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Open content, coined by analogy with "open source" (though technically it is actually share-alike), describes any kind of creative work including articles, pictures, audio, and video that is published in a format that explicitly allows the copying of the information. Content can be either in the public domain or under a license like the GNU Free Documentation License. "Open content" is also sometimes used to describe content that can be modified by anyone; there is no closed group, like a commercial encyclopedia publisher, responsible for all the editing.

It is possible that the first documented case of Open Content was with the Royal Society, where they aspired toward information sharing across the globe as a public enterprise. The commonality is difficult to dismiss. The words "open content" were first put together in this context by David Wiley, then a graduate student at Brigham Young University, who founded the OpenContent project and put together the first content-specific (non-software) license in 1998 with input from Eric Raymond, Tim O'Reilly, and others.

Like the debate between the titles "open source" and "free software", open content materials can also be described as free content, although technically they describe different things. For example, the Open Directory Project is open content but is not free content. The main difference between licenses is the definition of freedom; some licenses attempt to maximize the freedom of all potential recipients in the future while others maximize the freedom of the initial recipient. Much of the ideals of the open source movement was led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). One such application is their Open Courseware (see below).

The related term common content is occasionally used to refer to Creative Commons-licensed works. This takes after the Common Content project, which is an attempt to collect as many such works as possible.

Contents 1 Related topics, not open content 2 Licenses 3 See also 4 External links 5 Credit

Related topics, not open content

• MIT OpenCourseWare [1] is not open-content material by the definition above, since copyrights remain with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or members of its faculty.

Licenses

• Creative Commons License (11 versions)
• Design Science License
• GNU Free Documentation License
• Open Content License
• Open Directory Project License used by Open Directory Project
• Open Game License - License of the Open Gaming Foundation, as drafted by Wizards of the Coast.
• Open Publication License - License for the Open Content Project

See also

• Open research
• collaborative writing
• copyleft
• free content
• free software movement
• List of open-content projects
• open access
• open publishing
• open source culture
• public domain
• public domain image resources
• public domain resources

External links

• alqua.com, Free documents
• Creative Commons - The open content idea and creative works
• Design Science License
• This Google search attempts to find documents with GFDL license grant boilerplate.
• Guide to Open Content Licenses, Lawrence Liang, a systematic survey of open content licenses
• Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals
• ibiblio - The open content idea as a library
• Licenses for Documentation at gnu.org
• locarecords.com, Open Source Record Label
• OpenContent.org
• "Open Content Licenses," Jan Newmarch, http://jan.netcomp.monash.edu.au
• Open Content resources and mailing list at OpenContentList.com
• Open directory category: Open Content
• Public Library of Science
• Directory of open access journals
• Read Print - includes many free public domain books
• Writings - Open Content - speech on Open Content with relation to DRM
• opencontentalliance[2]
• LibriVox - public domain audio books
• Open Content - Das Urheberrecht als Grenze und Ausblick (educa)

Credit

The list of open content projects are partly based on The Institutional Design of Open Source Programming on Firstmonday

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