eContentPlus is a new funding program from the European Commission. From the web site:
On 9 March 2005 the European Parliament and the Council approved the eContentplus Programme, a multiannual Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable. The 4-year programme (2005–08), proposed by the European Commission, will have a budget of € 149 million to tackle organisational barriers and promote take up of leading-edge technical solutions to improve acessibility and usability of digital material in a multilingual environment. The Programme addresses specific market areas where development has been slow: geographic content (as a key constituent of public sector content), educational content, cultural, scientific and scholarly content. The Programme also supports EU-wide co-ordination of collections in libraries, museums and archives and the preservation of digital collections so as to ensure availability of cultural, scholarly and scientific assets for future use. The programme aims at facilitating access to digital content, its use and exploitation, enhancing quality of content with well-defined metadata, and reinforcing cooperation between digital content stakeholders. It will tackle multilingual and multicultural barriers....In the area of cultural content, scientific information and scholarly content, eContentplus will support the development of interoperable collections and objects from cultural institutions (archives, libraries and museums...), and solutions to facilitate exposure, discovery and retrieval of these resources.
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.
