Springer Improves Its' Open Choice Publishing Program, Improves The Terms

Springer has improved the terms of its Open Choice program. First, open-choice authors may now retain copyright. Second, open-choice articles are released under a license which Springer says is identical to the Creative Commons Attribution-NoCommercial license.

PS: Congratulations to Jan Velterop (former BioMedCentral Head, at present Open Choice Director at Springer) who, I presume, was behind these changes.

Source: P Suber. Springer improves Open Choice OANews (11 Oct 2005) [FullText]

Big Publishers Sued By Authors for Unpermitted Electronic Publications

"Carole Ebbinghouse has a detailed update in the October 10 issue of Information Today on the class-action lawsuit, derived from the Tasini case that went to the Supreme Court, in which authors are suing publishers and database vendors (including Elsevier, Thomson, and Amazon) for unpermitted electronic publication of their work."

Source: P Suber. Tasini-based class action suit still simmering. Open Access News (10 Oct 2005) [Full Text]

UK report on Creative Commons (CC) Licenses for Public-sector Resources

"Today the UK Common Information Environment (CIE) released its report and 13 appendices on the use of Creative Commons licenses for UK public-sector resources. The members of CIE are now considering its recommendations. From the executive summary:

The Common Information Environment (CIE) commissioned this study to investigate the potential for Creative Commons licences to clarify and simplify the process of making digital resources available for re-use....During the study, workshops were held for key stakeholders in two groups - rights holders, primarily representatives of CIE organisations, and users of CIE produced digital resources, including the public, teachers at all levels of education, museum and library staff....The study concluded that many resources produced by CIE organisations could be made available under a common licence and that Creative Commons would allow a substantial amount of CIE resources to be made available for reuse. Other existing common licences, such as Creative Archive and Click-Use could be used if Creative Commons cannot be applied but their use should be minimised to avoid removing many of the key benefits of the Creative Commons Licences.....Recommendations: [1] Resources should be made available for reuse unless there is a justifiable reason why they should not. [2] The reuse of resources should be as unconstrained as possible. For example, resources should be made available for commercial reuse as well as non-commercial reuse wherever possible. [3] The range of permitted uses of resources should be as wide as possible, for example, including the right to modify the resource and produce derivative works from it. [4] Reuse should be encouraged by permitting others to redistribute resources on a world-wide basis. [5] Resources should be made directly available and discoverable electronically whenever possible. [6] The conditions of use for each resource should be linked directly to the resource so that they are reusable at the point of discovery.

The report was prepared by Intrallect and the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property & Technology Law at the University of Edinburgh. "

Source: Suber, P. UK report on CC licenses for public-sector resources. OANews (11/10/2005) [FullText]

Wall Street Journal Talks On Google Print

Jason Fry, Authors' Second Chance, Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2005. Excerpt:

Amazon.com's "Search Inside This Book" feature, which works in a similar way, is an opt-in program, so why is Google insisting publishers opt out? Things make more sense if you start off by thinking about how to build a search engine....Of course Google is storing entire books -- you can't make a usable search engine if you've only got bits and pieces to search against....(Some have noted that Google asks permission to include paid content in its index, but that's another red herring. These days, most creators of paid content on the Web are trying to figure out how to make their content searchable by the wider world and still get paid for it. Being shut out of Google is a problem that needs a solution, not a desired state of affairs.) The important thing isn't what's stored but what's shown -- and what Google's showing shouldn't worry anyone. (Granted, reference books, cookbooks and other works whose small chunks have great value may well be an exception, in which case publishers can remove them.) Google Print bills itself as a tool for finding information, not for reading, and from a few hours playing with it, I'm inclined to agree. I tried to use Google Print searches to cheat my way through two current favorites...Neither attempt worked for very long nor was anything close to a pleasurable reading experience. As for the opt-in model, we're all lucky that Google and its rivals didn't build their Web search engines that way: A search engine built via opt-in would be a failure, demanding a quixotic, ruinously expensive pursuit of ever-multiplying sources of new information. The only sane way to build a search engine is to index everything automatically and let Web-site operators that don't want to be included opt out....Besides, what Google's doing appears to be well within the realm of the "fair use" provisions of copyright law, meaning the company doesn't have to ask permission for the basics of Google Print anyway. I'm not a lawyer, but Jonathan Band is, and his analysis of the copyright implications of Google Print is a fascinating read....Mr. Band's conclusions: Google Print does have commercial purposes, but Google's not looking to profit from book sales; building a search engine requires it to "use" the complete work; and it's highly unlikely that Google's use will hurt demand for the books stored and searched....Many a frustrated author can tell you that being published is just the start of the dream of making it as a writer: If your publisher doesn't back your book, or it doesn't quickly connect with the reading public, it'll soon fall out of print and very few people will ever hear of you or your ideas again. That's exactly the frustration that's driven many writers to the Web, where anyone can publish and be guaranteed a world-wide audience for his or her thoughts. But it's not the Web itself that makes that guarantee -- it's the search engines that tame the Web's terabytes upon terabytes of information by making it all searchable.

Source: Peter Suber. OANews. Another defense of Google Library (10/10/2005) [FullText]

Why We Need Institutional Repositories?

Richard Gallagher, Why We Need Institutional Repositories, The Scientist, October 10, 2005. Excerpt (selected by Peter Suber Open Access News):

"Despite rapid explosion of knowledge in the life sciences, the full promise of digitization, storage and curation is nowhere close to being fully realized. The large-scale discipline-specific repositories that quickly became mainstream in information-intense branches such as genomics and proteomics are just the tip of the iceberg. The other seven-eighths comes in the shape of institutional repositories, such as MIT's DSpace, which provide the most comprehensive mechanism for digital preservation and dissemination. DSpace and other wide-ranging digital archives are truly transforming. They will house research data, journal articles, theses, teaching and learning materials, information for the general public, symposia and lectures, and informal accounts of life in the lab. While they are primarily being developed at universities, there is no reason why customized repositories shouldn't be introduced in other contexts, including industry....This new generation of institutional repositories does not compete with existing databases, it complements and extends them. At the same time, it reaffirms the position of an institution (in the case of a university) as a scholarly center and community hub."

New Open Access Repository for Earth Science

Earth-prints is a new OA repository for Earth science research. (Thanks to Andrea Marchitelli.) From the web site:
Earth-Prints is an open archive created and maintained by Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia with the collaboration of Programma Nazionale Ricerche in Antartide. This digital collection allows users to browse, search and access manuscripts, journal articles, theses, conference materials, books, book-chapters, web products. The goal of our repository is to collect, capture, disseminate and preserve the results of research in the fields of Atmosphere, Cryosphere, Hydrosphere and Solid Earth. Earth-prints is young and growing rapidly. Check back often.

Source: P.Suber. New OA repository for Earth science. OANews. (10 Oct 2005) [FullText]

New Open Access Research Repository at University College London

From a University College London press release, dated today:

A new web database for entering and viewing UCL academic staff research publications details online is now available to view on the UCL website. The database [is] named MyOPIA (MySQL Online Publications Index Administration)....Research publications data has been formally collated across UCL since 1997 and MyOPIA allows both academic staff publications from before this date and those published while employed outside of UCL to be added to the system. This will allow academic staff to have a complete personal listing of all their publications on MyOPIA, which is also accessible to the public....MyOPIA is also connected to UCL’s Eprints system, managed by UCL Library Services, which allows researchers to submit full-text copies of their research papers to an online archive. Once submitted to Eprints, the papers will automatically appear in the research publications database.

Source: P.Suber OANews Blog. New OA research repository at University College London (7 October 2005) [FullText]

The Vision Sadly Missed in Israeli Universities

From an Indiana University press release, dated yesterday:

Medical scientists must sift through and analyze mammoth amounts of data to find ways to treat disease, and an Indiana University School of Informatics-led team has been assembled to help them develop new discoveries. The School has been awarded a two-year $500,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to establish the Chemical Informatics and Cyberinfrastructure Collaboratory, and it brings together experts in informatics, medicine, computer science, chemistry, biology and from IU’s Pervasive Technology Labs (PTL). Chemical informatics is the application of computer technology to chemistry in all of its manifestations, particularly in the drug-manufacturing industry. The group seeks to devise an integrated cyberinfrastructure composed of diverse and easily expandable databases, simulation engines and discovery tools such as PubChem, the NIH’s small molecule chemical and biological database. They will use emerging high-capacity computer networks and data repositories and develop grid and Web technology for chemistry research.

Source: P.Suber OA News Blog. More integrated OA databases coming. (15 Oct 2005) [FullText]

UK Major Funder Wellcome Trust Mandates Open Access!

Dorothea Salo, Heard 'Round The World, Caveat Lector, October 3, 2005. Excerpt:

For the first time, a certain class of researchers must provide open access to their research results as a condition of their grant. The huge UK funder Wellcome Trust made deposit in PubMed obligatory as of yesterday. We here in the States had a golden opportunity to fire the open-access shot heard ’round the world: the NIH chewed on policy for nearly a year. We backed down. Wellcome Trust didn’t. Good for Wellcome Trust, and I hope to see a troop of funders fall into line behind them. That said --you’d think this would help me and the repository I manage, but it doesn’t... The Wellcome Trust grant agreement mandates PubMed, not just open access. They don’t positively forbid grantees to deposit somewhere else, but they don’t consider that a substitute for PubMed deposit. So I’m out in the cold, basically. The deeper question is which repositories are trustworthy enough to be viable substitutes for PubMed. Wellcome Trust understandably and correctly doesn’t want researchers slapping their stuff on their own websites and calling that a repository. (Why not? Well, because real repositories make guarantees about bit preservation and URL non-breakage that ordinary websites don’t. 404s aren’t acceptable in this business.) Nor, sadly, are all actual repositories likely to make it, long-term, because not everyone who has opened a repository quite realizes what a commitment they should be making to it. The answer may lie in repository certification. It’s terribly hard for an entity like Wellcome Trust to define just now which repositories are acceptable for deposit. (Mandate software platform? Sure, but the software platform is only one small part of the story.) Once repositories can be certified as trustworthy under a central definition, it becomes easy. So as much as I disagree with parts of NARA-RLG’s recommendations, I’m very glad they exist. I want a piece of the mandated-OA action, I do, and certification seems likely to be my path to it.

Source: P.Suber. OA News: Mandating OA: In what kind of repository? (6 October 2005) [FullText]

Elsevier's Scirus Will Index Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)

From a Reed Elsevier press release, dated yesterday:

Elsevier today announced a landmark partnership between Scirus, its free science-specific search engine, and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) to add the extensive collection of [open-access] theses and dissertations of its member institutes to Scirus. In addition to indexing the content on Scirus.com, Scirus will power a search service on the repository's site. The service will ensure this content will be easier to find on both the NDLTD and Scirus websites. The launch of the service was announced this week in Sydney at NDLTD's annual conference ETD2005. "Until now, theses and dissertations have not been fully leveraged by postgraduate students and researchers in their work because these documents have been difficult to find and retrieve," said Deborah Kahn, an associate at Electronic Publishing Services, Ltd. To combat this trend, Scirus has indexed over 200,000 theses and dissertations, in more than twelve languages...."With its particular expertise in indexing for scientific and research content, Scirus is a logical partner for NDLTD," said Edward Fox, executive director of NDLTD and professor of computer science at Virginia Tech. "Building on their impressive history of providing scientists and students with the information they need for their research, Scirus now also supports NDLTD's goals of enhanced access to scholarship worldwide. We are looking forward to expanding our collection and partnership in the future."

Source: P.Suber. Scirus will index ETDs. OANews (6 October 2005) [FullText]

Open Access Books and Journals Built on Blogging Software

Andrew Doan, Melding Traditional Publishing Models with Innovation, MedRounds Blog, October 3, 2005. Excerpt:

What do you get when combining elements of traditional publishing and Internet innovation? [1] Professional Copy Editing, [2] Academic Editors, [3] Expert Authors, [4] Google’s Blogger Technology. The products produced are peer-reviewed academic journals and medical textbooks that are published with Blogger technology. The educational material is open-access and free to the 6.5 billion readers in the world. We refer to it as "academic publishing with Blogger". This is exactly what MedRounds has done, and MedRounds will continue to produce high-quality educational materials utilizing Internet technologies to meld text with sound and video. MedRounds then announces the release of an OA textbook, Cataract Surgery for Greenhorns, and an OA journal, The Journal of Ocular Pathology --both peer-reviewed and both based on Blogger software. The journal charges no author-side fees.

(PS: If you're surprised to see blogging software turned to these purposes, have a look. You'll be more surprised to see that the fit is elegant and natural.)

Source: P.Suber. Open Access News (7 October 2005) [FullText]

Israel Scholar note: Israel based example of journals created with a help of Blooger software is a community magazine on Rehovot, www.MyRehovot.info , published in Hebrew, English and Russian . Israel Scholar Communication Scrolls also use Blogger platform combined with an advanced customization of the publishing template. While we probably would suggest using Blogger for students' projects on journal publishing, at present (giving significant number of technical problems with Google's Blogger, and posts loss ) we would not recommend to start with blogger serious academic journal. If necessary, please contact us for further details.

To Dismiss Academic Blogging Is A Bad Idea

"Henry Farrell, The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 7, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:

While blogging has real intellectual payoffs, it is not conventional academic writing and shouldn't be an academic's main focus if he or she wants to get tenure. But to dismiss blogging as a bad idea altogether is to make an enormous mistake. Academic bloggers differ in their goals. Some are blogging to get personal or professional grievances off their chests or... to pursue nonacademic interests. Others, perhaps the majority, see blogging as an extension of their academic personas. Their blogs allow them not only to express personal views but also to debate ideas, swap views about their disciplines, and connect to a wider public. For these academics, blogging isn't a hobby; it's an integral part of their scholarly identity. They may very well be the wave of the future. Look at what's happening in the disciplines of law and philosophy... In both of those disciplines, those who don't either blog or read and comment on others' blogs are cutting themselves out of an increasingly important set of discussions... Academic blogs offer the kind of intellectual excitement and engagement that attracted many scholars to the academic life in the first place, but which often get lost in the hustle to secure positions, grants, and disciplinary recognition. Properly considered, the blogosphere represents the closest equivalent to the Republic of Letters that we have today... While blogging won't replace academic publishing, it builds a space for serious conversation around and between the more considered articles and monographs that we write....Once you get used to this rapid back-and-forth, it can be hard to return to the more leisurely pace of academic journals and presses. In the words of the National University of Singapore philosophy professor and blogger John Holbo, the difference between academic publishing and blogging is reminiscent of "one of those Star Trek or Twilight Zone episodes where it turns out there is another species sharing the same space with us, but so sped up or slowed down in time, relatively, that contact is almost impossible."... Cross-blog conversations can turn the traditional hierarchies of the academy topsy-turvy... This openness can be discomfiting to those who are attached to established rankings and rituals -- but it also means that blogospheric conversations, when they're good, have a vigor and a liveliness that most academic discussion lacks... Most important, the scholarly blogosphere offers academics a place where they can reconnect with the public... Blogging democratizes the function of public intellectual."

Source: Peter Suber. Open Access News (5 Oct 2005) [FullText]

Google Held the First Google Scholar Open House at Corporate Headquarters in Mountain View, California

Lois E. Smith, Google Scholar Open House, SSP News and Views, October 2, 2005. Excerpt:

"On September 14, Google held the first Google Scholar Open House at corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California. About 50 people attended, representing large and small commercial and noncommercial publishers, university presses, and other providers of scholarly publishing content. The purpose of the open house, according to Google engineer Anurag Acharya, is to "start a conversation" between Google and content providers and to share information about the status of, changes to, and near-term plans for Google Scholar. The morning featured presentations by John Sack (Highwire), Mark Doyle (American Physical Society), Peter Binfield (Sage Publications), Gordon Tibbitts (Blackwell), and Ted Freeman (Allen Press). Speakers reported on significant increases in traffic to journal content after Google began crawling it. Google referrals have vastly exceeded those from any other search engines, they reported. Most of the presenters have seen increasing numbers of referrals from Google Scholar in the 10 months since it launched, though not nearly as many as from google.com - at least not yet. Many of the morning presenters talked about challenges Google Scholar poses to publishers. These include lack of publisher branding within search results; the presence of myriad versions of the same work, some of which is free of charge versus by subscription or pay per view; and perceived bias toward more highly cited works in ranked search results because of the way Google Scholar's algorithm works. Some of these challenges also present opportunities for publishers, a few speakers noted. By working closely with Google, branding could improve, for example, making it more apparent to users which is the publisher's article of record. Doyle (APS) said one of the terms of its collaborative agreement with Google is that the APS-published article will appear first in the search results. Binfield (Sage) remarked that the combination of author self-archiving, institutional repositories, and Google Scholar poses a threat to non-open access publishers. He said it is in the interest of publishers to work with Google to increase the use of paid-for content....Google has automated the citation extraction process, though issues such as wide variation in citation styles and the propagation of erroneous citing make this challenging. Google attempts to normalize citations and facilitate ranking by grouping different versions of the same work. Google Scholar has grown by 66% in the last six months, Acharya reported, though he did not say how large the index is. Roughly, its coverage by category (in order of size) is 22% medicine, 14% engineering, 13% biology, 13% sociology, 12% physics, 7% chemistry, and 5% business. Query traffic has increased by 200% in the last six months, with the largest source countries being the United States (50%), the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany....Recent changes in Google Scholar include coverage of institutional repositories (about 325 libraries)."

The article concludes with a very useful summary of the Q&A. If you are a publisher with a question about Google Scholar, your question is probably on the list.

Source: P.Suber. OANewsBlog (4/10/2005) [FullText]

How Much Will Google Print Help Users?

Barbara Quint, Apology, Searcher, October 4, 2005. Excerpt:

"I somehow got the false impression that Google was transmitting electronic copies of the books it was digitizing back to publishers participating in the Google Print for Publishers program....Well, back up the truck. Google does not give publishers digital copies of their books. The copies Google gives to the participating "G5" libraries are TIFF or JPEG files containing images of every page, not complete books in a convenient format such as PDF. As for the public domain books, which Google does allow readers to see cover to cover, all reading must be done while connected to Google. So the question arises: With the exception of public domain, e.g., pre-1920s books, how does Google Print contribute to the distribution of book literature? Insofar as a user finds an in-print book from a Google Print publisher, Google will provide links to online booksellers and publisher Web sites. But most of the books on library shelves are out of print, especially those taken from giant research libraries. Those online booksellers may help you find used copies and a connection to the OCLC Open WorldCat "Find in a Library" service could help too. But digitizing millions of out-of-print books might end up swamping the retrieval of in-print books that have a good chance of delivery. In any case, the Google Print delivery routes offend all three of the Web's iron laws of user-friendliness: They're not free; they're not fast; and they're not online. Add one more depressing note: They're not reliable....Who would think that one would ever have to prod Google into broadening its vision? Yet here it is....The only way to make the Google Print project work for publishers, libraries, authors, and, most importantly, the Web users of the world, is to guarantee that what people find online, they can fetch online. Delivery is the key. Otherwise, it could end up worse than when it started. End users searching for the books Google Print presents to them will find traditional sources — publishers and librarians — rejecting their requests. The matchless collections of the "G5" libraries are called matchless exactly because they have what others do not. OCLC's Open WorldCat will do the best it can, but...in most cases Marian/Marion the Librarian will not help. One of the new offers to Google Print publishers made in August allows publishers to register the books they expect Google to find on the G5 library shelves and, when searchers find the books, connect users to publisher Web sites. Gosh, thanks! So when all those out-of-print book requests come in, the publishers get to tell users to go shinny up a pole. Are we having fun yet? I know it's the early days for the massive Google Print project, but it's never too early to do it right. Come on, Google. Give publishers and copyright holders e-books they can deliver. Change the world ... again. I'll gladly write an apology for being wrong about being wrong, if only you make it right."

Source: P.Suber. OANews. (4 Oct 2005) [FullText]

Is Impact Factor Fair? No so Fairly Calculated, New Journals Editors Say

The Chronicle of Higher Education has posted the transcript of yesterday's online colloquy on impact factors. The questions came from participating readers and the answers from Anurag A. Agrawal, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University. Agrawal has served on the editorial boards of five journals and recently published a letter in Trends in Ecology and Evolution "decrying some common editorial practices designed to raise citations and journal-impact factors." Since Agrawal uses ellipses in his answers, my own ellipses are in square brackets. Excerpt from the transcript:

Question from Diane Sullenberger, [Executive Editor of the] Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: How is online access to research papers, in particular, free online access, affecting research impact?

Anurag A. Agrawal: Not clear... it does seem that the free availability of articles has got to make things a bit more fair. Nonetheless, there is always going to be a prestige factor.... those articles in high impact journals or by authors from powerhouse universities will likely get more attention simply because of the source. Free on-line access should also further bias what is being cited however... some journals do not have the archives available as PDF files (for various reasons) ... given the current climate of scientists going to the physical library less and less, the are more likely to cite papers from journals with free on-line access.

Question from Rebecca Minnillo, Society for Investigative Dermatology: [...] What(if any) effect will open access have?

Anurag A. Agrawal: [...] Open access journals have the flavor of "science for the sake of science" which I applaud. However, I do not think they are immune to the potential abuses.

Richard Monastersky (Moderator): Editors and publishers of new open-access journals say they are hurt by the way impact factors are calculated because you need several years of citation data before an impact factor can be determined. So a start-up journal faces a tough time getting submissions from scientists who are concerned about impact factors. One interesting fact is that the Public Library of Science Biology journal saw its submissions double after it received its first (and quite high) impact factor this summer."

Source: More on OA and increasing citation impact. OANews Blog by P Suber (13 October 2005) [FullText]

Open Content Alliance Rises to the Challenge of Google Print

Barbara Quint, Open Content Alliance Rises to the Challenge of Google Print, Information Today, October 3, 2005. Excerpt:

"What a great idea!...The goal of the effort is to establish a flexible, open infrastructure for bringing large collections of digitized material into the open Web. Permanently archived digital content, which is selected for its value by librarians, should offer a new model for collaborative library collection building, according to one OCA member. While openness will characterize content in the program, the OCA will also adhere to protection of the rights of copyright holders....Even though Yahoo! Search has taken a leading role with the OCA, the fundamental principle behind the program is open accessibility. As material comes online, all search engines --and yes, that does include Google-- will have access to the repository....Experience has shown that the most stringent barriers to digitization often lie in the bureaucratic politics and complex legalities. The Open Content Alliance hopes to work through these problems and, according to Kahle, "establish mechanisms for sharing while meeting each institution’s responsibility in opening content." Kahle described the organization’s goals. "In essence, we want to get the rules right, to enable libraries to work with commercial sources, governments, etc., without having to hammer out separate agreements."...Initially, according to Kahle, the OCA content will be completely open access; it will be available to all, with no password required. The OCA may carry notices on specific requirements due to Creative Commons licensing, but it will not police compliance....When asked what will distinguish the OCA material from Internet Archive’s existing archives, e.g., the snapshots of the Web in the Wayback Machine, Kahle said that the "Open Content Alliance will be more library-like, as opposed to an archive. Content will be more curated, more vetted by library staff. The OCA is trying to kick off with an end-user focus, as opposed to where the collections come from, but how it will evolve, we don’t know yet."...I interviewed Carole Moore, chief librarian at the University of Toronto, and Daniel Greenstein, associate vice president and university librarian at the California Digital Library. Interestingly, both saluted Google Print for getting the ball rolling. Discussing mass digitization projects, Greenstein said: "Google kicked us into gear. They woke us up." Moore said: "It is an idea whose time has come. Before, when it came to digitizing books, the world was not ready, but the world has changed. Google can’t do it all. Other people have to contribute."...For Greenstein, probably the single most promising factor was that he now sees librarians tapping into collection budgets to fund digitization projects. Instead of treating digitization as an extra service that would probably be funded by grant money, librarians have begun seeing digitization and sharing with other institutions - and the world through the open Web - as a form of collaborative collection building."

Businesses Recognizing Costs of Intellectual Property Extremism

James Kanter, The Idea Economy: Battle over right to sell knowledge, International Herald Tribune, October 2, 2005. (Thanks to Manon Ress.) Excerpt:
Ideas that are free, widely available and instantly duplicated were impossible to contemplate in the days when copyright and patent law took root, a time when the expenses needed to print, distribute and sell a book or movie were considerable. Now, the information, entertainment and technology industries say they lose billions of sales to the free exchange of ideas. Incremental advances are stalled by endless lawsuits over inventions. Drug companies are on the defensive when they refuse to share their original research....The battles pit companies against companies, creators against distributors, almost everyone against the United States — and, some say, China against the rest of the world. ''This is warfare,'' said Jerry Klein, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. ''It's a high-stakes intellectual battle, and it's very complicated.'' Companies, even those the size of Intel, could one day be blocked from marketing a particular product whose design is made up of hundreds of thousands of patents just because an opportunist has claimed ownership of a single patent, said Adam Jaffe, dean of arts and sciences at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and a patent expert. Some intellectuals say that the more such rights are expanded, the less good the public reaps, a benefit that government's protection of innovation once intended. And now some companies are starting to agree, arguing that the race for rights and royalties can actually harm competition. "In certain cases," said Elsa Lion, an analyst at the London research firm Ovum, "technology companies are beginning to realize they have more to gain by releasing patents to the general public than by hoarding licensing income." By giving away some of their knowledge, companies like IBM and Nokia are not just polishing their image among the Internet generation. They also questioning a business strategy that has become a bedrock of contemporary capitalism: Whoever has the most patents wins.

Source: P.Suber. Businesses recognizing costs of IP extremism. OANews Blog (2 Oct 2005) [FullText]