Open Access News

Just a few weeks after its launch, the Open Content Alliance has already added dozens of new members to its Open Library project....Twenty-four new participants have joined the initial 10 founding members. All contributors have committed to donating services, facilities, tools, and/or funding. Microsoft Corp. has joined the effort with the announcement of MSN Book Search, a new mass book digitization project....RLG plans to supply bibliographic descriptions to Open Content Alliance digitizing operations from the more than 48 million titles in its RLG Union Catalog....Microsoft has joined the Open Content Alliance with an estimated $5 million promise to digitize approximately 150,000 books next year to launch its MSN Book Search service. It promises to help the OCA not only scan and digitize publicly available print materials, but also to work with copyright owners to legally scan protected materials....Rumors circulate that the next potential OCA participant may even be Google. At the Oct. 25 evening inaugural event, Google’s Dan Cleary attended and, according to our reporter, Lisa Picarille, “clapped throughout much of the presentation, but not when Yahoo! (a founding member) spoke or when the Microsoft executive was on stage.” Cleary even slipped off his name tag when he examined the scanner demonstration, reportedly to avoid being bothered by the press. An OCA representative commented that “Google wants to help us.” Time will tell....The for-profit companies contributing hardware, software, and service support to the OCA would seem to have strong motivation to use the effort to illustrate and market their abilities to the world. This could explain why the OCA is so much more open about its equipment and its performance than Google Print....Some of the books will even offer an audio version, in which case one can click on “listen” at the book. LibriVox supplies the audio technology and a network of volunteers does the reading. A connection with Lulu.com supplies bound, print-on-demand versions of books at a user’s request with an estimated average price of approximately $8 a book or about $1 for a short (100-page) black and white book....Recognizing that technology changes can render stored content obsolescent, it plans to move all its content to new systems every 3 years....At OCA’s inaugural event, Brewster Kahle stated that OCA would try to target the 80 percent of books published between 1923 and 1964 that are out of copyright, then expand to include orphaned books, where the publisher and author can not be found, then out-of-print works, and finally in-print material. He called the effort “tricky but doable.” This could put a lot of pressure on participating libraries to develop ways of verifying copyright ownership....Greenstein stated that the hope of the OCA effort is to promote the recognition of the principle that content distributors “must compete on value added to the content, not on ownership.” Opening content up to third parties will “drive innovations in service provisions, such as annotated and educational services.” In the future, Greenstein hopes that publishers will recognize that “proprietary control over content is an impediment to commerce.”