The consortium, says OCA founder Brewster Kahle, could eventually scan millions of books. “We’ve been trying to digitize materials for years,” said Kahle, adding that publishers will eventually be invited to submit copyrighted works, which will be made available on a more limited basis. “The breakthrough is that we are doing this in the open --everybody’s shoulders drop, the lawyers go back to their cubicles, and we’re free to get things done.” The other breakthrough, say librarians for both universities, is scale. Prior to linking up with Kahle, the UC library system estimated the cost of scanning and archiving documents at $20 per page, while the University of Toronto, which has already scanned small portions of its collection, estimates that cost at $1. By contrast, Kahle’s technology costs only 10 cents per page. “It’s the production level,” says University of Toronto chief librarian Carole Moore. “Before, we weren’t doing it on any mass scale.” While the project was widely interpreted in initial reports as a rejoinder to the Google project, Google Director of Content Partnerships Jim Gerber said..., “I don’t think [the projects] are competitive at all,” said Gerber, adding that he sees OCA “as additive and beneficial” both to the publishing community and to Google’s mission of indexing the world’s information....While Yahoo’s actual dollar contribution to OCA pales in comparison to the tens of millions of dollars Google is poised to spend on its scanning project, the softball approach to digitization could have two potential benefits. First, by partnering with an innocuous project like the OCA, Yahoo can sit back and let Google slog through the legal muck of digitizing copyrighted books, something that both sides agree will eventually become the norm. Second, the fact that the OCA will allow anyone to host and index public-domain works may serve to undercut Google’s effort to protect --and profit from-- its digital copies.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/07/2005 11:27:00 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.
