[OAI-implementers] FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT

Tue Aug 14 14:55:30 EDT 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:

Fedora Commons: Sandy Payette

(607) 255-9222, payette at cs.cornell.edu

http://www.fedora-commons.org <http://www.fedora-commons.org> 

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: Greg Nelson

(415) 561-7427, greg.nelson at moore.org

FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR
BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES

(Ithaca, New York, August 10, 2007) - Fedora Commons today announced the
award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect
revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and
educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital
intellectual creations.  Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that
will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source
software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of
Virginia.  The Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital
Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell
Computing and Information Science. 

With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support
the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates
open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and
educational materials in digital form.  The software platform developed by
Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a
networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars,
teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new
ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues
worldwide.  With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository system,
developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the
new software will continue to focus on the integrity and longevity of the
intellectual products that underlie this new form of knowledge work.  The
result will be an open source software platform that both enables
collaborative models of information creation and sharing, and provides
sustainable repositories to secure the digital materials that constitute our
intellectual, scientific, and cultural history. 

Recognizing the importance of multiple participants in the development of new
technologies to support this vision, the Moore Foundation funding will also
support the growth and diversification of the Fedora Community, a global set
of partners who will cooperate in software development, application
deployment, and community outreach for Fedora Commons.  This network of
partners will be instrumental for making Fedora Commons a self-sustainable
non-profit organization that will support and incubate open-source software
projects that focus on new mechanisms for information formation, access,
collaboration, and preservation.

According to Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, "the new
Fedora Commons can foster technologies and partnerships that make it possible
for academic and scientific communities to publish, share, and archive the
results of their own work in a free, open fashion, and make it possible to
analyze and use content in novel ways."

"Establishing a sustainable open-source software system that provides the
basic infrastructure for on-line communities of scholars will have enduring
impact.  The unanticipated cross-disciplinary uses of this open platform are
the hallmark of this revolutionary infrastructure," said Jim Omura,
technology strategist with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Payette also noted, "The open-source software that is developed and
distributed by Fedora Commons can impact the entire lifecycle of what is
often referred to as "e-Research" and "e-Science," including storage of
experimental data, analysis of experimental results, peer review, publication
of findings, and the reuse of published material for the next generation of
scholarly works.  We will also continue our work with libraries and museums
to facilitate the sharing of digitized collections, making previously locked
away material available to wide audiences.  Also, building on our attention
to digital preservation in the Fedora open-source repository system, Fedora
Commons will continue to stress the importance of the sustainability of
digital information in applications of our work."

About Fedora Commons

Fedora Commons <http://www.fedora-commons.org>  is a non-profit organization
whose purpose is to provide sustainable open-source technologies to help
individuals and organizations create, manage, publish, share, and preserve
digital content upon which we form our intellectual, scientific, and cultural
heritage.  Since 2001, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
Cornell University and the University of Virginia have collaborated on the
Fedora Project which has developed, distributed, and supported innovative
open-source repository software that combines content management, web
services, and semantic technologies.  The Fedora software has been adopted
worldwide to support an array of applications including open-access
publishing, scholarly communication, digital libraries, e-science, archives,
and education.

Fedora Commons will initially be located in the Information Science Building
at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.  The Executive Director of Fedora
Commons is Sandy Payette, who co-invented the Fedora architecture and led the
Cornell arm of the open-source Fedora Project.  The Board of Directors of
Fedora Commons provides leadership from multiple communities, including
open-access publishing, digital libraries, sciences, and humanities.  For
more information, visit http://www.fedora-commons.org.

About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in 2000, seeks to advance
environmental conservation and cutting-edge scientific research around the
world and improve the quality of life in the San Francisco Bay Area.  The
Foundation's Science Program seeks to make a significant impact on the
development of provocative, transformative scientific research, and increase
knowledge in emerging fields. For more information, visit
http://www.moore.org.

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