I just heard Ethan Beard from Google talking about Google Book Search. It's a great project.
But when you search for Lessig's book Free Culture (published by Penguin Books and licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 1.0 licence) you can see only excerpts from the book (the 'card catalogue' view). Full text search is not available, even though it is allowed by the licence. Instead, it points to Penguin Books, enabling you to buy the book from the publisher, with no reference to the fact that its free at all.
I asked Beard about this and he said that they are working with Creative Commons but that they won't be able to 'make searches every type of licence in the world'. I hope that they at least start with Creative Commons licenses. With 55 million linkbacks, surely that's a big enough pool?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/19/2005 11:28:00 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.
