This morning, Dr. Victoria Stodden was awarded the Kaltura Prize for her paper entitled “Enabling Reproducible Research: Open Licensing for Scientific Innovation.” The Kaltura Prize is granted to the author of the best submission on a topic relating to digital media remix, open-source business models, collaborative production, democratic culture, or related themes which speak to the identity of Kaltura as the world’s first open-source video platform.
In conjunction with this conference, the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy (or IJCLP) held the fifth annual interdisciplinary writing competition on access to knowledge.
The authors of selected papers are being invited to publish their work in a special volume of the IJCLP, dedicated to the memory of former IJCLP lead editor Boris Rotenberg.
This year’s writing competition features an award sponsored by Kaltura — the first open-source platform for video creation, management, interaction and collaboration. For those of you not familiar with Kaltura, it is a leader in open-source video creation, discovery, and collaboration, building one of the world’s largest video network across thousands of sites. Launched in September of 2007, it is the winner of numerous awards for its pioneering open-source platform enables web publishers to engage with their users by easily adding interactive video and rich-media functionality - including searching, uploading, importing, editing, remixing, and sharing. The Kaltura platform, which has been dubbed ‘Wiki meets YouTube’ includes unique collaboration functionalities that allow groups of users to create and consume rich media together. This collaboration increases users’ engagement by adding a social element to the rich media experience.
Kaltura’s platform has been embraced by Wikipedia, the leader in online collaboration. Kaltura and the Wikimedia Foundation have launched a beta program aimed at reaching Wikipedia’s 250M viewers. Kaltura’s strategy rests on creating similar open-source collaborative video extensions to all other major Content Management Systems (CMS). Kaltura’s goal is to create the world’s first and largest network of legally sharable and remixable rich media content, and contribute to the Access to Knowledge movement by providing essential tools for rich media collaboration and sharing.
The Kaltura Prize has been granted to the author of the best submission on a topic relating to digital media remix, open-source business models, collaborative production, democratic culture, or related themes which speak to the identity of Kaltura as the world’s first open-source video platform. The Kaltura Prize will include a cash stipend of $1,000 and funding for travel to and accommodations in Geneva to accept the award at the A2K3 conference.
I’m happy to announce that the winner is Dr. Victoria Stodden for her paper entitled “Enabling Reproducible Research: Open Licensing for Scientific Innovation”
Dr. Stodden is a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, has a JD from Stanford Law School and a Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford. We are happy to present the Kaltura writing prize to Victoria and request that she share a few words about her paper.
The paper can be accessed at: http://www.stanford.edu/~vcs/
Paper Abstract
There is a gap in the current licensing and copyright structure for the growing number of scientists releasing their research publicly, particularly on the internet. Scientific research produces more than the final paper: the code, data structures, experimental design and parameters, documentation, figures, are all important for communication of the scholarship and replication of the results. I propose the Open Research License for scientific researchers to use for all components of their scholarship. It is intended to encourage reproducible scientific investigation, facilitate greater collaboration, and promote engagement of the larger community in scientific learning and discovery.
There is an analogy between the development of culture postulated by the Creative Commons licenses and fundamental scientific methodology: both envision advances through building on work that has come before. The Creative Commons licenses are designed to facilitate the creation of culture through the modification of existing media, whereas scientific understanding grows through the reproduction and extension of current scientific research. Providing an Open Research License in the spirit of the Creative Commons licenses serves to allay fears that prevent a scientist from publicly releasing all the scholarship by including an attribution component, as well as a provision that derivative works carry the same license. I argue using the ORL can only increase our scientific understanding, at very minimal cost.
