Open Access Week 2012

 It is Open Access Week 2012.  This is the second of two Ancient World Online (AWOL) related posting for the event.  The first is here.

I discovered yesterday that the the pre-1990 back list of Brooklyn Museum Publications is now available under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license via the copies in the custody of HathiTrust. In other words they're free for you to read or download. I've pulled together the titles dealing with antiquity here.

Two weeks ago the Metropolitan Museum did a similar thing, and I posted a list of their past oriented titles here.

This past summer, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens published the full run of Hesperia in open access, joining their already considerable corpus of open access materials. 

It's wonderful to see these institutions following in the steps of pioneers of open access publication in these fields such at the Oriental Institute and the École française d'Athènes.

There are of course many other projects and institutions providing open access copies of collections large and small, and I work to list them in AWOL when I discover them and when you tell me about them. But it is particularly encouraging to see institutional commitment to openness from such venerable organizations, and I hope that it will encourage other institutions to follow suit. Indeed, anyone who holds the rights to a book or books held by HathiTrust is encouraged to do as Brooklyn has done and authorize them to make it fully accessible under a Creative Commons license.