Shiri Lev-Ari, The national poet and the new generation, Haaretz International, January 17, 2005. Excerpt: 'Everyone in the copyright and new media department of ACUM, the Association of Composers, Authors and Publishers of Music in Israel, breathed a sigh of relief. The end of 2004 marked 70 years since the death of national poet Haim Nahman Bialik, and his work entered the public domain....What will happen now that the works of the national poet are accessible to everyone? The Internet has already given its answer. At the beginning of this month, the Ben Yehuda Project uploaded all of Bialik's work. The project, at benyehuda.org, started in 1999 and presents the works of Hebrew writers, poets and thinkers who died more than 70 years ago. On January 3, 220 of Bialik's poems appeared on the site, as well as stories, essays, articles and oral works that were later put in writing....[Assaf] Bartov plans to propose a change to the copyright law to reduce the period that heirs hold the rights to work. "There is a lot of old material by important writers and less popular material that has disappeared from the stores and is out of print, and thus is inaccessible to readers," he said. "Anyway, it does not pay financially for publishers to reissue them, so why wait 70 years?"' (Thanks to BNA Internet Law News.)
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.
