DigitalKoans

The Disruptive Library Technology Jester and Free Range Librarian blogs have sounded a warning that $47 million of unobligated current-year funding for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program is in serious danger of being rescinded.

House Joint Resolution 20 has been passed in the House and is now being considered by the Senate.

The NDIIPP 2005 Annual Review provides a detailed look at the work of this important Library of Congress program.

See Murray’s Jester posting for the cutback details and check out his protest letter to Ohio’s Senators.

The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) has issued an open access position paper ("ASCB Position on Public Access to Scientific Literature").

Here is an excerpt:

The ASCB believes strongly that barriers to scientific communication slow scientific progress. The more widely scientific results are disseminated, the more readily they can be understood, applied, and built upon. The sooner findings are shared, the faster they will lead to new scientific insights and breakthroughs. This conviction has motivated the ASCB to provide free access to all of the research articles in Molecular Biology of the Cell two months after publication, which it has done since 2001. . . .

Some publishers argue that providing free access to their journal’s content will catastrophically erode their revenue base. The experience of many successful research journals demonstrates otherwise; these journals make their online content freely available after a short embargo period that protects subscription revenue. For example, as noted above, the content of Molecular Biology of the Cell is free to all after only two months, yet the journal remains not only financially sound, but profitable. The data clearly show that free access and profitability are not mutually exclusive.

Our goal should be to make research articles freely available as soon as feasible so that science and the public benefit from their expanded use and application. At the same time, it is important that nonprofit societies and other publishers generate sufficient revenues to sustain the costs of reviewing and publishing articles. We believe that a six-month embargo period represents a reasonable compromise between the financial requirements of supporting a journal and the need for access to current research.

The Princeton University Library has announced that it has joined the Google Book Search Library Project.

From the press release:

A new partnership between the Princeton University Library and Google soon will make approximately 1 million books in Princeton’s collection available online in a searchable format.

In a move designed to open Princeton’s vast resources to a broad international audience, the library will work with Google over the next six years to digitize books that are in the public domain and no longer under copyright. . . .

"We will be working with Google in the next several months to choose the subject areas to be digitized and the timetable for the work," [Karin] Trainer said. "Library staff, faculty and students will be invited to suggest which parts of our distinctive collections should be digitized."

Princeton is the 12th institution to join the Google Books Library Project. Books available in the Google Book Search also include those from collections at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of California, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas-Austin, the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the New York Public Library, the University Complutense of Madrid and the National Library of Catalonia.

Google also announced the new partnership in its Inside Google Book Search blog.

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: Community Created Content: Law, Business and Policy, "A Comparison of OpenURL Link Resolvers: The Results of a University of Connecticut Libraries Environmental Scan," "Continuing Use of Print-Only Information by Researchers," "A Dublin Core Application Profile for Scholarly Works," "Mandate Momentum in 2007," and "U.S. Institutional Repositories: A Census."

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.

The Oregon State University Libraries have released version 0.7 of LibraryFind, which is open source metasearch software.

LibraryFind features noted in the press release include:

• 2-click user workflow (one click to find, one click to get)
• Integrated OpenURL resolver
• 2-tiered caching system to improve search response time
• Customizable user interface

According to the installation instructions, the software requires Ruby 1.8.4 and Rails 1.1.6.