The Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) has updated the following documents that deal with digital imaging issues:
The Association of Research Libraries has published The E-only Tipping Point for Journals: What’s Ahead in the Print-to-Electronic Transition Zone.
Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":
The role of the printed journal in the institutional marketplace faces a steep decline in the coming 5 to 10 years. Print journals will exist mainly to address specialized needs, users, or business opportunities. Financial imperatives will draw libraries first—and ultimately publishers also—toward a tipping point where it no longer makes sense to subscribe to or publish printed versions of most journals.
Publishers will be driven to rationalize their investments in declining print revenue streams and to finance investments in e-publishing infrastructure and emerging opportunities. Some will be faster to do so, such as those already straining from the cost burden. Others will be slower, such as those with a self-supporting base of individual subscribers or significant advertising revenue from print.
A new focus will emerge on productivity in scholarly communication. Experiments will explore new business models and new ways of conducting and facilitating research. Along the way, vexing issues such as those surrounding assurance of long-term access to the scholarly record will continue to be sorted out and perhaps even solved.
The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.
Especially interesting are: "Can Open Access Repositories and Peer-Reviewed Journals Coexist?," "Census of Institutional Repositories in the U.S.: A Comparison Across Institutions at Different Stages of IR Development," "The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses," "eScience and the Humanities," "Open Access and the Divide between 'Mainstream' and 'Peripheral' Science," "Pathways: Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories," "Publishing Journals@UIC," Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet, "Synergies: Building National Infrastructure for Canadian Scholarly Publishing," "The University of California as Publisher," "Update on the Bill Mandating OA at the NIH," "Use and Users of Digital Resources," "What Do Faculty and Students Really Think about E-Books?," and "Will the Parasite Kill the Host? Are Institutional Repositories a Fact of Life—and Does It Matter?"
Florian Bösch is organizing a petition drive to put Switzerland's new DMCA-style copyright law to a referendum at the No Swiss DMCA website. Only 50,000 signatures are needed, but they must be collected before January 24, 2008.
Read more about it at "DMCA-Style Laws Coming to Canada, Switzerland"; "Swiss DMCA Coming Down—50,000 Signatures Needed to Unmake It"; "Swiss DMCA Petition—50,000 Signatures Will Kill Switzerland's Copyright Law"; and "Swiss DMCA Quietly Adopted."
Thanks to a million dollar grant from the Macarthur Foundation, version 1.0 of Sophie, software that allows non-programmers to easily create multimedia documents, will be released in February 2008. Sophie runs on Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems. An alpha version and several demo books created with Sophie are available.
Here's an excerpt the project's home page:
Originally conceived as a standalone multimedia authoring tool, Sophie is now integrated into the Web 2.0 network in some very powerful ways:
- Sophie documents can be uploaded to a server and then streamed over the net
- It's possible to embed remote audio, video and graphic text files in the pages of Sophie documents meaning that the actual document that needs to be distributed might be only a few hundred kilobytes even if the book itself is comprised of hundreds of megabytes or even a few gigabytes.
- Sophie now has the ability to browse OKI (open knowledge initiative) repositories from within Sophie itself and then to embed objects from those repositories.
- We now have live dynamic text fields (similar to the Institute's CommentPress experiments on the web) such that a comment written in the margin is displayed immediately in every other copy of that book—anywhere in the world.
Slashdot reports that the Motion Picture of Association of America has removed the MPA University Toolkit software from the software's website after Matthew Garrett contacted the MPAA's ISP indicating that the software violated the GNU GPL. Garrett had attempted to contact the MPAA directly, but it was unresponsive. Currently, only Toolkit documentation remains on the website.
Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, has posted "The Canadian DMCA: What You Can Do," which presents 30 ways that Canadians can fight upcoming DMCA-style copyright legislation. It also includes a YouTube video on this topic.
Lisa Spiro, Director of the Digital Media Center and the Educational Technology Research and Assessment Cooperative at Rice University's Fondren Library, has established the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities weblog.
Here's a selection of recent posts: