The Open Content Alliance (OCA) is a collaborative effort on the part of numerous groups to build a permanent, multilingual archive of digitized texts and multimedia content.

The materials gathered by the OCA are available on their website, and are indexed by Yahoo! The first materials to be added to the archive come from the European Archive, the Internet Archive, the UK National Archives, O’Reilly Media, Prelinger Archives, the University of Toronto and University of California.

The archive is compiled in such a way as to respect copyright holders. Certain files have some kind of restricted access, e.g. they are not downloadable.

The OCA was conceived in response to Google Book Search’s more closed nature. Google Book Search makes use of several access limitations and security measures to limit the number of a pages a user can view, and to prevent printing or copying of material.

The two organizations have a different view on digitization of copyrighted materials, as well. The OCA asks permission from copyright holders before digitizing their work, while Google Book Search plans to digitize copyrighted work unless explicitly told not to do so. Google Book Search contends that digitizing for the purpose of indexing is fair use of copyrighted material.