= [Overview]
The MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative launched by
MIT (Massachusetts Institute 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, passed 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
participating 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
classroom 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 études
françaises valorisées 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 (Massachusetts Institute 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
institutions 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 Documentation 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 participation 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 document 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 institutions:
Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Marine
Biological Laboratory, Missouri Botanical Garden, Smithsonian
Institution, 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 documents 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 documents 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.
The Encyclopedia of Life is built on the work of thousands of
experts around the globe, in a moderated wiki-style
environment, for the general public to be able to contribute.
The first pages were available in mid-2008. The encyclopedia
should be fully "operational" in 2012 and completed with all
known species in 2017. The English version will be translated
in several languages by partner organizations. People will be
able to use the encyclopedia as a "macroscope" to identify
major trends from a considerable stock of information - in the
same way they use a microscope for the study of detail.