone to discuss the benefits of open access policies.
• Roll your own open access — someone discussing self archiving and sites like SSRN.
• Successful open access journals — success stories from current open access UK law journals.

I’m sure that you can think of some others. Interested? Leave a comment or contact me.

Knowledge Politics Quarterly

The journal describes itself as:

Knowledge Politics Quarterly (KPQ) is an academic journal produced by the think-tank Knowledge Politics. It is edited by Craig Berry (Department of Politics, University of Sheffield). KPQ publishes original articles by established scholars, graduate students and non-academic practitioners. The topics covered by KPQ include the media, the internet, broadcasting, technological development, the social, political and economic implications of ICTs – in terms of theory, policy or practice

They accept “anything ranging from 3000-word ‘opinion’ pieces and 10,000-word+ empirically-based articles” with 8000 words generally recommended.

Though it doesn’t appear that they have a journal policy on publishing under an open content licence, their copyright policy does allow for its use:

Authors retain all copyrights at all times, and as such are free to publish their articles in other fora. KPQ also accommodates the use of ‘Creative Commons’ licenses.

The one article I downloaded (see below) Fred Flagg, “The Academic Library and the Commons” (no mention of Creative Commons or copyright issues) merely had the (c) symbol and no use of an open content licence. Thus readers can only expect to exercise their fair dealing rights and whatever rights may be implied by being in a webjournal.

Based on their first issue, they appear to only offer the articles as PDF files and not as webpages, which is a little curious because this makes the journal that much less accessible to its readers (and to search engines).

The first issue (October 2007) contains:

_____

Editorial

Notes on contributors

ARTICLES:

Robert Hassan PhD
Temporalized Democracy and a Future Politics

Laura Kyrke-Smith
Information Intervention and the Case of Kosovo: Realising the Responsibility to Protect

Claudia Magallanes-Blanco PhD and Leandro Rodriguez Medina
A Feminist-Dialogical Analysis of Independent Video-Makers on the Indigenous Zapatista Rebellion

Alberto Masetti-Zannini
Web 2.0 and International Development NGOs

OPINION:

Fred Flagg
The Academic Library and the Commons

BOOK REVIEW:

Laura White
Information and Communication Technologies for Development and Poverty Reduction edited by Maximo Torero and Joachim von Braun (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006)

OwnTerms is designed as a repository for “boilerplate” legal documents: those that every web site, startup, or entrepreneur needs but doesn’t want to draft in a lawyer for.

All the documents on OwnTerms are licensed under a Creative Commons license, enabling anyone to take them and edit them for their own use provided certain conditions are met.

A privacy policy that I drafted for the Personality Rights Database and then later adapted to my WordPress blog websites (twitchgamer and opencontentlawyer) is now up as Privacy Policy2 and is available here.

The policy is in the public domain, but if you’d like the comfort of a CC licence, then please use the CC-BY Scotland licence.

All of this is of course with the usual caveat — I am actually a lawyer but I’m not YOUR lawyer. This form is not legal advice.

Thoughts on drafting an open data licence

Kevin Anderson has a post that recaps some of the morning’s sessions.

One of the areas that I will be posting on in the next couple of weeks is open data. My latest project is to re-draft an existing open data licence into a format for worldwide use, much in the same vein of Creative Commons.

If you have an interest in open data, please contact me. More details to follow.

Smithsonian copyright revisited: “

Back in May 2007, there was a sudden spike in interest around the ‘outing’ of over 6,000 images from Smithsonian Images by a body calling itself public.resource.org. Essentially, they consider the images to be largely public domain, and therefore did something about it, scraping them from the Smithsonian Images site, embedding some metadata and then uploading the lot to Flickr. Read more about what and how here.

The posting of public domain images on Flickr is something I’ve been discussing here at twitchgamer and hope to develop into a formal post over at opencontentlawyer sometime soon.

See:

Flickr and copyright of public domain works

Flickr, public domain, and copyright