Harvard's Arts and Sciences faculty voted unanimously yesterday to make it so that faculty members' scholarly articles will be regularly submitted to an online archive, for all the world to see and make use of. It's a major step forward for academic open access, so huzzah for Harvard -- and school librarian Robert Darnton, who's been pushing for a more transparent and accessible university for a long time. It's not a bad thing to see major universities compete over who can be the most open and do the most good, like we've seen with the standard that MIT set by posting its coursework online.

But there's one point I don't understand, and don't know enough about academic publishing to begin to figure it out. It seems like faculty members will, under this new regime, be required to submit all of their articles to the archive (unless, importantly, they opt-out altogether). The thing is, it seems to me that the moment in the past when a paper/article became a finished creation was when it was readied for publication -- peer-reviewed, edited (I'm guessing). The way things are going to work now, is it now up to the academic herself or himself to decide, "yep, this baby's done and ready for archiving"?

And what if an academic wants to wait and have her or his work go through the 'traditional' review and vetting process before deciding that it's worthy of being saved for posterity? It seems like then he or she has to negotiate the rights to the piece from the journal in question in a way that frees her or his hand to go open access with it once it's published. And that would seem to involve a concession from the journal, which may not be too inclined to make it.

As the global face to the Creative Commons, iCommons is the group responsible for spreading the ideas of Creative Commons -- "open content, access to knowledge, open access publishing and free culture" -- around the world and doing it as a united movement. How we create and handle content internationally is perhaps even more interesting an experiment than how we do it here in the U.S., and so I was very happy to get the chance today to contribute a post to the iCommons blog. While, as I should mention, I still wrote on something here in New York City, that's only because I don't know much about the international stuff yet.

A debate over the originality of the design of the Freedom Tower -- that's the memorial to be built in the site of the former World Trade Center -- reached the courts recently, an unusual turn of events because architecture is very much a "remix" art. Designers borrow ideas from each other all the time and are reluctant to take each other to before the law. Here's a snippet from my post:

Shine vs. SOM became the first major case of architectural copyright infringement in U.S. history, in large part because of its high profile - the design of the Freedom Tower was on the cover of New York papers for many months. But cases of architectural copyright don't often make it to the court for another reason. The field itself is built on the idea that new work is built on old work, new ideas remixed from old ones; and architects are reluctant to challenge that prevailing norm. But in this case, the court found that Childs appeared to have gone beyond permissible architectural borrowing. The design of the two proposed buildings were so similar - both featured a twisting diamond-shaped facade unusual in architecture - that the court ruled that the case could proceed to trial. (Judge for yourself.)

Of course I have to say this, but I do think it's an interesting issue. I for one don't think much the collaborative creative process behind how big buildings get built, not nearly as much as I might think how music is created. So it was great fun for me to dig more deeply into this idea of whether theres is an architectural "commons."

Anyway, hope you'll check it out. And thanks of course to iCommons for lending me a bit of their space.

[T]hey discovered that the wiki was also a convenient place to post what they were learning about lab techniques: manipulating DNA, getting cell cultures to grow. "A lot of the how-to gets passed around as lore in biology labs and never makes it into the protocol manuals," says Jason Kelly, a graduate student who now sits on the OpenWetWare steering committee... [W]henever a student or postdoc managed to stumble through a new protocol, he or she would write down what was learned on a wiki page. Others would then add whatever tricks they had gleaned. The information was very useful to the labs' members, notes M.I.T. grad student and steering-committee member Reshma Shetty, but "that information also became available around the world."