The new SCImago Journal & Country Rank system utilizes data from Elsevier's Scopus database to produce a variety of scholarly journal rankings. For example, you can rank countries by the number of citable documents in library and information sciences that they produce.
The Help page provides detailed information about the free service.
The Institute of Physics has launched the IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, an open access proceedings service. A FAQ is available.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Based on IOP Publishing’s highly successful open access proceedings in physics, EES allows conference organizers to create a comprehensive record of their event and make a valuable contribution to the open access literature that will be of long-lasting benefit to their research communities.
As part of the service’s launch, EES is waiving a total of US$5000 of publication fees for a number of conferences who expect to publish their proceedings during 2008.
We are delighted to announce that the first conference to qualify for this is the 14th International Symposium for the Advancement of Boundary Layer Remote Sensing (ISARS2008) which takes place on 23–25 June 2008, Risø National Laboratory, DTU, Roskilde, Denmark.
The French Ministry of Culture has proposed a number of measures to deal with illegal downloading on the Internet, including a controversial proposal to terminate accused pirates' Internet access after two downloading violations.
Here's an excerpt from "French Gov't Plans to Disconnect Content Pirates":
The government has won agreement for its latest proposals from the French media industry, which will implement the watermarking measures and make legal downloads of films more widely and rapidly available. Albanel signed the agreement Friday with TV channels, Internet service providers (ISPs), and groups representing filmmakers, authors and musicians rights groups.
In return for the support of these organizations, the government will create a new agency to monitor Internet traffic for the presence of watermarked files and handle complaints from rights holders. Anyone whose Internet connection is used to download such files could receive an official warning from their ISP. A second offense could result in their contract with the ISP being terminated and their name being added to a registry of offenders.
Read more about it at "The Insanity of France's Anti-File-Sharing Plan: L'État, C'Est IFPI," "French Pact Aims to Fight Unauthorized Downloading," and "Pirates Face Crackdown over Movie Downloads."
The U.S. Copyright Office has published a completely updated version of Copyright Law of the United States and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code. Freely available in HTML or PDF formats, the updated document includes "all amendments enacted through the end of the second session of the 109th Congress in 2006."
The free JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool allows users to compare journal title lists, journal database capabilities, and e-book database capabilities for selected e-resource products and systems. For example, the user can compare the functionality of ebrary with that of NetLibrary.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
With so many products offering a huge diversity and wealth of information, it can be difficult for librarians to know what resources they should be investing in. The Academic Database Assessment Tool provides access to detailed information and title lists for major bibliographic and full text databases. It also delivers key service information for database and e-Book content platforms. This enables librarians to quickly compare and contrast key items to assist in the purchase decision process. These include: a list of titles included in each database; search features available; linking methods e.g. full text linking; metadata standards and methods of access provided to these resources e.g. IP access, Athens or Shibboleth.
Prompted by the strong support from university librarians in the UK, a prototype version of this tool was launched at the end of 2006. Sponsorship from IBSS, Thomson Scientific, Elsevier and ProQuest means that this tool has been further developed from the beta stage of its development and continues to remain freely available.
As the information for this tool has been provided directly by the relevant content suppliers and publishers, librarians will have the opportunity to access the latest information on the resources they already subscribe to. Librarians can subscribe to the email altering service notifying them when suppliers update their listings.
DigitalKoans postings will resume on 11/26/07.
ARL's Authors and Their Rights Web page provides access to ARL libraries' Web pages dealing with author rights topics and to other related resources.
The Free Software Foundation has established an Expert Witness Defense Fund to "help provide computer expert witnesses to combat RIAA's ongoing lawsuits, and to defend against the RIAA's attempt to redefine copyright law." Ray Beckerman and a group of selected attorneys will advise the fund. You can make tax deductible contributions to the fund, which is a registered 501(c)3 organization.
John Tehranian, Professor of Law at the University of Utah, has written a paper for the Utah Law Review titled "Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap."
Here's an excerpt from the paper where Tehranian summarizes the infringement activity of a hypothetical U.S. law professor during a single day:
By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges).
If copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.