[pd-discuss] PRESS RELEASE : Gale releases all its public domain content freely on the open web

"Gale, part of Cengage Learning, is thrilled to announce that all its public domain content will be freely accessible on the open web. 'On this Public Domain Day, we are proud to have taken such a ground-breaking decision. As a common good, the Public Domain content we have digitized has to be accessible to everyone' said Marmaduke Robida, Director for Public Domain Content, Gale. Hundreds of thousands of digitized books coming from some of the world's most prestigious libraries and belonging to top-rated products highly appreciated by the academic community such as 'Nineteenth Century Collection Online', 'Eighteenth Century Collection Online', 'Sabin America', 'Making of the Modern World' and two major digitized historical newspaper collections (The Times and the Illustrated London news) are now accessible from a dedicated website called http://galecengage-publicdomain.com . The other Gale digital collections will be progressively added to this web site throughout 2013 so all Public Domain content will be freely accessible by 2014. All the images are or will be available under the Public Domain Mark 1.0 license and can be reused for any purpose. Gale's global strategy is inspired by the recommandations issued by the European reflection group 'Comite des sages' and the Public Domain manifesto. For Public Domain content, Gale decided to move to a freemium business model : all the content is freely accessible through basic tools (Public Domain Downloader, URL lists, ...), but additional services are charged for. 'We are confident that there still is a market for our products. Our state-of-art research platforms offer high quality services and added value which universities or research libraries are ready to pay for' said Robida. A specific campaign targeted to national and academic libraries for promoting the usage of Public Domain Mark for digitized content will be launched in 2013. 'We are ready to help the libraries that have a digitization programme fulfill their initial mission : make the knowledge accessible to everyone. We also hope that our competitors will follow the same way in the near future. Public Domain should not be enclosed by paywalls or dubious licensing terms' said Robida."