Part 9 (2/2)

The MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative launched by MIT (Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology) to put its course materials for free on the web, as a way to promote open dissemination of knowledge. In September 2002, a pilot version was available online with 32 course materials. The website was officially launched in September 2003. 500 course materials were available in March 2004. In May 2006, 1,400 course materials were offered by 34 departments belonging to the five schools of MIT. In November 2007, all 1,800 course materials were available, with 200 new and updated courses per year.

MIT also launched the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCW Consortium) in November 2005, as a collaboration of educational inst.i.tutions that were willing to offer free online course materials. One year later, it included the course materials of 100 universities worldwide.

# Public Library of Science

With the internet as a powerful medium to disseminate information, it seems quite outrageous that the results of research - original works requiring many years of efforts - are ”squatted” by publishers claiming owners.h.i.+p on these works, and selling them at a high price. The work of researchers is often publicly funded, especially in North America. It would therefore seem appropriate that the scientific community and the general public can freely enjoy the results of such research. In science and medicine for example, more than 1,000 new articles reviewed by peers are published daily.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded in October 2000 by biomedical scientists Harold Varmus, Patrick Brown and Michael Eisen, from Stanford University, Palo Alto, and University of California, Berkeley. Headquartered in San Francisco, PLoS is a non-profit organization whose mission is to make the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource in free online archives. Instead of information disseminated in millions of reports and thousands of online journals, a single point would give access to the full content of these articles, with a search engine and hyperlinks between articles.

PLoS posted an open letter requesting the articles presently published by journals to be distributed freely in online archives, and asking researchers to promote the publishers willing to support this project. From October 2000 to September 2002, the open letter was signed by 30,000 scientists from 180 countries. The publishers' answer was much less enthusiastic, although a number of publishers agreed for their articles to be distributed freely immediately after publication, or six months after publication in their journals. But even the publishers who initially agreed to support the project made so many objections that it was finally abandoned.

Another objective of PLoS was to become a publisher while creating a new model of online publis.h.i.+ng based on free dissemination of knowledge. In early 2003, PLoS created a non- profit scientific and medical publis.h.i.+ng venture to provide scientists and physicians with free high-quality, high-profile journals in which to publish their work. The journals were PLoS Biology (launched in 2003), PLoS Medicine (2004), PLoS Genetics (2005), PLoS Computational Biology (2005), PLoS Pathogens (2005), PLoS Clinical Trials (2006) and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (2007), the first scientific journal on this topic.

All PLoS articles are freely available online, on the websites of PLoS and in the public archive PubMed Central, run by the National Library of Medicine. The articles can be freely redistributed and reused under a Creative Commons license, including for translations, as long as the author(s) and source are cited. PLoS also launched PLoS ONE, an online forum meant to publish articles on any subject relating to science or medicine.

Three years after the beginning of PLoS as a publisher, PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine have had the same reputation for excellence as the leading journals Nature, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine. PLoS has received financial support from several foundations while developing a viable economic model from fees paid by published authors, advertising, sponsors.h.i.+p, and paid activities organized for PLoS members. PLoS also hopes to encourage other publishers to adopt the open access model, or to convert their existing journals to an open access model.

# Wikipedia

Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (Larry resigned later on). It has quickly grown into the largest reference website on the internet, financed by donations, with no advertising. Its multilingual content is free and written collaboratively by people worldwide, who contribute under a pseudonym. Its website is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit, correct and improve information throughout the encyclopedia. The articles stay the property of their authors, and can be freely used according to the GFDL (GNU Free Doc.u.mentation License).

In December 2004, Wikipedia had 1.3 million articles (by 13,000 contributors) in 100 languages. In December 2006, it had 6 million articles in 250 languages. In May 2007, it had 7 million articles in 192 languages, including 1.8 million articles in English, 589,000 articles in German, 500,000 articles in French, 260,000 articles in Portuguese, and 236,000 articles in Spanish.

Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, founded in June 2003, which has run a number of other projects, beginning with Wiktionary (launched in December 2002) and Wikibooks (launched in June 2003), followed by Wikiquote, Wikisource (texts from public domain), Wikimedia Commons (multimedia), Wikispecies (animals and plants), Wikinews, Wikiversity (textbooks), and Wiki Search (search engine).

# Citizendium

Citizendium was launched in October 2006 as a pilot project to build a new encyclopedia, at the initiative of Larry Sanger, who was the cofounder of Wikipedia (with Jimmy Wales) in January 2001, but resigned later on, over policy and content quality issues. Citizendium - which stands for a ”citizen's compendium of everything” - is a wiki project open to public collaboration, but combining ”public partic.i.p.ation with gentle expert guidance”.

The project is experts-led, not experts-only. Contributors use their own names, not anonymous pseudonyms (like in Wikipedia), and they are guided by expert editors. As explained by Larry in his essay ”Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge”, posted in September 2006: ”Editors will be able to make content decisions in their areas of specialization, but otherwise working shoulder-to-shoulder with ordinary authors.” There are also constables who make sure the rules are respected.

Citizendium was launched on March 25, 2007, with 1,100 articles, 820 authors and 180 editors. There were 9,800 high- quality articles in January 2009, and 11,800 articles in August 2009. Citizendium also wants to act as a prototype for upcoming large scale knowledge-building projects that would deliver reliable reference, scholarly and educational content.

# Encyclopedia of Life

The Encyclopedia of Life was launched in May 2007 as a global scientific effort to doc.u.ment all known species of animals and plants (1.8 million), including endangered species, and expedite the millions of species yet to be discovered and catalogued (about 8 million).

This collaborative effort is led by several main inst.i.tutions: Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Missouri Botanical Garden, Smithsonian Inst.i.tution, Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The initial funding came from the MacArthur Foundation (US $10 million) and the Sloan Foundation ($2.5 million). A $100 million funding over ten years will be necessary before self-financing.

The multimedia encyclopedia will gather texts, photos, maps, sound and videos, with a webpage for each species. It will provide a single portal for millions of doc.u.ments scattered online and offline. As a teaching and learning tool for a better understanding of our planet, the encyclopedia wants to reach everyone: researchers, teachers, students, pupils, media, policy makers and the general public.

The encyclopedia's honorary chair is Edward Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University, who was the first to express the wish for such an encyclopedia, in an essay dated 2002. Five years later, his project could become reality thanks to technology improvements for content aggregators, mash-up, wikis, and large scale content management.

As a consortium of the ten largest life science libraries, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) started the digitization of 2 million doc.u.ments from public domain spanning over 200 years.

In May 2007, when the project was officially launched, 1.25 million pages were already digitized in London, Boston and Was.h.i.+ngton DC, and available in the Text Archive section of the Internet Archive.

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