Opening the Lyceum
Looking for an image for last week’s entry on shadows I turned to art history databases JSTOR/ArtSTOR, ECCO, and the WGA (academic database people seem to have a penchant for initialism). After getting badgered with various login options, access restrictions, rules for use, off-campus policies and so on, I turned to the hoi polloi: between Google Images and Flickr’s Creative Commons search I quickly turned up a worthwhile painting, free to use. Three news items from today confirmed that I’m not alone in thinking that keeping academic publishing behind university paywalls is a bit counterproductive.
The New York Times ran a piece detailing a proposal presented today to the faculty at Harvard. Their scholars’ academic work could soon be automatically published online, publicly available, on a surprisingly opt-out basis. While many professors already publish their work online at one journal repository or another, this could become a compelling centralized resource. This kind of no-cost open access has the journal and database publishers a bit worried, and for good reason. I haven’t been able to turn up any info yet on whether the proposal passed or not, or when exactly it’s up for vote (if that’s the way it works). Will developments like this kill niche journals that rely on their sibling publications’ high subscription fees? Will this change the business model of scholarly journals?
Next, Professor Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons fame writes that the “Legal Commons” project has seen their first release of case data, available as CCØ-licensed XML. This organization seeks to bring 1.8 million pages of federal case law into the public domain before the year is out, available for free for any use or purpose. It’s an ambitious goal, especially considering the clout of the expensive subscription-based alternatives, but a worthy one. After all, shouldn’t the word of the law be in the hands of the public?
Finally, I came across a post on the O’Reilly Radar blog about a newly announced non-profit service called CK-12. Their system provides a UI that will allow educators, students, and the public to assemble their own textbooks using open data and resources. Right now it sounds like it’s mostly limited to flat text, but in the future they plan to incorporate more dynamic items like RSS feeds, videos, and widgets. A bit of Web 2.0 for the classroom. I hope that it catches on with a least a few tech-savvy teachers. I’ll have to browse through the other news coming out of O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference to see what else is going on along these lines in the publishing world.
UPDATE: Looks like Harvard’s faculty overwhelmingly accepted the proposal. There are more open law projects cropping up (like The Public Library of Law, which includes some commercial links) and public.resource.org’s archive is being picked up on legal information sites like Justia.