A fight for open access
A dispute between the University of California (UC) and the publishing giant Elsevier echoes in academia. After months of negotiations, UC decided to terminate the agreement with the publisher as the latter was not willing to agree to UC’s terms. UC, where almost 10% of scientific articles in US are published, wanted to make those articles available to the public. Instead, Elsevier insisted on double payment for “open access” articles.
In May 2019, UC joined more than 135 educational institutions and organizations advocating open access, more financial transparency and less barriers in publishing scientific articles. Professor Steven Brenner from UC Berkeley said in an interview for The Daily Californian that the main purpose of the research at UC is to make the works available to the general public. He explained on the example of text and data mining that open access facilitates the process, whereas the traditional subscription model makes it almost impossible to mine.
Because of the termination of the contract with Elsevier, many researchers at UC are now unable to access important articles from their database. UC Berkeley Library helped and redirected them to alternative sources amongst which also open access articles. UC’s decision to terminate the contract might result in a change of perspective on scientific writing and publishing. The scientific community hopes this will encourage major changes in this area.
Discussion on the Slovenian aspects of introducing the principles of open science will take place at the 1st national event of the project “GET TO KNOW – Support in Introducing Principles of Open Science in Slovenia”, which will be held on Thursday, October 5, 2023, from 9:00 to 15:00 in the atrium of ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 2, 1000 Ljubljana.
On September 16, 2023, Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič participated in the event @Re:Source MAH – the 10th International Conference on Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology. The program was divided into various categories (“tracks”), specifically focusing on the documentation and preservation of media arts; climate change; pioneers of media arts; and the history of media arts in museums.
The U.S. Copyright Office has once again denied the registration of an artwork created by artificial intelligence. Artist Jason M. Allen was unsuccessful in his second attempt to register the artwork “Theatre D’opera Spatial” as a copyrighted work because it contains more than a de minimis amount of content generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
On Friday 23 June 2023, a webinar entitled “Copyright and Legal Basis for Generative Artificial Intelligence Training” was held as the inaugural event of an informal research network in the region in the field of copyright. Researchers from Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and North Macedonia participated in the event, which is part of the national Open Knowledge Day initiative and the national and regional coordination activities carried out by ODIPI under the auspices of Knowledge Rights 21.