Information Research Weblog

When it was announced in January that Prentice Hall - the technical book publisher owned by Pearson - planned to release a new series of books under the Open Publication Licence (OPL), rather than traditional copyright, other publishers were baffled.

So begins an article in yesterday's Financial Times by Richard Poynder. Prentice Hall's choice of OPL was sensible, given that the book series is about open source software and the publisher is pretty sanguine about the benefits, expecting sales to be maintained because people will want to buy the physical book.

Curiously, I can't find anything about this development on either the Prentice Hall or the parent company (Pearson - publisher of the FT) on either of the Web sites.

Poynder also mentions the Creative Commons development - I use one of their licences in connection with this Weblog. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and hit the Creative Commons button.

Developments such as this give one some hope that scholarly output will become more freely available, but as the copyright legislation in the US shows, the forces of commerce can be relied upon to make it difficult!