What made me sit down to think about this for a few days was the passing description of this an an Open Access project.
I worked for many years in the museum community, and every museum that I ever worked for or consulted for wanted to make its collections available in one digital form or another. ... Museums were among the earliest institutions to share their collections online in the mid 1990s. ...
Sure, there have been lengthy discourses about levels of access to the digital media surrogates and questions of rights and control of those new media assets ... but no museum wants to limit discovery of their collections -- they want to facilitate their collections' use in research and teaching.
I've just not heard it described as "open access" before. ...
Then it hit me -- for the past 15 years museums have been major players in the open access movement without necessarily always knowing it. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 9/16/2008 04:07:00 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.