Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences goes Open Access

In recent years, the Open Access movement in academic publishing has been gathering steam, with the growth of open access journals such as PLoS and mandates from funding bodies such as the NIH that require authors to deposit copies of their work into open databases. Now that 800lb. gorilla of academe, Harvard University, has started to throw its weight behind the spread of Open Access publishing. Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences has voted to require faculty to make copies of their research freely available through the Office of Scholarly Communications.

One of the great promises of the internet revolution has been the democratization of knowledge. Armed just with a computer and way of connecting to the internet, it is possible to find information on just about any topic known to humankind. In academia, the spread of the digital age has been most effective. Instead of having to spend hours in dusty stacks looking for the right volume of an obscure periodical, a few seconds using PubMed, Google Scholar, or any one of a number of databases will often yield up an electronic copy.

I give a half amen to the idea that the internet has been brought forth the democratization of knowledge. It's exactly because of the internet that we have had in this country legislation such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the "Mickey Mouse Protection Art".

The DMCA has restricted fair use of digital products. It was created so that, for example, record companies could create MP3s with code that would allow you to listen to a song in only one type of machine while disabling in others, even if it is meant for your own personal use. An example is MP3s designed to only play in one registered computer but not on a phone with digital playback capability or in an iPod or only in PCs running one specific operating system.

Copyright Term Extension Act was primarily lobbied by the Disney Company (which is why it's called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act). It is also known as the Sonny Bono Act and it was meant to deny the public domain (that means you and me) from freely using copyrighted materials for over 100 years after their creation and/or the death (if an individual) or liquidation (if a corporation) of the copyright holder.

Mickey Mouse, along with many other Disney characters, would have become public domain just about now, making it possible for millions of people to use the images freely, without the economic restrictions of licensing agreements. Yet because the law was extended to cover all works published before 1975, millions of novels, textbooks, non-fiction books, dictionaries, educational movies, news casts, photographs, paintings were denied public domain status; making it impossible for anybody to have free access to a lot of cultural, scientific and technological knowledge.

Enter the Open Access Movement.

While opponents to the DMCA and CTA duke it out in the courts and in Congress, many scholars, scientists, artists, software developers and other cultural creatives, have come together for three simple actions: To create content that is accessible 24/7, free of charge and free of copyright and/or licensing restrictions.

Harvard is not the only example of how to successfully produce projects that are accessible all the time on the internet, free of any charge and, more importantly, free to use as however one likes.

The following are 5 internet stops that will make your IQ go a few percentages higher thanks to the Open Access Movement :

1. Creative Commons
Their mantra is "we use private rights to create public goods". What does this mean? They've created a whole licensing system that makes it possible for copyright holders to explain how others may exercise their copyright. Or, as some might like to think of Creative Commons licenses, to copyleft your work. Since millions of creatives have already embraced this type of copyright reinterpretation, they've created a search engine that allows you to scour the internet for copylefted materials.

2. Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced electronic encyclopedia with 9.25 million articles in 253 languages and edited by millions of users from around the world. Whereas encyclopedias have traditionally been the product of scholars and experts given 'official' status by the company that produces them, Wikipedia thrives on the premise of "the wisdom of crowds" and it's one of the reasons why people either praise it or hate it. I, personally, use it constantly. I don't take everything in Wikipedia as 100% factual, but 90% of what I have needed from it has been absolutely outstanding. For many researchers like myself, it is a much needed point of entry to other sources or an excellent quick refresher of dates, statistics, names or facts long forgotten.

3. Archive.org
It was created for the express purpose of preserving the internet. With its 'Wayback Machine' people can go as far back as 1996 and see what the internet looked like at that time. It nowadays offers permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections. It includes now one of the largest collections of public domain texts, audio, moving images, and software on the internet.

4. NASA Multimedia
The beautiful photograph that's at the top of this article comes from NASA's Multimedia Hub. More exactly, its Image Of The Day section. NASA has been at the vanguard of the CopyLeft movement, having been one of the first government agencies to clearly release free of copyright and as part of the public domain, not just their historical archives, but all new and subsequent work and materials created by the agency. In other words, they rawk!

5. Project Guttenberg
Michael Hart, the founder of the project, invented e-books back in 1971. His intention? To make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search. You need all of Shakespeare? Official and doubtful books alike. Mark Twain? You got it. How about some Miguel De Cervantes? In Spanish and in English. Project Gutenberg's work is nothing short of amazing and should be bookmarked by anybody who's always wanted to finish reading that classic they skimmed through in college but wish they had read more closely. With that in mind, go to The History and Philosophy of Project, to read more about how the project was born and how it has been sustained for 36 years.

This is just a teensy bit of all the great Open Access projects that are out in the web. It's just meant to whet your appetite.

If you have your favorite, add them to the comments section. I'll definitely use them (and credit you) in my follow up with more goodies to this post. In the mean time, enjoy getting your nerd on. LOL!


Photo Credit: NASA, Out On A Limb STS-103 payload commander Steven L. Smith retrieved a power tool while standing on the mobile foot restraint at the end of the remote manipulator system during a Hubble servicing mission in 1999.