From: Heather Morrison <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 1 Jan 2014 21:48:35 +0000

The December 2013 Dramatic Growth of Open Access is now available:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2014/01/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-december.html

This is the first open source edition. Data files are available in
non-proprietary formats and licensing has been removed and replaced
with some thoughts on attribution, repeated here to encourage
discussion. Note that these comments are about data in spreadsheet
format, not articles or the blog commentary.

To attribute or not to attribute?

If you are using the data for scholarly purposes, you should cite your
source. This is not a copyright issue, it's a question of appropriate
scholarly practice. Using these data in a scholarly without citing the
source would constitute plagiarism, a serious offense in academia
which can cost students their degrees and scholars their jobs. Aside
from the question of plagiarism, when writing scholarly works you
should point to your sources so that readers can look up for the data
themselves. There is no need for copyright! If you are using the data
for the purposes of promoting open access, attribution is welcome and
encouraged, but please use your judgement. If you're using a few
figures on an open access poster or presentation, don't let
attribution take away from the effectiveness of your presentation.

My hope is that this small step will encourage all of us in the open
access movement to move away from our hard critical approaches to move
to a new era of open discussion on the nuances of best practices to
transition to open access.  While I remain firmly opposed to what I
consider the overly simplistic and dangerous perspective equating the
Creative Commons CC-BY license with open access, I see the value of
open sharing of data and would welcome a discussion about how to make
this happen.

Happy 2014!!

--
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
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