In undertaking the Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project additional areas of inquiry have emerged.
It is now apparent that we need to do more work to determine the structural underpinnings of the legal framework required to support e-Research. Building on work started in the UK and the US, our priority is to make the legal conditions as dynamic and effective as the technology.
This extends OAK Law from ‘open access to all’ into an open innovation model within secure knowledge communities. That is, the material is openly available to ‘members’ of the closed group, such as a particular research/knowledge community or innovation centre. This is the natural progression of the project.
Foundation work on a framework for understanding how e-Research legal issues can be managed, structured and reformed to facilitate collaboration has been carried out by Professor Paul David and Dr Michael Spence at Oxford University in the UK: Paul A David and Michael Spence, ‘Towards institutional infrastructures for e-Science: the scope of the challenge’ Research Report No 2, Oxford Internet Institute, September 2003.
The work of David and Spence is an invaluable road map for our project, which will take those initial thoughts and build a deeper understanding of the issues, especially from an Australian perspective.
