Last Tuesday we launched a National Emergency Library—1.4M digitized books available to users without a waitlist—in response to the rolling wave of school and library closures that remain in place to date. We’ve received dozens of messages of thanks from teachers and school librarians, who can now help their students access books while their schools, school libraries, and public libraries are closed.

We’ve been asked why we suspended waitlists. On March 17, the American Library Association Executive Board took the extraordinary step to recommend that the nation’s libraries close in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. In doing so, for the first time in history, the entirety of the nation’s print collection housed in libraries is now unavailable, locked away indefinitely behind closed doors.  

This is a tremendous and historic outage.  According to IMLS FY17 Public Libraries survey (the last fiscal year for which data is publicly available), in FY17 there were more than 716 million physical books in US public libraries.  Using the same data, which shows a 2-3% decline in collection holdings per year, we can estimate that public libraries have approximately 650 million books on their shelves in 2020.  Right now, today, there are 650 million books that tax-paying citizens have paid to access that are sitting on shelves in closed libraries, inaccessible to them. And that’s just in public libraries.

And so, to meet this unprecedented need at a scale never before seen, we suspended waitlists on our lending collection.  As we anticipated, critics including the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have released statements (here and here) condemning the National Emergency Library and the Internet Archive.  Both statements contain falsehoods that are being spread widely online. To counter the misinformation, we are addressing the most egregious points here and have also updated our FAQs.

One of the statements suggests you’ve acquired your books illegally. Is that true?
No. The books in the National Emergency Library have been acquired through purchase or donation, just like a traditional library.  The Internet Archive preserves and digitizes the books it owns and makes those scans available for users to borrow online, normally one at a time.  That borrowing threshold has been suspended through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency.

Is the Internet Archive a library?
Yes.  The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity and is recognized as a library by the government.

What is the legal basis for Internet Archive’s digital lending during normal times?
The concept and practice of controlled digital lending (CDL) has been around for about a decade. It is a lend-like-print system where the library loans out a digital version of a book it owns to one reader at a time, using the same technical protections that publishers use to prevent further redistribution. The legal doctrine underlying this system is fair use, as explained in the Position Statement on Controlled Digital Lending.

Does CDL violate federal law? What about appellate rulings?
No, and many copyright experts agree. CDL relies on a set of careful controls that are designed to mimic the traditional lending model of libraries. To quote from the White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books:

“Our principal legal argument for controlled digital lending is that fair use— an “equitable rule of reason”—permits libraries to do online what they have always done with physical collections under the first sale doctrine: lend books. The first sale doctrine, codified in Section 109 of the Copyright Act, provides that anyone who legally acquires a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display, or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner. This is how libraries loan books.  Additionally, fair use ultimately asks, “whether the copyright law’s goal of promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts would be better served by allowing the use than by preventing it.” In this case we believe it would be. Controlled digital lending as we conceive it is premised on the idea that libraries can embrace their traditional lending role to the digital environment. The system we propose maintains the market balance long-recognized by the courts and Congress as between rightsholders and libraries, and makes it possible for libraries to fulfill their “vital function in society” by enabling the lending of books to benefit the general learning, research, and intellectual enrichment of readers by allowing them limited and controlled digital access to materials online.”

Some have argued that the ReDigi case that held that commercially reselling iTunes music files is not a fair use “precludes” CDL. This is not true, and others have argued that this case actually makes the fair use case for CDL stronger.

How is the National Emergency Library different from the Internet Archive’s normal digital lending?
Because libraries around the country and globe are closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Internet Archive has suspended our waitlists temporarily. This means that multiple readers can access a digital book simultaneously, yet still by borrowing the book, meaning that it is returned after 2 weeks and cannot be redistributed.  

Is the Internet Archive making these books available without restriction?
No. Readers who borrow a book from the National Emergency Library get it for only two weeks, and their access is disabled unless they check it out again. Internet Archive also uses the same technical protections that publishers use on their ebook offerings in order to prevent additional copies from being made or redistributed.

What about those who say we’re stealing from authors & publishers?
Libraries buy books or get them from donations and lend them out. This has been true and legal for centuries. The idea that this is stealing fundamentally misunderstands the role of libraries in the information ecosystem. As Professor Ariel Katz, in his paper Copyright, Exhaustion, and the Role of Libraries in the Ecosystem of Knowledgeexplains: 

“Historically, libraries predate copyright, and the institutional role of libraries and institutions of higher learning in the “promotion of science” and the “encouragement of learning” was acknowledged before legislators decided to grant authors exclusive rights in their writings. The historical precedence of libraries and the legal recognition of their public function cannot determine every contemporary copyright question, but this historical fact is not devoid of legal consequence… As long as the copyright ecosystem has a public purpose, then some of the functions that libraries perform are not only fundamental but also indispensable for attaining this purpose. Therefore, the legal rules … that allow libraries to perform these functions remain, and will continue to be, as integral to the copyright system as the copyright itself.” 

Do libraries have to ask authors or publishers to digitize their books?
No. Digitizing books to make accessible copies available to the visually impaired is explicitly allowed under 17 USC 121 in the US and around the world under the Marrakesh Treaty. Further, US courts have held that it is fair use for libraries to digitize books for various additional purposes. 

Have authors opted out?
Yes, we’ve had authors opt out.  We anticipated that would happen as well; in fact, we launched with clear instructions on how to opt out because we understand that authors and creators have been impacted by the same global pandemic that has shuttered libraries and left students without access to print books.  Our takedowns are completed quickly and the submitter is notified via email. 

Doesn’t my local library already provide access to all of these books?
No. The Internet Archive has focused our collecting on books published between the 1920s and early 2000s, the vast majority of which don’t have a commercially available ebook.  Our collection priorities have focused on the broad range of library books to support education and scholarship and have not focused on the latest best sellers that would be featured in a bookstore.

Further, there are approximately 650 million books in public libraries that are locked away and inaccessible during closures related to COVID-19.  Many of these are print books that don’t have an ebook equivalent except for the version we’ve scanned. For those books, the only way for a patron to access them while their library is closed is through our scanned copy.

I’ve looked at the books and they’re just images of the pages. I get better ebooks from my public library.
Yes, you do.  The Internet Archive takes a picture of each page of its books, and then makes those page images available in an online book reader and encrypted PDFs.  We also make encrypted EPUBs available, but they are based on uncorrected OCR, which has errors. The experience is inferior to what you’ve become accustomed to with Kindle devices.  We are making an accessible facsimile of the printed book available to users, not a high quality EPUB like you would find with a modern ebook.

What will happen after June 30 or the end of the US national emergency?
Waitlists will be suspended through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.  After that, the waitlists will be reimplemented thus limiting the number of borrowable copies to those physical books owned and not being lent. 

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1/ The current legislation under review by the European Commission’s Digital Single Market Strategy regarding “neighboring rights”, to be voted on by the European Parliament in late March 2018, has little if anything to do with author rights

2/ All arguments about protecting revenue streams for publishers indicate that the true purpose is to fortify the rights of publishers (who have arrogated to themselves the rights of authors)

3/ The arguments from the public domain side against this legislation are equally problematic and suspect for the same reason that author rights are not part of the rationale for propping up the knowledge commons against the disputed proprietary rights of publishers

4/ The central issue, which is also hidden in plain sight, is – after all – the moral rights of authors (“Lockean natural rights”) as established in the Enlightenment and as enshrined in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886)

5/ Both the EC and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have shown no interest in addressing this set of rights, given the inherent abstract nature of such rights and given that both are operating on behalf of industry in a global IP campaign that resembles the “weaponizing” of IP rights

6/ Given that economic data (or any empirical proof) confirming that free copying of works or appropriation by platform cultures benefits the author is impossible to produce, whether justified through the murky term “transformative use” or “discoverability”, all such arguments, as used on both sides of the debate (by publishers to e-license copyrighted works and by advocates of Open Access to justify authors giving their works away for nothing) devolve to mere speculation based on the bias of the beneficiaries

7/ Given the origin of copyright in the Venetian Renaissance, via the granting of privilegio to authors for books published in the Republic of Venice, and given the almost immediate arrogation of privilegio by printer-publishers in the Republic of Venice, the arguments associated with “neighboring rights” today merely revisit historic arguments waged then against the damage done to authors and presses through illegal copying

8/ What has not advanced, and what needs to be fully disclosed, is how mass digitalization from both sides of this battleground has forced the lion’s share of authors today into a class conveniently labeled the “precariat” by critics of capitalism for the benefit of a global “vectorial class”

9/ What is less obvious regarding this widening chasm between the precariat and the vectorial class is that almost all academic proponents of fortifying the knowledge commons through an enforced neoliberalized open-access regime for scholarly works are part of the global vectorial class by virtue of participation in the production of platform cultures that decimate author rights from the so-called non-profit side, while “Capital” takes care of the destruction of author rights on the for-profit side

Photo by Spongehoe

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Open Access Scholarly Publishing

For generations, scientists and scholars have used scholarly journals to share their latest research discoveries and theories. These journals – usually run by commercial publishers selling subscriptions to university libraries and research institutes – provide the easiest, most efficient way for academic disciplines to advance their collective knowledge.

But the arrival of the Internet and digital technologies has called into question the expense and information restrictions of this commercially driven system. Thanks to digital publishing, it has become far cheaper and easier for a field of researchers to share their specialized research with anyone on the planet. To be sure, there are still costs associated with editing a journal and the peer review of articles, but Web-based publishing has radically reduced (and sometimes eliminated) the expenses of print production, distribution and marketing.

Most commercial journal publishers, not surprisingly, have seen these developments as a troubling threat to their business models. They have continued to assert strict copyright control over articles, putting them behind Web paywalls and charging high subscription fees. In short, they have limited access to research that could otherwise be made freely available – research that taxpayer money has often financed.

In the early 2000s, a variety of academic researchers in the US and Europe began to address this significant problem by starting the open access, or OA, movement in scholarly publishing. Its goal has been to make academic research freely and openly available to anyone in perpetuity. Open access advocates have had to pioneer new revenue models for academic journal publishing, overcome the limitations of copyright law by using Creative Commons licenses,¹ and fight fierce opposition from commercial publishers, uninformed politicians and slow-moving university administrators.

Happily, these strong, sustained efforts to reclaim research from profit-driven publishers and reclaim it for the academic commons have had many great successes. The open access journals started by the Public Library of Science in 2003² have been followed by thousands of other publications that honor open access in one fashion or another. One example is the International Journal of the Commons,³ an open access journal published by the International Association for the Study of the Commons. Major funders of scientific research, including governments, have started to require that research be published under OA principles, and commercial journals have allowed academics to self-archive their work in open access repositories. Some of the largest journal publishers have themselves started OA journals, joining a small group of niche publishers that have pioneered OA publishing as a profitable enterprise.

As of July 2015, the Directory of Open Access Journals had indexed 10,354 open access, peer-reviewed journals that had published more than 1.8 million articles. A flood of major research universities, including Harvard University, now require their faculty to publish works under open access principles. While there remain many challenges in making scientific and scholarly research more accessible, open access journals have become one of the most significant success stories in reclaiming and reinventing knowledge commons.

 – David Bollier

Book Publishing as a Commons for Regional Culture

Dissatisfied with the costs and slowness of conventional book publishing, some newcomers are trying to re-introduce the craft, care and social relationships that once prevailed in the field. One of the most innovative examples is Levellers Press, a worker-owned and -managed co-operative in Amherst, Massachusetts (USA), the offshoot of a regional photocopying business, Collective Copies.

Levellers Press – inspired by the seventeenth-century commoners who denounced the privatization of common lands and called for greater equality – wants to give authors new opportunities to reach readers, and first-time authors new opportunities to publish. This means changing the relationships among publishers, authors and readers. As one local observer put it, “It’s something of a throwback to a different era, when publishers were also printers and worked more closely with writers on their books – and when books were produced not just for the sales potential but for their literary and informative value.”⁴

The authors who publish their books through Levellers Press usually live in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. Many Levellers books cover regional topics that might not otherwise find a book publisher. Levellers’ first book, for example, was Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, by a retired Amherst College professor, Robert Romer. Since its inception in 2009, Levellers has published more than fifty books on a wide range of topics – fiction, poetry memoirs, social issues, health. Books are sold in local markets as well as via the Levellers and Amazon websites.

Two factors have been critical to Levellers’ success – its skillful use of new technologies to develop a new publishing model, and its founder, Steve Strimer, a worker-owner of Collective Copies since 1997. Strimer realized that the publishing marketplace was changing radically, and that a niche printer such as Collective Copies could prosper by pioneering a new form of regional publishing. New types of software, printers, scanners and bindery machines now make it possible for a small enterprise like Levellers to do print runs of 100 to 200 books for less than $10 a copy.

Such small-batch “print on demand” publishing helps avoid costly, unsold inventory while also giving unproven authors an opportunity to find their voice and reach readers. This publishing model also allows great flexibility in meeting unpredictable consumer demand. If a spurt of interest arises for Vital Aging, a guide for older people, or Girls Got Kicks, a popular photo-documentary book about “badass females,” Levellers can quickly print a few dozen copies within a few days for a very low cost. Most Levellers’ authors sell between 200 and 300 copies. After The Wealth of the Commons was rejected by a dozen conventional publishers, Levellers agreed to publish the book in 2012 and welcomed the editors’ use of a Creative Commons license. The book went on to sell well and earn a profit for the worker cooperative.

Authors like the Levellers publishing model because it is simple and fair: Levellers absorbs the startup costs of layout, design and printing for any book it chooses to publish, and the author gets no advance payment and must do most of the marketing. But once production costs have been recouped – usually after sales of 100 to 150 books – the author and publisher split all revenues 50-50. This is a far better deal for authors than the usual royalty rates of 7 to 12 percent. Levellers also has a self-publishing arm called Off the Common Books, which assists authors in printing and marketing books themselves. This was a perfect arrangement for Patterns of Commoning because of the greater author autonomy, low pricing, open licensing and production control that Off the Common Books makes possible.

Levellers has enriched the western Massachusetts area by carving out a viable new market for books of local interest – memoirs by community personalities, biographies, histories, recipe books, and many other books of quirky authenticity. Strimer concedes that he does not need to be as market-focused as conventional publishers to be profitable, and that is mostly the point: the Levellers publishing model blends financial practicality with localism, and makes book publishing a feasible creative outlet for a diverse roster of people who might not otherwise become authors.

 – David Bollier

A Community of Commoners in the Guise of a Magazine

The first time the printing presses were fired up for Oya, the word “crisis” followed “print media” like a mantra. Since March 2010, thirty issues of this young magazine from Germany have been published every two months. Oya emboldens readers to forge new paths in living a “good life.” Yet the editors do not themselves decide what a “good life” is supposed to be, but instead set out on an expedition with their readers. The journey winds a varied trail from open workshops and urban gardens to art in public spaces and communal residential projects. The magazine has gone to ecovillages, farms practicing eco-responsible agriculture, and schools in the wild.

Commons principles lie at the core of the projects. They all depend upon voluntary contributions, communal action, self-organization, self-determination and a diversity of participants. As the motto of Oya’s online edition (www.oya-online.de) puts it, “Much more interesting than a bunch of like-minded people is a community of differently minded people.” While Oya tends to focus on practical applications, it is also a thoughtful and reflective magazine. Its essays question the foundations of contemporary thinking and squarely face up to failures and disillusionment.

The magazine has been published every two months since March 2010 with a lively layout and strong photos, and of course, on eco-friendly paper. Roughly 90 percent of the print edition is available online under a copyleft license, the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA). The project is run by Oya Medien eG, a cooperative whose preamble states that its goal is not to enrich its members, but to publish a meaningful magazine. Oya has a large and loyal following that warrants print runs of 10,000 copies – a cost financed mostly by subscriptions, advertising and sales at select railway news stands. One tenth of the magazine’s 4,000 subscribers are members of the cooperative and support it with shares of 200 Euros each: an impressive show of support, but not quite enough to make the magazine financially stable. That will require 5,000 subscriptions. In the meantime, the editorial staff, administrators, and authors made substantial gifts to the magazine in the early years in the form of their work.

Oya is not a glossy lifestyle magazine designed to promote a bit of sustainable consumption. It is a magazine by and for activist-minded people who are deeply concerned with the state of the world and want to make a real difference. In this sense, Oya is far more than a magazine. It is a community of commoners trying to develop and share commons-based ways of living and forms of economic activity that can thrive in a world framed by climate change and Peak Oil.

 – Lara Mallien

A Growing Network of Commons-Oriented Magazines

A number of magazines are starting to provide regular coverage of the commons and companion-movements. In the United Kingdom, STIR magazine, for “stir to action,” has introduced a fresh, vigorous voice to the coverage of politics, culture and social transformation. In addition to its coverage of co-operatives, open source projects and alternative economics, STIR has focused a great deal on the commons movement and its initiatives. Like Oya, STIR has re-imagined the idea of a magazine as a focal point for bringing together an active community of reader/activists/thinkers. Many small, local projects with great potential are woven together to suggest hopeful new visions for the future.

Another notable British publication on the commons is The Commoner, edited by Massimo De Angelis. The website is a rich body of Web commentary and analyses from an autonomous Marxist political lens. Since May 2001, The Commoner has published fifteen substantive collections of essays exploring how the commons is relevant to care work, domestic labor, free software, energy, money, the body and value, among other topics. The Commoner explains that it is “about living in a world in which the doing is separated from the deed, in which this separation is extended in an increasing numbers of spheres of life, in which the revolt about this separation is ubiquitous.”

In the US, several web and print magazines are providing valuable coverage of the commons. Shareable, based in the Bay Area, is a Web magazine with plentiful, cutting-edge coverage of developments in the “sharing and collaborative economy.” Shareable has pioneered the idea of “shareable cities” with a set of detailed policies, and organized dozens of projects to promote alternative local projects and activism. Yes! Magazine – the magazine for alternative futures – features an ongoing series of articles on “commonomics,” the development of local alternatives, from local co-ops to public banks to community-owned solar projects. On the Commons magazine, published from Minneapolis, generally focuses on the great variety of North American commons, giving special attention to placemaking initiatives, water commons and organizing efforts.

Kosmos, a beautifully designed quarterly magazine with an international readership, has frequently focused on the commons as part of a larger agenda of building a “planetary civilization and world community.” Published out of the Berkshires in Massachusetts, Kosmos also explores transformational leadership and spiritual dimensions of making change.

The Case for the Commons is a bimonthly e-publication that explores the implications of dozens of judgments and orders about the commons passed by the Indian Supreme Court, High Court and state governments. Produced by the Foundation for Ecological Security in India, the e-publication interprets and popularizes the legal rulings, with an eye toward improving commons governance.

In Latin America, Pillku – “lovers of freedom” – is an online magazine about free technology and culture, commons, good living, collaboration and commun­ity property. It is published quarterly by Código Sur, a nonprofit organization whose purpose, among others, is to assist the development and socialization of these concerns by providing basic funding and technical infrastructure. The Pillku website provides a collaborative space for debate on free culture and commons in Latin America and seeks to build a society based on the freedom to share. Although it meets the standards of scientific and scholarly journals, Pillku as an organization and magazine is dedicated to collective creation, even in its editing processes. Most of the work needed to produce Pillku is voluntary. Contributions to the website come from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, generating a vast commons of information and building relationships among various projects. The extended Pillku community and editorial board are comprised of committed social organizations in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Mexico.

In India, Pratham Books is a not-for-profit publisher that has the avowed mission of “putting a book in every child’s hand.” It is an outgrowth of the “Read India Movement,” which seeks to cultivate a joy of reading among children and encourage education. Identifying a lack of affordable, quality books for children in India, Pratham Books has set out to publish inexpensive books in English and ten other Indian languages. It works with a range of partners – a foundation, a conservation group, social media enterprises and other publishers – to reach children. To date, it has published over 280 titles and over 12 million books.

Of course, there are also a wide number of blogs and websites devoted to the commons. The leading academic website on the commons include those run by the International Association for the Study of the Commons, founded by the late Professor Elinor Ostrom, and the Digital Library on the Commons, which hosts an extensive collection of documents. Another much-used resource is the P2P Foundation’s blog and wiki, a vast archive of materials about digital peer production, the commons and related fields.

 – David Bollier and Santiago Hoerth Moura

 Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by brewbooks

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The commons is….

• A social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and community identity.
• A self-organized system by which communities manage resources (both depletable and and replenishable) with minimal or no reliance on the Market or State.
• The wealth that we inherit or create together and must pass on, undiminished or enhanced, to our children.  Our collective wealth includes the gifts of nature, civic infrastructure, cultural works and traditions, and knowledge.
• A sector of the economy (and life!) that generates value in ways that are often taken for granted – and often jeopardized by the Market-State.

There is no master inventory of commons because a commons arises whenever a given community decides it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability.

The commons is not a resource.  It is a resource plus a defined community and the protocols, values and norms devised by the community to manage its resources.  Many resources urgently need to be managed as commons, such as the atmosphere, oceans, genetic knowledge and biodiversity.

There is no commons without commoning – the social practices and norms for managing a resource for collective benefit.  Forms of commoning naturally vary from one commons to another because humanity itself is so varied.  And so there is no “standard template” for commons; merely “fractal affinities” or shared patterns and principles among commons.  The commons must be understood, then, as a verb as much as a noun.  A commons must be animated by bottom-up participation, personal responsibility, transparency and self-policing accountability.

One of the great unacknowledged problems of our time is the enclosure of the commons, the expropriation and commercialization of shared resources, usually for private market gain.  Enclosure can be seen in the patenting of genes and lifeforms, the use of copyrights to lock up creativity and culture, the privatization of water and land, and attempts to transform the open Internet into a closed, proprietary marketplace, among many other enclosures.

Enclosure is about dispossession.  It privatizes and commodifies resources that belong to a community or to everyone, and dismantles a commons-based culture (egalitarian co-production and co-governance) with a market order (money-based producer/consumer relationships and hierarchies).  Markets tend to have thin commitments to localities, cultures and ways of life; for any commons, however, these are indispensable.

The classic commons are small-scale and focused on natural resources; an estimated two billion people depend upon commons of forests, fisheries, water, wildlife and other natural resources for their everyday subsistence.  But the contemporary struggle of commoners is to find new structures of law, institutional form and social practice that can enable diverse sorts of commons to work at larger scales and to protect their resources from market enclosure.

Open networks are a natural hosting infrastructure for commons.  They provide accessible, low-cost spaces for people to devise their own forms of governance, rules, social practices and cultural expression. That’s why the Internet has spawned so many robust, productive commons: free and open source software, Wikipedia and countless wikis, more than 10,000 open access scholarly journals, the open educational resources (OER) movement, the open data movement, sites for collaborative art and culture, Fab Labs that blend global design with local production, and much else. In an age of capital-driven network platforms such as Facebook, Google and Uber, however, digital commons must take affirmative steps to protect the wealth they generate.

New commons forms and practices are needed at all levels – local, regional, national and global – and there is a need for new types of federation among commoners and linkages between different tiers of commons.  Trans-national commons are especially needed to help align governance with ecological realities and serve as a force for reconciliation across political boundaries.  Thus to actualize the commons and deter market enclosures, we need innovations in law, public policy, commons-based governance, social practice and culture.  All of these will manifest a very different worldview than now prevails in established governance systems, particularly those of the State and Market.

This infographic was produced for Commons Transition and P2P: a Primer, a joint publication between the P2P Foundation and the Transnational Institute.

Originally published in Bollier.org. Photo by Dykam

The post The Commons, Short and Sweet appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Frankenstein reproduction right

With the original objective of “protecting equality, press and informed news”, the proposed “publishers right”, or “ancilliary copyright” could very well turn into an unbounded and unrestricted ‘frankenstein reproduction right’ that goes far beyond existing copyright’s “orginality requirements”. The proposed “reproduction right” is radically different from existing copyright law where the originality requirement prevents the appropriation of facts, ideas and non-original expression which are usually not considered to be protected by copyright. Many amendments on the table today before the Legal Affairs Committee aim at prohibiting the use of even the smallest bit or snippet of any text, image or sound from a press article, from public information or from an academic text without the prior permission of the publisher. The negative impact on access to information, access to knowledge and scientific scholarship could be devastating. We are facing a clear attack on our democratic rights as European citizens.

It should be noted that this new layer of copyright does not exist in the US nor in international copyright law.

“Closed science”, “Closed access” and “Closed data”

Many elements of articles 11 and 13 constitute a frontal attack on open science programmes as supported by the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament.

New filtering, policing, monitoring and payment obligations would significantly weaken access to valuable research content produced through public funding by creating extra costs, bureaucratical burdens and legal uncertainty for the academical community. These new legal obligations of intermediary liability would enter into direct conflict with the open science and open access policies that are being widely adopted in Europe and around the world. The aim of these policies is to increase access to research results in order to maximize the use and benefits of science across all sectors. To support open access and open science, universities, libraries and research organisations manage repositories in which researchers upload scientific articles, publications and research data so that everyone can benefit and use the results of research, including other researchers, industry and the public. A new filtering and payment obligations would significantly inhibit through legal uncertainty access to valuable research content produced through public funding, and greatly slow the progress of open science.

Crippling academic “open access” repositories

This new attempt at the enclosure of knowledge threatens the movement towards widespread availability of scientific results for the good of all, and the existence of over 1250 repositories that non-profit European institutions and academic communities use to disseminate academic output. It is important to note that, in the context of academic research, the creators of the content -the scientists- do not receive any financial compensation for their articles, yet publishers often demand that researchers sign over their copyright to the publishers.

Many universities maintain that a new intellectual property right for academic publishers would do “untold damage to the ability of researchers to share their findings and reference the world of scholarship in their published works” (LERU 2016).

Building walls around open data

Open data means that there are no legal restrictions to access to or use, modification and sharing of information for any purpose, subject at most to an obligation to attribute the source. ‘Open’ also means there are no technical restrictions to access and use, e.g. the data is offered in machine readable formats, and in open format rather than in a proprietary format. In contrast, Articles 11 and 13 directly and indirectly restrict the use of open data as well as difficulting open access which are flagship strategies of the EU and its Horizon 2020 research and innovation framework.

Restricting freedom of information

A key rationale that underpins freedom of expression is that the free flow of information is indispensable as it helps ensure that the best democratic decisions are taken. The right protects not just the imparting of ideas and information, but all phases of the communication process, from the gathering of information including a right to access sources, to the communication and reception of it. The legal implications of articles 11 and 13 could mean barriers to the access of citizens to news, public interest information and institutional data, all necessary for informed democratic debate. The public sector might very well automatically own a great deal of publishers intellectual property within its own publicly owned publications. To create exclusive rights in information for publishers will necessarily interfere with the freedom of expression of others. It should be noted that the European Charter of Fundamental Rights upholds a strict standard of scrutiny in the case of news and other public interest information.

In general the EU’s copyright reform has been hijacked by the publishing industry lobby and has been turned into copyright counter-reform that aims at further enclosing knowledge at the expense of our scientific, academic and cultural commons.

Photo by Mark Deckers

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In an attempt to address this problem, Varmus and his colleagues launched an online petition calling for scientists everywhere to pledge that they would no longer submit papers to journals that didn’t make the full text of their papers available to all, unconditionally, either immediately or after a reasonable delay of some months. They also urged scientists to no longer subscribe to or write reviews for such journals.²

The response was swift and astonishing: More than 34,000 scientists from 180 nations signed the open letter. However, it soon became clear that signatories could not practically adhere to goals of the letter because there were simply too few publications that would actually provide or allow open access to their articles.

To address this gap, Varmus and other scientists inaugurated a new publishing venture known as the Public Library of Science (www.plos.org). The project’s purpose was to help scientists and scholars regain control over their own research by providing “open access” publishing vehicles that would make articles freely available to everyone in perpetuity. The original authors retain copyright and license the articles to the world under a Creative Commons Attribution license to enable free re-use, sharing and distribution. (See essay on the Creative Commons licenses.)) This project built off the earlier development of Biomed Central, a publishing venture with similar aims led by London-based entrepreneur Vitek Tracz, and by other innovative publisher efforts of the late 1990s.

Since its founding in 2003, PLOS has grown from a community protest into the world’s largest publisher of free to read, immediately accessible and openly licensed scholarly content. The first PLOS journal, PLOS Biology, published its first articles in late 2003, rapidly establishing a reputation for high quality articles. Over the next few years, the project launched PLOS Medicine and four community journals focused on research in computational biology, genetics, pathogens and neglected tropical diseases, respectively.

As these six journals grew, the founders began to step up to their original, more ambitious goal of catalyzing a transformation in scholarly communication. The next big step toward this goal was the founding of PLOS ONE (www.plosone.org), a new scientific journal in 2006 to cover the whole of science and pioneer a new approach for a scientific journal. For the first time there would be no artificial limits placed on the number of articles published. Submissions would be considered only on the basis of scientific validity and technical quality, not on perceived impact. Traditionally researchers have sought the prestige of publishing in the most selective journals, to the extent that the prestige of the container has become more important than the quality of the articles. This can lead to perverse incentives for both authors and editors to write and select the most sensational claims rather than provide measured evidence. PLOS ONE publishes every submitted paper that meets the criterion of being properly done science – a publishing strategy that made PLOS ONE the world’s largest journal in 2010. All major publishers soon imitated the PLOS ONE “megajournal” model by publishing journals of broad scope that do not artificially limit the number of articles published.

Because of its larger readership and the diversity of submitted papers, PLOS ONE has also become a pioneer in rigorous pre-peer review validation. It conducts some of the most rigorous checks of all journals for statistical validity, ethical review and reporting guidelines.

PLOS was financed initially by charitable grants and income from philanthropic sources such as the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which are associated with the founders of the Intel Corporation and Microsoft, respectively). But it broke even for the first time in 2010 and the not-for-profit has posted a surplus in each year since. PLOS has committed itself to a transparent approach to financial information, and so pioneered the publishing of detailed income and expense figures alongside the disclosures required by the government for nonprofits. In 2012, PLOS publishing ventures were collectively reaping over US$38 million, with a surplus of US$7 million.

Once its financial sustainability was established, the organization began to focus on new innovations in scholarly communications. One notable project has been Article Level Metrics, a toolset that provides open data to assess in great detail the impact and usage of individual papers.³ Before this innovation, research articles were traditionally judged more by the reputation of the journal in which they appeared rather than by their own individual merits.

This initiative has had a further impact – the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which has been signed by more than 10,000 researchers and 400 organizations.⁴ The 2012 statement calls on funders, institutions and other publishers to judge research articles on their own merits rather than conflating the “impact factor” of a journal (the average number of citations for an article) with the quality of a particular scientist’s contribution. These ideas are changing how research is assessed and slowly but surely affecting how hiring, promotion and firing decisions are made.

More recently, PLOS has focused on ensuring that research data directly underlying published papers is made freely accessible, except where ethical of other considerations make that inappropriate. PLOS has also developed new tools for structured evaluation of published articles after publication, helping to encourage continuing evaluation of the accuracy of research.

By reimagining scientific publishing as a type of commons, PLOS has been at the vanguard of the massive shift in scholarly publishing. Equally important, PLOS has been able to provide vital advocacy and pacesetting innovation to the field, which now includes thousands of open access journals and over half a million freely licensed research articles.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Cameron Neylon (USA) is former Advocacy Director at PLOS, a role he moved to from a career as a researcher. He has an interest in how to make the Internet more effective as a tool for science and writes and speaks regularly on scholarly communication, the design of Web-based tools for research, and the need for policy and cultural change within and around the research community.

Photo by biblioteekje

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The internet now provides a free platform for sharing knowledge. How is it possible — or even socially just — that so many of us can’t get access to scholarly research? Isn’t society propelled forward by access to the science, literature, and art of the world’s scholars? What if that research is publically funded? These are the primary concerns that drive the open access movement.

What would these concerns look like if we removed them from the scholarly communications circle and applied them to realms beyond the ivory tower like nature, society, technology, and ultimately the intersection of those things — agriculture. How does resource sharing affect biodiversity? How does knowledge exchange drive community resilience? How is information access — delivered via technologies — an equalizer among the underrepresented, marginalized, and oppressed? How does our ability to feed a growing planet depend on a culture of openness? Let me work my way back.

In December 2001 the Open Society Institute hosted a conference in Budapest to promote open access — then called Free Online Scholarship — and defined the potential of the movement in the Budapest Open Access Initiative. The history of the open access movement is deeply rooted in the world wide web, which is the vehicle that makes it possible. With the rise of the internet came unprecedented possibilities for free and unrestricted information exchange. Yet instead of creating new, more appropriate publishing models for the digital realm, we applied the same practices that had been developed for print. What was once a rational way of covering publishing costs made little sense in the digital world where there are no significant costs for making content accessible.

Like its forerunner open source, open access encourages licensing that enables users to freely copy, modify, or distribute content with appropriate attribution. In most disciplines authors aren’t paid for publishing and are therefore in a position to do it openly without losing revenue. But open access literature, while free to access, is not free to produce or maintain. The great challenge of open access is not how scholarly research can be costless, but how we can remove access fees and barriers from the end user: the reader. The open movement, along with the institutions that struggle to uphold open repositories and journals, have not agreed on one unifying economic model although many good ones have been proposed. To summarize, the open access movement is an attempt to use the internet as a tool for free access to research and as a platform for scholarship to be built off of and improved; the tension is how to create an economic model that distributes the costs.

But the ethos of “open” is much older than the internet, or even our modern culture, and, importantly, isn’t about licensing. Manifestations of open are seen in our agricultural heritage, owned by all and fabricated over generations. Open pollination, which is how plants propagate naturally by wind, insects, or birds instead of controlled procedures, results in plants whose genetic traits vary widely; this increases biodiversity. The boundless mixing of genetic materials seen in open pollination boosts the overall vigor of plants and regenerates the abundance of nature. This is a vital function of the ecosystem; the building blocks of adaptation and evolution. The resulting ‘hybrid vigor’ is directly related to the resilience of the system as a whole. Increasing attention is being paid to Mycorrhizal networks, or the so called Wood Wide Web, whose fungi connect individual plants to each other and transfer not only water, carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients, but also information. Nature, it seems, is much more open than we ever could have imagined, and that openness is central to evolution.

There is also a long history of open in many traditional cultures around the world. Local knowledge, often collectively inherited, shared orally, and passed over jurisdictional borders and geographies, is the backbone of traditional agriculture and biodiversity preservation as farmers save and trade seeds — and it’s been at work for centuries. It is impossible to imagine claiming any presumptive ownership of our agricultural heritage; yet copyrights, patents, and breeders’ rights hinder the spread of indigenous seeds and continually fail to protect local knowledge. When we remember the environment, agriculture, society, culture, and technology are collectively-shaped natural and human systems, our fixation with originality seems rudimentary. In Harold Bloom’s “The Anxiety of Influence,” he writes that to be truly original you must connect with something that existed before you. Our agricultural heritage is a banquet laid out for all of us, and to successfully build off of it, we need access and each other.

In western circles, the open access movement has begun to shift the assumption that publicly-funded research and scholarship is a proprietary product that should be locked behind paywalls and guarded with restrictive licensing to that of a ‘public good’ —something that benefits our society and should be freely accessible and available for appropriate reuse. The Budapest statement explains that,

“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.”

The character of open is one of co-creation, community ownership, and building off of each other’s successes and failures. Open requires a shift from the proprietor to the collective; namely to a system that prioritizes the wellbeing of entire systems over individuals. Nowhere does this ring more true than in agriculture. Since the agricultural revolution in 10,000 BCE, farming has been an intersection of human societies and nature. The history of agriculture is fraught with destruction and exploitation, but has the potential to be one of regeneration and healing. Agroecology — a term that refers to ecological farming practices that emphasize the interdependence of social and environmental ecosystems — is inherently mutualistic. In fact, farmers must value the overall well-being of agroecosystems rather than exclusively concentrating on outcomes. When done effectively the result is social and environmental resiliency.

Finding Autonomy in Open 

Open advocates tell us that open is a development methodology and that sharing and cooperation lead to social solidarity just as they do in thriving, mutualistic ecosystems. When we share unrestricted information that information improves and becomes more reliable, which subsequently benefits all of humanity. The development world has largely taken the opposite approach.

International development is majoritively top down: charity — the prevailing solution to poverty — treats communities as passive beneficiaries rather than active participants that have a role in building their own future. Similarly industrial agriculture, the predominant approach to food production in the U.S., follows an economic model that locks farmers into systems of chronic interdependence, reinforcing social stratification while falsely claiming to feed the planet. Driven by large-scale monoculture and proprietary chemical products and methods, it is one of the largest contributors to climate change, now generating around one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions. Its growing proliferation around the world is accelerated through agricultural extension services and international development workers — and it’s devastating rural livelihoods. The proprietary mentality (top-down) prevails even among well-meaning development agencies who siphon transfer technologies and “expertise” to poor farming communities. It’s no surprise that these “innovations” are rarely sustainable and fail to improve the lives of farmers: they are largely unaffordable and do not take into consideration local conditions.

The changing natural world, along with the fluctuating political, social, and economic conditions farmers find themselves in, make farming a multidimensional profession rooted in knowledge-based skills, resourcefulness, and the ability to problem solve. Farmers must manage whole systems as they relate to landscapes, families, farms, communities, and regions; furthermore agriculture’s vast dimensions include soil, water, and energy conservation and managing — not controlling — ecological relationships to minimize disturbance and maximize potential. Farming is a livelihood and so farmers must understand how to diversify their crops, land use and revenue sources so that they are never dependent on a single crop, product or income source in this volatile environment. To this end they must conserve capital and genetic resources such as seeds, and utilize local resources whenever possible. On top of all this, women, who comprise the largest percentage of the workforce in the agricultural sector, face enormous barriers to land access and often care for children in addition to farm work. All these dimensions make farming one of the most demanding and knowledge-intensive professions in the world. Sadly, because farmers are also some of the poorest people on Earth, lack of information can have devastating effects. Entire regions are vulnerable to being forced to adopt proprietary practices. Lack of information access puts farmers’ autonomy at risk. Open is not just an environmental issue, it is also a social justice issue.

Farming is knowledge intensive, not resource intensive. Local knowledge, a fundamental element in healthy agroecosystems, is developed over time by people with deep synergies with a place. There has been some attention paid recently to the role of time in communities’ ability to be resilient. Undoubtedly there is no one more proficient in the natural environment than a farmer who experiments, innovates, and most importantly experiences a land over generations.

If a farmer is to manage such complex systems in the context of constantly changing conditions, she must be able to consult a friend or neighbor. A farmer’s ability to pass information — and seeds — through farmer-to-farmer networks is essential, as is her ability to adapt, improve, and localize a technique to meet site-specific conditions.

These adaptations — or new ways of doing things — are now called local innovations by many in the field. In contrast to the proprietary practices of the mainstream industrial sector, local innovations often consider the dimensions of a place since they are modelled and born from its multifaceted contexts. In short, they’ve been shown to be resilient. PROLINNOVA, an international multi-stakeholder network that supports local farming initiatives, defines innovation and innovations as the following:

Local innovation is the process by which people in a given locality discover or develop new and better ways of doing things — usually using locally available resources on their own initiative.

Local innovations are the outcome of this process for example, farming techniques or ways of organizing work that are new for that particular locality.

Given that innovations have shown to be effective, resilient, and a source of pride in farming communities it seems logical that they could be integrated with modern science. This would require a paradigm shift in the top-down development model to one that prioritizes participatory relationships between communities, development workers, and philanthropists. Our fixation with, and indeed our very definition of expertise will have to bend to accommodate other ways of knowing. In this paradigm, research and development are not isolated from real-world practices; they work alongside communities to improve scholarship and community well-being for us all.

Luckily the internet is changing the nature of scholarship and facilitating new and inclusive ways of working that were not possible before. One example is peer review — traditionally a judgement made behind closed doors — can now be organized openly and the record of that process can improve the scholarship by exposing self interests, or biased agendas. This open process alters the very notion of credentialism (who gets to do quality control) and is a beacon of equality on a digital horizon. The idea is that by integrating other ways of knowing with formal scholarship we greatly improve the reliability of inquiry: the ability of science to self correct, test, and validate knowledge claims.

Knowledge is Non-rivalrous in the Digital Age

The birth of the internet has minimized the cost of making content accessible and it serves as a potential equalizer. It has also made knowledge non-rivalrous. Now any number of people can access knowledge at the same time without compromising the ability of another to access it.

Scholarly literature — previously stored in physical objects such as books, journals, and videos that wore down with use and were accessed by only a few users at at time — is now part of an infinite digital space. There is no risk of knowledge depletion in this space and this makes digital information non-rivalrous, allowing us an unparalleled opportunity for open.

It is instead economic and social inequality that restrain users from access. The internet was quickly centralized into territories governed by several western multinationals. What was once a decentralized infrastructure positioned to be democratically shaped by all, has marginalized entire geographies and populations, even when they are set to gain the most. In the Global South it is governments that largely control access to the internet, and some use it as a weapon to suppress free speech, protest, group organizing, and even to crack down on religious, ethnic, or other minorities.

Open is key to an inclusive internet governance model; one that provides equal opportunities regardless of differences. There are other obstacles that greatly disrupt an open model of development such as excessive patenting.

Patents, breeders’ rights, and other intellectual property rights can seriously disrupt innovation systems. The rise of the industrial agriculture model has followed that of proprietary technologies: competitive aggregating of knowledge to be later dispensed for a fee. Some agrichemical products have patented the very genes of plants and animals; the same ones that were able to evolve and improve through open genetic mixing. Multinational companies now own the genetic structures of natural living organisms and they will execute protection of this “property” with callous ferocity.

For centuries farmers have collectively propagated, preserved, and passed on to next generations the plants and animals they work with. The intellectual property rights now in force do not protect these systems; in fact they harm them by serving big agriculture monopolies, industrial nations’ trade agreements, and fencing off markets. In turn, rural economies suffer, biodiversity diminishes, and farmers are deprived of autonomy.

Intellectual property rights in agriculture have created a climate of fear, dependence, and desperation. Some farmers are now reluctant to share their ideas because they fear for-profit companies will steal and patent them. These fears are not completely without merit; in fact many indigenous farmers suffer from knowledge misappropriation tangled up in long histories of social injustice and colonialism. Jane Anderson writes:

“The ethos of freedom, public, openness and commons is problematic because it does not properly deal with the baggage of the past… The whole notion of ‘the public [good]’ in intellectual property presumes a notion of inclusion and representativeness that is at odds with Indigenous experiences within colonial contexts.”

It’s important therefore to note that open is not experienced as a positive force across all marginalized populations as ‘the public’ has often been discriminatory. Marginalized populations cannot be blamed when they wonder, “who does my open knowledge benefit?” This is a great challenge for open, but also an opportunity for reexamining our complex relationships. The overturning of proprietary development models and knowledge systems in favor of open frameworks is at the heart of social and environmental justice. The resolution of these tensions will determine the carrying capacity for the biome and the planet’s ability to maintain resiliency.

Given the diversity of cultural value systems, widespread inequality, and the often unresolved sovereignty politics between indigenous peoples and nation states, we must bring local farmers into the innovation process so they can help match it to socio-environmental and cultural realities. Ultimately the success of our humanity depends on everyone’s humanity; therefore technology must make progress alongside social justice, environmental stewardship, civil liberties, and local, critical perspectives — not in despite of them.

Agroecology — whether under the guise of permaculture, biodynamics, regenerative farming, or another model — is based on crafting farming systems that mimic natural processes and reflect societal and cultural conditions. It’s time for agrarians and advocates to recognize that progress is not only about looking forward but also about looking around; and sometimes even below to the fungal networks who share information and resources that connect all living things. This is the open source paradigm, and agroecology is rooted in its ethos.

Header art created by Freya Yost. Cross-posted from Shareable.

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“Germany’s DEAL project, which includes over 60 major research institutions, has announced that all of its members are canceling their subscriptions to all of Elsevier’s academic and scientific journals, effective January 1, 2017.

The boycott is in response to Elsevier’s refusal to adopt “transparent business models” to “make publications more openly accessible.”

Elsevier is notorious even among academic publishers for its hostility to open access, but it also publishes some of the most prestigious journals in many fields. This creates a vicious cycle, where the best publicly funded research is published in Elsevier journals, which then claims ownership over the research (Elsevier, like most academic journals, requires authors to sign their copyrights over, though it does not pay them for their writing, nor does it pay for their research expenses). Then, the public institutions that are producing this research have to pay very high costs to access the journals in which it appears. Journal prices have skyrocketed over the past 40 years.

No one institution can afford to boycott Elsevier, but collectively, the institutions have great power. The high price-ticket on journals means that the entire customer base for them is institutions, not individuals, and the increasing prices have narrowed the field of institutions that can afford to participate — but that has also narrowed the number of institutions that need to cooperate to cripple Elsevier and bring it to heel.

Even so, this kind of boycott was unimaginable until recently — but the rise of guerrilla open access sites like Sci-Hub mean that researchers at participating institutions can continue to access Elsevier papers by other means.

All participants in this process are aware of the imminent effects this has on research and teaching. However, they share the firm conviction that, for the present, the pressure built up by the joint action of many research institutions is the only way to to reach an outcome advantageous for the German scientific community.

No full-text access to Elsevier journals to be expected from 1 January 2017 on [Göttingen State and University Library]”

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Happy browsing!
Khushboo Balwani, Fest communications & OuiShare Fest Team

The post The OuiShare Fest Report and Toolkit is now live appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As bills come to a vote, it is not uncommon for amendments to be added.  Sometimes the proposed changes seem to completely unrelated to the bill. Often a single sentence can impact the public dramatically.  We cobble together an analysis and fire it over to our administration, who then lobby the legislature for or against the proposed language in the bill.

Bill tracking software is a niche business. To me, it seems symbolic that proprietary software allows private sector business groups to monitor and influence public sector legislation.

However, there open source apps available to ordinary citizens for tracking legislation.  Even better, there are communities working together to make the legislative process more transparent.

One such community is the Sunlight Foundation.  In addition to developers, the Sunlight Foundation offers non-tech opportunities to shine a light on bills, influence, and elections.

Extracted from http://sunlightfoundation.com/about/

OUR MISSION

The Sunlight Foundation is a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that uses the tools of civic tech, open data, policy analysis and journalism to make our government and politics more accountable and transparent to all. Our vision is to use technology to enable more complete, equitable and effective democratic participation. Our overarching goal is to achieve changes in the law to require real-time, online transparency for all government information, with a special focus on the political money flow and who tries to influence government and how government responds. And, while our work began in 2006 with only a focus on the U.S. Congress, our open government work now takes place at the local, state, federal and international levels.

We believe that information is power, or, to put it more finely, disproportionate access to information is power. We are committed to improving access to government information by making it available online, indeed redefining “public” information as meaning “online.”

We approach our work in a number of ways. We work with thousands of software developers, local transparency activists, bloggers, on and off-line active citizens and journalists, involving them in distributed research projects, hackathons and training. Sunlight’s Policy team pushes for improved transparency policy through NGO efforts like OpeningParliament.org, and by working directly with governments at all levels. Our reporters cover political influence stories both through reporting and through close collaboration with technical staff, leveraging computer-assisted reporting and data visualization techniques. And in Sunlight Labs, our team of technologists and designers create apps and websites to bring information directly to citizens, as well as building and maintaining APIs—Application Programming Interfaces—that power the applications and work of others.

Extracted from http://sunlightfoundation.com/api/community/

Welcome to the Sunlight Developer Community! On this page you’ll find a sampling of projects to get you started on contributing to an OpenGov project. There are three categories for projects:

• Needs tech help, for projects that need a software developer’s touch
• Needs non-tech help, for projects that rely on a community of volunteers to help analyze government data
• Projects to inspire, for projects that aren’t actively seeking contributions, but are open source projects, ready to be deployed in your home jurisdiction.
  

  Foreign Influence Project

  Sunlight Foundation Help track how foreign governments and entities try to influence U.S. policy by helping us comb through amazingly detailed records on file at the Department of Justice. These records provide the most detailed information available on how Washington’s influence industry work. Help us to turn it into a searchable, sortable database that developers, journalists and citizens can use.

  Needs Non-Tech Help

  United States Glossary

  Sunlight Foundation A collection of pleasant, readable definitions of terms and processes in the United States. Designed for integration in various user-facing applications. Ease of understanding is the #1 priority. Precision and completeness are #2.

  Needs Non-Tech Help

• Bill Nicknames

  Sunlight Foundation Bill Nicknames is a github repository that contains a CSV with popular bill numbers matched with their (unofficial) nicknames. For instance, HR3590 is mapped to ‘obamacare’ and ‘ppaca’, and HR3101 is mapped to ‘hipaa’. This project always needs help adding new bills that are commonly referred to by their nickname instead of by their official bill title.

  Needs Non-Tech Help

Photo by jacopast

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