Friday, January 11, 2008

Open Access Blogging

I became intrigued by how prevalent open access licenses are in the ancient world blogging community so I made a list based on AWBG contributors. I mean this only as a descriptive exercise as I'm guessing that some bloggers haven't given this issue much thought and that some have good reasons for going open access or for not doing so.

I went through the contributors list quickly and used the first ancient world themed blog I could find for each name. My apologies in advance for any mistakes.

No statement:
James Baker: JC Baker
William Caraher: The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World
Jim Davila: Paleojudaica.com
Dan Diffendale: Tria Corda
Ioannis Georganas: Mediterranean Archaeology
David Gill: Looting Matters
Mark Goodacre: NT Gateway Weblog
Sean Graham: Electric Archaeologist
Charles Elwood Jones: Persopolis Fortification Archive Project
Kathrin Kleibl: Gräco-Ägyptische Religion und Heiligtümer
Antonio Lombatti: Pseudoscienze cristiane antiche e medievali
James McGrath: Exploring Our Matrix
Duane Smith: Abnormal Interests
Neel Smith: Vitruvian Design
James Spinti: Idle musings of a bookseller
Judith Weingarten: Zenobia: Empress of the East


Creative Commons
Tom Elliott: Horothesia
Sebastian Heath: Mediterranean Ceramics
Eric Kansa: Digging Digitally
Charles Watkinson: Charles Watkinson's blog

Some of the contributors to AWBG are also contributors to the Stoa. I didn't see an explicit license on the front page there. Nor is there one on this blog.

6 comments:

Chuck Jones said...

OK, well done! I've now added an explicit license on this blog and on my other ancient themed blogs

Judith Weingarten said...

What exactly does the license mean (and how do I get it onto my blog)? Anyone may copy what I've written, any time, but I'd like my name -- or Zenobia's -- to appear. Is that it?

Judith

David Gill said...

I do however have a statement on my History of the British School at Athens postings
http://bsahistory.blogspot.com/

Unknown said...

A license is a legal and hopefully clear statement of rights and restrictions associated with the work. The "attribution" creative commons licenses that Sebastian, Eric, myself and now this blog use enshrine exactly the terms Judith outlines in her comment. Charles is using a "attribution, share-alike" license, which imposes on reusers and remixers of his content an additional requirement: if they alter, transform, or build upon his work, they may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. The Creative Commons website explains things pretty well. Using an explicit license helps in various ways: it makes reuse terms clear for your users (they can wave it at the copyright clearance people when they're trying to include your work in a coursepack!), and it also sets the open-access example for colleagues who may be marking their web work with "copyright yyyy, all rights reserved".

Judith Weingarten said...

Thanks for the good advice. I'm now on board CC too.

Duane Smith said...

I have a Creative Commons license on the front page on my regular Abnormal Interest site at http://www.telecomtally.com/blog/. It seems that it is not on the Blogger site that I used for a while when my server was down. I do think I need to place it on my the individual pages. Thanks for reminding me of this.