Open Access News

1) What additional measures could be taken at national and European level to encourage digitisation and online accessibility of material in all European languages?...

5) How could public domain material and other material available for general use (voluntary sharing) be made more transparent and widely known in order to facilitate its online availability for subsequent use?...

7) Is there a risk that national legal deposit schemes lead to a multiplication of requirements on internationally active companies? Would European legislation help avoiding this?...

All interested individuals and organisations - from the private and from the public sector - are encouraged to provide their views on some or all of these questions. Replies and comments should be sent to the following address before 20 January 2006: European Commission, Attn. Mr. Hernández-Ros, Head of Unit DG INFSO E4, Information Market, Bâtiment EUROFORUM, Office 1174, Rue Alcide de Gasperi, L-2920 Luxembourg, ec-digital-libraries@cec.eu.int....

Here are my opinions to the questions above.

1) Let me say first that I support "Open Access" (OA) and not "Toll Access" to cultural heritage items. All digitized materials should be free of cost and without permission barriers available in the internet. States and funding agencies should pay that all citizens with internet access can enjoy for free the treasure of knowledge. Public funded scholarly research results should be OA. Libraries should not digitize historical items without cooperation with the potential users and especially the scholars in the relevant thematic field. There should be more support for and more cooperation with grassroot digitization made by NGO projects like Project Gutenberg or Wikisource (sister project of Wikipedia). See...a recent initiative of distributed scanning. National and other libraries should cooperative with initiatives like the Open Content Alliance and donate scanned Public Domain books to them....

5) There are some ways to make digitized material more widely known. Library should have the duty (and the money) to cataloge digitized items worldwide in a cooperative manner according to international standards like Dublin Core or the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). There should be freely accessible meta-data from each digitized single book or other items (including table of contents). There should be more cooperation with NGO initiatives (see above ad 1) who can e.g. contribute meta-data. There should be more support for free full text search engines and OAI harvester beside of the large commercial search engines.

7) I do not see such a risk. A company which is a global player can deposit in any national library worldwide without any disprofit. No private company can ensure long-term preservation which is a legitimate public office. Maybe it would be a good idea to invent "knowledge taxes" for profit making companies as a compensation for the public costs for making the knowledge available e.g. in libraries and for ensuring long-term preservation.