From Neel Smith comes word of The Pantheon Project – The Pilot Project of the Karman Center. Definitely worth a look, with very nice OA policies covering the core project data:
… many questions remain concerning the design, construction, statics, building logistics and the original purpose of this unique monument. The Karman Center’s Pantheon Project aims to resolve these questions with up-to-date technical means, new digital measurings of the entire building and new forms of web-based scientific collaboration … One of the new means of the Pantheon Project for scientific work is a 3D digital data model based on 540,000,000 points (= >9 gigabytes of numerical data) from a laser scanning operation executed in Rome during December 2005. The model not only contains the coordinates of all the points but also the colour value of the surface … The Pantheon Project, as all other future Karman Center projects, focuses on Open Access Scholarship, that is, not only the research results from the Pantheon Project and the Karman Center, but also all the basic data and discussion concerning them will be made freely accessible to all interested scholars for their own use. We also hope to convince archives and other institutions owning historical sources, such as drawings, photographs, prints, rare books, maps, etc., to help us make them available online for research. This would not only help to intensify scholarly work but would at the same time help to preserve the often very delicate or easily damaged originals.
