Anand Parthasarathy, Towards an all-digital book world, The Hindu, December 8, 2005. Excerpt, after reviewing the controversy over Google Book Search:
Meanwhile, nations like India have been prodded into their own initiatives to digitise and preserve their rich legacy of the printed word. The Digital Library of India was launched two years ago with the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science as the nodal agency with the backing of the Union ministry of Communication and Information Technology and the U.S.-based Carnegie Mellon University. Repositories of rare collections including Kanchi University, Sringeri Mutt, the Academy of Sanskrit Research at Melkote near Mysore, the Tirumala-Tirupathi Devasthanam, SASTRA Tanjore, various Tibetan monasteries as well as Rastrapathi Bhavan are partners in the DLI project. In a separate initiative, the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi has also begun digitising its huge collection of half a million titles including a priceless collection of newspaper cuttings. Sate-level initiatives include the digitising of all 17 volumes of Epigraphia Carnatica, with help from the Indian Council of Historical Research. A Bangalore-based company, Newgen Software, is turning the entire collection dating back to the 2nd century BC into CD format. Mysore is also home to the Vidyanidhi project, which seeks to create a single national database of PhD dissertations. Such regional and national initiatives aside, the world is slowly groping towards a model of information sharing where money or the lack of it should never be a barrier. The Open Access Initiative specifically targets access to scientific and research information, which is often denied to developing countries because they are sewn up by a handful of costly journals and their publishers. At the Tunis World Summit on The Information Society in November, Subbiah Arunachalam, distinguished fellow of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai, was one of a small group of committed scientists pleading for new seamless digital delivery systems for knowledge sharing. (See their monograph.) Hopefully, such academic initiatives, and the more hard-nosed ones from the Googles of the world, will make common cause in the global challenge of seamless, ego-less information sharing.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/07/2005 09:28:00 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.
