Open Access: Not the Best in 2008

The best of 2008:

10. The launch of Europeana. Already large and valuable, on track to be more so, unifying many smaller projects, and committed to OA for its public-domain contents.

Europeana is not large, nor valuable, see

?s=europeana

It’s a very small amount of the large bulk of digitized European materials.

For digitized books in Europe see

http://wiki.netbib.de/coma/DigiMisc

For the large photographic online archives in the Netherlands:

http://www.fotostoria.de/?page_id=181

Drenthe with 50.000+ photos is not an exception. All these collections are not in Europeana.

And commited to OA?

It’s absurd that a TA project, SCRAN of Scotland http://www.scran.ac.uk , can merchandise via Europeana. SCRAN is only showing thumbnails. The picture resoultion of Europeana pics is often low but having only a thumbnail is worthless.

Letter from Edinburgh in original size from SCRAN “free”

Here is the rights statement at

http://www.europeana.eu/portal/termsofservice.html

You are allowed access to browse the site for your personal use only. Users may print off or make single copies of web pages or objects for personal use only. Users may also save web pages or objects electronically for personal use. Electronic dissemination or mailing of web pages or objects articles is not permitted, without prior permission from the EDL Foundation, the rights holders of the material and/or the contributing content partner concerned

Under no circumstances does permitted usage include any commercial exploitation of the material. For this, permission is required from EDL Foundation, the rights holders of the material and/or the contributing content partner concerned.

Unreasonable use, including the systematic downloading of content without a written license, will result in access to the site being blocked.

What does Suber mean with “committed to OA for its public-domain contents”? If this has any sense then the sense that PD remains PD and that re-use is allowed in every way you like.

OA to PD contents cannot mean anything else that there are NO permission barriers.

Europeana is cleary supporting the Copyfraud of its main partners claiming IPR rights for digitizing the PD.

For this Copyfraud the e.g.

http://www.geheugenvannederland.nl/?/en/paginas/over_het_geheugen/copyright

The Europeana collections should make publicly available their OAI-PMH interfaces (necessary for Europeana harvesting). This would be
the better way than the disappointing Europeana.

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