DigitalKoans

Jon Udell has posted an interview ("Word for Scientific Publishing") with Pablo Fernicola, a Microsoft Group Manager, about the Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 (see my prior posting "Microsoft Developing Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 with NLM DTD Support"). (Warning: there is a very annoying Silverlight download pop-up that obscures part of the post.)

Udell has also posted a screencast of Fernicola demonstrating the add-in ("Pablo Fernicola Demonstrates the Word Add-In for Scientific Authors").

CrossRef and iParadigms will launch CrossCheck in June, which will allow publishers to analyze content in both publisher systems and Internet Web sites in order to identify works that may have been plagiarized.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

CrossRef is partnering with iParadigms, LLC to offer its members—leading scholarly and professional publishers—the opportunity to verify the originality of works submitted for publication using the iThenticate service to check against a vast database of proprietary as well as open web content. Until now, there was no automated way to check submissions against previous publications because the published literature had not been indexed and "text fingerprinted" for this purpose. The CrossCheck database will include the full-text journals of leading academic publishers, and is expected to grow very rapidly over the coming months as CrossRef member publishers sign up for the service.

CrossCheck will be available to all CrossRef members who opt to contribute their content to the database. To use the service publishers will need to integrate the checking tool into their editorial processes and develop suitable policies and guidelines. CrossRef is working with iParadigms, member publishers, and editorial system software producers on appropriate technical information and guidelines for CrossCheck.

JISC has announced JorumOpen, a national repository of open access educational materials under Creative Commons licenses.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

It was announced today that Jorum, the UK national repository for learning and teaching materials funded by JISC, is to offer open educational resources. This will make it easier for lecturers and teaching staff to share and re-use each other's teaching resources. JorumOpen—as it will be called—will also provide a showcase for UK universities and colleges on the international stage. . . .

Jorum is managed jointly by EDINA and Mimas, the two National Academic Data Centres funded by JISC at the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester. During the first phase of Jorum's development, the focus has been on building a system that safeguards investment in digital learning resources and offers controlled access to licensed materials. The result is a service that supports access to over 2,500 learning resources for download for direct use in the classroom and within virtual learning environments (VLEs).

Through the development of JorumOpen, lecturers and teachers will be able to share materials under the Creative Commons licence framework: this makes sharing easier, granting users greater rights for use and re-use of online content and easier to understand. Importantly, it does not require prior registration. As a result availability is global as well as across UK universities and colleges. JorumOpen will run alongside a 'members only' facility, JorumEducationUK, that will support sharing of material just within the UK educational sector; this will be available only to registered users and contributors, as is currently the case.

The Greater Western Library Alliance, a consortium of 31 research libraries, has expressed interest in the SCOAP³ project. The Greater Western Library Alliance joins a growing list of U.S. institutions interested in the SCOAP³ project.

Here's an excerpt from Towards Open Access Publishing in High Energy Physics: Executive Summary of the Report of the SCOAP³ Working Party that explains the project:

The proposed [SCOAP³] initiative aims to convert high-quality HEP journals to OA, pursuing two goals:

• to provide open and unrestricted access to all HEP research literature in its final, peer-reviewed form;
• to contain the overall cost of journal publishing by increasing competition while assuring sustainability.

In this new model, the publishers’ subscription income from multiple institutions is replaced by income from a single financial partner, the "Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics" (SCOAP³). SCOAP³ is a global network of HEP funding agencies, research laboratories, and libraries. Each SCOAP³ partner will recover its contribution from the cancellation of its current journal subscriptions. This model avoids the obvious disadvantage of OA models in which authors are directly charged for the OA publication of their articles. . . .

In practice, the OA transition will be facilitated by the fact that the large majority of HEP articles are published in just six peer-reviewed journals from four publishers. Five of those six journals carry a majority of HEP content. These are Physical Review D (published by the American Physical Society), Physics Letters B and Nuclear Physics B (Elsevier), Journal of High Energy Physics (SISSA/IOP) and the European Physical Journal C (Springer). The aim of the SCOAP³ model is to assist publishers to convert these "core" HEP journals entirely to OA and it is expected that the vast majority of the SCOAP³ budget will be spent to achieve this target. The sixth journal, Physical Review Letters (American Physical Society), is a "broadband" journal that carries only a small fraction (10%) of HEP content; it is the aim of SCOAP³ to sponsor the conversion to OA of this journal fraction. The same approach can be extended to another "broadband" journal popular with HEP instrumentation articles: Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A (Elsevier) with about 25% HEP content.

Based on the Vulcan carbon dioxide inventory project, Purdue University scientists have named Harris County, which is the Texas county that Houston is in, as the top carbon-dioxide producing county in U.S.

Read more about it at "We're No. 1! Harris County Named U.S. Capital of Carbon."

The draft designation for the Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses has been removed, and the document is now the official explanation of the goals of this group of licenses.

Read more about it at "Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses Released."

A digitized page from the mid-13th century by William de Brailes has become the 100,000th item in the Iowa Digital Library.

Read more about it at "Iowa Digital Library Hits 100,000 Items."

Here's a selection of news articles and Weblog postings about the Georgia State copyright infringement lawsuit.

"Coursepack Sharing: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?": John Mark Ockerbloom, who maintains The Online Books Page, looks at the suit from an open access point of view. He says:

But in a world that's brought us global content sharing systems like Flickr, CiteULike, and PubMedCentral, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine systems that would let instructors provide and share open access course readings more readily. A well-designed, browsable and searchable repository of such readings could provide a convenient way for professors to upload, organize, and disseminate open coursepacks for their students ("Just go to the OpenCoursePacks website, and type in the name of my course", they could say). The same site could also let profs could tag, annotate, and recommend their readings, thereby making it that much easier for other professors to find and include suitable open access content in their own coursepacks. With a good design, and suitable scale and interest, a coursepack sharing site could make a lot more good instructional material widely and freely used and shared.

"Georgia State Sued For Copyright Infringement": Information Media Partners supports the suit and provides an interesting comment about publishers' fear of entering the "valley of death" of the print-to-electronic transition.

"Oxford, Cambridge and Sage Sue Georgia State": Paul N. Courant, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, reacts to the suit. In summary, he says:

Things have come to a pretty pass when academic institutions sue each other over academic matters. Even if the publishers prove to be right on the merits, the lawsuit ought to be the last resort, and student use of academic materials produced by academic institutions ought be priced at something like marginal cost, rather than at the price that maximizes profit. And one wonders why three rich and distinguished institutions would go after an urban university that is much less well-resourced.

"A Press Revolt against E-Packet Practices": Andy Guess' Inside Higher Ed article overviews the suit, provides background information about prior communications between GSU and the plaintiff’s law firm, notes that the suit indicates that the e-reserves system wasn't restricted access until after a complaint to the university, and includes a call from Kenneth C. Green, director of the Campus Computing Project, for a iTunes-like system for scholarly material.

"Publishers Sue Georgia State for Copyright Infringement": Calvin Reid's Publisher's Weekly article overviews the suit and includes comments by Patricia Schroeder (AAP President and Chief Executive Officer), Allan Adler (AAP Vice President, Legal and Governmental Affairs), and Niko Pfund (Oxford University Press Vice President).

"Publishers Sue Georgia State University Over E-Reserves": Andrew Albanese's Library Journal article overviews the suit and includes comments by Pfund as well as a useful brief recap of prior e-reserves disputes and resolutions. (For more background, see Albanese's 2007 article "Down with E-Reserves: Confusing, Contentious, and Vital, E-Reserves Fuel Higher Education—And an Ongoing Copyright Battle.") Albanese notes that the "suit offers a remarkably detailed view of what the plaintiffs believe to be infringing activity at GSU, including specific examples of uses it considers to be well beyond the scope of fair use and a detailed appendix of alleged infringed materials."

"Trying to Sue State U": Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke University, analyzes the suit, weaving in an analysis of a recent case of state sovereign immunity and copyright infringement (discussed here in "Copyright Infringement Liability of State Employees"). In summary, Smith says:

A little bit of attention to the economics of scholarly publishing quickly undermines the claim in this complaint that, without permission fees for electronic reserves, the incentive system of copyright will be undermined. No monetary incentive currently exists for the vast majority of academic publishing, from the point of view of faculty, yet academics keep writing. There is no evidence at all that this well of free content will suddenly go dry if publishers are not able to collect an additional income stream from that well. If this suit goes forward in spite of sovereign immunity, that should be the issue on which the court focuses its attention.

For further reactions, see Jennifer Howard's "Librarians React to Lawsuit Against Georgia State U."