Thank you Richard for this post!

I would have been very glad to attend the forthcoming workshop; time and money are too short... I signed up  the Open Linguistic mailing list, hoping to find opportunities to attend in a near future.

We are trying to promote open access to resources on CRDO-Aix despite legal, ethical and personal complications. We believe that this can be achieved while a project is being followed up in medium-term archiving. In this context, we advise producers of resources to negotiate the proper permissions with project participants and gradually modify access rights accordingly. Unsurprisingly, most recent corpora shared on our archive are still in restricted access, but it is no longer the case with older projects such as the Open ANC <http://crdo.fr/crdo000770>.

In some cases such as <http://crdo.fr/crdo000714>, participants allow us to share recordings with the scientific community provided that their names are not cited. Consequently, signed consent forms must be stored and archived in a secret folder. However, all will automatically become public beyond the 50-year period assigned by Code du patrimoine (the Heritage Code)!

We have cases such as http://crdo.fr/crdo000761 in which all participants spontaneously signed a consent form unaware that their 164-minute recording is full of gossip that might be perceived as outrageous by the named victims or their relatives. One of the speakers (aged almost 90) jokingly concluded: "why should we care since they are all dead?" This means practically that we maintain restricted access till we have completed an anonymisation procedure (using http://crdo.fr/crdo000526). Once completed, anonymised files will be in open access but raw files will only be accessible to scientists under CRDO (non-commercial) license. In such cases the Creative Common Licence is not appropriate for the entire 'package'.

I suggest that CKAN harvests our OAI data provider http://crdo.fr/oai looking for those items whose access rights are declared "Free access".

BTW, the wiki page of your work group seems to be a dead link:
http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/linguistics

All the best,

Bernard Bel <[log in to unmask]>
Laboratoire Parole et Langage
http://lpl-aix.fr
13604 Aix-en-Provence Cedex 1 (France)

Centre de Ressources pour la Description de l'Oral (CRDO-Aix)
http://crdo.fr


At 23:55 +0100 25/06/11, Richard Littauer wrote:

>I'm glad you've brought this up, Damien. I've been giving a lot of thought recently to what open data means, in Linguistics. This is partly because I'm currently doing a <http://notebooks.dataone.org/workflows>project looking at open data in ecology and bioinformatics, and how it is absolutely essential towards progression in that field. There are differences with linguistics, especially dealing with variation - having to get an informants permission to post something in the open web is a tough obstacle, as are things like IRBs. But these shouldn't be much different than say issues with genomic analysation companies using anonymised genome data from participants in their research.
>
>I don't know if anyone here has heard of the <http://www.okfn.org>Open Knowledge Foundation, but they're very interested in making everything publicly accessible. I'm presenting on the application of scientific workflows, which provide streamlining of repetitive processes and cluster scaling, to linguistic, open data next week at their main conference in Berlin. It should be interesting - I'd be happy to send the minutes of the <http://okcon.org/2011/programme/open-linguistics-workshop>Open Linguistics Workshop along to this list, as well. They also have a <http://linguistics.okfn.org/>blog that might be interesting.
>
>I'm busy at the moment so I can't add more, but here's part of my two cents.
>
>Richard
>
>
>
>
>On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 7:02 PM, Penny Eckert <<mailto:[log in to unmask]>[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
>And if you have a problem IRB, join it and fix it. The US federal guidelines for human subjects research are designed to be flexible, and rogue IRBs often exist where researchers leave policy decisions to administrators who have little interest in facilitating research.
>
>The IRB professionals' organization in the US, PRIM&R (<http://www.primr.org/>http://www.primr.org/), is all about flexibility, so if your IRB is digging in its heels, you might suggest that they attend a conference or two.
>
>
>Penny Eckert
>
>
>
>On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 9:00 PM, David Bowie <<mailto:[log in to unmask]>[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>The strength of the IRB problem depends, of course, on the IRB, given the nearly-completely decentralized nature of the system. If you happen to work somewhere with an, um, strict IRB (as at a place I used to work at where there was worry about any human subjects research issues threatening their planned medical school), it can create problems to the point that you simply can't make any recordings to try to share publicly. (In my case, it pushed me into working with pre-existing archives rather than doing fieldwork during the time i was there.)
>
>Basically, just because IRBs aren't always a problem (and probably aren't as much of a problem as academic folklore would lead one to believe), this doesn't mean that IRBs always aren't a problem.
>
>--
>David Bowie
>
>
>On 13/Jun/11 3:10 PM, Claire Bowern wrote:
>
>Regarding IRBs, I recently did a survey of common problems and data
>management was not one that anyone mentioned (the article is available
>here: <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/language/summary/v086/86.4.bowern.html>http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/language/summary/v086/86.4.bowern.html).
>The IRB problem is less in actuality than people often think.
>Claire
>
>On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 4:23 PM, Kephart, Ronald<<mailto:[log in to unmask]>[log in to unmask]>  wrote:
>
>Patty,
>
>I (and probably many others) share your worldview, but some of us are ruled by Institutional Review Boards that to a greater or lesser degree demand that we conform to standards that were originally developed to curb real abuses in "medical" and "psychological" research.  The Linguistic Society of America and the American Anthropological Association have managed to attenuate this to some extent by providing materials for the education of IRB's, but it's still a problem. Especially when you put data out in the public domain that was collected without any expectation that this would be possible.  For example, I have some really neat stuff in English Creole that I recorded over 30 years ago, but I don't think I can put it "out there" without running afoul of my uni's IRB.  They would probably want me to get retroactive permission from people who have in many cases moved off the island or passed away.
>
>I haven't looked at the site in question, but I bet that they have a place where you have to affirm that the data you upload was acquired according to IRB standards or at least that you have permission from the people you recorded, or something like that.
>
>Ron
>
>Ronald Kephart
>Associate Professor of Anthropology
>
>
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>Penelope Eckert                             
>Professor, Department of Linguistics
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><http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/>http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/
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