Ben Brumfield has written software, FromThePage, to coordinate the work of online volunteers in transcribing and digitizing handwritten manuscripts. Now he wants to release the code as open source, but only under a license that would require users to make the resulting transcriptions OA. From the blog post on his dilemma:
...My quandary is this: none of the existing Free or Open Source licenses allow me to require that FromThePage be used in conformance with Open Access. Obviously, that's because adding such a restriction -- requiring users of FromThePage not to charge for people reading the documents hosted on or produced through the software -- violates the basic principles of Free Software and Open Source. So where do I find such a license? ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/03/2009 11:38:00 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.
