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April 2017
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Initiative for Open Citations Takes Alternative Approach To Freeing Up Knowledge

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We've just written about widespread frustration at the slow pace of the shift to open access publishing of academic papers, and about how some major funding organizations are trying to address that. Open access aims to make entire publications publicly available, and that is meeting considerable resistance from traditional publishers who derive their healthy profits from charging for subscriptions. Rather than continue to tackle publishers head-on, an interesting new project seeks instead to liberate only a particular part of each article, albeit an important one. The new Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) seeks to promote the unrestricted availability of the list of citations that form a key part of most academic articles:

Citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an explanation for how we know facts. They allow us to attribute and credit scientific contributions, and they enable the evaluation of research and its impacts. In sum, citations are the most important vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge.As the number of scholarly publications is estimated to double every nine years, citations -- and the computational systems that track them -- enable researchers and the public to keep abreast of significant developments in any given field. For this to be possible, it is essential to have unrestricted access to bibliographic and citation data in machine-readable form.The present scholarly communication system inadequately exposes the knowledge networks that already exist within our literature. Citation data are not usually freely available to access, they are often subject to inconsistent, hard-to-parse licenses, and they are usually not machine-readable.
The I4OC aims to address those problems by encouraging all publishers, whether open access or otherwise, to provide the data on citations found in their journals in a form that is structured, separable, and open. "Structured" here means that it is held in a common data form that is machine readable. "Separable" refers to the fact that even for non-open access materials, the citation data is nonetheless freely available. And "open" means that it is released as raw facts, and thus without a license, or uses a CC0 public domain dedication that makes it quite clear that the citation data can be used for any purpose without needing permission.As the I4OC home page explains, a key benefit from this new approach is increased discoverability of published articles, since even if they are not freely available, their citation data will be out in the open. Another is citation data can be analyzed in new and complex ways thanks to its machine-readable nature. Finally, it may be possible to create new services and even new businesses based around the new data resource.All of that is highly welcome, but the fact that a separate initiative was required to make it happen underlines that fact that too much of humanity's knowledge remains locked up behind paywalls, where its full potential is hard to realize. The correct solution to that is not making one element available, but liberating the full texts as open access. And that means real open access, not the subverted kind that Richard Poynder analyzed in his compelling and troubling post "Copyright: the immoveable barrier that open access advocates underestimated".Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+s

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posted at: 12:00am on 14-Apr-2017
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Trademark Bullying Works: Mooselick Brewing Co. Becomes Granite Roots Brewing Out Of Fear Of Moosehead Breweries

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I will occasionally get a common question when discussing stories about trademark bullies: why do these bullies actually do this? The easy answer is, of course, because it works. And it works on many levels. For example, the primary targets in actual lawsuits can be bullied out of using names and terms for their businesses or brands, so it works on that level. But that's really just the tip of the iceberg. Where being a trademark bully really works is when it makes lawsuits unnecessary, because other businesses and people are so fearful of the bully tactic.To see that in practice, one need only look at the brewery formerly named Mooselick Brewing Co., which is now rebranding itself as Granite Roots Brewing without putting up a fight against, you guessed it, Moosehead Breweries.

Mooselick started selling beer in July 2015 and opened its tap room on Route 12 in Troy soon after with a name that honored their local heritage.“We thought it was fun, interesting and it kind of paid homage to the moose,” Oliver Levick said Monday. “We thought it was one of the coolest of animals in New Hampshire, and that we could have fun and play with and have some moose themes.”
It wasn't long before the lawyers for Moosehead Breweries came calling. Levick mentions in the article that he was shocked that trademarks could be so broad as to cover everything using anything moose-related in the alcohol industry. It's a notion familiar to many, with the mind naturally recoiling at the idea that so broad a thing could be locked up by a singular player for a massive marketplace. The actual test for trademark, as you will know, is whether there is potential for confusion by consumers. As with many of the legal threats levied by Moosehead Breweries, that seems as though it would have been unlikely in this case.Except we'll never see that question adjudicated in court, because Mooselick chose to take on the substantial costs for rebranding itself instead.
“We didn’t have the resources for a long, drawn-out legal battle,” Levick said. So the owners notified Moosehead of a transition plan and worked on creating a new name and image for the brewery.Levick and his friends Iodice and LoDulce had all grown up in New Hampshire and wanted to pay tribute to their roots and the brewery’s commitment to the state.
The warning shot by Moosehead Breweries was all it needed to fire -- so entrenched is its reputation for trademark bullying and its willingness to engage in costly lawsuits. Startups understandably do the math on whether fighting the fight is more costly than simply rebranding. It's unfortunate that what was once a consumer-protection mechanism has devolved into this kind of sanctioned bullying.

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