What do you get when you combine a four-year-old licensing system and two possibly complementary projects to digitize substantial quantities of print information? With luck, a substantial ecommons: millions of digital items that can be used directly and as the basis for derivative works without infringing copyright. These projects should also result in full-text indexing for millions more items that won't be freely available online but can be acquired through libraries and booksellers....Pulling these threads together, OCA encourages use of Creative Commons licenses whenever that makes sense. That makes it more likely that a good deal of copyright material will be available under appropriate license, since Creative Commons licenses offer carefully drawn ways to "give away" some copyright control without losing copyright. Google isn't part of this combination yet, but it wouldn't take much to make the public domain works part of the greater whole. Creative Commons takes one tack toward building a commons of econtent (and physical content). OCA uses Creative Commons and the many open standards developed to share information where it can, and works to make major resources available to all without injury to any. There will be more such projects—not to undermine the rights of writers and publishers, but to provide a commons that we can use and derive new creations from.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/21/2006 11:26:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
