In the December 6 Chronicle of Higher Education, Florence Olsen reviews the state of MIT's OpenCourseWare project, which aims to put all MIT courses online without charge to users. MIT faculty retain copyright to their coursework but license MIT to distribute it online. Course materials written by others have not been as easy to work with. "Collecting permissions, paying royalties, and finding other materials to substitute for copyrighted materials have turned out to be much bigger jobs than expected."
Quoting Roy Rosenzweig, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, on GMU's similar project to put course materials for 100,000 courses online: "We should be in the business of having people steal our stuff, because we're trying to foster innovation, exchange, communication, and dialogue."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/02/2002 11:56:00 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.
