Open Access Week is a particularly appropriate time to reflect on the many different ways to expand access. Appropriately, new publishing and distribution models for the scholarly and scientific literature will be the subject of much discussion. Existing library collections of journals, books, newspapers, and government documents also contain substantial amounts of public domain material, and as Melissa Levine reminds us in her issue brief we are releasing today, “The public domain is the ultimate open access.”
Levine has spearheaded the largest and most comprehensive review ever undertaken of the copyright status of diverse-source publications. The Copyright Review Management System (CRMS), funded by IMLS, administered by the University of Michigan, and targeting the content of HathiTrust, is a remarkable project. Over a period of eight years, CRMS developed review protocols for the US and other Anglophone countries, built a distributed process for implementing the protocols, and coordinated an effort that examined half a million volumes. From this effort, some 330,000 volumes were determined to be in the public domain, allowing HathiTrust to unlock public access to them. CRMS has been a truly landmark effort to populate our digital public domain. Source: Finding the Public: Domain The Copyright Review Management System (ITHAKA S+R; 2016)
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
