One main goal of the OCA is to standardize the format of digitized works using the web-friendly XML standard to index text and PDFs for reproduction of book pages. As David Mandelbrot of Yahoo! recently told The Technology Review, "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." Read "other [digitization] programs" as Google and "third-party search engines" as Yahoo and MSN, and it becomes clear why these companies have formed this alliance – to keep a monopoly of digitized print content out of Google's ever-expanding virtual hands. As the OCA continues to gain members, it is disclosing the operational details, costs, and logistics of its digitization project, something that Google hasn't done. In effect, and somewhat ironically because of Microsoft's participation, the OCA has become a combination of an Open Source Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium, while Google seems to be trying to become the Microsoft Windows of online content. Where it all ends up is anybody's guess, but the resolution of the lawsuits between publishers and Google will go a long way toward answering that question. In the meantime, we can soon look forward to full access to the myriad public domain works in the world, easily accessible and searchable with the click of a mouse.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/03/2005 10:10:00 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.
