... [M]any more [public domain] works are now freely and easily available to the public today than a year ago. Much of this is thanks to initiatives like Google Books and the Open Content Alliance, which are digitizing books and other works that libraries have acquired and preserved. Many of the digitized works are in the public domain, and these projects have been making them freely readable and downloadable when they can confirm their public domain status. And now that Google has negotiated a settlement with book publisher and author groups, they plan to be more proactive about identifying and releasing public domain works, including works published after 1922 that are out of copyright (but are not so easy identified as public domain as older books are).
These works have been part of the public domain for years, but when they were simply sitting on the shelves of a few research libraries, they weren’t doing the public much good. Once they’re digitized, though, and their digitizations and descriptions are shared online, they can be much more easily found, read, adapted, and reused by anyone online. By opening up the treasure trove of public domain expression that libraries have preserved, we magnify its value. When libraries share their intellectual endowment, they better fulfill their mission to bring art and knowledge to readers, and make it easy for readers to learn, build on, and be enriched by this knowledge.
I wish I could say that libraries always acted with this understanding. ...
In the new year, I hope to encourage libraries to be more open in sharing their knowledge resources (and to support partners that also enable such openness). My gifts to the public domain this year are in that spirit.
The first one, dedicated immediately to the public domain, is the start of a simple, free decimal classification system, intended to be reasonably compatible with certain existing library standards, but freely available and usable by anyone for any purpose. (I created this after someone requested such a system for their institutional repository, and found out that the current Dewey Decimal system is subject to usage restrictions based on copyright and trademark.) While this is more of a proof of concept than something I expect libraries to adopt in great numbers, I hope it inspires further open sharing of library metadata and standards. ...
Update. See also the new version of the classification system.
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 1/17/2009 09:54:00 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.
