My talk on copyright, from the University of Manchester’s “Open Knowledge in Higher Education” course
January 5, 2017
Back in February last year, I had the privilege of giving one of the talks in the University of Manchester’s PGCert course “Open Knowledge in Higher Education“. I took the subject “Should science always be open?”
My plan was to give an extended version of a talk I’d given previously at ESOF 2014. But the sessions before mine raised all sorts of issues about copyright, and its effect on scholarly communication and the progress of science, and so I found myself veering off piste. The first eight and a half minutes are as planned; from there, I go off on an extended tangent. Well. See what you think.
The money quote (starting at 12m10s): “What is copyright? It’s a machine for preventing the creation of wealth.”
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
January 5, 2017 at 8:55 pm
I appreciate your sauroponderous outrage.
January 31, 2017 at 10:46 pm
Thank you for the eloquent talk! Although it is obvious that science should be open, making people accept it and act accordingly is a challenge, and talks like yours are much needed.
For an example of the ‘stealing and making better’ dynamic in classical music, see ‘the Seven Last Words of Christ’ by Haydn, as chronicled at the beginning of my blog post:
http://researchpracticesandtools.blogspot.fr/2014/02/the-case-for-emancipating-articles-from.html
(The rest of the post is about trying to imagine how this dynamic could work in the case of scientific articles.)
January 31, 2017 at 10:50 pm
Thanks, Sylvain, I will take a look at that and quite possibly steal it for my next talk on openness!