Funds from this grant support a project by Professor Pamela Samuelson of the University of California, Berkeley Law School to develop practical solutions to the obstacles copyright law places in the way of the implementation of digital library initiatives. Samuelson and her research team will address several thorny issues, including orphan works, private ordering, collective licensing, digital lending, and metadata ownership, in an effort to develop fair and practical procedures for the successful implementation of library initiatives that seek to realize the full potential of digital libraries. Over two years, funds from this grant will support several white papers, workshops and conferences, and the crafting of model legislation. The work of Samuelson's team will also help inform the continued development of the Foundation-supported Digital Public Library of America.

Funds from this grant provide continued support to the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns and operates Wikipedia, in its efforts to professionalize and sustain itself organizationally while improving the quality of Wikipedia articles. Wikimedia's ambitious goals in the next five years are to increase the number of people served to one billion; to increase the number of articles to 50 million; to review 25% of all articles to insure accurate, quality information; to double the number of editors to 200,000; and to double the number of women editors and contributors from the developing world. Funds will support efforts to improve article quality by partnering with professors and universities and encouraging students to create or improve articles in their area of expertise. Also supported through this grant is a Wikimedia project to convert its most talented volunteers into paid fellows through a fellowship program focused on research, existing program work, and new high impact work. Wikimedia is also undertaking an aggressive, high profile campaign to attract more women contributors. Finally, Wikipedia will use some of the Foundation's support to develop its relationship with the cultural sector by working with its 30 worldwide chapters to foster partnerships with galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and educational institutions.

This is a request for Maura Marx, executive director of the Open Knowledge Commons (OKC), to build the organization's base and public profile, and to develop a national digital strategy that will appeal to policymakers as well as libraries. We created the Open Knowledge Commons out of a previous grant to the Internet Archive due to the need for strengthening existing partnerships and forging new alliances with libraries, archives, funders, legislators and the public behind a universal digital library. Maura Marx, recruited after a national search, spent her first year trying to work out a rapprochement with the Internet Archive and when that became unfeasible, recruiting a new Board of Directors and setting up a new not-for-profit organization, incorporated in Massachusetts. Marx now requests one year of support to help consolidate and expand the role of OKC in developing a blueprint for a national strategy for book digitization that will be useful to policy makers as well as the library community and to create demonstration projects that showcase the benefits of such a blueprint. OKC is the only organization devoted exclusively to this vision and it fills a very important gap. Marx proposes to move OKC to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and to work to develop the intellectual, social and legal framework to foster the strengths of this new digital environment. We view the Open Knowledge Commons as a key vehicle to develop and implement our own program in digital information technology as we seek to create a realistic digital library with universal appeal.

The Foundation helped create the Open Knowledge Commons (OKC) in order to have more community building efforts in our open digitization initiatives and to catalyze new large?scale collaborations among libraries. This request is the first major digitization effort from OKC, and it involves creating an open digital library focusing on the history of medicine as a theme and drawing on the participation of five major institutions: the National Library of Medicine (NML); the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University; the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University; and the New York Public Library. There are enthusiastic letters of endorsement from all five institutions, which include three of the leading collections in the world (NML, Harvard, and Yale). Following an initial phase of digitization of public domain monographs, they would also create a de?duplication database to prevent redundancy of efforts, a tool based on that used by the successful Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The BHL is a model for this theme?based approach to scanning. The history of medicine is a very rich discipline intellectually that cuts across many fields. It is estimated that the entire field numbers about 1,500,000 volumes, of which half (750,000) are pamphlets, including dissertations, one third (500,000) are serial volumes, and the remaining sixth (250,000) are monographs. This effort would digitize 30,000 monographs or just over 10% of the existing collection. This effort would be a collaborative venture taking into account the scholarly needs and sensitivities of the academic and library communities which have not always felt well-served by existing digitization efforts. Given the new economic environment as well as the Google juggernaut, we need to be more selective and strategic about our digitization efforts and to try to build wider collaboration and coordination among interested users that will also benefit the general public.

The Board on Science, Technology and Economic Policy (STEP) of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) requests co-funding for a project on The Impact of Copyright Policy on Innovation in the Digital Era. We have identified the issues surrounding copyright as critical to our program in Digital Information Technology and the Dissemination of Knowledge but the debate surrounding copyright has been informed by more heat than light. This is an effort by the NAS to bring a more rational and systematic approach to discussions of copyright by expanding research in this area and by identifying a community of researchers with interest and knowledge of copyright to inform broader policy discussions. They would begin by commissioning three background papers: 1) a review of existing literature on the costs and benefits of copyright and related Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) policies; 2) A baseline estimate of the magnitude and categories of U.S. economic activity affected by copyright together with a discussion of the range of business models dependent on its protection; and 3) a theoretical analysis of how copyright might stimulate or inhibit innovation, collaboration, and creativity. The project will also create a public Web site to post papers, comments, and other discussion items regarding copyright. In the spring, NAS would host a day and a half workshop to address and prioritize a range of research topics and methodologies. We are being asked to cover half of the budget. Several Sloan staff would attend this workshop because so little rigorous work has been done in this area, and we believe issues of copyright and intellectual property cut to the heart of our program in Digital Information Technology and the Dissemination of Knowledge.