The University of Richmond Libraries are recruiting a Director of Bibliographic and Digital Services.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The Director of Bibliographic and Digital Services (BDS) provides strategically focused leadership, coordination, administration, and policy management for all technical and digital services, including acquisitions, serials, cataloging, special collections, electronic resource management, and the University's growing digital library program, which includes the planning for, creation of, and preservation of sustainable digital library collections and services. Develops and implements innovative programs to facilitate change and promote an environment of continuous improvement through library-wide strategic planning, policy making, and development and evaluation of services. Identifies staff training needs to further the goal of providing efficient, effective, and high quality services. Supervises Head, Digital Initiatives; Head, Cataloging and Metadata Services; Head, Acquisitions; Electronic Resources Librarian; and the Head, Collections Development and Special Collections Librarian.

The University Council of Boston University has endorsed an open access initiative that will establish an institutional repository.

Here's an excerpt from "University Council Approves Open Access Plan":

Boston University took a giant step towards greater access to academic scholarship and research on February 11, when the University Council voted to support an open access system that would make scholarly work of the faculty and staff available online to anyone, for free, as long as the authors are credited and the scholarship is not used for profit.

"We believe this is the first time that a university as a whole has taken a stand on behalf of the university as opposed to a single school or college," says Wendy Mariner, the chair of the Faculty Council and a professor at the School of Law, at the School of Public Health, and at the School of Medicine. "We are looking forward to new forms of publication in the 21st century that will transform the ways that knowledge and information are shared."

"The resolution passed by our University Council is a very important statement on the importance of open access to the results of scholarship and research created within the University," says BU President Robert A. Brown. "The digital archive called for in the resolution will become a great repository for the creativity of our faculty and students."

The University of Tennessee Libraries and the Office of Research have established an Open Publishing Support Fund.

Here's an excerpt from "Fund for Open Access Publishing Offers Opportunities for Faculty":

The fund, which was founded in the fall semester of last year, provides money to faculty and graduate students wishing to publish in an open access journal. According to the Web site, the open access publishers charge money to the authors rather than the readers to cover the costs of publishing.

The money for the fund comes from an opportunities fund used for the pursuit of various research and scholarly opportunities, said Gregory Reed, vice chancellor for research administration. The Open Access Fund, at the moment, contains $20,000 for assistance.

The e-Infrastructure Reflection Group has released the e-IRG White Paper 2008

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of the e-IRG White Papers is to provide a "snapshot" of technical, policy and organisational developments in the e-Infrastructure domain, influencing the provision, use and broader uptake of the services. Based on this situation analysis, the White Paper outlines the opportunities and challenges stemming from these developments. This analysis culminates in the e-IRG recommendations, providing suggestions for the next steps to maximise benefits from the considerable investments to the electronic infrastructures supporting research activities made in Europe so far.

The selection of topics for this White Paper was based on the recently re-articulated mission of the e-IRG being "to pave the way towards a general-purpose European e-Infrastructure". The topics that at the moment are most important for accomplishing this mission, were chosen after a broad consultation of experts, and presented to e-IRG delegates during the e-IRG workshop in Zurich (April 2008). The topics deemed to be especially relevant at this moment were:

• Grid and Cloud computing
• Security: A holistic approach
• Education and Training
• Global Collaboration
• Sustainability of the computing-related e-Infrastructure
• Remote Instrumentation
• Virtualisation

Indiana University's Office of the Vice President for Information Technology has released Empowering People: Indiana University's Strategic Plan for Information Technology 2009.

Of particular interest is section "C12 Recapturing the Scholarly Record," which starts on page 35.

Here's an excerpt:

As a grand-challenge domain IU has limited ability to unilaterally affect scholarly communication models. IU does, however, have great opportunities to lead like-minded institutions and other stakeholders in collective efforts to pioneer new models. These may include partnerships and consortia with other universities that are also examining such directions, new relationships with publishers and the commercial sector, and new approaches for engagement with professional associations to help achieve mutual aims.

One area for exploration is the possibility of a publishing infrastructure that is owned (or managed as a back-office production contract) by colleges and universities. This "Big Digital Machine" could provide efficiencies and economies of scale as a means for professional societies, journal editors, university presses, and others to produce, distribute, and preserve their scholarly communications without a need to put university and commercial values in conflict. There are many questions regarding the feasibility, funding model, and efficacy of a universities-owned Big Digital Machine, and any such capability would need to be able to support a diverse set of journal funding and subscription models, for-fee and open access for monographs, and other means that afford business-model control to each scholarly community. There is evidence for reasoned optimism in this approach, however, as many community source software development projects, library consortia, and other higher education collaborations have demonstrated that a cooperative approach can achieve economy-of-scale efficiencies while respecting and preserving institutional values.

David W. Lewis, Dean of the University Library at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, has been named Assistant Vice President for Digital Scholarly Communications in the Indiana University Office of the Vice President for Information Technology. Lewis will serve for two years in this capacity while retaining his duties as Dean of IUPUI's University Library.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

In his new role, Lewis will provide university-wide leadership for Recommendation 12, "Recapturing the Scholarly Record," which is described as a grand challenge in Empowering People, IU’s strategic IT plan.

Recommendation 12 envisions a set of actions for IU to "pursue a position of leadership in the development (with partners) of new, sustainable models for scholarly publication, dissemination, and curation that enable scholars—and their collective communities—to re-assert control over rights to the scholarly record and its institutional preservation."

The plan, developed with the involvement of more than 140 members of the university community in response to a charge from President McRobbie, was endorsed by the IU Trustees in December 2008.

In announcing the appointment, IU Vice President for IT Brad Wheeler said, "The complexities and challenges for economically sustaining scholarly communications are great, and this is a timely opportunity for IU to assess a full range of options for the future. David's appointment assures the focused effort we need to help coalesce many ideas into actionable plans."

As assistant vice president, Lewis will engage in extensive dialogue with IU's faculty and research scholars, librarians, faculty council committees, the IU Press, UITS, and other research universities.

"Libraries are at the center of the many complex issues regarding scholarly publication and dissemination," said Patricia Steele, Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries. "We've worked diligently help find solutions. Having David in a leadership role leverages his knowledge of these issues and the critical understanding he brings as a librarian."

Lewis joined Indiana University in 1993 as the head of public services at IUPUI University Library and has served as dean since 2000. He has a bachelor's degree in history from Carleton College, a master's of library science degree from Columbia University, and certificates of advanced study in librarianship from the University of Chicago and Columbia University.

With funding from the Council on Library and Information Resources, Geneva Henry and Lisa Spiro of Rice University's Center for Digital Scholarship are exploring whether a primarily digital research library for a new university is feasible. You can follow their investigation on their E-Research Library blog.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative declaration turned seven on February 14th.

Here's an excerpt from the Peter Suber's posting about the BOAI:

Released on February 14, 2002, the BOAI "statement of principle,…statement of strategy, and…statement of commitment" was the first to offer a public definition of OA, the first to use the term "open access", the first to call for OA journals and OA repositories as complementary strategies, the first to call for OA in all disciplines and countries, and the first to be accompanied by significant funding. A good number of OA projects were already under way, but the BOAI helped to catalyze the OA movement and give it energy, unity, and identity.

The JISC Digitisation Programme has announced that it will issue a new funding call at the end of the month or at the beginning of March.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The call will focus on 3 key themes:

1. institutional skills and strategies, including activities aimed at embedding digitisation into institutional strategies and practices, eg development of institutional skills, policies and capacity to perform digitisation; creating, or building on existing, institutional infrastructure, workflows and processes to streamline digitisation; developing partnerships and collaborative models at regional or other levels aimed at carrying out digitisation in a more cost effective way, for example by reaching economies of scale, or capitalising on institutions’ own particular areas of expertise in different aspects of digitisation activity, and through fostering knowledge exchange and sharing of good practice;
2. enhancing existing online digital collections in order to increase their current use, including enhancing interfaces, enriching existing metadata, improving resource discovery mechanisms, for example by making use of Web 2.0 networks and functinalities or search engine optimisation, promotion and marketing activities within relevant research and teaching communities as well as embedding resources into teaching and learning;
3. clustering of existing online digital collections, in order to create critical mass of content and increase its current use, including bringing together collections which have been identified as being complementary from a thematic, chronological or format point of view or making use of existing platforms and services to deliver digital content through a variety of entry points. This may involve merging the metadata or technical infrastructure for related resources; developing cross-search functionality; exploiting Web2.0 methodologies such as data mash-ups to "cross-fertilise" the content in existing resources.

The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishing has released "ALPSP Response to the Intellectual Property Office Issues Paper '© the Future'."

Here's an excerpt:

In any discussions on current or future copyright exceptions we believe that the Berne Convention 3-step test should continue to be of fundamental importance. It is noted that one of the concerns of the Issues Paper is that the boundaries of many copyright exceptions are unclear and that this creates uncertainty for both users and rights holders. Clearly certain elements of the legislation were written before the digital era where perfect copies can now be made and distributed with ease; we believe that some areas of the legislation could therefore usefully be clarified. However, we see no requirement for the introduction of any expanded or new exceptions to the copyright legislation at a time when the technological landscape and the market’s response to it are changing very rapidly. We are currently seeing many activities and initiatives taking place to facilitate the use of new technology by all stakeholders in the copyright chain and we believe these should be afforded sufficient time to adapt and evolve. We feel that at such a time it would be better to leave any new boundary setting to the Courts who can respond flexibly to issues as they arise rather than to legislate.

The New York Public Library Labs has built a new Rails-based usability testing tool called Infomaki. It' still a "zero-point” release, but an open source release is planned soon.

Read more about it at "Introducing Infomaki: Bite-sized Usability Testing."

As indicated in recent postings ("Fair Copyright in Research Works Act: Ten Associations and Advocacy Groups Send Letter to Judiciary Committee Members Opposing Act" and "Urgent Call to Action: Conyers Bill Opposing NIH Open Access Policy May Soon Come to House Vote"), the fight over the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (H.R. 801) is heating up.

If you want to oppose the bill and support the NIH Public Access policy and open access, you should contact members of the House Judiciary Committee and your Representative immediately by letter, e-mail, fax, or phone. If a Judiciary Committee member is in your district, your opposition will have considerably more impact. If you are uncertain, about who your House member is, you can use the The Hill's search form to find out. The "Contact" tab for the House member's The Hill record, includes a "Contact [Congressional representative] via Web Form" function that can be used to send e-mail messages.

Below is a list of Judiciary Committee members and a draft letter from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access’ call to action.

• John Conyers, Jr., (D) Michigan, 14th, Chair: john.conyers@mail.house.gov, e-mail form, 202-225-5126, fax: 202-225-0072
• Tammy Baldwin, (D) Wisconsin, 2nd: e-mail form, 202-225-2906, fax: 202-225-6942
• Howard Berman, (D) California, 28th: e-mail form, 202-225-4695, fax: 202-225-3196
• Rick Boucher, (D) Virginia, 9th: e-mail form, 202-225-3861, fax: 202-225-0442
• Jason Chaffetz, (R) Utah, 3rd: e-mail form, 202-225-7751, fax: (202) 225-5629
• Howard Coble, (R) North Carolina, 6th: howard.coble@mail.house.gov, 202-225-3065, fax: 202-225-8611
• Steve Cohen, (D) Tennessee, 9th: e-mail form, 202-225-3265, fax: 202-225-5663
• Bill Delahunt, (D) Massachusetts, 10th: William.Delahunt@mail.house.gov, 202-225-3111, fax: 202-225-5658
• Randy Forbes, (R) Virginia, 4th: The Hill form, 202-225-6365, fax: 202-226-1170
• Trent Franks, (R) Arizona, 2nd: e-mail form, 202-225-4576, fax: 202-225-6328
• Elton Gallegly, (R) California, 24th: The Hill form, 202-225-5811, fax: 202-225-1100
• Louie Gohmert, (R) Texas, 1st: e-mail form, 202-225-3035, 202-226-1230 fax
• Charles Gonzalez, (D) Texas, 20th: e-mail form, 202-225-3236, fax: 202-225-1915
• Bob Goodlatte, (R) Virginia, 6th: e-mail form, 202-225-5431, fax: 202-225-9681
• Luis Gutierrez, (D) Illinois, 4th: e-mail form, 202-225-8203, fax: 202-225-7810
• Gregg Harper, (R) Mississippi, 3rd: e-mail form, 202-225-5031, fax: 202-225-5797
• Darrell Issa, (R) California, 49th: e-mail form, 202-225-3906, fax: 202-225-3303
• Henry "Hank" Johnson, Jr., (D) Georgia, 4th: e-mail form, 202-225-1605, fax: 202-226-0691
• Jim Jordan, (R) Ohio, 4th: e-mail form, 202-225-2676, fax: 202-226-0577
• Steve King, (R) Iowa, 5th: e-mail form, 202-225-4426, fax: 202-225-3193
• Sheila Jackson Lee, (D) Texas, 18th: e-mail form, 202-225-3816, fax: 202-225-3317
• Zoe Lofgren, (D) California, 16th: e-mail form, 202-225-3072
• Dan Lungren, (R) California, 3rd: e-mail form, 202-225-5716, fax: 202-226-1298
• Dan Maffei, (D) New York, 25th: e-mail form, 202-225-3701, fax: 202-225-4042
• Jerrold Nadler, (D) New York, 8th: e-mail form, 202-225-5635, fax: 202-225-6923
• Pedro Pierluisi, (D) Puerto Rico, Resident Commissioner: e-mail form, (202) 225-2615
• Ted Poe, (R) Texas, 2nd: e-mail form, 202-225-6565, fax: 202-225-5547
• Tom Rooney, (R) Florida, 16th: e-mail form, 202-225-5792, fax: 202-225-3132
• Linda Sanchez, (D) California, 39th: The Hill form 202-225-6676, fax: 202-226-1012
• Adam B. Schiff, (D) California, 29th: e-mail form 202-225-4176, fax: 202-225-5828
• Bobby Scott, Virginia, 3rd: The Hill form, 202-225-8351, fax:202-225-8354
• F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr., (R) Wisconsin, 5th: e-mail form, 202-225-5101, fax: (202) 225-3190
• Brad Sherman, (D) California, 27: e-mail form, 202-225-5911, fax:202-225-5879
• Lamar Smith, (R) Texas, 21st: The Hill form, 202-225-4236, fax: 202-225-8628
• Debbie Wasserman Schultz, (D) Florida, 20th: The Hill form, 202-225-7931, fax: 202-226-2052
• Maxine Waters, (D) California, 35th: e-mail form, 202-225-2201, fax: 202-225-7854
• Melvin L. Watt ("Mel"), (D) North Carolina, 12th: e-mail form, 202-225-1510, fax: 202-25-1512
• Anthony D. Weiner, (D) New York, 9th: e-mail form, 202-225-6616, fax: 202-226-7253
• Robert Wexler, (D) Florida, 19th: e-mail form, phone: 202-225-3001, fax: 202-225-5974

Draft letter text:

Dear Representative;

On behalf of [your organization], I strongly urge you to oppose H.R. 801, “the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act,” introduced to the House Judiciary Committee on February 3, 2009. This bill would amend the U.S. Copyright Code, prohibiting federal agencies from requiring as a condition of funding agreements public access to the products of the research they fund. This will significantly inhibit our ability to advance scientific discovery and to stimulate innovation in all scientific disciplines.

Most critically, H.R. 801 would reverse the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy, prohibit American taxpayers from accessing the results of the crucial biomedical research funded by their taxpayer dollars, and stifle critical advancements in life-saving research and scientific discovery.

Because of the NIH Public Access Policy, millions of Americans now have access to vital health care information from the NIH’s PubMed Central database. Under the current policy, nearly 3,000 new biomedical manuscripts are deposited for public accessibility each month. H.R.801 would prohibit the deposit of these manuscripts, seriously impeding the ability of researchers, physicians, health care professionals, and families to access and use this critical health-related information in a timely manner.

H.R. 801 affects not only the results of biomedical research produced by the NIH, but also scientific research coming from all other federal agencies. Access to critical information on energy, the environment, climate change, and hundreds of other areas that directly impact the lives and well being of the public would be unfairly limited by this proposed legislation.

[Why you support taxpayer access and the NIH policy].

The NIH and other agencies must be allowed to ensure timely, public access to the results of research funded with taxpayer dollars. Please oppose H.R.801.

Postscript: ALA has issued a call to action about the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (H.R. 801). The alert includes a link to a Web form that will allow you to e-mail a House Judiciary Committee Member from your district about the bill (will not work if your Representative does not serve on the Judiciary Committee).

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has a Web form (with letter text) that you can use to e-mail your Congressional representatives.

The bill has been referred to the Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy.