In a much-awaited move, the non-profit Citizendium encyclopedia project announced that it has adopted the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-by-sa) as the license for its own original collaborative content. The license permits anyone to copy and redevelop the thousands of articles that the Citizendium has created within its successful first year.
The license allows the Citizendium to join the large informal club of free resources associated especially with Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation. Wikipedia uses the FSF’s GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), which is expected to be made fully compatible with CC-by-sa in coming months. Therefore, Wikipedia and the Citizendium will be able to exchange content easily....
To explain the choice of license to present and future contributors, [Citizendium founder and editor in chief Larry Sanger] released a 22,000-word essay: “An explanation of the Citizendium license.” The project underwent a very lengthy deliberation process in multiple groups and venues, beginning last spring....
The project rejected a license (CC-by-nc-sa) that would forbid commercial reuse, an issue on which “Citizens” were evenly divided....
PS: If you remember, Larry Sanger kicked off the discussion back in September by calling for "well-reasoned position statements, from anyone...about what licensing scheme" Citizendium should use.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/22/2007 09:36:00 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.
