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@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.
From the ACLU: …last month, a Virginia resident initiated obscenity proceedings against two acclaimed books: Gender Queer, a Memoir, by Maia Kobabe, an autobiographical graphic novel that depicts the author’s ...
From the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office: Beginning August 1, 2022, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Patent Center system—available to the public since 2017—will fully replace the legacy ...
CORE: Our Commitment to The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure Elsevier’s Acquisition of Interfolio: Risks and Responses GPO to Discontinue Assigning Library of Congress Classification Numbers in Records for Hearings ...
From National Geographic: In the early 1990s, a Canadian student named Adam Smith opened a dumpster in the basement of his apartment building in Vancouver, Canada, and discovered a stack ...
From the Google Scholar Blog: Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of rec. This release covers articles published in 2017–2021 and ...
The Rare Book School (U. of Virginia) video embedded below (a National Endowment for the Humanities-Global Book Histories Initiative Lecture by Kelly Wisecup) was recorded on June 15, 2022. From ...
From a W3C Release: The World Wide Web Consortium is set to pursue 501(c)(3) non-profit status. The launch as a new legal entity in January 2023 preserves the core mission ...
Full Text of a Texas A&M University Libraries Announcement: We are pleased to announce the appointment of Julie Mosbo Ballestro as University Librarian and Assistant Provost of University Libraries at ...
From an EBLIDA (European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations) Post: EBLIDA is laying the foundation for “sustainable copyright” in public libraries through the publication of the “First European ...
From a DPLA Announcement: Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce an $850,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support its effort to advance racial justice in ...
From the Report: Technical methods for effectively archiving complex digital research publications and for creating an integrated collections of content in different formats have not yet been developed. As part ...
Coherent Digital Launches South Asia Archive on the Coherent Commons Platform The Longest-Running Queer News Radio Show Is Headed to the Library of Congress (via NPR) University of Cambridge Now ...
