The Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum (ISM; International Mozart Foundation) has digitized Mozart’s music, and in this groundbreaking project is making it accessible to everyone [free of charge] on its web site. The ‘NMA Online’ is a digital version of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe (NMA; New Mozart Edition), a scholarly edition of Mozart’s complete works that was compiled by musicologists from around the world in the last 50 years. ‘NMA Online’ has been produced by the ISM in Salzburg in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute in Los Altos, California....
With its 125 volumes the NMA contains the complete text of Mozart’s works based on the critical examination of all available sources. This monumental venture was begun in 1954 by the ISM in cooperation with the Mozart cities of Augsburg, Salzburg and Vienna, and its successful completion is imminent. The project documents Mozart’s productivity in some 24,000 pages of music. Also included are 8,000 pages of critical reports with commentary on the state of the sources and giving detailed information on the variants found in the main sources.
Starting on December 12, 2006 the ISM and the Packard Humanities Institute will make the complete musical texts of the NMA available to everyone for private, scholarly, and educational use as NMA Online. Free access will be provided on the Internet [here]....
Update (December 14, 2006). Mike Carroll reports that the Mozart files are not as free as they appear to be:
Digital copies of Mozart's scores are now "freely" available here. These works are in the public domain for copyright purposes, which means you are free to copy them without restriction.
However, the International Mozarteum Foundation...has imposed a click-through agreement requiring visitors to agree to limit their use of the public domain to personal and fair use copies.
Digitizing copyright's public domain is to be applauded. Locking it behind contractual fences is not. There are other and better cost recovery models for this kind of transitional effort.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/12/2006 08:38:00 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.
