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The dangers of crown copyright

Published August 26th, 2008 in censorship, freedom of expression, open government | 1 Comment »

This is the title of an interesting post by a colleague, Olivier Charbonneau. He writes about how the Harper government is refusing to make public a report by Health Canada that link Global warming to health problems. The government insists that the document is too big, and thus can only be provided on demand. A physician for Health Canada has therefore decided to make the report freely available for download on his blog. More info here and here.

Charbonneau mentions how in the USA, the government does not retain copyright on its publications, and that they are automatically put into the public domain, making them available immediately, without barriers to access. However true that may be, it does not stop the American government from pressuring scientists to submit reports that are convenient to the government, or have those reports rewritten by government policy makers. The Union of Concerned Scientists set up a webpage documenting political interference in science. Here is one example of how the government interefered with (and played down) a Congressional testimony on the dangers of global warming to public health.

Seems like the Harper government is taking notes.

A Strike to the Heart of Small Press

Published April 24th, 2007 in alternative media, freedom of expression, open government | No Comments »

May we turn from the usual U.S. bad guys (the Federal Communications Commission) and take a look at the Postal Regulatory Commission for a moment? They’re responsible for setting postage rates in the United States and they’re into some bad stuff. In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Katrina Vanden Heuvel says that the secrecy of the Postal Regulatory Commission “makes the FCC look like a Vermont commune.” The PRC actually accepted a rate plan from Time Warner (and rejected the one put forth by the U.S. Postal Service) which is going to favour large magazine publishers over small ones. Timeline information is available here.

Says FreePress:

Under the original plan, all publishers would have a mostly equal increase (approx. 12 percent) in the cost for mailing their publications. The Time Warner plan overturned this level playing field to favor large, ad-heavy magazines like People at the expense of smaller publications like In These Times and The American Spectator. It penalizes thousands of small- to medium-sized outlets with disproportionately higher rates while locking in privileges for bigger companies.

The Nation, for example, would be expected to pay $500 000 more per year in postage fees (according to itself). It all goes into effect July 15 unless, of course, we stop it from happening.

Please help tackle this ridiculousness on the FreePress site. Also, have a read through Robert McChesney’s letter to the masses.

If the plans go through, perhaps we Canadians should start looking for facilities to house all the American publishers moving to this side of the border.

Thanks to DD.

-SIO

Free the hospital records!

Published March 26th, 2007 in advocacy, information commons, open government, other, social justice, social responsibilities | No Comments »

An editorial in the Toronto Star today speaks to lifting secrecy from the medical realm. (To me) this is a call to arms … especially within a publicly funded health care system. (Duh).

Here are some of the highlights:

    1. 23 000+ ppl per year die in Canadian hospitals due to adverse events

    2. access to information is dependent on jurisdiction and the POV of hospital administrators, not the Access to Information Act.

    3. the dismal surgical record of an Ontario surgeon - not available to the public - led to more than a dozen women suffering physical and emotional harm under his care

Link.

Ontario legislators are debating health accountability legislation this week. How about siding with public safety on this one.

This article is the third in a series in the Star about coming clean about medical errors.

Check the first two out here and here.

-PC

Climate Change Petition

Published March 12th, 2007 in Community, advocacy, green libraries, open government, other, social responsibilities | No Comments »

I don’t post every petition I come across on here but this one is from a solid organization and it looks like it has some potential to at least get a legitimate hearing from top decision makers. So why not add your name to support this message?

—
Dear friend,

This Thursday, the environment ministers from the G8, the world’s biggest contributors to climate change, will be meeting in Germany. The outcome of this meeting is crucial to world’s response to global warming.

Avaaz.org has been invited to attend this meeting to present our climate change petition. A strong voice for action could help set the agenda for the G8. To help seize this opportunity, click below:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/climate_action_germany

The G8 is a summit of world leaders from the “Group of 8″ largest economies. Together, these countries account for 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions–the gasses that cause climate change. The full G8 summit is coming in June, but the agenda and outcome of this type of high-profile event is usually set far in advance–at meetings like the one this Thursday.

This year, the president of the G8 is German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, is in charge of the ministers meeting Thursday. And at 4 pm on March 15th, we have a personal meeting with Mr. Gabriel to present our petition for binding emissions targets to stop catastrophic climate change.

Merkel has indicated an interest in making climate change a top priority. With a significant global petition, we can make the case that the world is ready for aggressive leadership on climate change–and pave the way for truly historic commitments at the G8 summit this June.

It’s a rare opportunity to have a global impact. Add your voice to the petition now:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/climate_action_germany

50,000 people from 131 countries have already demanded action. Our goal is to reach 100,000. Please sign the petition, forward this email to friends and family, and post the link on your blog–we only have a few days to make this statement count.

If we add our voices together, now, 2007 can become the year we took the first step to save the world.

With hope,

Ricken, David, Iain, Lee-Sean, Galit, Graziela, and the rest of the Avaaz.org team

Students For Open Access - Int’l Day of Action (Feb 15, 2007)

Published February 6th, 2007 in open access, open government, other | No Comments »

ALLIANCE FOR TAXPAYER ACCESS
www.taxpayeraccess.org
For immediate release
February 1, 2007

Contact(s):

Gavin Baker
Freeculture.org

grbaker@ufl.edu

(407) 929-5657

Jennifer McLennan
SPARC
jennifer@arl.org

(202) 296-2296 ext. 121

Students Rally for Access to Publicly Funded Research

Campuses declare “National Day of Action” in support of federal
legislation

WASHINGTON, DC - February 1, 2007 - Freeculture.org, the
international student movement for free culture, in collaboration
with the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), today announced that
February 15, 2007 will be a “National Day of Action” for students
that support open sharing of scientific and scholarly research
findings on the Internet. Events nationwide will highlight the
importance of taxpayer access to publicly funded research and rally
support for Congressional passage of the Federal Research Public
Access Act. The day also marks the fifth anniversary of the landmark
Budapest Open Access Initiative, when the worldwide open access
movement first took form, and will be supported by the launch of a
new Web resource and petition for public access, produced jointly by
freeculture.org and the ATA.

The Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced last year by
Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) and Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and is
awaiting reintroduction in the 110th Congress. The bill would require
federal agencies that fund over $100 million in annual external
research to make manuscripts of peer-reviewed journal articles
stemming from that research publicly available via the Internet. (For
further information about the legislation, see http://
www.taxpayeraccess.org/frpaa/). It is estimated that approximately
half of the research conducted at universities is government funded.

Freeculture.org and its 36 chapters nationwide joins 72 other members
of the ATA, 132 university and college presidents and provosts, and
thousands of taxpayers, patients, researchers, and librarians that
have voiced support for the legislation.

“Students are researchers, and were among the first groups to
recognize the vast benefits of open access,” said Gavin Baker,
director of freeculture.org’s Open Access project and author of a
University of Florida student senate resolution in support of the
Cornyn-Lieberman public access bill (http://www.sg.ufl.edu/MeetingPDF%
5C155.htm). “Since many of their professors, advisors, and colleagues
have conducted their work with the benefit of federal grants, it
makes sense that this work should be freely circulated and built
upon. Students have coordinated their efforts on a national level to
formalize their strong belief that public access to research is the
way to move forward.”

“Improving access to government-funded research results is critical
to advancing science,” said David Minh, a University of California
San Diego graduate student who serves on the coordinating committee
for Universities Allied for Essential Medicines. “Public access to
research will not only benefit students and researchers in the United
States, but will also empower scientists in the developing world -
who have far fewer resources available to them - to accelerate the
pace of biomedical research, particularly in neglected diseases.”

“Students adding their considerable energy and significant weight to
the momentum behind the issue is yet another sign of the strength and
breadth of support for public access to research results,” said
Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing
and Academic Resources Coalition, founder of the ATA). “We encourage
universities, libraries, researchers, scholarly societies, patient
organizations, and consumer groups to support student researchers in
making the National Day of Action a success.”

Campuses nationwide will be announcing individual events and support
for the National Day of Action in the coming weeks. For more
information, please visit the freeculture.org-Alliance for Taxpayer
Access student resource at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/students/.

###

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is a coalition of patient, academic,
research, and publishing entities that support free public access to
the results of federally funded research and advocate passage of the
Federal Research Public Access Act. The Alliance was formed in 2004
to urge that peer-reviewed articles stemming from taxpayer-funded
research become fully accessible and available online at no extra
cost to the American public. Details on the ATA may be found at
www.taxpayeraccess.org.

SPARC | 21 Dupont Circle NW, Ste. 800 | Washington, DC 20036 |
www.arl.org/sparc

(Via Heather Morrison on the CLA mailing list)

- JH

China Unblocks Wikipedia

Published October 12th, 2006 in censorship, open access, open government, privacy | No Comments »

“China has unblocked Wikipedia. Wikipedia refused to censor itself to appease totalitarian Beijing, but China unblocked it anyway. China needs Wikipedia and Chinese net-users would access it using circumvention tools — the block on Wikipedia made Chinese Wikipedia users into automatic dissidents.

If only Google, Microsoft and Yahoo had the same courage as Wikipedia, the same confidence that their search-engines were valuable enough to be indispensible.” (via Boing Boing)

- JH

Act Now To Keep NSA Case in Public Courts

Published July 17th, 2006 in advocacy, open government | No Comments »

“Cindy Cohn, EFF’s stellar Legal Director, sez, “Senator Specter and the Bush Administration today announced that they have reached a deal to send all of the cases concerning the illegal NSA wiretapping (including EFF’s) to the secret FISA court. This is being spun in the press as a big concession by the Administration but in truth it’s an abomination — the FISA court acts in secret and doesn’t even hear argument from both sides. This bill will likely move fast, so we only have a limited window to try to stop it. Here’s s direct link to EFF’s action center to let you write to the relevant Congressional committees.” (via Boing Boing)

J.

Cyber Book Burning?

Published May 20th, 2006 in censorship, open government, public domain | No Comments »

Is that a good term to describe what happens when the new Canadian Minister of the Environment removes existing documents regarding Global Warming from the government’s offical web site? (via Sask Writers Listserv)

J.

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Bits of news

Published April 26th, 2006 in green libraries, information commons, open access, open government, other | No Comments »

Well, the handover of LibrarianActivist is imminent. A group of really great people have offered to take it over. I will probably talk more about this in the coming week (or simply let them introduce themselves once the handover is done).

In the meantime, here are a couple of small stories that i couldn’t help mention:

Civicaccess.ca: (from dose) a new organization sees the day:

Citizens for Open Access to Civic Information and Data (CivicAccess) is a group of citizens which believes all levels of government should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens. We believe this is necessary to allow citizens to fully participate in the democractic process of an “information society.”

Airplane parts library: Green libraries anyone? Check out this particularly interesting architectural plan, made from Boeing fuselages for a library competition in Mexico! (from boing boing… where else…)

BCLA conference presentations: Some presentations from the BCLA annual conference are up on ELIS.

Access to Knowledge: A conference held at Yale last weekend. Here’s the conference wiki, and the session entitled “The role of libraries for A2K“.

Transparency and Access to Information

Published February 2nd, 2006 in open government | No Comments »

Under the direction of CIPPIC, an Access to Information User Manual has been released. In its press release, CIPPIC writes:

The Manual fills a gap in public education on issues of government accountability and privacy rights

The Manual is intended to guide someone through the process of filling out Access to Information requests both at the Federal and provincial level.

And this, just in time for Justice Gomery’s second report on the sponsorship scandal, entitled “Restoring Accountability“. There is a good section on “Transparency” which states:

Commission supports the need for effective public access to information about the workings of government.

It might be a good idea to print out CIPPIC’s manual and have it on hand as a ready reference?

[source: CLA Information Policy Committee, CIPPIC]

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