Fedora Commons was recently established with the award of a $4.9-million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the frameworks necessary to change how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new nonprofit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the 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.
Fedora Commons provides sustainable technologies to create, manage, publish, share, and preserve digital content as a basis for intellectual, organizational, scientific, and cultural heritage by bringing two communities together.
With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository system, under development since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the goal is to establish 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.
According to Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons and coinventor of the Fedora architecture, "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."
Fedora Commons will initially be located in the Information Science Building at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The Board of Directors of Fedora Commons provides leadership from multiple communities, including open-access publishing, digital libraries, sciences, and the humanities .
Among those currently listed as Fedora community members are:
- The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research
- The American Geophysical Union
- The ARROW Project
- The Biodiversity Heritage Library -- Encyclopedia of Life
- The Columbia University: Center for International Earth Science Information Network
- The Digital Peer Publishing (DiPP) -- An Open Access initiative for eJournals
- The Encyclopedia of Chicago
- The eSciDoc Project
- The Glasgow Caledonian University
- The Johns Hopkins University -- Digital Knowledge Center
- The Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / National Library of Wales
- The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center - Department of Surgery
- The National Library of Estonia
- The New York University: The Humanities Computing Group
- The Open Access Repositories in New Zealand
- The Oxford University Library Services
- The Rhodes College
- The Rutgers University Library
- The Technical University of Denmark
- The Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center
- The Tufts University: The Digital Collections and Archives Department
- The University of Athens, Libraries Computer Center
- The University College Dublin -- IVRLA
- And the Yale University Library: Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library and the Yale Electronic Records Archive.
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's Science Program seeks to make a significant impact on the development of provocative, transformative scientific research, and increase knowledge in emerging fields.
