Walking along the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge 25 years ago, an undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology foresaw the impact that computer networks would have one day and decided there were two great causes he could devote his life to: encrypting digital information to protect privacy or building an online version of the Great Library of Alexandria. Brewster Kahle picked the library. "I've never had a new idea since then," Kahle said. "And it's been a great career path." Since then, every company or project started by the man who created the Internet Archive has been a step on the road to realizing the grand theme that drives his life: "universal access to all knowledge."..."Is the library of the future going to be open?" Kahle said. "Or will it be controlled by a couple of big corporate players?"...Amazon.com bought Alexa in 1999 for $300 million, split between Kahle and a couple of other founders and investors. The money has left Kahle time to focus on the archive and things like the Open Content Alliance and its race with Google. On that front, one of Kahle's colleagues, O'Reilly, wonders about the intentions of partners like Yahoo and Microsoft: Are they really sincere? Or are they just trying to derail search-engine rival Google? "I'm worried that [the OCA] is being positioned as, 'We're not Google,'" O'Reilly said. And while O'Reilly supports both OCA and Google, he recently argued in a New York Times opinion piece that publishers and authors should embrace Google's approach, despite the controversy over copyright. O'Reilly believes Google's approach doesn't violate copyrights because it will only display a snippet of the book in the search results, and will also include a far greater number of books. Kahle disagrees. He believes Google should only include books with permission from the copyright holder. And Kahle believes it's important to remain philosophically pure to set a precedent for future open content debates. And, he believes that if his group succeeds, it will put pressure on Google to modify its program. "I'm very hopeful," Kahle said. "When I talk to [Google co-founder] Larry Page, I tell him if you just move five degrees to the left, we have one project.
"If we get the balance right, we all win."
A I was always fascinated by the myth of the Great Library of Alexandria. It was the center of learning in Egypt until it burned down. The opportunity to build that again is a career-straightening maneuver. You set it out there, and check your progress against that each year. Universal access to all knowledge. I've adopted that as a goal, as a mission. The way information moved around when we were growing up was open. You visited a library, and everything was available. Now we're going through a digital information revolution. People are turning to the Internet as the library of the future. All the technological pieces -- the networks, the machines, the software -- are finally in place for this to happen. My whole career has been about what's happening right now. But now the question is: Do you want to be in an open system? Or do you want that information to be controlled by just a couple of corporations?...[Where has OA failed?] [L]ook at what has happened with still images. A company called Corbis, owned by Bill Gates, went to public libraries to digitize public domain images. They met with some resistance. But there was no public alternative. So now you have to go to Corbis and pay them, to get access to get digital copies of these images. If that happens to books and music, we'll lose more than just still images. If the intellectual discoveries go down that same path, it's just not in the tradition of our democracy....[Where has OA triumphed?] [T]he Human Genome Project. If you recall, the federal government set out to map the human genome. But a private company, Celera Genomics, came along and said they were going to digitize the human genome but you'd have to pay to license it. The public sphere, the National Institutes of Health, pulled together a distributed project to challenge Celera and decode the genome even faster. The public sphere rose to the occasion. Eventually, there was a very uncomfortable joint announcement with NIH and Celera where they agreed to jointly make the results available. In the end, the public won out. You can download it to your laptop. It's our literature. We own it.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/30/2005 08:43:00 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.
