From About: "Common Content is a catalog of content, a repository of information about works made available under licenses from the Creative Commons project, or in the Public Domain."

Types of content include images, audio, video, text and websites. Lawrence Lessig, Matt Haughhey and Cory Doctorow are a few of the notables involved in this concept. I've added my weblog and recent article. If you have any Creative Commons licensed content on the web, be sure to add it to their index.

For those that still aren't convinced of the importance of the Open Access movement, read Simon Caulkin's article in today's Guardian Observer (link courtesy of Open Access News). Caulkin's article succinctly pulls the major points of the open access debate together. For example, as he points out quite clearly,

How's this for a winning publishing formula? A university funds scientific research; the research is turned into a paper by an author, who pays a colour illustration and reprint charge - say, £1,000 - and surrenders the copyright for the privilege of publishing his findings in a specialised journal. Peers review the work for free, then the publisher prints the article - and sells it back for a hefty fee to the institution where the work was carried out in the first place.

. . . .

Over the past two years, protests at the unfairness of the current system have mounted. Having paid once to produce new scientific knowledge, funding agencies and scientists argue, why should taxpayers and charitable bodies have to pay again to use it?

The question for me is at what point do the humanities become involved in this debate? While the humanities perhaps doesn't pay for "colour illustration and reprint charge," the irony is yet the same. In regards to print publication, academic institutions are funding our research, we are then giving up our rights to the texts, and then having to pay for access to those texts. As Caulkin points out, an equally important consideration is the effect the very high price of science journals is having on library journal subscriptions where the humanities also suffers:

My article making the case for open source and open content in composition studies, Copyright, Access and Digital Texts, has just been published in Across the Disciplines, a new peer-reviewed journal hosted at the WAC Clearinghouse:

As consumers of text, we make selections which either support or deny the proprietary publishing model. As producers of text, we can decide how our writing is to be published and accessed by others.

• If we create open content, we are making materials available to all, setting an example which resides in contrast to one of control, creating an alternative metaphor to the domineering one of property, ownership.
• If we advocate open content and open source, we will gain more supporters of open content as the "right way" of creating texts for both education and our society, building a larger political base for eventually reforming intellectual property laws.
• If we use open content and open source in our classes, we can discuss sharing, pointing out to students how the principles of peer-to-peer are aligned with our concerns about access.

I need some help. I'm looking for references to open source and copyleft in Comp/Rhet which are in print or peer-reviewed publication, whether contextualized within copyfight discussions, discussing publishing as open content or advocating the use of open source software, and pretty much anything else. So far, I've found the following rather limited list, and I'm sure I haven't found everything yet: