Law.Gov : A Proposed Distributed Reposit…

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Law.Gov : A Proposed Distributed Repository of All Primary Legal Materials of the United States :
“Law.Gov is an idea, an idea that the primary legal materials of the United States should be readily available to all, and that governmental institutions should make these materials available in bulk as distributed, authenticated, well-formatted data. To make this idea a reality, a series of workshops were held throughout the country, resulting in a consensus on 10 core principles”
URL : http://resource.org/law.gov/index.html

E-Science and Data Support Services

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The Association of Research Libraries E-Science Working Group developed a survey to “build an understanding of how libraries can contribute to e-science activities in their institution” and “identify organizations and institutions that have similar interests in e-science to leverage research library interests.”

The August 2009 survey gathered 57 responses to the survey from the 123 ARL member libraries in the United States and Canada. Twenty-one respondents report their institution provides infrastructure or support services for e-science, 23 institutions are in the planning stages, and 13 do not provide support for e-science.

After analyzing the survey results, the authors identified a small set of respondents (Purdue University, the University of California, San Diego, Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for interviews to further elaborate their activities.

The resulting six case studies synthesize the interviews with the corresponding institutions’ responses to the survey. The cases further illuminate programs and services mentioned only briefly in the survey and allow some interesting patterns to emerge from interviewees’ reflections on faculty connections, staffing levels, and organizational structure and culture.

This report presents a summary of the survey results and the six cases studies. It also includes a bibliography of related articles, reports, and Web sites, along with the survey instrument and a selection of recent research library position descriptions with significant e-science support components.

URL : http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/escience-report-2010.pdf

Using Competition Law to Promote Access …

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Using Competition Law to Promote Access to Knowledge :
“One of the points of convergence among the many strands of the A2K movement is resistance to the one-size-fits-all ratcheting up of intellectual property provisions around the world. The resistance is grounded in analysis showing that intellectual property rules often create social costs that far outweigh their intended benefits. Much of the A2K movement’s advocacy for limitations of intellectual property rights is located within the field of intellectual property law – promoting the inclusion and use of balancing mechanisms within the laws granting intellectual property rights. But intellectual property rights are also shaped and limited by their interaction with other fields of law, competition law being a prime example. After describing the theoretical and doctrinal underpinnings of a shift of A2K legal advocacy toward the use of completion law, this paper surveys some of the strategic advantages of using competition norms to reframe political debates and shift struggles into new, potentially more hospitable, forums. ”
URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1654023