Open Access News

Content in the OCA archive will be accessible soon through this website and through Yahoo! The OCA will encourage the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the content owners and contributors. Contributors to the OCA must agree to the principles set forth in the Call for Participation.

From the call for participation:

Please join an Open Content Alliance (OCA) made up of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world, which will offer broad, public access to a rich panorama of world culture by building a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. By creating a growing archive of digital materials, the OCA will serve the combined interests of its contributors and the global community of Internet users. Contributors will donate collections, services, facilities, tools and/or funding to the OCA. The contributing organizations support the following principles: [1] The OCA will encourage the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the rights of content owners and contributors. [2] Contributors will determine the terms and conditions under which their collections are distributed and how attribution should be made. [3] The OCA need not be obligated to accept all content that is offered to it and may give preference to that which can be made widely accessible. [4] The OCA will offer collection and item-level metadata of its hosted collections in a variety of formats. [5] The OCA welcomes efforts to create and offer tools (including finding aids, catalogs, and indexes) that will enhance the usability of the materials in the archive. [6] Copies of the OCA collections will reside in multiple archives internationally to ensure their long-term preservation and accessibility to all.

From Brewster Kahle's introduction to the OCA on the Yahoo blog:

[I]t is time to have more great material available on the Internet and to be able to have it be open and free. The opportunity before all of us is living up to the dream of the Library of Alexandria and then taking it a step further-- Universal access to all knowledge. Interestingly, it is now technically doable. Then the question became-- is it in the interest of enough people and institutions to get there? Some hang-ups have been around costs, rights, and guidelines for sharing. All of these things were worked out for their domains by Internet folks and open source folks in the last few decades. But how are we going build a system that has everything available to everyone?...To kick this off, Internet Archive will host the material and sometimes helps with digitization, Yahoo will index the content and is also funding the digitization of an initial corpus of American literature collection that the University of California system is selecting, Adobe and HP are helping with the processing software, University of Toronto and O'Reilly are adding books, Prelinger Archives and the National Archives of the UK are adding movies, etc. We hope to add more institutions and fine tune the principles of working together. Initial digitized material will be available by the end of the year. So the costs are mostly being borne by the host institutions based on their own fundraising or business models. The cost of digitization is sometimes offset by a different party (in the case of American Lit-- Yahoo!). We think this can scale to millions of books movies and audio recordings....To be clear, the public domain works in the Open Content Alliance can be "borrowed" in bulk for build navigation services, do research on, and the like. Bits and pieces of the public domain collections can be re-used and re-interpreted. If someone wants to print and binding a book and sell it on Amazon.com-- go nuts, if they want to make it into an audio book and post it on the web-- go for it (we will even supply the hosting for this), basically let’s have a blast building on the classics of humankind.

Also see Katie Hefner's story about the OCA in today's NYTimes, In Challenge to Google, Yahoo Will Scan Books. Excerpt:

An unusual alliance of corporations, nonprofit groups and universities plans to announce today an ambitious plan to digitize hundreds of thousands of books over the next several years and put them on the Internet, with the full text accessible to anyone. The effort is being led by Yahoo, which appears to be taking direct aim at a similar project announced by its archrival, Google, whose own program to create searchable digital copies of entire collections at leading research libraries has run into a series of challenges since it was announced nine months ago. The new project, called the Open Content Alliance, has the wide-ranging goal of digitizing historical works of fiction along with specialized technical papers. In addition to Yahoo, its members include the Internet Archive, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, as well as the National Archive in England and others....[T]he potential power of the new collaboration lies in the collective ability of many institutions to compare and cross-reference materials, said Daniel Greenstein, librarian for the California Digital Library at the University of California....In a departure from Google's approach, the Open Content Alliance will also make the books accessible to any search engine, including Google's. (Under Google's program, a digitized book would show up only through a Google search.) And by focusing at first on works that are in the public domain - such as thousands of volumes of early American fiction - the group is sidestepping the tricky question of copyright violation....When it comes to copyrighted materials, the newly formed group appears to be taking a more cautious approach by seeking permission from copyright holders and by making works available though a Creative Commons license, whereby the copyright holder stipulates how a work can be used. "Other projects talk about snippets," said Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that is building a vast digital library. "We don't talk about snippets. We talk about books." Dr. Greenstein said that the University of California, which plans to contribute as much as $500,000 to the project in the first year, will scan 5,000 volumes of early American fiction at the outset, with the eventual goal of scanning another 5,000 to 15,000 volumes within the next year....Yahoo did not disclose the overall budget for the project, although its own contribution has been estimated at between $300,000 and $500,000 for the first year. Hewlett-Packard and Adobe Systems are contributing equipment to the project, and the Internet Archive will do the actual digitizing and archiving of the books. The Internet Archive has set up shop at the University of Toronto and has scanned some 2,000 volumes at a cost of about 10 cents a page....The new group is calling for others to join. And Mr. Kahle of the Internet Archive said he hoped to recruit Google. "The thing I want to have happen out of all this is have Google join in," he said. "I know we're dealing with archcompetitors, but if there's room for these guys to bend, by the time my kid goes to college, we could have a library system that is just astonishing."

Also see the OCA press release and news stories in the Washington Post, Associated Press, Search Engine Watch, RedNova, and PaidContent.