Open Access News

Academic Earth is a new collection of OA "video lectures from the world's top scholars".  (Thanks to Richard Ludlow.)  From the about page:

Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education?  At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.  Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable....

The videos are OA.  Registered users may create their own collection of favorites, but even unregistered users may grade the lectures.  (From the FAQ:  "Lectures start out with a grade of B.  From there the grade is an average of the grades that our users have given it.  Course grades are based on the grades given to the lectures in that course.  Highly rated content will show up first in browse results and in the Top Rated sections in our homepage.")

Update (2/2/09).  More from Jeffrey Young at Wired Campus:

...The company has simply grabbed the videos off the universities’ own Web sites and plans to offer tools to students who want to talk about the content — along with a chance to grade the quality of the lectures.

Richard Ludlow, the company’s CEO and founder, said in an interview today that it is allowed to republish the videos because they were released by the universities under Creative Commons licenses....Mr. Ludlow says that his company will not place any advertising on Web pages that contain university videos, though he hopes to expand the site in the future to include sections where videos from other sources are shown with advertising....

Mr. Ludlow...[will] meet this week with officials from MIT to talk about [his company's] plans.

How do the universities feel about the company republishing their lectures?

“I haven’t looked at his example enough to give you a definite answer,” said Steve Carson, external relations director for MIT’s Opencourseware project, which publishes free materials from the institute’s courses, including complete videos from some 30 courses. “It might be OK—as long as the use adheres to the terms and conditions on our site, we encourage the material to be redistributed for educational purposes....They’re putting interactive services around it — it could be very complementary to what we’re doing.” ...

Mr. Ludlow points out that some of the colleges and universities use more open Creative Commons licenses than others. MIT and Yale allow “derivative use” of their content, meaning that the company can cut the lectures into various sections, based on topics, he said. Berkeley does not allow such derivative use, nor does Stanford for some of its courses, he added....