Post-Gazette loses court fight to block state agencies from deleting emails; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4/26/16

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Post-Gazette loses court fight to block state agencies from deleting emails:

"The Post-Gazette and other media outlets said the practice violated the due process rights of the public seeking records under the state’s Right-to-Know law.

The Commonwealth Court rejected the argument, saying the Right-to-Know law doesn’t have a record-retention requirement, doesn’t outlaw destruction of records and governs only whether existing records should be made public.

The Supreme Court affirmed the lower court and denied the paper’s request for an oral argument."

Ohio State Trademarks Name of Ex-Football Coach Woody Hayes; Associated Press via New York Times, 4/22/16

Associated Press via New York Times; Ohio State Trademarks Name of Ex-Football Coach Woody Hayes:

"After trademarking the name of current Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer, the university has done the same with a predecessor, Woody Hayes.

The university filed for the trademark earlier this year from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, The Columbus Dispatch (http://bit.ly/1Sx5w8d ) reported.

The director of trademark and licensing services at Ohio State, Rick Van Brimmer, said the school has used the late coach's name or face on T-shirts, hats and bobblehead figures over the years."

Chief Justice Calls U.S. Patent Challenge Process Bizarre; Reuters via New York Times, 4/2/5/16

Reuters via New York Times; Chief Justice Calls U.S. Patent Challenge Process Bizarre:

"U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts on Monday described as bizarre the legal process used by companies to challenge competitors' patents as the Supreme Court heard a case involving a vehicle speedometer that alerts drivers if they are driving too quickly.

The eight justices heard an appeal filed by Cuozzo Speed Technologies LLC, whose speedometer patent was invalidated in a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office review board procedure after being challenged by GPS device maker Garmin Ltd in 2012.

The issue before the justices during a one-hour argument in the case was whether the U.S. government has made it too easy for companies to pursue challenges to the patents of other companies...

Roberts was the most outspoken critic among the eight justices of the current system in which companies can adopt a dual-track strategy by challenging patents simultaneously in federal court and through the agency review board."

Cassandra Clare Created a Fantasy Realm and Aims to Maintain Her Rule; New York Times, 4/23/16

Penelope Green, New York Times; Cassandra Clare Created a Fantasy Realm and Aims to Maintain Her Rule:

"These high stakes may be why so many young-adult and fantasy authors find themselves ensnared by lawsuits.

In February, Ms. Clare was sued for copyright infringement, among other charges, by Sherrilyn Kenyon, an American young-adult author who writes an urban fantasy series about demon killers named Dark-Hunters. Ms. Clare’s lawyer, John R. Cahill, said he expected the suit to be dismissed and issued a statement that read, in part, “The lawsuit failed to identify a single instance of actual copying or plagiarism by Cassie.”

But the dispute puts Ms. Clare in good company: Ms. Meyer; Rick Riordan, another successful author who drew from Greek mythology when he created his young-adult series; and Ms. Rowling have all been sued for plagiarism, often more than once."

Prince; RobRogers.com, 4/24/16

Rob Rogers, RobRogers.com; Prince

"Prince's impact will continue to be felt..."

Canadian journal breaks new ground in open access science; Globe and Mail, 4/12/16

Ivan Semeniuk, Globe and Mail; Canadian journal breaks new ground in open access science:

"On Tuesday, Canadian Science Publishing – an organization born out of the downsizing of the National Research Council – officially launches FACETS, an online multidisciplinary journal that is Canada’s most ambitious effort yet to carve a niche in the burgeoning world of open access science.

FACETS will charge a fee of $1,350 for each paper it publishes, a few hundred dollars less than the cost of publishing in PLOS ONE, the world’s leading open access journal, which uses a similar model.

But while PLOS ONE requires only that a scientific paper be technically sound for publication, FACETS will also require that each paper it publishes contributes new knowledge, Dr. Blais said.

FACETS will also publish opinion pieces and articles on science policy, he added, providing a forum that could lead to a more public airing of issues related to science in Canada and its interaction with government and politics."

Is Open Access To Research Biden's Answer To Curing Cancer?; Forbes, 4/22/16

Lindsey Tepe, Forbes; Is Open Access To Research Biden's Answer To Curing Cancer? :

"Vice President Joe Biden sees hope beyond the horizon for cancer research. As the man tapped by President Obama to tackle the disease with a new “cancer moonshot,” Biden addressed the nation’s leading cancer experts at their annual research meeting this week by invoking an example from outer space—the Hubble Telescope—and laying out an exciting vision for open research in the process.

The Hubble Space Telescope mission promised to bring into focus faraway objects, celestial bodies beyond the view of astronomers. But when it was first launched in 1990, a faulty mirror blurred the telescope’s vision—it wasn’t until three years later that the NASA team was able, using tiny mirrors, to improve its sight and take its first, sharp photographs of the universe. With the addition of improved spectrograph technology a few short years later, the team was able to improve its search for supermassive black holes...

Openness isn’t just an argument for the public interest, though perhaps that’s where it starts. Taxpayers in the United States currently fund almost $5 billion in cancer research annually, with an additional $800 million in the President’s Budget for fiscal year 2017 to support cancer research. Right now, the results of that research are overwhelmingly published in closed journals that can cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars to access. When even Harvard can’t keep pace with the rising cost of journal subscriptions, just imagine what that means for everyone else.

Quoting an op-ed published on Monday in Wired by Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley, Biden asked the researchers assembled to imagine if, instead, we broke down these barriers to cancer research and made the findings of our public investment openly available to all. Establishing a system of open access—free, immediate access to research articles online, coupled with legal permissions to reuse it—holds the potential to address distorted priorities built into this closed system for publication."