DigitalKoans

This year’s been a total bummer. Hopefully 2007 will be better.

Blogging resumes the week of 1/8/07.

What was new and interesting during the week of 12/18/06? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.) Next Flasback on 1/12/07

• "2nd Circuit Affirms Fair Use with Collage Containing Copyrighted Photographs"
  

  On October 25th, 2006, in Blanch v. Koons, the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Second Circuit ruled on an important case dealing with the fair use of copyrighted material in an artistic, "collage" setting, affirming that artist Jeff Koons’ incorporation of a photograph into a collage painting was fair use.

• "Australia Court: Link to Copyrighted Material, Feel the Wrath"
  

  Bloggers, MySpacers, and anyone else who links to copyrighted material without permission is fair game for legal action, a court in Australia has ruled.

• "Bloggers Beware: Debunking Nine Copyright Myths of the Online World"
  

  A handful of myths have spawned practices, particularly among bloggers and website owners, that turn copyright law on its head. These myths are rooted in the assumption that everything is up for use online unless and until proven otherwise.

• "Book Publishing in the U.S.: Bigger Than We Thought?"
  

  Well, I ran into a surprise in this morning’s paper, and it’s verified by the U.S. Census bureau’s website: the adjusted number for 2005 is $51.9 billion (including ebooks, to be sure, but that’s certainly less than 3% of that number, no matter what definition you use).

• "CC Changes"
  

  Five hours later, in the Creative Commons party in the virtual world of Second Life, I [Lawrence Lessig] made for me an announcement. As I removed the CC torch from my bag of objects, I told those in world, and in San Francisco, that Joi Ito, a venture capitalist from Japan and a key driver in the “sharing economy,” would be replacing me as Chairman of Creative Commons. I will remain on the board, and as CEO. But from the moment I handed him the torch, he is CC’s new Chairman.

• "Curation and Access Services"
  

  I just ran across the C21st Curation: access and service delivery lecture series.

• "Deep Web Research Research 2007"
  

  This article and guide is designed to give you the resources you need to better understand the history of the deep web research, as well as various classified resources that allow you to search through the currently available web to find those key sources of information nuggets only found by understanding how to search the "deep web."

• "Google’s Book-Scanning Efforts Trigger Philosophical Debate"
  

  The latest tensions revolve around Google’s insistence on chaining the digital content to its Internet-leading search engine and the nine major libraries that have aligned themselves with the Mountain View-based company.

• "How Web Providers Dodged a Big Legal Bullet"
  

  Web site providers can take a deep breath. The California Supreme Court has ruled that they are not legally responsible for content posted by third parties on their site

• "The Information Model to End All Information Models"
  

  ICA-AtoM must be flexible enough to support a wide variety of potential uses. Firstly, as an archival description package for individual archival institutions as well as a union catalog application that can combine descriptions from multiple repositories (e.g. http://humanrightsarchives.org).

• "Journal Ends Peer Review Experiment"
  

  Citing a lack of participation, the British journal Nature said Thursday it was ditching a closely watched online experiment that allowed scientists to comment on their peers’ research before publication.

• "Mass Digitization for Art Libraries and Special Collections"
  

  The Alfred P. Sloan foundation has granted $1 million to the Internet Archive for digitization in 5 US institutions to boost the materials available in the Open Content Alliance (OCA).

• "Milestones: Stanford’s HighWire Press Passes 1.5 Million Free Full Text Articles in Database"
  

  Whatever the case may be, congrats to the HighWire team on passing (or soon passing) the 1.5 million free article mark.

• "Piracy Suit Being Dropped Against NY Mom"
  

  The recording industry is giving up its lawsuit against Patti Santangelo, a mother of five who became the best-known defendant in the industry’s battle against music piracy. However, two of her children are still being sued.

• "PLoS ONE Is Launched By the Public Library of Science. A New Era Begins for Scientific Publishing on the Internet."
  

  In almost all other journals, publication of a research paper is a full stop. The next significant step forward will be the publication of another paper following on from the previous work. But in PLoS ONE, as soon as an article is published, a conversation between authors and readers can begin.

• "Report on Scholarly Cyberinfrastructure"
  

  The American Council of Learned Societies has just issued a report, “Our Cultural Commonwealth,” assessing the current state of scholarly cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences and making a series of recommendations on how it can be strengthened, enlarged and maintained in the future.

• "‘Returning Author’s Rights: Termination of Transfer’ Beta Tool Launched"
  

  To help those of you who don’t have a live case to test and who are unfamiliar with how the provisions work, we suggest you try one or more of the hypotheticals included on this page so that you can see the different aspects of the tool.

• "Robots Could Demand Legal Rights"
  

  Robots could one day demand the same citizen’s rights as humans, according to a study by the British government.

• "Sharecropping 2.0? Not Likely"
  

  Nick Carr has an interesting post arguing that sites like MySpace and Facebook are essentially high-tech sharecropping, exploiting the labor of the many to enrich the few. He’s wrong, I think, but in an instructive way.

• "Sony Has Far to Go in Rootkit Case"
  

  Sony BMG is making amends in California and Texas for secretly loading antipiracy software onto customers’ computers. But the record label has a long way to go before putting the public relations nightmare behind it.

• "Using METS and MODS to Create XML Standards-Based Digital Library Applications "
  

  Morgan Cundiff and Nate Trail describe the creation of "Library of Congress Presents: Music, Theater, and Dance" (LCP) and the "Veterans History Project" (VHP).

• "Workshop Pieces Together European Library Digitisation Project"
  

  In an initiative launched through the European Digital Library Project (EDLProject), representatives from the European Community’s (EC) various eContentPlus funded programmes which are designed to create easier and improved access to digital collections, have gathered for a workshop held at the Austrian National Library.

There has been a great deal of discussion of late about the impact of self-archiving on library journal subscriptions. Obviously, this is of great interest to journal publishers who do not want to wake up one morning, rub the sleep from their eyes, and find out over their first cup of coffee at work that libraries have en masse canceled subscriptions because a "tipping point" has been reached. Likewise, open access advocates do not want journal publishers to panic at the prospect of cancellations and try to turn back the clock on liberal self-archiving policies. So, this is not a scenario that any one wants, except those who would like to simply scrap the existing journal publishing system and start over with a digital tabula rosa.

So, deep breath: Is the end near?

This question hinges on another: Will libraries accept any substitute for a journal that does not provide access to the full, edited, and peer-reviewed contents of that journal?

If the answer is "yes," publishers better get out their survival kits and hunker down for the digital nuclear winter or else change business practices to embrace the new reality. Attempts to fight back by rolling back the clock may just make the situation worse: the genie is out of the bottle.

If the answer is "no," preprints pose no threat, but postprints may under some difficult to attain circumstances.

It is unlikely that a critical mass of author created postprints (i.e., author makes the preprint look like the postprint) will ever emerge. Authors would have to be extremely motivated to have this occur. If you don’t believe me, take a Word file that you submitted to a publisher and make it look exactly like the published article (don’t forget the pagination because that might be a sticking point for libraries). That leaves publisher postprints (generally PDF files).

For the worst to happen, every author of every paper published in a journal would have to self-archive the final publisher PDF file (or the publishers themselves would have to do it for the authors under mandates).

But would that be enough? Wouldn’t the permanence and stability of the digital repositories housing these postprints be of significant concern to libraries? If such repositories could not be trusted, then libraries would have to attempt to archive the postprints in question themselves; however, since postprints are not by default under copyright terms that would allow this to happen (e.g., they are not under Creative Commons Licenses), libraries may be barred from doing so. There are other issues as well: journal and issue browsing capabilities, the value-added services of indexing and abstracting services, and so on. For now, let’s wave our hands briskly and say that these are all tractable issues.

If the above problems were overcome, a significant one remains: publishers add value in many ways to scholarly articles. Would libraries let the existing system of journal publishing collapse because of self-archiving without a viable substitute for these value-added functions being in place?

There have been proposals for and experiments with overlay journals for some time, as well other ideas for new quality control strategies, but, to date, none have caught fire. Old-fashioned peer review, copy editing and fact checking, and publisher-based journal design and production still reign, even among the vast majority of e-journals that are not published by conventional publishers. In the Internet age, nothing technological stops tens of thousands of new e-journals using open source journal management software from blooming, but they haven’t so far, have they? Rather, if you use a liberal definition of open access, there are about 2,500 OA journals—a significant achievement; however, there are questions about the longevity of such journals if they are published by small non-conventional publishers such as groups of scholars (e.g., see "Free Electronic Refereed Journals: Getting Past the Arc of Enthusiasm"). Let’s face it—producing a journal is a lot of work, even a small journal that only publishes less than a hundred papers a year.

Bottom line: a perfect storm is not impossible, but it is unlikely.

The Public Library of Science has released a beta version of its innovative PLoS ONE journal.

Why innovative? First, it’s a multidisciplinary scientific journal, with published articles covering subjects that range from Biochemistry to Virology. Second, it’s a participative journal that allows registered users to annotate and initiate discussions about articles. Open commentary and peer-review have been previously implemented in some e-journals (e.g, see JIME: An Interactive Journal for Interactive Media), but PLoS ONE is the most visible of these efforts and, given PLoS’s reputation for excellence, it lends credibility to a concept that has yet to catch fire in the journal publishing world. A nice feature is the “Most Annotated” tab on the home page that highlights articles that have garnered reader commentary. Third, it’s an open access journal in the full sense of the term, with all articles under the least restrictive Creative Commons license, the Creative Commons Attribution License.

The beta site is a bit slow, probably due to significant interest, so expect some initial browsing delays.

Congratulations to PLoS on PLoS ONE. It’s journal worth keeping an eye on.

The Electronic Publishing Working Group of the Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation (DINI) has released an English draft of its DINI-Certificate Document and Publication Services 2007.

It outlines criteria for repository author support; indexing; legal aspects; long-term availability; logs and statistics; policies; security, authenticity and data integrity; and service visibility. It also provides examples.

CrossRef has made a DOI finding tool publicly available. It’s called Simple-Text Query. You can get the details at Barbara Quint’s article "Linking Up Bibliographies: DOI Harvesting Tool Launched by CrossRef."

What caught my eye in Quint’s article was this: "Users can enter whole bibliographies with citations in almost any bibliographic format and receive back the matching Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for these references to insert into their final bibliographies."

Well not exactly. I cut and pasted just the "9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI" section of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography into Simple-Text Query. Result: error message. I had exceeded the 15,360 character limit. So, suggestion one: put the limit on the Simple-Text Query page.

So them I counted out 15,360 characters of the section and pasted that. Just kidding. I pasted the first six references. Result?

Alexander, Martha Latika, and J. N. Gautam. “Institutional Repositories for Scholarly Communication: Indian Initiatives.” Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community 19, no. 3 (2006): 195-201.
No doi match found.

Allard, Suzie, Thura R. Mack, and Melanie Feltner-Reichert. “The Librarian’s Role in Institutional Repositories: A Content Analysis of the Literature.” Reference Services Review 33, no. 3 (2005): 325-336.
doi:10.1108/00907320510611357
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00907320510611357

Allen, James. “Interdisciplinary Differences in Attitudes towards Deposit in Institutional Repositories.” Manchester Metropolitan University, 2005.
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00005180/
Reference not parsed

Allinson, Julie, and Roddy MacLeod. “Building an Information Infrastructure in the UK.” Research Information (October/November 2006).
http://www.researchinformation.info/rioctnov06digital.html
Reference not parsed

Anderson, Greg, Rebecca Lasher, and Vicky Reich. “The Computer Science Technical Report (CS-TR) Project: A Pioneering Digital Library Project Viewed from a Library Perspective.” The Public-Access Computer Systems Review 7, no. 2 (1996): 6-26.
http://epress.lib.uh.edu/pr/v7/n2/ande7n2.html
Reference not parsed

Andreoni, Antonella, Maria Bruna Baldacci, Stefania Biagioni, Carlo Carlesi, Donatella Castelli, Pasquale Pagano, Carol Peters, and Serena Pisani. “The ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library: Meeting the Requirements of a European Community within an International Federation.” D-Lib Magazine 5 (December 1999).
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/peters/12peters.html
Reference not parsed

Hmmm. According to Quint’s article:

I asked Brand if CrossRef could reach open access material. She assured me it could, but it clearly did not give the free and sometimes underdefined material any preference.

Looks like the open access capabilities may need some fine tuning. D-Lib Magazine and The Public-Access Computer Systems Review are not exactly obscure e-journals. Since my references are formatted in the Chicago style by EndNote, I don’t think that the reference format is the issue. In fact, Quint’s article says: "The Simple-Text Query can retrieve DOIs for journal articles, books, and chapters in any reference citation style, although it works best with standard styles."

Conclusion: I play with it some more, but Simple-Text Query may be best for conventional, mainstream journal references.

Using a new purchase service, individuals will be able to purchase JSTOR articles for modest fees (currently $5.00 to $14.00) from publishers that participate in this service. JSTOR describes the service as follows:

An extension of JSTOR’s efforts to better serve scholars is a new article purchase service. This service is an opt-in program for JSTOR participating publishers and will enable them to sell single articles for immediate download. Researchers following direct links to articles will be presented with an option to purchase an article from the publisher if the publisher chooses to participate in this program and if the specific content requested is available through the program. The purchase option will only be presented if the user does not have access to the article. Prior to completing an article purchase users are prompted to first check the availability of the article through a local library or an institutional affiliation with JSTOR.

International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) has announced that its journals will be included in the CrossRef linking service.

In an INASP press release, Pippa Smart, INASP’s Head of Publishing Initiatives, said:

For journals that are largely invisible to most of the scientific community the importance of linking cannot be overstressed. We are therefore delighted to be working with CrossRef to promote discovery of journals published in the less developed countries. We believe that an integrated discovery mechanism which includes journals from all parts of the world is vital to global research—not only benefiting the editors and publishers with whom we work.

The MOIMS-Repository Audit and Certification BOF mailing list (Moims-rac) has been established to foster the development of an ISO standard for the audit and certification of digital information repositories.