Yale's Open Access policy

Yale's "Open Access" policy
Yesterday, Yale announced its new "open access" policy for online images of millions of objects housed in Yale's museums, archives, and libraries, and more than 250,000 images are available through a newly developed collective catalog.

The goal of the new policy is to make high quality digital images of Yale's vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available. Yale is using a Creative Commons license, Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) for the open access material. "This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials."

This policy is a big big success for Yale and its Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure (ODAI) and the libraries, archives, and museums at Yale. Without a centralizing, coordinating agency on campus, I can't imagine that Yale University would have been able to make this decision and connect it to a tool for discovery across Yale's many cultural and scientific units such as the libraries at Yale, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Yale Center for British Art. ODAI is proving its value to Yale.