Are RSS feeds open access? They are free of charge. But are you free to use them as you like? What if you wanted to braid your favorite three into one? Would you need the three authors' permission for that? Robin Good argues that RSS feeds should carry labels, like Creative Commons licenses, telling users what they are permitted to do with them. That would let some authors limit usage and let others remove permission barriers and provide open access. Good is not only encouraging the idea. He's also offering to create a directory of officially open-access RSS feeds. Sébastien Paquet comments: '[W]hy separate it? I think copyright information ought to be just one more field in a global directory that enables searches to be limited to reusable feeds. Robin says none of the 104 feed directories he knows about tabulates rights information. Pretty astonishing.' (PS: For the record, the RSS and Atom feeds for Open Access News are as OA as the blog itself. I use a CC license on the blog, and when I have time to figure out how to embed it in the feeds, I will embed it.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/03/2004 09:55:00 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.
