Sure enough. We regularly hear about the great "information age" we live in, while seeing the tightening of laws relating to dissemination of information. The contradiction is obvious.

This problem has also affected several European countries, where the copyright law switched from "author's life plus 50 years" to "author's life plus 70 years", following pressure from content owners who successfully lobbied for "harmonization" of national copyright laws as a response to "globalization of the market". To regulate the copyright of digital editions in the wake of the relevant WIPO international treaties, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) was ratified in October 1998 in the United States, and the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) was ratified in May 2001 by the European Commission.

According to Michael Hart, and Project Gutenberg CEO Greg Newby, "as of January 2009, the total number of separate public domain books in the world is between 20 and 30 million, and that 5 million are already on the internet, and we expect another million per year from now until all the easy-to-find books are done. 10 million or so will be done before people start to think about the facts telling them the rate cannot continue to double as they come up to the point of already having done half. New copyrights lasting virtually for ever in the U.S. will bring the growth process to a screeching halt when The Mickey Mouse copyright laws, literally, copyright laws on Mickey Mouse, and Winnie-the-Pooh, etc., stop all current copyright from expiring for the forseeable future."

= Copyleft and Creative Commons

The term "copyleft" was invented in 1984 by Richard Stallman, a computer scientist at MIT (Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology), who launched the GNU project to develop a complete Unix-like operating system called the GNU system.

As explained on the GNU website: "Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well. (...) Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pa.s.s along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has freedom. (...) Copyleft is a way of using of the copyright on the program. It doesn't mean abandoning the copyright; in fact, doing so would make copyleft impossible.

The word 'left' in 'copyleft' is not a reference to the verb 'to leave' - only to the direction which is the inverse of 'right'. (...) The GNU Free Doc.u.mentation License (FDL) is a form of copyleft intended for use on a manual, textbook or other doc.u.ment to a.s.sure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifications, either commercially or non commercially."

Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessing, a professor at Stanford Law School, California. As explained on its website: "Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof."

There were one million Creative Commons licensed works in 2003, 4.7 million licensed works in 2004, 20 million licensed works in 2005, 50 million licensed works in 2006, 90 million licensed works in 2007, and 130 million licensed works in 2008.

Science Commons was founded in 2005. As explained on its website: "Science Commons designs strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. We identify unnecessary barriers to research, craft policy guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develop technology to make research, data and materials easier to find and use. Our goal is to speed the translation of data into discovery - unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing."

ccLearn was founded in 2007. As explained on its website: "ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons dedicated to realizing the full potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational resources. Our mission is to minimize legal, technical, and social barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials."

2002: A WEB OF KNOWLEDGE

= [Overview]

The MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative launched by MIT (Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology) in 2002 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. In November 2007, all 1,800 course materials were available, with 200 new and updated courses per year. From 2003 onwards, in the same spirit of free access of knowledge, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) launched several high-quality online periodicals. New kinds of encyclopedias were set up, for the general public to both use available articles and contribute to their writing. Wikipedia, launched in 2001, became the leading online cooperative encyclopedia worldwide, with hundreds and then thousands of contributors writing articles or editing and updating them, leading the way to other initiatives like Citizendium. launched in 2006, and the Encyclopedia of Life, launched in 2007.

= Culture, from print to digital

More and more computers connected to the internet were available in schools and at home in the mid-1990s. Teachers began exploring new ways of teaching. Going from print book culture to digital culture was changing relationship to knowledge, and the way both scholars and students were seeing teaching and learning. Print book culture provided stable information whereas digital culture provided "moving"

information. During a conference organized by the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) in September 1996, Dale Spender gave a lecture about "Creativity and the Computer Education Industry", with insightful comments on forthcoming trends.

Here are some excerpts:

"Throughout print culture, information has been contained in books - and this has helped to shape our notion of information.

For the information in books stays the same - it endures. And this has encouraged us to think of information as stable - as a body of knowledge which can be acquired, taught, pa.s.sed on, memorised, and tested of course. The very nature of print itself has fostered a sense of truth; truth too is something which stays the same, which endures. And there is no doubt that this stability, this orderliness, has been a major contributor to the huge successes of the industrial age and the scientific revolution. (...)

But the digital revolution changes all this. Suddenly it is not the oldest information - the longest lasting information that is the most reliable and useful. It is the very latest information that we now put the most faith in - and which we will pay the most for. (...) Education will be about partic.i.p.ating in the production of the latest information. This is why education will have to be ongoing throughout life and work. Every day there will be something new that we will all have to learn. To keep up. To be in the know. To do our jobs.

To be members of the digital community. And far from teaching a body of knowledge that will last for life, the new generation of information professionals will be required to search out, add to, critique, 'play with', and daily update information, and to make available the constant changes that are occurring."

Russon Wooldridge, a professor in the Department of French Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada, wrote in February 2001: "All my teaching makes the most of internet resources (web and email): the two common places for a course are the cla.s.sroom and the website of the course, where I put all course materials. I have published all my research data of the last 20 years on the web (re-edition of books, articles, texts of old dictionaries as interactive databases, treaties from the 16th century, etc.). I publish proceedings of symposiums, I publish a journal, I collaborate with French colleagues by publishing online in Toronto what they can't publish online at home. In May 2000, I organized an international symposium in Toronto about French studies enhanced by new technologies (Les etudes francaises valorisees par les nouvelles technologies). (...)

I realize that without the internet I wouldn't have as many activities, or at least they would be very different from the ones I have today. So I don't see the future without them. But it is crucial that those who believe in free dissemination of knowledge make sure that knowledge is not 'eaten' by commercial ventures for them to sell it. What has happened in book publishing in France, in linguistics for example, where you can only find textbooks for schools and exams, should be avoided on the web. You don't go to Amazon.com and the likes to find disinterested science. On my website, I refuse any sponsorship."

= A few leading projects

# MIT OpenCourseWare

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 ownership 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 publishing based on free dissemination of knowledge. In early 2003, PLoS created a non- profit scientific and medical publishing 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, sponsorship, 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 Washington DC, and available in the Text Archive section of the Internet Archive.