We’ve been proposing here at the Theology Library that an important part of our work is to create focused subject area portals that collect a corpus of texts or, perhaps better, data, that can sustain and draw scholarly collaboration and dialogue. Would we imagine such a portal as a “commons?”

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Naturally, his vision has enormous implication for scholarly publishing…

Engineering professor Richard Baraniuk talks about his vision for Connexions, an open-source system that lets teachers share digital texts and course materials, modify them and give them to their students — all free, thanks to Creative Commons licensing.

Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.