For journals, there’s several proposed ways of dealing with it, none of which are entirely satisfactory. You can try to infer which author is which automatically, by cluster analysis (subject, co-authors, journal etc). That seems to work better than it ought to (to my mind) but still falls down badly when you have two very similarly-named people working in overlapping fields at the same time. Or you can create a central ID system for authors, where authors authenticate themselves and lay claim to ‘their’ papers. (Local versions of this exist already – any institutional repository of papers, like our own ORO, does that job. And some subject areas have their own systems that do it too.) Or you can just wave your hands at it and say it’s probably not much of a problem and it roughly comes out in the wash.

Some combination of that lot is probably the answer!

Newer forms of digital scholarship make some things easier and some things harder. It’s often easier to attribute authorship to a single identified entity – although group blogs and people blogging in multiple contexts makes it slightly trickier. And tracking references is easier (Google does it for you, in many ways) and harder (how do you rule out links from spam blogs?).

The manual calculation is a bit tricky, but the benefit is that individual scholars are best placed to do it: they know (or ought to!) what papers they’ve written, and are motivated to find the lot and work out the highest score they can get. But that’s probably a better bet in disciplines where that sort of algorithmic thinking is part of the domain!

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to add a footer to items in the RSS feed of a WordPress.com hosted blog like mine. (Or at least, if there is, I can’t find it, and neither can lots of people on the WordPress.com forums.) So I’ll have to rely on cut-and-pasting it myself, which is a bit tedious, and I’m bound to forget sometimes. But better than nothing.

I subscribe to your rss feed. When I click on the link, I don’t see the home page. Some blog apps allow editing of the footer, which might let the cc license be displayed on each page at the bottom. Just a thought.

There are of course instances where DRM purveyors attempt to control copying directly (e.g. Blu-ray disks have a BD-ROM mark that is theoretically not copiable by ordinary players.)

But yes, in general DRM serves to make life harder for genuinely honest users, and is at best (worst?) a speedbump for determined mass copiers.

Firstly, Creative Commons is not the same as public domain! Creative Commons provides a range of licenses that allow the rights owner to make their work available under the terms that suit them – see e.g. http://creativecommons.org/choose/. Creative Commons do also provide a tool to release works in to the public domain – see e.g. http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/ – but the essence of Creative Commons is ’some rights reserved’. Public domain is pretty much ‘no rights reserved’.

Secondly, although I’m an enthusiast for Creative Commons licences, I don’t see people rejecting sites without a CC licence any time soon, if the content is the stuff they want.

Thirdly, this blog is already licensed under a Creative Commons licence – CC-BY, the least restrictive Creative Commons licence. That means anyone can do what they like with my blog content, so long as they attribute me as the author.

There’s a notice to that effect in the top right-hand corner of the blog’s home page – let me know if you have a better suggestion for how to make this clear to all comers.

– I already do have a, up in the top right-hand corner of the site.

Humans think in tag soup. Maintaining sensible hierarchies is only for obsessives.

The only way semantic stuff works is when it’s abstracted by machine from human behaviour. Even then, it’s prone to epic fails.