It is a great idea, and the resulting catalogue will rapidly become the starting place for researchers around the world. But it might not happen, because the project is currently stalled after three US authors sued Google for scanning their copyright material....I am an author, so I have an interest in this, and even though I have many doubts about Google's operations and ideology, I have to support them in this one....Google is big enough to stand up to the pressure, and it can afford even more expensive lawyers than the Authors Guild. But there is a danger that now they are a public company obliged to enhance shareholder value, they will instead cut a deal with them to share revenue or pay to license this way of using the text. We would get our catalogue then, but have lost something equally valuable - the ability for anyone else to do what Google has done. After all, why should I not be able to scan the books I own and index them so that I can find out exactly where William Gibson first used the term "cyberspace"?...Rights holders have often tried to use the law to stop innovations that do not benefit them directly. In the 1970s the movie industry tried to kill video recording, and the record industry has only just begun to realise that online distribution is the key to their future survival rather than the devil's handiwork. Now some authors and their trade association are standing in the way of progress, even though it is clear that the main beneficiaries of the project will be publishers and the authors themselves. They will sell more books or, if they are academics, see their research read and cited more often. There will be a general increase in the quality of university research simply because vital sources will be overlooked less often. The world will be a better place....If existing copyright law can stop Google, or anyone else with the inclination, from creating such a phenomenally useful tool, then copyright law is wrong and must be changed. There are three things Google can do now to make it clear that profit is not the only thing motivating them in the project. First, they can change the name. "Google Print" makes publishers and authors think of print on demand and printing extracts, but even the US Authors Guild might have been happy to see the launch of "Google Catalog". Second, and more crucially, they can open the project up to anyone who wants to participate. That means publishing the technical specifications and any relevant APIs so that - for example - I can search the database from within my web application without having to show their ads on my site. Finally, they should let any library in the world have a copy of the electronic versions of all the books they hold that are in the catalogue. Not a link to the Google website but a real copy, to be held locally and used by the library under a very relaxed and permissive licence. Otherwise we will just have to kick off an open source scanning project to create a free catalogue of our own - I have got a few thousand books to get started with - and let the publishers sue ten thousand of us.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/10/2005 11:31:00 AM.
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.
