Anon., How to Digitize Eight Million Books: A Conversation with Michael Keller, The Book and the Computer, December 15, 2003. Quoting Keller: "Books are copyrighted, and we can't violate those copyrights. So what we have to do is persuade the rights holders -- the publishers, the authors, the agents and so forth -- that there's a benefit to them in digitizing their books. The first project we're doing is digitizing the books at the Stanford University Press. Over the last 80 years, we've published about 2,500 titles. We're digitizing them all. We'll put some on the Web for free and put others up for sale through a company like Ebrary, where they can be sold around the world, costing us only a pittance to produce on a per-page basis. We can take books that have been long out of print and put them back on the market, benefiting authors who might not have seen a dime since their first sale long ago. This will be an example to other publishers, to see if we can't persuade them to let us do the same with their titles. Another thing we can do is to digitize books published by the government and by nongovernmental organizations, if they're not copyrighted, making them available to the world. We can begin to demonstrate what effects this kind of collection might have on study, research and teaching -- not just higher education, but kindergarten through high school and in continuing education. I think it's an experiment that's got to happen."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/16/2003 09:49:00 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.
