For those of you who are interested in following what happens at the 2010 American Society for Environmental History Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon this week, you can follow the Twitter hashtag #aseh2010. If you're at the conference and you're using Twitter, be sure to use this hashtag.

COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain, recently produced The Public Domain Manifesto, an omnibus statement on the importance of the public domain for cultural production and community knowledge. Read more about it and its significance for Canadian history here.

Now that the much-hyped Apple iPad has been revealed, will it have any use for historians? Read more here.

The Library and Archives of Canada is working on digitizing its collection and it wants to hear from historical researchers. Read more here.

What will be the effect of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement on historical knowledge mobilization? The summer copyright consultations are over and the Canadian government is now negotiating a new intellectual property rights treaty. Read the full story here.

Read more about these issues on the Notes on Knowledge Mobilization blog.

As environmental historians, we do a lot of reading and writing. Readers of this blog (and many other scholars) are beginning to do more of their reading in a digital format. If we consider how much digital reading we do each day, including websites and email, it is obvious that this new medium of writing has become a significant component of academic work.

The development of mass market consumer digital reading devices, including the iPhone, Kindle, and Nook will have implications for how scholars read and write. The Digital Campus podcast has been covering this subject a lot lately and CNET's Reporters' Roundtable recently discussed the growth of digital reading. Have a listen to find out more about the strengths and limitations of these digital technologies for knowledge mobilization.

Reporters' Roundtable 8: Future of the book

Digital Campus Episode 46: Theremin Dreams

This past week(October 19-22, 2009), the University of British Columbia Library hosted three days of events at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre for the First International Open Access Week. The events were designed to raise awareness about the open access movement around the world, highlight the ways in which the UBC Library is working to make its repositories open, and explore open access journal publication.

The open access movement is certainly gaining momentum and events like this one show the extent to which university libraries are natural allies for scholars interested in opening knowledge to the world. For those who were unable to attend the events in Vancouver, you can watch a slidecast of John Wilbanks' presentation.

Also, Vancouver is hosting the E-Learn 2009 World Conference next week. This will be yet another forum for the discussion of open access education. You can watch Richard Baranuik's presentation "Open Access Education -Building Communities and Sharing Knowledge" from last year.

Should publicly-funded Canadian university libraries charge fees for use? Should graduate students from other Canadian universities have to pay those fees? These are the questions being raised by graduate students at York University in Toronto, Ontario who face a proposed new fee to use the library resources at the University of Toronto.

Being a former York graduate student myself, I understand exactly how important it is to have access to the rich collection of resources at the University of Toronto. York's own library system, by comparison, is inadequate to support the university's large and growing graduate programs and relies on the University of Toronto to subsidize this deficit. This is part of the reason why you find so many York grad students browsing the stacks of Robarts Library.

York graduate students have circulated a petition against the proposed $200 annual fee and they have got their message out in the Toronto Star this week. However, neither the petition nor the article address the matter of greater public access to university libraries in Canada. If graduate students from York are entitled to access other publicly-funded university libraries, shouldn't the public at-large have greater access to those same resources?

This is an issue that came up in discussions at the Public Knowledge Project conference over the summer and one that should be raised in this current debate over the University of Toronto library system. The proposed fees for graduate students from York are not unlike those levied against community borrowers. They stand as a barrier for Canadians outside of academia with an interest in accessing the wealth of scholarship held within the walls of places like Robarts Library. We should strive to find more ways to properly fund our university libraries while we remove such barriers to their collections.

I meant to write about this earlier in the summer, but there is still time. Industry Minister Tony Clement and Heritage Minister James Moore launched a public consultation process on copyright policy on July 20th. Following the government's failed efforts to quietly revise Canadian copyright law last year through Bill C-61, Clement and Moore have opened up a broad public consultation process.

The Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences has put out a call to all scholarly researchers to take part in the online consultation process. Changes to copyright law have the potential to greatly improve or harm research and teaching at Canadian universities. If you've ever shown a video in your class, used an image in a lecture slide, or created a custom course reader, you have a very large stake in copyright law in this country.

To learn more about the consultation process and the state of Canadian copyright law, I encourage you to read through Professor Michael Geist's (University of Ottawa) website, speakoutoncopyright.ca.

Visit the government's copyright consultation page to voice your concerns and keep up with the debate.

And continue to check back on the Notes on Knowledge Mobilisation page for a continued discussion about copyright and other issues surrounding the mobilisation of research in the environmental history community in Canada.

Last week John Willinsky delivered an excellent opening keynote address for the 2009 Public Knowledge Project conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. PKP has archived a number of the main talks from the conference here. Willinsky constructs a unique argument for open access in scholarly publishing in his opening remarks.

Watch the full video of Professor Willinsky's keynote and check out some of Sean Kheraj's conference notes at http://seankheraj.wordpress.com

The Public Knowledge Project Conference begins tomorrow night at SFU's Harbour Centre campus in Vancouver, British Columbia. According to the organizers, the conference will explore "innovative work in scholarly publishing, with a focus on the contribution that open source publishing technologies can make to improving access to research and scholarship on a global and public scale." It should be a fascinating three days that you can follow on Sean Kheraj's blog this week at http://seankheraj.wordpress.com. A full report and analysis of the conference will be posted on this page soon.

Should Canadian and environmental historians publish like this? The Open Humanities Press, an international open-access publishing collective, has been publishing and supporting online peer-reviewed scholarly journals on contemporary critical thought since at least 2006. OHP is committed to providing the same rigorous peer-review process and high-quality scholarship of traditional subscription-based or "gated" journals.

As scholarly publishing changes with the high-cost of print publications and the global reach of digital distribution, Canadian and environmental historians need to take a closer look at the merits and drawbacks of this model of scholarly publishing.

Read more about OHP here:

Jöttkandt, Sigi. 'Free Libre Scholarship: The Open Humanities Press'

Hall, Gary. 'The Impact of the Humanities: or, What's Next for Open Access'

Novelist, blogger, and technology activist, Cory Doctorow, posted a video of some of his thoughts on the importance of an open-access approach to scholarship and education. He recorded this video for the European Union's International Symposium on Helping Educational Leaders Use New Tools. Doctorow lays out some of his main arguments and ideas on the value of using Creative Commons in education because, as he says, "the educational system exists to educate students, not to subsidize publishers.".

Is it time for more historians to re-think scholarly publishing? In what ways can an open-access and an open-source approach to publishing enhance knowledge mobilisation? This ongoing project of NiCHE Digital Infrastructure will explore these questions by collecting content links, resources, thoughts, and reflections on the subjects of copyright, the open-access movement, and scholarly publishing.

As this project begins to find its shape, we'll start by offering a handful of sources to introduce readers to key texts on these subjects. Take a look and check back soon as we continue to develop this exciting new project.

For regular updates you can also follow: http://seankheraj.wordpress.com

Posted by William J. Turkel

One of NiCHE's foundational ideas is a commitment to open access, open content and open source. We believe that the value of this approach has been amply demonstrated in traditional scholarly research. By giving away 'intellectual property' we stand the best chance of building a strong community and making our work relevant to the largest number of people.
We don't know what kinds of roles a strategic knowledge cluster can play in such a process. In part, NiCHE can be seen as one experiment to clarify some of the ways of that knowledge can be mobilised amongst members of a network. Recent research at the University of Tokyo sheds some light on the process. Akio Iwagami and Naoki Masuda showed that altruism spreads successfully through a heterogenous network, and furthermore, that people who are linked to many others (known as "hubs") tend to benefit more. You can read a summary of their research here. The paper is "Upstream Reciprocity in Heterogenous Networks" (25 May 2009) at arXiv.org.

As this project continues, we'll keep an ongoing bibliography for readers to follow. If you have any additional readings to suggest, please contact us at sean.kheraj@ubc.ca.

Copyright:

Boyle, James. The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008

Doctorow, Cory. Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. San Francisco: Tachyon, 2008.

Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. New York: Penguin, 2004.

Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Open-Access / Open-Source [General]:

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Stallman, Richard M. “The Free Software Definition,” (2004).

Peter Suber, ed. Open Access News

Unsworth, John M. “The Next Wave: Liberation Technology,” Chronicle of Higher Education 50, no. 21 (30 Jan 2004).

Weber, Steven. The Success of Open Source. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Scholarly Publishing:

Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig. "Owning the Past,” Digital History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005.

Cohen, Daniel J., Michael Frisch, Patrick Gallagher, Steven Mintz, Kirsten Sword, Amy Murrell Taylor, William G. Thomas III, and William J. Turkel. "Interchange: The Promise of Digital History," Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (Sep 2008).

Dougherty, Peter J. “A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing” The Chronicle Review 55 (39) June 2009: B10.

Hall, Gary. 'The Impact of the Humanities: or, What's Next for Open Access'

Jöttkandt, Sigi. 'Free Libre Scholarship: The Open Humanities Press'

Rosenzweig, Roy. “The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web,” Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (Sep 2001): 548-579.

Rosenzweig, Roy. “Should Historical Scholarship Be Free?” Perspectives on History 43 (4) April 2005.

Rosenzweig, Roy. “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (Jun 2006): 117-146.

Willinsky, John. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Willinsky, John. “Copyright Contradictions in Scholarly Publishing” First Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal of the Internet 7 (11) November 2002.