[cross posted on legalresearchplus]

We are pleased to announce the AALL Hot Topic for the annual meeting in Portland, Oregon will be Push Back and Push Forward – Open Access in Oregon and Beyond. So mark your calendars: Sunday, July 13th at 4:15pm.

The program will feature Carl Malamud (public.resource.org) and Tim Stanley (Justia.com).

Recently, the State of Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee sent Justia a notice of copyright infringement and demand to cease and desist online publication of the Revised Statutes online. Carl Malamud and Tim Stanley will share the story of this struggle to keep the laws of Oregon freely available.

But what about the rest of the country? Can state governments prohibit others from downloading, reproducing or distributing their laws? Can courts provide similar restrictions by the nature of their vendor dealings (they do in California!)? Carl Malamud and Tim Stanley will address these questions, too, sharing their concerns and experiences in this area.

This session will provide both an update on a timely issue, and serve as a call to action on how each of us can get involved in the open access movement.

And, on the topic of Oregon, Peter Forsyth has an interesting post on the WikiProject Oregon site. I pasted it below for further reading and perhaps an inspiration for getting involved.

From WikiProject Oregon, posted by Peter Forsyth:

This Thursday, the Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee (LCC) will be holding a hearing that should be of major interest to anyone with an interest in Oregon law, and in building (or using) public resources on the Internet. The topic: whether or not the laws that we, the people of Oregon write are in the public domain, or whether the State can prevent their republication by insisting on licensing arrangements.

A couple months back, the LCC — which provides legal advice to the state legislature, and edits draft legislation — issued a takedown notice to justia.com, which was hosting the Oregon Revised Statutes. Justia is a web site that publishes state laws (free of charge, and without advertising) from all states, in a standard format.

Legislative Counsel Dexter Johnson issued the takedown notice under direction from the LCC, and cited a 1953 law that gives it authority to make determinations about ownership of various works of the Legislature. He wrote that although the words of the laws themselves are in the public domain, some of the text involved in their publication — the section numbers, descriptive text, etc. — is owned by the State, and protected by copyright.

California-based nonprofit public.resource.org has been the leading advocate for getting this policy changed. They have retained counsel to challenge the policy. Their research indicates both that there aren’t solid legal grounds for this policy, and that it is contrary to the public interest.

The LCC has invited Public.resource.org to give testimony at their next public meeting, but there is no formal representation for Oregon’s community of wiki editors, bloggers, etc.

I expect to testify at the hearing, and would welcome the company of any other Oregon folks. Let me know if you want to come! Additionally, I’d encourage you all to write your legislators (find out who they are here), and the members of the LCC. I’ll try to work up a standard letter in the next day or two, so you don’t have to compose from scratch; watch this post for further news.

[cross posted on LegalResearchPlus]


The good folks at public.resource.org have just released a new collection on their site: Justice.gov. This collection, once known as FLITE and then later as JURIS, is a digital collection of federal case law. The story behind this is quite fascinating, too.

From the Public.Resource.org site:

"Back when disco was king, the USAF decided that those new-fangled computers might be just the thing for the JAG Corps, so they set a bunch of flyboys down in front of keypunch machines and made a database of U.S. law called FLITE. After several turf-grabbing campaigns and a massive meeting of BOGSATT, the system was taken over by the Department of Justice and re-dubbed JURIS."


"But, the lawyers in Justice were jealous of their pin-stripe buddies in private practice, so they got themselves high-priced West and Lexis-Nexis accounts so that they could be professional. Then, they deleted the JURIS database from government computers so there would be no going back. Today, the U.S. government does not possess a digital copy of the cases and codes that make up the law of the land."

"One copy of JURIS survives, acquired by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) of the University of Pennsylvania and available under a carefully restricted license agreement to those who pay the sum of $800 and agree not to redistribute the data. The LDC is a group of linguistic researchers and they acquire corpora of linguistic interest to analyze. By prohibiting redistribution and binding their members to such constraints, they are able to acquire commercial databases to analyze."


"Public.Resource.Org has purchased a copy of the JURIS database and we have requested that the Linguistic Data Consortium free this public domain data so that it may be examined by all. The database consists of 1,665 files totaling 3.1 gbytes. The 522 mega-words in the corpus yields approximately 2,091,628 pages of text."


"UPDATE: Friday, 13 June 2008. We have made the JURIS database available so that you may judge for yourself the importance of these files. You may browse the directory or download the 900 Mbyte tarball. There is a compelling public policy issue in the fact that the Department of Justice deleted 2 million pages of case law after establishing their for-pay contract with a commercial concern. Why did the government delete such a valuable asset that was created at taxpayer expense? Why would a copy not be kept just in case? Why does the government not have a digital copy of their own work product? These are questions of national concern and the public has a right to examine the evidence."

[cross posted on LegalResearchPlus]

Statement Of Patrice McDermott, Director of OpenTheGovernment.org

Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, Committee on Homeland Security

H.R. 6193, The "Improving Public Access to Documents Act,"
Hearing: Wednesday, June 11, 2008

[excerpt from the prepared testimony]

"We have experienced a trend in our country away from trust in the public to a “need-to know” mind set. A few, primarily federal, departments and entities have either, in a few cases, been designated or have arrogated to themselves the power to say who has a need-to-know and only governments and a few private sector entities have been deemed worthy. The public and the press have been almost entirely excluded. At one point, the Department of Homeland Security even attempted to make Congressional staff sign nondisclosure agreements in order to prove they could be trusted into the inner circle of those
legitimate few.

Again, there is absolutely some finite amount of information that, for a certain amount of time, needs to be shared only in a limited fashion. The problem for the public is that we have “translucence, not transparency, i.e., transparency within the network, but opacity to those outside.”* The "need-to-share"" cannot be limited to agencies within governments and defense and homeland security contractors; it also must include, to the greatest extent possible, sharing relevant information with the public. The White House Memorandum and this legislation both recognize this by requiring “portion marking,” so that information in a document that is eligible for disclosure can be made public."

*Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, “Translucence Not Transparency: Reviewing Alasdair Roberts, Blacked Out: Government Secrecy In The Information Age.” I/S: A Journal Of Law And Policy For The Information Society, Vol. 2, Issue 1 (2006).

[Cross posted on legalresearchplus]

Shrinking access to EU documents? This is from a press release on the European Ombudsman site:

“The European Ombudsman, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, has called on the European Parliament (EP) to defend the European Union’s commitment to transparency and the citizens’ right of access to EU documents. This follows the European Commission’s recent proposals to revise the law on public access to documents. In his contribution to today’s public hearing in the EP’s LIBE Committee (Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs), the Ombudsman said:

“The Commission’s proposals would mean access to fewer, not more, documents. This raises fundamental issues of principle about the EU’s commitment to openness and transparency.”

Read the entire contribution given by the Ombudsman

The EU proposals sharply limit the definition of what is a “document” — ”The Commission’s proposed definition of a document would mean that, in many cases, citizens could only apply for access to a document if it appeared in a register.”

Read the full text of the EU proposal to revise Regulation 1049/2001: “Proposal for a REGULATION OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents” [4/30/2008]

Hat tip to the lawlibrarians blog for tracking this!

[Cross posted on Legalresearchplus.com]

The New York State Office for Technology and the New York State Archives, has just issued a report that "examines how the state can provide choice, interoperability and vendor neutrality in electronic document creation while ensuring electronic records are preserved and remain accessible."

"The report [“A Strategy for Openness: Enhancing E-Records Access in New York State”] recommends establishing a statewide, cross-government Electronics Records Committee to address, in a formal, long-term and collaborative manner, all aspects of electronic record creation, management and preservation. The committee would facilitate state agency adoption, place the vendor community on notice of the state’s strategic direction and long-term commitment for technology openness, and ensure this commitment is institutionalized throughout the state enterprise and survives government leadership transitions. Another recommendation suggests the committee develops and publishes a final open records policy, and begins issuing a series of standards and guidelines for implementing the policy."

Hat tip to BeSpacific

Nextgov reports that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is free to reconnect itself to the Internet, thanks to a Washington D.C. District Court ruling earlier this month.

Interior allowed to reconnect to Internet, by Gautham Nagesh, Nextgov, May 21, 2008.

District Judge James Robertson granted on May 14 motions filed by [Deparment of the] Interior requesting that the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Office of Hearings and Appeals, the Office of the Special Trustee, and the Office of Historical Trust Accounting be allowed to reconnect their networks to the Internet.

The BIA network was ordered to shut down in 2001 amid accusations of poor data security in the ongoing Cobell v. Kempthorne class action case.

Security questions remain, however.

[Judge] Robertson acknowledged that Interior’s IT security may still be inadequate. “The congressional and inspector general reports indicating that the Interior Department, overall, continues to receive failing grades on its IT report card are troubling, but I have no authority to act in response to them, nor do I have any colorable suggestion that the declarations before me … were made in bad faith,” he wrote.

As of this writing, the BIA site has not been fully restored. According to Interior chief information officer Michael Howell, it is expected to take a couple of months for the BIA to reconnect.

-Brian Provenzale

Here at Stanford, the campus recently enjoyed the excitement that is Recyclemania. (Stanford actually won the Gorilla Prize!)

In the spirit of Recyclemania, I want to share an amazing project for recycling PACER documents. The site, brought to you by Carl Malamud and the good people at Public Resource, gives everyone a chance to liberate PACER case downloads.

How do you do it? Here are the simple instructions from the site:

"Just upload all your PACER Documents to our recycling bin. Click on the recycle bin and you'll be presented with a dialogue to choose files to upload. Then, just hit the “Start Upload” button and you'll hear the sounds of progress as your documents get reinjected into the public domain.

We'll take the documents, look at them, and then put them onto bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/pacer for future distribution. This is a manual process and you won't see your documents show up right away. But, over time, we hope to accumulate a significant database of PACER Documents. "

Interested in helping, but you don't have the time to recycle documents onto the site? Well, lucky for you, the site also allows you contribute with Digital Offsets. The digital offsets are a tax-deductible donation to Public.Resource.Org which will then be utilized to purchase PACER Documents for the site.

Are you lucky enough to live near one of the 16 libraries with FREE access to PACER? Perhaps, you want to sign up to join the Thumb Drive Corps, who will go to these locations with a jump drive and download as many PACER documents as possible for the Pacer recycling site.

So, what is good for the bottle, is good for the docket....

-Erika

Interviews with Innovators: Online Access to Public Information: Carl Malamud, IT Conversations, March 18, 2008.

For many years Carl Malamud has been a tireless crusader for online access to U.S. public information: SEC filings, patents, Congressional video, the Smithsonian's historical photgraphy, and most recently, case law. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Malamud about his strategies, accomplishments, and future plans.

This is an inspiring interview. If only there were libraries and library directors who had the simple, effective vision that Carl has!!

The Special Library Association (SLA) announced today that EPA plans to re-establish the closed libraries by September 2008.

SLA met with EPA officials today to review the agency's report to Congress on the future direction of its library network.

The report, submitted to Congress yesterday, includes a summary of the network standards developed with respect to physical space, on-site collections, staffing and services of EPA’s Regional and Headquarters libraries, as well as a plan for allocating resources from the the 1 million dollars given to them by Congress:

•Re-establish on-site libraries in Region 5, 6, and 7, and the consolidated EPA Headquarters Repository and Chemical Library in DC.
•Enable Regional EPA libraries to update their collections, facilities, and equipment to meet Network standards.
•Conduct a formal needs assessment for EPA library services to support future development.

I am glad to see that EPA took the hearing's recommendations to meet with affected stakeholders and library organization officials seriously, but I do not think they met with anyone before the report to Congress was due, as was recommended at the hearing. At least, I have not heard or read about any such meeting. Correct me if I'm wrong. Nevertheless, EPA states:

"Over the next few months, we will continue to engage affected stakeholders (including our employee unions) as we finalize our specific plans for each library. The Agency is committed to working with its employees and outside parties on its future digitization plans (based on the third party review), a customer needs assessment, and long term strategic planning efforts".

Today is the world's first Document Freedom Day! About 200 teams from more than 60 countries worldwide are organizing local activities to raise awareness for Document Freedom and Open Standards. The site also has a pamphlet to print and distribute, as well as information on open standards, document standards, and more.

Monday, March 17: American University's Washington College of Law's Collaboration on Government Secrecy hosted its first Freedom of Information Day, featuring panels and speakers addressing new FOIA legislation, the state secrets privilege, and transparency. They also presented the first "Robert Vaughn FOIA Legend Award" to Thomas M. Susman, a government openness advocate and initial drafter of the 1974 FOIA Amendments.

Tuesday, March 18: Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley discussed Freedom of Information and other open government issues during a Sunshine Week dinner event at The National Press Club. The speech looked ahead to priorities in the new administration, an update to Curley's 2004 Hays-Enterprise Lecture, which many view as a defining moment in moving forward efforts to preserve and protect access to information. The full text of Curley's speech can be found at the Sunshine Week website.

Wednesday, March 19: OpenTheGovernment.org, among others, sponsored the 3rd annual Sunshine Week National Dialogue on Open Government and Secrecy. This year's panel discussions focused on "Government Secrecy: Censoring Your Right to Know". The webcast is archived and will also be available soon at OpenTheGovernment.org and the event will be on a DVD available for purchase. They also compiled a list of legislation and resources about government secrecy and related issues.

The National Freedom of Information Coalition (NFOIC) will hold a national conference, entitled, "2008 FOI Summit", May 9-10, 2008 in Philadelphia, PA.

Here are some of the panels:

FOI Reform Efforts: Rewriting your state's laws?
FOI 2.0: Wikis and podcasts and blogs, oh my!
Sunshine Week Roundtable
Coalition Care and Feeding

Kicking off Sunshine Week, Senator Clinton answered the Sunshine Campaign Survey on open government.

And according to the 2008 Sunshine Week survey, 3/4 of American Adults view the federal government as secretive.

Did anyone happen to attend National FOI Day on Friday? I'll have to check back on their website for a summary of what occurred. Speakers included J. William Leonard and Tom Blanton.

If you are in the D.C. area on Monday, March 17th, NARA is hosting a public meeting held by the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) to solicit public reaction to its recent Report, "Improving Declassification".

Sunshine Week has been mentioned in previous posts but it certainly deserves its own blog post too. This national initiative is set to take place March 16th through the 22nd. Its purpose is to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Anyone can take part, as long as you do something to engage discussion about open government. For example, you could write a letter to your local newspaper, host a panel discussion at your library, hold a debate on the FOIA in your political science class, etc.

Visit the Sunshine Week website for more information on events and resources and ideas to help spread the word. Updates will be posted on the Sunshine Week blog.

So...what will you be planning to do that week or maybe for next years Sunshine Week? Care to share your ideas? (Because I'm looking for some!) I think this year I will create a daily post on my depository's blog about open government and freedom of information resources, but next year I'd like to do something more interactive and on a larger scale with the community.

This isn't about government information specifically, but it's big news for proponents of open access everywhere.  This  story is all over the news this morning - the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Ed., and Inside Higher Ed. among others. Harvard's Arts and Sciences faculty unanimously approved a plan on Tuesday night that will require faculty to post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program. While other institutions have online repositories for their faculty’s work, Harvard is the first university in the United States to mandate open access to its faculty members’ research publications. Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard who proposed the new policy, said after the vote that the decision “should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated.”
The Harvard Crimson has an editorial about the importance of open access to scholarship in which the impact on libraries and scholarship is discussed. The Crimson also reports that the Harvard University Library will be in charge of implementing a new initiative to publish faculty scholarship. The library will set up an Office for Scholarly Communication to make the open-access repository an instrument for access to research across all disciplines in the spirit of the “one-university” environment that their OPAC now provides for holdings in all the libraries.