U.S. Accuses Harvard Scientist of Concealing Chinese Funding; The New York Times, January 28, 2020

Ellen Barry, The New York Times; U.S. Accuses Harvard Scientist of Concealing Chinese Funding


“Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, was charged on Tuesday with making false statements about money he had received from a Chinese government-run program, part of a broad-ranging F.B.I. effort to root out theft of biomedical research from American laboratories.
 
Dr. Lieber, a leader in the field of nanoscale electronics, was one of three Boston-area scientists accused on Tuesday of working on behalf of China. His case involves work with the Thousand Talents Program, a state-run program that seeks to draw talent educated in other countries.

American officials are investigating hundreds of cases of suspected theft of intellectual property by visiting scientists, nearly all of them Chinese nationals or of Chinese descent. Some are accused of obtaining patents in China based on work that is funded by the United States government, and others of setting up laboratories in China that secretly duplicated American research.”

5 Major Research Universities Endorse Open-Access Journals; Wired Campus, 5/14/09

Ben Terris via Wired Campus; 5 Major Research Universities Endorse Open-Access Journals:

"In an effort to support alternatives to traditional scholarly publishing, five major research universities announced their joint commitment to open-access journals on Monday.

The institutions—Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley—signed a compact agreeing to the “timely establishment” of mechanisms for providing financial support for free open-access journals."

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Five-Major-Research/8042/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

At Columbia Conference, Harvard’s Darnton Asks: Is Google the Elsevier of the Future?, Library Journal, 3/18/09

Via Library Journal: At Columbia Conference, Harvard’s Darnton Asks: Is Google the Elsevier of the Future?:

"Is the public’s interest in books at risk with the pending Google Book Search Settlement? That was one of many issues addressed at an all-day conference on the settlement, held on March 13 at Columbia University.

In the final panel of the day, which addressed public interest issues, Google’s Alexander Macgillivray, associate general counsel for products and intellectual property, responded a bit pugnaciously...He suggested that “a special type of researcher,” such as automated translation experts, would also benefit enormously from the database, that “the long term effects of those researchers having access to this corpus” could even lead “to more peace in the world,” and that the database would add significantly to access to books by disabled people, citing an endorsement from the National Federation of the Blind...

“The downside has to do with the danger of monopoly,” he [Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton] said, adding that, while not all monopolies are bad, the danger comes in the abuse of power, notably via monopoly pricing. “So we have a situation where Google can really ratchet up prices, and that’s what really worries me,” he said. “There’s no real authority to enforce fair pricing… I’m worried that Google will be the Elsevier of the future, but magnified by a hundred times.” Without a mechanism to police pricing, he warned, “it’s going to ruin libraries.”...He called the provision of one terminal in public libraries “one of the weakest provisions,” and predicted chaos in a large urban public library. Google, meanwhile, has said it would consider more than one terminal in larger libraries.

Another solution?
Is Congressional intervention on the public’s behalf a possibility? Does the settlement, for example, make it harder, or perhaps easier to go to Congress for authorization to create a national digital library? “I hate to say this, I don’t think it’s possible,” Darnton said. “We’ve got this settlement, and if it’s not modified now, it’s going to shape the world of digital information for the near future, maybe the far future.”"

http://www.libraryjournal.com/CA6645344.html

NIH Open Access mandate made permanent, Science Commons, 3/17/09

Via Science Commons: NIH Open Access mandate made permanent:

"The NIH Public Access Policy, which was due to expire this year, has now been made permanent by the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, signed into law last week...

Prior to NIH’s mandatory deposit requirement, under a voluntary policy NIH began in 2005, the compliance rate in terms of deposits in PubMed had been very low (4%, as published in an NIH report to Congress in 2006). Shortly after the adoption of the new mandatory policy, submissions spiked to an all time high, prompting an NIH official to project compliance rates of 55-60%. Just take a look at this NIH chart, and note the sharp rise after the policy took effect in early 2008."

http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2009/03/17/nih-mandate-made-permanent/

Harvard Team Asks Court To Allow Live Broadcast Of Tenenbaum Case Against RIAA, TechDirt.com, 12/29/08

Via TechDirt.com: Harvard Team Asks Court To Allow Live Broadcast Of Tenenbaum Case Against RIAA:

"A bunch of folks have sent in the story that Charles Nesson of Harvard, who is challenging the constitutionality of the RIAA's lawsuits against file sharers, has filed a motion asking that the trial be broadcast live over the internet, amusingly using the RIAA's own words to support his request. From the beginning, the RIAA has always insisted that its lawsuits were part of a broad "educational campaign" to teach people about the evils of file sharing."

http://techdirt.com/articles/20081229/0144443229.shtml

OpEd: Editorial: Google Deal or Rip-Off?, Via Library Journal, 12/15/08

OpEd: Via Library Journal: Editorial: Google Deal or Rip-Off?:

"One public access terminal per public library building. Institutional database subscriptions for academic and public libraries that secure once freely available material in a contractual lockbox, which librarians already know too well from costly e-journal and e-reference database deals. No remote access for public libraries without approval from the publisher/author Book Rights Registry, set up to administer the program. And no copying or pasting from that institutional database, though you can print pages for a fee. Of course, you can always purchase the book, too.

Those are just a few of the choice tidbits from the 200-page settlement in the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Authors Guild three-year-old suit against Google, drawn from Jonathan Band's “Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement.” Band's report was commissioned by the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries...

The restrictions were obviously too much for one of the original five Google partners, Harvard University Library (HUL), which criticized the settlement. Robert Darnton, the HUL director, said the deal had “too many potential limitations on access to and use of books” for academia and public libraries and questioned what the price for access would be, given that “the subscription service will have no real competitors.”"

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6618842.html

Billion Dollar Charlie vs. the RIAA, Boston Globe, 11/18/08

Via Boston Globe: Billion Dollar Charlie vs. the RIAA:

"[Charles] Nesson and his [Harvard Law School] students have decided to "litigate in the court of public opinion," as well as in the courtroom, and they are putting on quite a show. Legally, they are arguing that the RIAA is using civil litigation to punish alleged criminal activity, which they say violates the Constitution. Moreover, Nesson et al have posted all manner of fascinating materials at the CyberOne website of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society."

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/articles/2008/11/18/billion_dollar_charlie_vs_the_riaa/

What Is Art For?, New York Times, 11/14/08

Via New York Times: What Is Art For?:

"For the Copy Left, as for Hyde, the last 20 years have witnessed a corporate “land grab” of information — often in the guise of protecting the work of individual artists — that has put a stranglehold on creativity, in increasingly bizarre ways. Over dinner not long ago, he told me about the legal fate of Emily Dickinson's poems. Dickinson died in 1886, but it was not until 1955 that an “official” volume of her collected works was published, by Harvard University Press. The length of copyright terms has expanded substantially in the last century, and Harvard holds the exclusive right to Dickinson’s poems until 2050 — more than 160 years after they were first written. When the poet Robert Pinsky asked Harvard for permission to include a Dickinson poem in an article that he was writing for Slate about poetic insults, it refused, even for a fee. “Their feeling was that once the poem was online, they’d lose control of it,” Hyde told me.

In highlighting the absurd ways in which intellectual copyright has overreached, Hyde brings to mind such iconic Copy Left figures as Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional-law scholar at Stanford. Yet Hyde’s new book, which he allowed me to read in draft form (it is unfinished and untitled), addresses what he considers a more fundamental issue. We may believe there should be a limit on the market in cultural property, he argues, but that doesn’t mean that we have “a good public sense” of where to set that limit. Hyde’s book is, at its core, an attempt to help formulate that sense."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/magazine/16hyde-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=copyright&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Harvard Slams Google Settlement; Others React with Caution - Library Journal, 10/30/08

Via Library Journal: Harvard Slams Google Settlement; Others React with Caution:

"As LJ noted in its initial report, most observers say that the success of the deal will be in the details—and, as of now, this broad, complex business arrangement, still seeking court approval, simply leaves many questions open—especially for libraries. LJ has put together a quick roundup of thoughtful opinions now circulating about what the settlement means..."

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6610115.html