Julian Dibbell has written a detailed account of the obstacles he faced in making an OA edition of his book, My Tiny Life, even after it went OP and the rights reverted to him. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) Excerpt:
...I was hoping, actually, to make a rather grander announcement, one that I've been looking forward to through years of anxious and improbably complicated preparation but now, at last, should probably just hand-deliver straight to the shitcan of my broken dreams. I was going to announce today that MY TINY LIFE had been liberated -- not merely launched anew but born again under a Creative Commons "copyleft" license and thus set loose for any passing amateur to upload, remix, mashup, and otherwise repurpose in all the many fruitful ways that copyright, precisely, fails to permit.
Except it hasn't. And while the long, sad tale of how it came to this could easily be reduced to a couple sentences (and probably should), I'm going to risk a fuller telling now because, well, there's the off chance I am not the only person on the planet for whom it's news that carving out a little open space in the midst of the existing intellectual-property regime could possibly be as difficult as this....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/21/2008 11:58:00 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.
