"Our goal is to help with the expansion of human knowledge," said Dave Mandelbrot, Yahoo's vice president of search content. "What we'd like to see in two or three years is a major collaborative effort where libraries are contributing material and publishers are providing permission" to digitize their content....In fact, Mandelbrot said, the group's goal is to make the content available so that any search engine can index it and make it available. Digitizing the world's cultural archives, from television shows to classic books, has long been a burning ambition of Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. In fact, Kahle's Internet Archive has already launched an effort to digitize books called the Million Book Project, a collaboration with Indian and Chinese agencies and Carnegie Mellon University. "The real crime is that we have all these people using the Internet for research, but we don't have some of the best content on it,' Kahle said....In addition to working with libraries to scan older content whose copyright is expired, the consortium will collaborate with publishers and authors who want to make their works available on the Web. In some instances, the Open Content Alliance will give copyright-holders the option of releasing their material under a Creative Commons license, an alternative licensing scheme that encourages re-use and distribution of content.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/20/2005 11:32:00 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.
