Larry Lessig announced today that the fourth of his books, The Future of Ideas (actually, the second book in order of publishing) has joined the other three in being licensed for free access under a Creative Commons license: The Future of Ideas is now Free (Lessig Blog). Of course, for an author of his statute, this kind of deal is doable whereas for most authors, it's probably not. But the more important aspect of his deal is the data that it generates as an experiment. Publishers have to find out what happens when they abandon their tried and true approaches, and it's a real shame that it takes someone begging them to try something new, but that's that. So, at least it's a toe in the water.
It's a new year. So much happened last year in the music industry, in the courts with respect to fair use for transformative works (mostly the search engine cases), tv on the Internet, the NIH OA mandate. What might we look forward to this year? I'm going to be focusing on change in scholarly publishing, beyond Open Access and the NIH -- the University Presses and library collaborations. The experimentation taking place in these venues is likely to be very robust this year, moreso than in commercial publishing, because the stakes are much higher for University Presses. They've come so much closer to the precipice than their commercial cousins. Just today I noticed that five University Presses had nabbed a huge Melon grant ($1.37 million) to study ways to streamline some of the backend tasks:
Top university presses announce a collaboration to find a way to reduce costs of scholarly publishing and to allow for more books to be released. Set up as a joint operation for copy-editing, design, layout and typesetting for the work in American literatures, the collaboration will be funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The five university presses involved are: the NYU Press, Rutgers University Press, Fordham University Press, Temple University Press and the University of Virginia Press.
Check out Scholarly Communication at U of Illinois for more details.
In addition to Press/library collaborations, I think we should keep an eye on the efforts of libraries and library organizations, as well as others, to make progress on the orphan works problem. Orphan works scream out for creative, collaborative solutions, and many people are putting their heads together to come up with ideas in the absence of meaningful (actually, in the absence of any) solutions from Congress.
And what do you think about the new initiative from the Center for Social Media to define as fair use a broad range of creative uses of others materials in the creation of videos? The report is called, Recut, Reframe, Recycle. I am very impressed, though not at all surprised. This Center has been in the vanguard of effectiveness by taking actions that are having concrete results. Perhaps Congress' ineffectiveness in restraining copyright's growth and strength has indirectly encouraged the tremendous surge in creative work-arounds. Not all by itself, of course. Massive consumer resistance has certainly had a part to play... Interesting to see it all moving along after 15 years of watching.
