Wade Roush, Digitize This, MIT Technology Review, October 20, 2005. Roush interviews David Mandelbrot, Yahoo's VP for search technology. Excerpt (quoting Mandelbrot):
Over the time we were discussing forming the alliance, Google did launch their program, and we looked at their program for ideas about what they were doing and things we might want to do differently. We do want to have copyrighted works available through the Open Content Alliance -- but only with the express permission of the copyright holder. Secondly, we mainly want the alliance to focus on this theme of openness. One of the things we've seen with other [digitization] programs is they tend to use proprietary technologies to host the content, so it's impossible for third-party search engines to crawl it. So we're using XML and PDF and making the content easily crawlable by search engines. It was important to make this project open so that entities that contribute know they're not just benefiting one search engine....When it comes to these digitization efforts, the publishers have primarily been speaking through the publisher's associations rather than individually, because they're concerned about any kind of retribution that could come from search engines if they're critical of any particular effort. But what we have heard from the publishers' associations is that they're very happy about the approach we're taking. The Association of Learned Professional Society Publishers, for instance, has been very positive about our program, because of the fact we are working with the copyright holders in advance....We're encouraging participation in the alliance by all entities that are engaged in digitization efforts. The Open Content Alliance has already had a very preliminary discussion with Google about its participation, and we encourage Google to contribute work that they digitize to this alliance. We don't see the alliance as offering a competing digitization effort, but rather as establishing a set of guidelines for the sharing of content.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/20/2005 11:22:00 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.
