Yahoo launches Open Content Alliance

Posted on October 3, 2005
Filed Under Digitisation |

The FT reports that Yahoo are following Google with the announcement of their involvement in a major digitial archiving project - the Open Content Alliance. 

Initial members of the consortium include: University of Toronto, Adobe Systems, the European Archive, Hewlett
Packard Labs, the UK’s National Archives, O’Reilly Media, the Prelinger Archives and the Internet Archive.

The big difference from the Google Print project is that “content under copyright will be made available through the OCA only with the copyright holder’s authorisation.”

Search Engine Watch notes that “At the option of the copyright holder, copyrighted content may be distributed through a Creative Commons license,” going on to explain that “Creative Commons is a non-profit organization whose licensing encourages personal use, reuse and re-purposing of digital content. Content that is made available on the OCA website will be available in PDF and other widely adopted formats. This approach enables mass media and independent publishers to
expand their reach by submitting content that spans categories, file formats and languages while retaining their copyrights.”.

Chronicle.com points out that the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, has endorsed the Yahoo plan. In a press release, Sally Morris, chief executive of the association, said, “We welcome the launch of the OCA because its approach respects the rights of publishers and other copyright owners.”

According to project leaders  neither Yahoo nor any other group involved has been given exclusive rights to the content - material will be made available so that it can indexed and searched by other search engines.  Yahoo will get things going by paying for the scanning of an 18,000-volume collection of American literature at the University of California.

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