Wayne Clough, the current secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is already leagues ahead of his predecessor, Lawrence Small, on access issues as well as ethics issues. See Brett Zongker's story today from the Associate Press:
[Clough] said the Smithsonian should focus on tackling the issues of education, climate change and biodiversity, and American identity and diversity. And he wants curators to help open access to the Smithsonian's 137 million-object collection.
"Our job is to authenticate and inform the significance of the collections," he said, "not to control access to them." ...
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In this passage, "open" is a verb, and Clough may simply mean making access wider and easier, not providing free online access. But even wide and easy access would be an improvement over his predecessor's deals with Corbis and Showtime to enclose portions of the national commons.
Or he may really mean free online access. In September 2008 he announced plans to digitize all 137 million objects in the Smithsonian's collection. The announcement didn't say whether the digital versions would be OA, but reading his recent language in light of the digitization plans is very promising. Moreover, it was under Clough that the Smithsonian joined the Flickr Commons in June 2008, an expressly OA rebuke to the Corbis deal. And of course his principle is the right one: "Our job is to authenticate and inform the significance of the collections, not to control access to them."
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.
