Netflix and the Long Tail

Netflix, the Internet company that rents DVDs, has an inventory that includes most of the 60,000 non-pornographic DVDs that are commercially available. What percent of these titles do you think rent each day? Five percent? Ten percent? Twenty percent at most?

No, about 66%. That’s 35,000 to 40,000 titles (and an unspecified number of actual DVDs) out the door and into customers’ mail boxes every day. (There are about five million Netflix accounts.)

The long tail at work.

Source: Leonhardt, David. "What Netflix Could Teach Hollywood." The New York Times, 7 June 2006, C1, C5.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (6/5/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Business Models in Open Access Publishing"; "The Case for Scholars’ Management of Author Rights"; "Copyright: Finding a Balance"; "The Depth and Breadth of Google Scholar: An Empirical Study"; "Digital Library Federation (DLF) Aquifer Project"; "Finding a Balance 2: Signs of Imbalance"; "Follow-up on the Federal Research Public Access Act"; "Open Content and the Emerging Global Meta-University"; "Public Access to Federally Funded Research: The Cornyn-Lieberman and CURES Bills"; Scholarly Publishing Practice Academic Journal Publishers’ Policies and Practices in Online Publishing. Second Survey; and "Sustainable Digital Library Development for Scientific Communities in China."

For weekly updates about news articles, Weblog postings, and other resources related to digital culture (e.g., copyright, digital privacy, digital rights management, and Net neutrality), digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing, see the latest DigitalKoans "Flashback" posting.

Every Move That You Make: Internet Privacy at Risk

Privacy advocates have good reason to worry about a recent flurry of activity related to Internet data retention by ISPs. (In this context, data retention means keeping records about subscribers and their Internet activities beyond what is required for normal business purposes.)

In late April, Colorado Representative Diana DeGette, a Democrat, drafted legislation that would require ISPs to retain data about their subscribers until one year after their accounts were closed (see "Congress May Consider Mandatory ISP Snooping" and "Backer of ISP Snooping Slams Industry").

Then, in Mid-May, it was reported that Wisconsin Representative F. James Sensenbrenner, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was drafting legislation to mandate Internet data retention (see "Congress May Make ISPs Snoop on You"). The Judiciary Committee’s Communications Director backpedaled a few days after this revelation, issuing a statement that said: "Staff sometimes starts working on issues—throwing around ideas, doing oversight—and (they) get ahead of where the members are and what they want to tackle" (see "ISP Snooping Plans Take Backseat").

In late May, the Attorney General was reported to be privately asking major ISP’s to "retain subscriber information and network data for two years" (see "Gonzales Pressures ISPs on Data Retention").

What does data retention mean for reader privacy in an era where users are increasingly turning to Internet-based information resources instead of print resources? It depends on what data is retained, whether the user is authenticated (e.g., some libraries provide unauthenticated public Internet access), and under what circumstances it can be revealed. Let’s assume for the moment that there is fairly detailed data retention (e.g., user A went to URL B), but not total data retention (e.g., user A went to URL B, where the content of B is also retained).

Determining what the user saw at a particular URL may be dependent on how static the content is. Formally published material is presumably static. Access barriers may temporarily prevent the disclosure of licensed and other protected content until such barriers can be overcome by legal means, but nothing stops the immediate disclosure of freely available, formally published static material. Dynamic information, formally published or not, may have changed since the user accessed it, but how much? Information that is not formally published could have simply vanished, but the Internet Archive may permit reconstruction of what the user saw, and, for freely available material, it may also overcome the problem of changing content. In short, it may now be possible, for mandated retention periods, to determine every e-article, e-book, or other e-resource that a reader has used down to the level of specificity that a URL represents (e.g., page views within an HTML-based e-book).

Stepping back, you might ask: How is this different from the familiar library check-out record privacy problem? The difference is that libraries do not check out journal articles and a variety of other materials, such as reference books. Moreover, libraries are not required to retain circulation records, and readers always have the option for unrecorded in-library use. In the digital age, if it’s online, its use can be recorded.

Consequently, reader privacy may be going the way of the dinosaur. Stay tuned.

2006 Dr. Ilene F. Rockman Award

I was very surprised and deeply honored by receiving the first Dr. Ilene F. Rockman Award yesterday for my work on the "Reference Librarians and Institutional Repositories" issue of Reference Services Review. (Normally, this award, which is one of the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence, is given for the outstanding paper of the year, rather than an outstanding issue.)

My thanks to the RSR Editors and Editorial Board (who made this award without my knowledge), to Emerald, to the issue’s authors, and, of course, to Ilene.

The RSR issue in question includes the following IR articles (the links are to e-prints):

Forget RL, Try an Avatar Instead

Real life (RL) is so 20th century. Virtual worlds are where it’s at. At least, that’s what readers of BusinessWeek‘s recent "My Virtual Life" article by Robert D. Hof may quickly come to believe.

You may think that virtual worlds are just kids stuff. Tell that to Anshe Chung, who has made over $250,000 buying and renting virtual real estate in Linden Lab’s Second Life. Or, Chris Mead, whose Second Life couples avatars earn him a cool $90,000 per year. Or the roughly 170,000 Second Life users who spent about $5 million real dollars on virtual stuff in January 2006.

How about this? For all virtual worlds, IGE Ltd. estimates that users spend over $1 billion real dollars on virtual stuff last year.

While most users may be buying virtual clothes, land, and entertainment and other services, conventional companies are exploring how to use virtual worlds for training, meeting, and other purposes, plus trying to snag regular users’ interest with offerings such as Well’s Fargo’s Stagecoach Island.

For the library slant on Second Life, try the Second Life Library 2.0 blog and don’t miss the Alliance Second Life Library 2.0 introduction on 5/31/06 from 2:00 PM-3:30 PM. And don’t foget to browse the Second Life Library 2.0 image pool at Flickr.

Oh, brave new world that has such avatars in it!

Source: Hof, Robert D. "My Virtual Life." BusinessWeek, 1 May 2006, 72-82.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (5/9/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Another OA Mandate: The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006," "Library Access to Scholarship," Podcasting Legal Guide: Rules for the Revolution, and "Preserving Electronic Scholarly Journals: Portico."

"Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia?" Preprint

A preprint of my "Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia?" paper is now available.

It will appear in Information Technology and Libraries 25, no. 3 (2006).

This quote from the paper’s conclusion sums it up:

What this paper has said is simply this: three issues—a dramatic expansion of the scope, duration, and punitive nature of copyright laws; the ability of DRM to lock-down content in an unprecedented fashion; and the erosion of Net neutrality—bear careful scrutiny by those who believe that the Internet has fostered (and will continue to foster) a digital revolution that has resulted in an extraordinary explosion of innovation, creativity, and information dissemination. These issues may well determine whether the much-touted "information superhighway" lives up to its promise or simply becomes the "information toll road" of the future, ironically resembling the pre-Internet online services of the past.

For those who want a longer preview of the paper, here’s the introduction:

Blogs. Digital photo and video sharing. Podcasts. Rip/Mix/Burn. Tagging. Vlogs. Wikis. These buzzwords point to a fundamental social change fueled by cheap PCs and servers, the Internet and its local wired/wireless feeder networks, and powerful, low-cost software: citizens have morphed from passive media consumers to digital media producers and publishers.

Libraries and scholars have their own set of buzz words: digital libraries, digital presses, e-prints, institutional repositories, and open access journals to name a few. They connote the same kind of change: a democratization of publishing and media production using digital technology.

It appears that we are on the brink of an exciting new era of Internet innovation: a kind of digital utopia. Dr. Gary Flake of Microsoft has provided one striking vision of what could be (with a commercial twist) in a presentation entitled "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imminent Internet Singularity," and there are many other visions of possible future Internet advances.

When did this metamorphosis begin? It depends on who you ask. Let’s say the late 1980’s, when the Internet began to get serious traction and an early flowering of noncommercial digital publishing occurred.

In the subsequent twenty-odd years, publishing and media production went from being highly centralized, capital-intensive analog activities with limited and well-defined distribution channels to being diffuse, relatively low-cost digital activities with the global Internet as their distribution medium. Not to say that print and conventional media are dead, of course, but it is clear that their era of dominance is waning. The future is digital.

Nor is it to say that entertainment companies (e.g., film, music, radio, and television companies) and information companies (e.g., book, database, and serial publishers) have ceded the digital content battlefield to the upstarts. Quite the contrary.

High-quality thousand-page-per-volume scientific journals and Hollywood blockbusters cannot be produced for pennies, even with digital wizardry. Information and entertainment companies still have an important role to play, and, even if they didn’t, they hold the copyrights to a significant chunk of our cultural heritage.

Entertainment and information companies have understood for some time that they must adopt to the digital environment or die, but this change has not always been easy, especially when it involves concocting and embracing new business models. Nonetheless, they intend to thrive and prosper—and to do whatever it takes to succeed. As they should, since they have an obligation to their shareholders to do so.

The thing about the future is that it is rooted in the past. Culture, even digital culture, builds on what has gone before. Unconstrained access to past works helps determine the richness of future works. Inversely, when past works are inaccessible except to a privileged minority, it impoverishes future works.

This brings us to a second trend that stands in opposition to the first. Put simply, it is the view that intellectual works are "property"; that this property should be protected with the full force of civil and criminal law; that creators have perpetual, transferable property rights; and that contracts, rather than copyright law, should govern the use of intellectual works.

A third trend is also at play: the growing use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. When intellectual works were in paper form (or other tangible forms), they could only be controlled at the object-ownership or object-access levels (a library controlling the circulation of a copy of a book is an example of the second case). Physical possession of a work, such as a book, meant that the user had full use of it (e.g., the user could read the entire book and photocopy pages from it). When works are in digital form and they are protected by some types of DRM, this may no longer true. For example, a user may only be able to view a single chapter from a DRM-protected e-book and may not be able to print it.

The fourth and final trend deals with how the Internet functions at its most fundamental level. The Internet was designed to be content, application, and hardware "neutral." As long as certain standards were met, the network did not discriminate. One type of content was not given preferential delivery speed over another. One type of content was not charged for delivery while another wasn’t. One type of content was not blocked (at least by the network) while another wasn’t. In recent years, "network neutrality" has come under attack.

The collision of these trends has begun in courts, legislatures, and the marketplace. It is far from over. As we shall see, it’s outcome will determine what the future of digital culture looks like.

Version 62, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 62 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over 2,680 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by the same author, provides much more in-depth coverage of the open access movement and related topics (e.g., disciplinary archives, e-prints, institutional repositories, open access journals, and the Open Archives Initiative) than SEPB does.

The "Open Access Webliography" (with Ho) complements the OAB, providing access to a number of Websites related to open access topics.

Changes in This Version

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are marked with an asterisk):

Table of Contents

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History*
2.2 General Works*
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History*
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals*
3.4 General Works
3.5 Library Issues*
3.6 Research*
4 General Works*
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights*
5.2 License Agreements
5.3 Other Legal Issues
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata*
6.2 Digital Libraries*
6.3 General Works*
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation*
7 New Publishing Models*
8 Publisher Issues*
8.1 Digital Rights Management*
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
Digital Libraries
Electronic Books and Texts
Electronic Serials*
General Electronic Publishing*
Images*
Legal
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
SGML and Related Standards

Further Information about SEPB

The HTML version of SEPB is designed for interactive use. Each major section is a separate file. There are links to sources that are freely available on the Internet. It can be can be searched using Boolean operators.

The HTML document includes three sections not found in the Acrobat file:

  1. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (biweekly list of new resources; also available by mailing list and RSS feed)
  2. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (directory of over 270 related Web sites)
  3. Archive (prior versions of the bibliography)

The Acrobat file is designed for printing. The printed bibliography is over 220 pages long. The Acrobat file is over 580 KB.

Related Article

An article about the bibliography has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (4/24/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "The Impact of Mandatory Policies on ETD Acquisition," "Journals in the Time of Google," "Libraries and the Long Tail: Some Thoughts about Libraries in a Network Age," "Signing Away Our Freedom: The Implications of Electronic Resource Licences," Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe, Unintended Consequences: Seven Years under the DMCA, and The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

DigitalKoans Is One

DigitalKoans and the digital-scholarship.com domain (which is actually the same as escholarlypub.com) are one today.

Of course, my blogging career began on June 07, 2001, when the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog was established. However, SEPW was designed as a supplement to the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, whereas DigitalKoans was designed as a stand-alone publication, albeit one that is inevitably interwoven with my other publication efforts.

So, how did we do in year one? According to Urchin, the digital-scholarship.com domain, which includes DigitalKoans and my other digital works (excluding SEPB, SEPW, and SEPR), has had 251,033 visitor sessions, with an average of 686 sessions per day. There have been 540,054 page requests (pages typically being content-bearing HTML or PDF files), of which 377,640 were for DigitalKoans.

These requests came from 131 top-level Internet domains (e.g., .com). In terms of domains representing identifiable countries, the top ten were: Canada, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, France, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, and Belgium. (Interestingly, India and China came in at 11th and 12th place.) Of course, most U.S. users are in the .com, .edu, .net, and .org domains, which dominated the rankings as a whole.

As I’ve noted previously, I use Urchin for first-cut use statistics, and analog for final ones, so I consider these figures to be preliminary.

Free, Legal Digital Audio Downloads (Courtesy of the Creative Commons)

In Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation, J. D. Lasica tells the story of Tarnation, a documentary film that nominated for a Camera d’Or award (pg. 84). The film was made for $218.31 using a video camera and iMovie. One catch: Lasica says that getting permission to use brief commercial music and video segments in the movie cost around $400,000. Creating derivative works that use the entertainment industry’s copyrighted works is clearly not cheap, assuming that you can obtain permission to use them at all.

Imagine instead a world where you could download, play, and use digital media works for free without paying license fees. It may sound impossible, but that world is starting to be built using Creative Commons licenses.

The most liberal license of the six main Creative Commons licences is Attribution: "This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation."

The most restrictive license is Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives: "This license is often called the ‘free advertising’ license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially."

Here’s a brief guide to selected resources that will help you get started finding digital audio works licensed under Creative Commons licenses.

  • Creative Commons Audio Page: An excellent place to start. It has a search engine, featured audio Web sites, brief information about the Creative Commons Licenses, a list of sites where you can contribute audio works, and featured artists, tools, and works. See also: the Creative Commons Find page, where you can search for CC-licensed works using Google and Yahoo!.
  • ccMixter: "This is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons, where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want." Site tabs provide access to picks, remixes, samples, a cappellas, people, and extras.
  • Common Content: "Common Content is a catalog of works licensed in the Creative Commons, available to anyone for copying or creative re-use. The catalog includes over 3,848 records, many of which are collections which include hundreds or thousands of other works." Audio categories include ambient, music, samples, and speech.
  • The Freesound Project: "The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focuses only on sound, not songs." Sound clips are described, tagged (there’s a tag cloud for popular tags), geotagged, and rated (example: tibetan chant 4 colargol 2.aif). Site includes a "Remix! tree," sample packs, and user forum.
  • Indieish: Your Free Music Daily: Blog with CC-licensed music reviews.
  • jamendo: "On jamendo, the artists distribute their music under Creative Commons licenses. . . .jamendo users can discover and share albums, but also review them or start a discussion on the forums. Albums are democratically rated based on the visitors’ reviews. If they fancy an artist they can support him by making a donation." Site distributes albums using BitTorrent and the M3U playlist file format.
  • PodSafeAudio: "This site aims to provide a location where musicians can upload music under the Creative Commons License for use in Podcasts, Mashups, Shoutcasts, Webcasts and every other kind of ‘casting’ that exists on the ‘net." A complex site with many features, including track reviews,categorization of music by genre and rating, categorization of artists by genre and region, collaboration project listing, user forums, and a blog.

Hear Luminaries Interviewed at Recent CNI Task Force Meetings

Matt Pasiewicz and CNI have made available digital audio interviews with a number of prominent attendees at the CNI Fall (2005) and Spring (2006) Task Force meetings.

A Simple Search Hit Comparison for Google Scholar, OAIster, and Windows Live Academic Search

Given that Windows Live Academic Search’s content is limited to computer science, electrical engineering, and physics journals and conferences, a direct comparison of it with other search engines is somewhat difficult.

Although its limitations should be clearly recognized, the following simple experiment in comparing the number of hits for Google Scholar, OAIster (a search engine that indexes open access literature, such as e-prints), and Windows Live Academic Search may help to shed some light on their differences. (Note that OAIster does not typically include content directly provided by commercial publishers, although it does include e-prints for a large number articles published in academic journals.)

The search is for: "OAI-PMH" (entered without quotes).

"OAI-PMH" being, of course, the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. This is a highly specific search, where many, but not all, hits should fall within the subjects covered by Windows Live Academic Search. A major area that might not be covered is library and information science literature.

To get a better feel for the baseline published literature about OAI-PMH, let’s first do some searching for that term in specialized commercial databases.

  • ACM Digital Library (description): 51 hits.
  • Engineering Village 2 (description): 66 hits.
  • Information Science & Technology Abstracts (description): 36 hits.
  • Library Literature & Information Science Index/Full Text (description): 13 hits.

Now, the search engines in question (the links for the below search engine names are for the search, not the search engine):

So, what have we learned? Windows Live Academic Search has a somewhat higher number of hits than the selected commercial databases and, if adjusted downward for publisher versions only (see below), is on the high end. This suggests that it covers the toll-based published literature very well. However, it has a significantly lower number of hits than OAIster and Google Scholar, suggesting that its coverage of open access literature may be weaker than Google Scholar and it is quite likely weaker than OAIster.

Of the 74 hits for the "OAI-PMH" search in Windows Live Academic Search, 54 (73%) were "published versions" (i.e., publisher-supplied works); 20 (27%) were not (i.e., e-prints). Scanning the "Results by Institution" sidebar, it appears that 100% of OAIster’s 180 hits were from open access sources; I didn’t check them all. I didn’t try to break down the 542-hit Google Scholar search result, which has a mix of toll-based and open access materials, although it would be quite interesting to do so. It should be clear that a sample of one search term is a very crude measure (and that this posting won’t grace the pages of JASIST anytime soon).

Of course, this simple experiment tells us nothing about the presence of duplicate entries for the same work in search result sets, which could be important for a meaningful open access comparison. Consider, for example, this group of 11 hits for "A Scalable Architecture for Harvest-Based Digital Libraries—The ODU/Southampton Experiments" from the Google "OAI-PMH" search.

Nor does it tell us the number of items that are not journal articles (or e-prints for them) or conference papers.

An apples-to-apples comparison would adjust for useless duplicates and non-journal/conference literature. (But, of course, it would be quite useful if Windows Live Academic Search had non-journal/conference literature such as technical reports in it.)

However, given the small hit sets, it would not be impossible for someone else to do a deeper analysis on the duplicate entry question and some other tractable questions.

Windows Live Academic Search Is Up

The beta version of Windows Live Academic Search is now available: http://academic.live.com/. It appears to me that the system is under a very heavy load, so you may want to wait a bit before giving it a test drive.

The Windows Live Academic Search development team now has a Weblog. The official press release is now available. A list of participants in Microsoft’s MSN Search Champs V4, some of whom gave Microsoft detailed feedback about Windows Live Academic Search is also available.

Windows Live Academic Search Overview

The home page provides a search box, brief overview, an explanation of search results, and an FAQ.

The system’s indexed content is limited to Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Physics journals and conferences, including: "6 million records from approximately 4300 journals and 2000 conferences." Here is a list of works indexed. Relevance is determined by: (1) "quality of match of the search term with the content of the paper", and (2) "authoritativeness of the paper." Citation count is not being used in the ranking algorithm at this time.

Interface

The interface has the following key features:

  • Search box: My understanding is that all MSN search commands work, but I have not tested this.
  • Slider bar: Expands or restricts the amount of information shown for each hit in the search results (left side of screen).
  • Search results:
    • Author and title information in hits are linked (blue links).
    • Other hit links include search the Web for the item, CiteSeer citations (if available), show abstract, and hide abstract (grey links).
  • Sort by: You can sort search results by relevance, date (oldest), date (newest), author, journal, and conference. The last three sorts provide a header that precedes the listed search results: for example, John Doe (2).
  • "+add to Live.com": Adds the search to your Windows Live page. Three clickable buttons appear above the stored search on that page: Web, News, Feeds. When one is clicked, the search is repeated in the appropriate information source (e.g. RSS feeds).
  • Preview pane: The right side of the screen is used to display the fielded abstract, BibTex formatted abstract, or EndNote formatted abstract.

Highlights from the Home Page FAQ

  • More content?: "We are not ready to provide a detailed timeline on when we will have a comprehensive index by subject."
  • OpenUrl: "You will be able to click on the link to your library Open URL resolver to determine the availability of full text access."
  • Preferences: "While the version of Academic search does not have a preference page, future versions will have that functionality."

Highlights from Windows Live Academic Information: Librarians

  • OpenURL: "If Academic search can identify that a user is affiliated with your institution, appropriate search results will be accompanied by a link to your OpenURL resolver vendor. We request that you work with your link resolver company and give them permission to provide the necessary information about your institution to us."
  • RSS feeds for searches: "When a new article related to that search is posted, they [researchers] are alerted instantly via an RSS feed."

Highlights from Windows Live Academic Information: Publishers

  • Participation: "Talk to Crossref about the Crossref/Academic search partnership to receive information on the program and instructions on how to initiate participation."
  • Search Results: "Therefore, search results from journals that are indexed from publishers and are published articles will always be marked ‘Published Version’. This ensures that users know which result is the official version. If there are many instances of the same article (from other sources such as a web-crawl), we will always link the search result heading to the version on the publisher’s site."
  • Abstract information: "We require that non-subscribers at least see an abstract of the paper when they land on your site from our search results page." However, it also says:

    "Academic search provides for three levels of display in the preview pane:

    • Full abstract
    • First 140 characters from abstract
    • Nothing from the abstract

    Publishers can choose any of these options for their content."

The Caravan Project: One Book, Five Distribution Formats

BusinessWeek reports that Peter Osnos, founder and Editor-at-Large of Public Affairs, is working with Borders, selected independent bookstores, six nonprofit publishers, and Ingram Industries to experiment with a new book publishing model. The idea is this: publish the book in five formats (audio, chapter, hardcover, digital, and print-on-demand) and let customers decide which one(s) they want. Larger publishers have reservations about the Caravan Project’s experiment. The article states that "going this far this fast unnerves publishers," and it quotes Al Greco (of the Book Industry Study Group): "they are terrified of being Napsterized."

Source: Lowry, Tom. "Getting Out Of A Bind." BusinessWeek, 10 April 2006, 79-80.

Microsoft’s Windows Live Academic Search

Microsoft will be releasing Windows Live Academic Search shortly (I was recently told Wednesday; the blog buzz is saying tomorrow).

As is typical with such software projects, the team is doing some last minute tweaking before release. So, I won’t try to describe the system in any detail at this point, except to say that it integrates access to published articles with e-prints and other open access materials, it provides a reference export capability, there’s a cool optional two-pane view (short bibliographic information on the left; full bibliographic information and abstract on the right), and it supports search "macros" (user-written search programs).

What I will say is this: Microsoft made a real effort to get significant, honest input from the librarian and publisher communities during the development process. I know, because, now that the nondisclosure agreement has been lifted, I can say that I was one of the librarians who provided such input on an unpaid basis. I was very impressed by how carefully the development team listened to what we had to say, how sharp and energetic they were, how they really got the Web 2.0 concept, and how deeply committed they were to creating the best product possible. Having read Microserfs, I had a very different mental picture of Microsoft than the reality I encountered.

Needless to say, there were lively exchanges of views between librarians and publishers when open access issues were touched upon. My impression is that the team listened to both sides and tried to find the happy middle ground.

When it’s released, Windows Live Academic Search won’t be the perfect answer to your open access search engine dreams (what system is?), and Microsoft knows that there are missing pieces. But I think it will give Google Scholar a run for its money. I, for one, heartily welcome it, and I think it’s a good base to build upon, especially if Microsoft continues to solicit and seriously consider candid feedback from the library and publisher communities (and it appears that it will).

Customers Welcome RFID-Enabled Cards. . . with Hammers and Microwave Ovens

The Wall Street Journal reports that customers lack enthusiasm for RFID credit cards due to privacy and fraud concerns. In fact, they are devising novel ways to disable RFID chips, including using hammers and microwave ovens to smash or fry them. FoeBud, a German digital rights group, sells a variety of devices to detect or disable the chips. Sensing a hot market, some companies have joined the bandwagon with new products (e.g., RFIDwasher) that do the job more safely than a microwave oven, which can be a fire hazard when used for RFID frying. For those who don’t want to tamper with their RFID cards, they can buy shielded wallets and passport cases from DIFRWEAR that block signals when closed.

As libraries begin to embrace RFID technology, these concerns from the credit card sector may be worth watching, and it may give them pause.

Source: Warren, Susan. "Why Some People Put These Credit Cards in the Microwave." The Wall Street Journal, 10 April, 2006, A1, A16.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (4/10/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "CERN’s Open Access E-print Coverage in 2006: Three Quarters Full and Counting," "Comparison of Content Policies for Institutional Repositories in Australia," "Discovering Books: The OCA/GBS Saga Continues," "A Library’s Contribution to Scholarly Communication and Environmental Literacy: The Case of an Open-Access Environmental Journal," "The State of the Large Publisher Bundle: Findings from an ARL Member Survey," Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe, and "Surveying the E-Journal Preservation Landscape"

Commemorative Issue of Reference Services Review for Dr. Ilene F. Rockman

Emerald Group Publishing has announced that the volume 34, number 1 (2006) issue of Reference Services Review has been dedicated to the memory of that journal’s former long-time editor Dr. Ilene F. Rockman, whose obituary was previously published in DigitalKoans.

This issue includes "tributes to Rockman, along with the editorial she was composing during the final days of her life."

Emerald will make this issue freely available during the month of April. (See the press release for access details.)

Emerald will also:

  • Fund the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Instruction Section (IS) Instruction Publication of the Year Award for five years, beginning with the 2006 Award, renaming it the Ilene Rockman Publication Award.
  • Establish that the Emerald Literati Network Award from Reference Services Review—the journal’s Outstanding Paper Award—hereafter be known as the Dr. Ilene Rockman Award.
  • Nominate Rockman for an Emerald Outstanding Service Award in April 2006.

Thanks to Emerald for these welcome tributes to Ilene.

Open Source Software for Publishing E-Journals

Want to publish an open access journal, but you don’t want to license a commercial journal management system, develop your own system, or to do it all by tedious HTML hand-coding? Here’s summary information about two existing open source e-journal management systems (and one emerging system) that may do the trick.

HyperJournal

  • "HyperJournal is a software application that facilitates the administration of academic journals on the Web. Conceived for researchers in the Humanities and designed according to an intuitive and elegant layout, it permits the installation, personalization, and administration of a dedicated Web site at extremely low cost and without the need for special IT-competence. HyperJournal can be used not only to establish an online version of an existing paper periodical, but also to create an entirely new, solely electronic journal."
  • Overview
  • Documentation
  • Download

Open Journal Systems, Public Knowledge Project

  • "Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research. OJS assists with every stage of the refereed publishing process, from submissions through to online publication and indexing. Through its management systems, its finely grained indexing of research, and the context it provides for research, OJS seeks to improve both the scholarly and public quality of referred research."
  • Open Journal Systems (Overview)
  • FAQ
  • OJS Technical Reference
  • Download

DPubS (Digital Publishing System), Cornell University Library (In development)

  • "DPubS’ ground-breaking software system will enable publishers to cost-effectively organize, deliver, present and publish scholarly journals, monographs, conference proceedings, and other common and evolving means of academic discourse."
  • About DPubS
  • FAQ

Postscript: Peter Suber suggests adding several other software packages, including:

  1. ePublishing Toolkit
  2. SciX Open Publishing Services (SOPS)

Bar Code 2.0

Now you can store a 20-second video that can be viewed on a cell phone in a colored bar code the size of a postage stamp. Or, if the cell phone is connected to the Internet, use the bar code to launch a URL. The user snaps a picture of the bar code to utilize it. Content Idea of Asia invested this new bar code technology, which can store 600 KB, and plans to offer it later this year.

Source: Hall, Kenji. "The Bar Code Learns Some Snazzy New Tricks." BusinessWeek, 3 April 2006, 113.

Scholarly Communication Web Sites and Weblogs at ARL Libraries (Version 2)

This posting updates and considerably expands my earlier "Scholarly Communication Web Sites at ARL Libraries" posting.

It presents a list of scholarly communication Web sites and Weblogs at the academic member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries. Web sites and Weblogs were identified using separate Google "site:" searches for the exact phrases "scholarly communication" and "open access." Search results were then scanned to identify Web sites or Weblogs that appeared to be intended as the main library’s primary means of communicating to the university community about scholarly communication and/or open access issues. Conferences, presentations, newsletter articles, symposiums, and similar materials were excluded, as were Web sites or Weblogs at branch libraries. Searching was limited to the first few pages of search results.

Additions and corrections are welcome. Use the "Leave a Comment" function for this.

On the Internet Everyone Knows You’re a Dog (Bark Carefully)

A recent BusinessWeek article ("You Are What You Post") by Michelle Conlin may give Millennials (and everyone else) pause.

The article leads with a story about then 22-year-old Josh Santangelo’s 2001 posting on a dusty corner of the Internet about a bad drug trip. This caught the eye of super blogger Jason Kottke, and, after he linked too it, it became very popular. Now, Santangelo’s name pops up about 92,600 Google hits. Unfortunately, as the article states:

That was back when Santangelo was an up-all-night raver in giant pants and flame-red hair. Today he’s a Web development guy with a shaved head who shows up at meetings on time and in khakis. Clients have included such family-friendly enterprises as Walt Disney and Nickelodeon, as well as Starbucks, AT&T, and Microsoft.

And the business world is now tuned in to search engines as a rich source of information about potential employees:

Google is an end run around discrimination laws, inasmuch as employers can find out all manner of information—some of it for a nominal fee—that is legally off limits in interviews: your age, your marital status, the value of your house (along with an aerial photograph of it), the average net worth of your neighbors, fraternity pranks, stuff you wrote in college, liens, bankruptcies, political affiliations, and the names and ages of your children.

So, this could be trouble for those pouring out the intimate details of their personal and work lives on blogs, vlogs, social networking sites (e.g., MySpace), and other cool sites.

The article gives several amusing examples of employees fired for revealing too much on the Internet (amusing, that is, unless you’re the one fired).

Of course, there is the counter-notion that any publicity is good publicity. For example, celebrity sex tapes. A recent New York Times article ("Sex, Lawsuits and Celebrities Caught on Tape") by Lola Ogunnaike says about the Paris Hilton tape:

Ms. Hilton tried to stop distribution of the tape, although its notoriety paradoxically catapulted her to an even higher orbit of fame, establishing her as a kind of postmodern celebrity, leading to perfume deals, a memoir and the covers of Vanity Fair and W.

And, after discussing the latest round of celebrity sex tapes threatening to emerge, it says:

Celebrity sex tapes surface with such regularity that cynics question whether the stars themselves may be complicit, despite their efforts to suppress them in court, because of the publicity they bring.

However, this counter-notion may only apply to the already famous.

No doubt we’ll find out as part of a generation that’s digitally exposed itself on the Internet increasingly enters the workplace and competes within it.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (3/27/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Advancing Scholarship and Intellectual Productivity: An Interview with Clifford A. Lynch (Part 1)," "Building the Econtent Commons," Digital Libraries, "Finding Information in (Very Large) Digital Libraries: A Deep Log Approach to Determining Differences in Use According to Method of Access," "Institutional Open Archives: Where Are We Now?," and "What Do You Do with a Million Books?."

All Sections and Subsections of the Open Access Bibliography Now Linked

There is now a link to each section and subsection of the HTML version of the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals.

For example:

4 Open Access Journals

4.1 General Works
4.2 Economic Issues
4.2.1 General Works
4.2.2 BMJ Rapid Responses about "Author Pays" May Be the New Science Publishing Model
4.3 Open Access Journal Change Agents
4.3.1 SPARC
4.4 Open Access Journal Publishers and Distributors
4.4.1 BioMed Central
4.4.2 Public Library of Science
4.4.3 PubMed Central
4.4.3.1 General Works
4.4.3.2 Science Magazine dEbate on "Building a GenBank of the Published Literature"
4.4.3.3 Science Magazine dEbate on "Is a Government Archive the Best Option?"
4.4.3.4 Science Magazine dEbate on "Just a Minute, Please"
4.4.3.5 Other
4.5 Specific Open Access Journals
4.5.1 Journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals
4.5.2 Pioneering Free E-Journals Not in the DOAJ
4.5.3 Other
4.6 Research Studies

The table of contents in the home page of the bibliography has a complete set of links for all sections and subsections of the document.

The Web page for each major section of the bibliography has links to the subsections (if present) at the start of the page.