For Immediate Release
For more information: James Campbell,
campbell@spatial.maine.edu,
207-548-2200
Nationally Renowned Scholars to Participate in the
Conference on the Intellectual Commons
at the University of Maine
Nationally renowned scholars Hal Abelson of MIT and Peter Suber
of Public Knowledge will join local presenters at the “Copyright,
Scholarship, and the Case for Open Access: A Conference on the
Intellectual Commons” on Saturday, November 20, from 8:30
a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in Orono at the D.P. Corbett Business Building
at the University of Maine. The conference is free and open to
the public although pre-registration is necessary.
Recent developments in copyright law, digital technology, and
an unprecedented concentration of media ownership are limiting
traditional channels of access to information in the United States.
The Conference on the Intellectual Commons will investigate emerging
options for scholars, teachers, authors, artists, entrepreneurs,
non-profit agencies, and others to access or re-use work produced
by others in new ways, and to make their own work more widely
available through the information commons.
Hal Abelson, a Professor at MIT, is a founder or founding director
of the Creative Commons, of Public Knowledge, and of the Free
Software Foundation. He has also played an instrumental role
in the development of DSpace, open-source software that allows
a university to “capture, distribute and preserve the intellectual
output of its faculty and researchers” in local repositories
in a way that makes that output available to the public.
Peter Suber is a national leader in seeking to expand access
to scholarly knowledge in today’s digital environment.
He is currently the Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge
in Washington DC, and a Senior Researcher at the Scholarly Publishing
and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). He is also a lawyer
as well as a research professor at Earlham College where he taught
as a full time faculty member from 1982-2003.
Neeru Paharia, the San Francisco-based Assistant Director of
the Creative Commons, will demonstrate some of her organization's
latest innovations in finding, re-using, and distributing music,
movies, art, and text.
Faculty from University of Maine system campuses will also lead
sessions. The conference will explore topics such as: Scholarly
Publishing in the Digital Age; Economics of Open Access; Artists,
Creators and the Commons – New Approaches to Sharing and
Disseminating Work; Libraries and Access to Scholarly Information;
and Alternatives to Traditional Copyright – Why and How.
The Conference on the Intellectual Commons is sponsored by the
University of Maine Information Science Collaborative, Fogler
Library, the Technology Law Center at the University of Maine
School of Law, Still Water and a number of professional organizations
concerned with preserving and expanding access to digital information.
There is no fee to attend but pre-registration is necessary due
to space limitations. Information on the conference and registration
is available on the Web at http://library.umaine.edu/COIC
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