[pd-discuss] PRESS RELEASE : Gale releases all its public domain content freely on the open web

Wed Jan 9 13:38:46 UTC 2013

Gale releases all its public domain content freely on the open web

Andover, Hampshire UK, January 1st, 2013.

Gale, part of Cengage Learning, is thrilled to announce that all its
public domain content will be freely accessible on the open web. "On this
Public Domain Day, we are proud to have taken such a ground-breaking
decision. As a common good, the Public Domain content we have digitized
has to be accessible to everyone" said Marmaduke Robida, Director for
Public Domain Content, Gale.
Hundreds of thousands of digitized books coming from some of the world's
most prestigious libraries and belonging to top-rated products highly
appreciated by the academic community such as "Nineteenth Century
Collection Online", "Eighteenth Century Collection Online", "Sabin
America", "Making of the Modern World" and two major digitized historical
newspaper collections (The Times and the Illustrated London news) are now
accessible from a dedicated website called
http://galecengage-publicdomain.com . The other Gale digital collections
will be progressively added to this web site throughout 2013 so all Public
Domain content will be freely accessible by 2014. All the images are or
will be available under the Public Domain Mark 1.0 license and can be
reused for any purpose.
Gale's global strategy is inspired by the recommandations issued by the
European reflection group "Comite des sages" and the Public Domain
manifesto. For Public Domain content, Gale decided to move to a freemium
business model : all the content is freely accessible through basic tools
(Public Domain Downloader, URL lists, ...), but additional services are
charged for. "We are confident that there still is a market for our
products. Our state-of-art research platforms offer high quality services
and added value which universities or research libraries are ready to pay
for" said Robida.
A specific campaign targeted to national and academic libraries for
promoting the usage of Public Domain Mark for digitized content will be
launched in 2013. "We are ready to help the libraries that have a
digitization programme fulfill their initial mission : make the knowledge
accessible to everyone. We also hope that our competitors will follow the
same way in the near future. Public Domain should not be enclosed by
paywalls or dubious licensing terms" said Robida.

Contact » Marmaduke Robida | Gale Cengage |
marmaduke.robida at galecengage-publicdomain.com