Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem

OAR on December 4, 2019

“TOME brings together scholars, universities, libraries, and presses in pursuit of a common goal—a sustainable open monograph ecosystem.Monographs remain the preeminent form of scholarly publication in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, but the funding model is broken. TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) seeks to address this problem by moving us toward a new, more sustainable system in which monograph publishing costs are met by institutionally funded faculty book subsidies. These publication grants make it possible for presses to publish monographs in open access editions, which increases the presence of humanities and social science scholarship on the web and opens up knowledge to a truly global readership.

TOME launched in 2017 as a five-year pilot project of the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses). The pilot is built on a) participating colleges and universities and b) participating university presses.

Participating colleges and universities commit to providing baseline grants of $15,000 to support the publication of open access monographs of 90,000 words or fewer (with additional funding for works of greater length or complexity).

Participating university presses (numbering over 60) commit to producing digital open access editions of TOME volumes, openly licensing them under Creative Commons licenses, and depositing the files in selected open repositories….”

TOME – Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem

Cleveland Museum of Art, free and open digital images

OAR on January 25, 2019

CC0 at the Cleveland Museum of Art: 30,000 high quality digital images now available.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is one of the most visited art museums in the world, and soon it will become one of the most important online collections as well. Today, we are announcing a release of 30,000 high quality, free and open digital images from the museum’s collection under CC0 and available via their API. CC0 allows anyone to use, re-use, and remix a work without restriction.

The newly released images and their associated metadata can also be viewed on CC Search, the Creative Commons image portal that provides access to millions of CC Images from 21 providers. This portal is currently in development and growing, and the Cleveland Museum of Art’s images provide another access point for billions of learners around the world to experience and enjoy cultural heritage. In this release, the CMA joins other institutions that have made the choice to share, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Source: https://creativecommons.org/2019/01/23/cleveland-museum/

Creative Commons “CC Search” project

OAR on December 17, 2018

There is no larger compendium of shared human knowledge and creativity than the Commons, including over 1.4 billion digital works available under CC tools. Despite the tremendous growth of the Commons, and the widespread use of the CC licenses and public domain marks, there is no simple way to maximize use of, and engagement with, all of that content. There is no front door — no tool designed for the general public to facilitate discovery for the purpose of reuse and remix, to simplify the license terms, make attribution easy, or support curation, and crowdsourced metadata.

Creative Commons’ “CC Search” project will develop and release an open online search and re-use tool that will allow high-quality content from the commons to surface in a more seamless and accessible way. Our beta relies on open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset and focuses on photos as its first media type. It is meant to elicit discussion and inform our development as we build out the full set of tools. “CC Search” will enable users to curate, tag, and remix that content. It will go beyond simple search to aggregate results from across the hundreds of public repositories into a single catalog, and also facilitate the use and re-use through tools like curated lists, saved searches, one- or no-click attribution, and provenance.
New Release

This release contains several new features, including AI image tags generated from our collaborator, Clarifai. Clarifai is a best in class image classification software that provides tagging support and visual recognition. Clarifai’s API was integrated in the process-flow as a means to automatically generate tags for the new and existing images. This means that CC search has machine-generated tags, user-defined tags, and platform-defined tags that were obtained from the web crawl data. Collectively, these will enhance the user’s search experience and improve the quality of the results. Currently, 10.3 million images have their respective Clarifai tags and the outstanding images will be integrated on an ongoing basis. Tags generated via Clarifai are marked with a on the detail page for each image. With this addition, we’re not just cataloging the commons, we’re making it better. Thank you to Clarifai for their support.

https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org/

CC Search

OAR on December 17, 2018

Creative Commons’ “CC Search” project will develop and release an open online search and re-use tool that will allow high-quality content from the commons to surface in a more seamless and accessible way. Our beta relies on open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset and focuses on photos as its first media type. It is meant to elicit discussion and inform our development as we build out the full set of tools. “CC Search” will enable users to curate, tag, and remix that content. It will go beyond simple search to aggregate results from across the hundreds of public repositories into a single catalog, and also facilitate the use and re-use through tools like curated lists, saved searches, one- or no-click attribution, and provenance.

https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org/