Tim Berners-Lee was just voted the greatest Briton of 2004. From today's Reuters story on the honor: 'Noted historian and panel member David Starkey said Berners-Lee's double acts of ingenuity and charity made him an automatic choice. "He chose not to commercially exploit his invention. He gave it away almost wilfully. If he had fully exploited it, he would make Bill Gates look like a pauper today," he said. Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990 while at the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva to let his fellow scientists work together even when in other parts of the world. But instead of patenting his invention he chose to open access to all - and the rest is history. He was knighted last year for an invention that has been likened in importance to the wheel.' (PS: Berners-Lee still works for the World Wide Web Consortium in Boston, but in December took a second position in his native Britain as chair of computer science at the University of Southampton, the greenhouse of OA tools and ideas.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/28/2005 09:08:00 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.
