Heather Ford, Wrapping up 2007, iCommons blog, December 18, 2007. Excerpt:
In my last letter for the year, I look back at 2007’s biggest news, and what to look forward to in 2008.
2007 saw some major successes in the open education movement. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration was launched with the goal of accelerating the international effort to promote open resources, technology and teaching practices in education. Yale started an open courseware initiative; MIT Open CourseWare passed the 1,800 courses mark, and SELF (Sharing Knowledge about Free Software) – a project to develop premium training and educational materials about Free Software and Open Standards – was launched at events in the Netherlands, Sweden, Bulgaria, Argentina, Mexico, India and Spain.
On the issue of license compatibility, Wikipedia Founder and iCommons Board Member, Jimmy Wales, announced a historic move by the Wikimedia Foundation that will give Wikipedia the right to choose to migrate to Creative Commons. The announcement was made at the fourth of 50 Parties that bring together Wikipedians, Creative Commoners, iCommoners and other free culture lovers – this time in the San Francisco Bay Area....
On the public domain front, audio book company, LibriVox released their 1,000th public domain audio book, and Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency and Creative Commons Canada – in partnership with Creative Commons Corporation – announced a ground-breaking project to create an online, globally searchable catalogue of published works that are in the Canadian public domain. Another major boon for the public domain came in September when COMMUNIA – coordinated by the NEXA Research Center for Internet and Society of the Politecnico of Torino – was launched as a three year project funded by the European Commission to conduct high-level policy discussion and strategic action on all issues related to the public domain in the digital environment....
PS: For my review of OA in 2007, see my SOAN article from earlier this month.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/11/2008 10:43:00 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.
