BU Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar: Open Access and Research into History: Issues of Copyright

Tuesday February 20, 2018, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering
610 Commonwealth Avenue

Casey Westerman, Archivist for the Institute for Advanced Study, will discuss some of the complex issues raised by the recent case of Kurt Gödel’s “Max Phil” notebooks. These fifteen notebooks, composed by Gödel in Gabelsberger shorthand between 1938 and 1955, were recently partially transcribed and edited by an international team of scholars funded by a research grant from the French government (http://www.ceperc.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article350). Since the conclusion of that work, portions of the Max Phil have been published or otherwise made available by a variety of publishers and institutions, while the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences now seeks to publish a complete critical edition of the entire series (http://www.bbaw.de/en/research/goedel).

Commenting will be Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, and Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.