If DocumentCloud lives up to its promise, this could be a massive paradigm shift for researchers and journalists.

From the Calais Blog:

The DocumentCloud initiative – winner of this year’s largest grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation – has lined up some two dozen partners, everyone from Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, to the ACLU National Security Project, The National Security Archive, the Center for Investigative Reporting and many more.

DocumentCloud is a unique online resource – found at http://www.documentcloud.org – that will provide public access to news reporters’ original source materials. It will debut in a beta version by the end of this year.

Source: OpenCalais

See Also: DocumentCloud adds impressive list of investigative-journalism outfits (via Nieman Journalism Lab)

Imagine being able to search across the New York Times’ cache of records on Guantánamo Bay detainees, the ACLU’s unrivaled set of documents on detention policy, Jane Mayer’s source material for her coverage of the CIA in The New Yorker, and The Washington Post’s valuable contributions to all of the above. That’s the promise of DocumentCloud…

Today [9/24] they’re also announcing an official partnership with OpenCalais, the powerful Thomson Reuters product that turns text into meaningful data. (For instance, it can distinguish between Poland, the country, and Poland, Maine, or group references to Guantánamo and Gitmo.) Material submitted to Document Cloud will be run through optical-character-recognition software, then OpenCalais and potentially other applications, with the goal of wringing as much value from them as possible.

Here’s a list of DocumentCloud Members (so far):

ACLU National Security Project, Arizona Republic, The Atlantic, Center for Democracy and Technology / OpenCRS, Centre for Investigative Journalism (City University London), Center for Investigative Reporting / California Watch, Center for Public Integrity, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, Gotham Gazette, The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, The National Security Archive, The New York Times, New Yorker, MinnPost, MSNBC, Mother Jones, PBS NewsHour, ProPublica, St. Petersburg Times, Sunlight Foundation, Talking Points Memo, Voice of San Diego, Washington Post, WNYC

From the FAQ:

What is it?

DocumentCloud will be software, a Web site, and a set of open standards that will make original source documents easy to find, share, read and collaborate on, anywhere on the Web. Think of it as a card catalog for primary source documents. It will accelerate the work of those doing investigations — whether reporters, bloggers or others.

Who can use it?

Once documents have been added to DocumentCloud, anyone will be able to find and share them. Users will be able to search for documents by things like date, topic, person, location, etc. and will be able to do “document dives” — collaboratively examining large sets of documents.

Stay Current With the Project via the DocumentCloud Blog