James Boyle, a professor of law and co-founder of the Centre for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University and author of The Public Domain: enclosing the commons of the mind, has given a public lecture on how intellectual property and public domain interacts with areas of human development such as scientific research and free speech.  Princeton’s UChannel has put his lecture up in a freely available podcast.

Go to the UChannel page to listen.

The Modern Language Assocation’s (MLA) new style guide for citing sources in research has done away with print being the default style.  They have also done away with citing the URL of an electronic resource found on the web!

The Modern Language Association’s styles are long the standard in humanities research, could other style guides be far behind?  With much of the medical research being published in electronic journals now how will other citation standards change?

Ars Technica has a short article with comments discussing the changes as well as a link to the MLA’s new guide.

Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the Creative Commons movement, has written a piece on his blog about H.r.801, the legislation that representative John Conyers is trying to get passed into law.  This would effectively forbid NIH from requiring that research funded with NIH funds be freely accessibly after 12 months.

Several organizations have banded together to state their opposition to this legislation; ALA being one of them.  Read more about how this law would effect access to information and essentially charge taxpayers twice to read an article on Lawrence Lessig’s blog.

Representative John Conyers has re-introduced a bill that will, among other things,  “Stifle access to a broad range of federally funded works, overturning the crucially important NIH Public Access Policy and preventing other agencies from implementing similar policies,”  according to other people concerned about open access.

To read more about the implications of this bill you can see Jennifer McLennan’s Letter from which this quote was taken from as well as other posts on BoingBoing and the Open Access Blog.