... The open-access project I blogged about here last October has yielded some impressive results. The project involved scanning and proofreading the House Judiciary Committee’s Report on the landmark Copyright Act of 1976. To my knowledge, the House Report has never been freely available online — a keenly felt omission, given how frequently United States courts in copyright cases rely on the Report ...
That problem has now been remedied.
Working in irregular bursts over the last eight months, volunteers at the English-language Wikisource project (a sister site of the much better known Wikipedia encyclopedia) have proofread all 370 page scans from the original House report, and the results have been stitched together to form a single document: Copyright Law Revision (House Report No. 94-1476). As the accompanying color-coded chart reveals, most pages of the report have been proofread by at least two different users, and the rest should be finished within a few weeks if current trends continue.
Here are just a few reasons why the Wikisource version of the House Report is the best now available anywhere.
It’s free. Like all U.S. government works, the text is in the public domain. And Wikisource, unlike proprietary database vendors, doesn’t purport to limit your freedom to copy or reuse the public-domain texts that are hosted on the site. ...
It’s complete. Other online versions of the Report, as well as most hard-copy reprints ... omit certain portions. ... Wikisource, in keeping with its general editorial philosophy, reproduces the complete text in its entirety; the site’s editors don’t substitute their own judgments about which portions of the document will be useful to you.
It’s pinpoint-hyperlink-able (I’m sure I’m overlooking a more technologically correct way of saying that). Did you spot those hyperlinks in the preceding paragraph? Mitigating the potential unwieldiness of posting a 370-page document as a single Web page is the fact that anchor elements are included to take you directly to any page within the document. So if you want to jump straight to the Committee’s discussion of fair use, for example, you can.
It’s (optionally) annotated. Wikisource reproduces original texts as published, warts and all. But the architecture of the site makes it easy to offer an alternative annotated version of the text where errors are marked and corrections offered. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 6/19/2008 12:27:00 PM.
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.
