[pd-discuss] Update on Gale

Thu Jan 10 13:19:35 UTC 2013

On 1/10/13 6:33 AM, Javier Ruiz wrote:
> Classic Yes Men, Afrika Gruppe, etc. work
>
> I completely fell for it.
>
> The point as Jonathan has said is to give others an opportunity to
> question why they don't do it for real.

Well, right now, I'd rather ask why *we* don't do it for real?
The stuff that Gale scanned isn't stuff they owned; it came from
libraries that gave them access to it, and who can give access to
others as well.   (Or, they can give companies like Gale access
to it on the condition that they release them to open access either
immediately, or after a set time, as some places like Michigan have
done-- that's why we're starting to see ECCO-TCP texts go open,
for instance.)

In fact, a lot of the Gale texts (though far from all of them)
are publicly available online via various independent scans.
For any given public domain text Gale has scanned, I'm happy to take
requests at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/suggest
and either track down other copies or put out a call for them
at my site, http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ .  On a larger
scale, Europeana, the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and various
other projects are making this work publicly available.

I also am quite happy, at other times, to ask that various groups
make their public domain texts freely available.  I'd been calling on
JSTOR to do that for some time, for instance, and they've now released
many of them that way, for which I thank them.

What I will *not* do, though, is stoop to unethical means,
or exploit such means and thereby encourage them, to try to
persuade people.  Not only is it wrong, it's stupid: people who
try pulling it end up making themselves and their cause look bad
in the eyes of the general public, at least as much as their target.
If our cause is right, we should be able to convince people of that
without giving up the high ground.

John Mark Ockerbloom