DigitalKoans postings will resume on 1/11/10. Happy holidays.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued a call to action about the OSTP open access RFI.

Here's the press release:

CALL TO ACTION: Let the White House know you support public access to public funded research

Last week, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a Request for Information (RFI) inviting input on "enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from research funded by federal science and technology agencies." SPARC is pleased that the Administration, as part of its Transparency and Open Government initiative, is looking at public access as an opportunity to stimulate scientific and technological innovation and competitiveness.

All are urged to respond to this pivotal opportunity, as individuals and on behalf of institutions and organizations, NO LATER than January 7, 2010. Your input will be critical in helping the administration to form a deep and balanced view of stakeholders’ interest in ensuring public access to publicly funded research.

This RFI will be active for only 30 days, from December 10, 2009 to January 7, 2010. Respondents are invited to comment online through the Public Access Policy blog at http://blog.ostp.gov/category/public-access-policy, where the discussion will center on a single theme for each of three ten-day periods.

December 10 – 20: Implementation

December 21 – 31: Features and technology

January 1 – 7: Management

Email comments will also be accepted, but will still be posted to the blog by the moderator. General comments may also be submitted. See the full Federal Register notice at http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/E9-29322.htm for details.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss, please contact SPARC, representing the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.

Heather Joseph, Executive Director
heather [at] arl [dot] org

Jennifer McLennan, Director of Communications
jennifer [at] arl [dot] org

We'll look forward to talking with you, and to working with you on this tremendous opportunity for higher education and American public.

Note: To post comments on the OSTP blog, you must register and login. There are also registration and login links on the sidebar of the Archive for the Public Access Policy OSTP blog category at the bottom right and on the OSTP blog home page in the same location. The current discussion post is "Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Implementation." As noted in the Federal Register announcement, comments can also be e-mailed to publicaccess@ostp.gov.

Read more about the OSTP RFI at "Obama Administration Potentially a Strong Voice in Open Access Debate" and "Obama's Open Government Plan Includes Open Access for Research Publications."

12/22/09 Update: The current discussion post is "Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Features and Technology." Comments are entered at this post.

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available. It provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, e-prints, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "Dublin Core Metadata Semantics: An Analysis of the Perspectives of Information Professionals," "Enhancing Scientific Communication through Aggregated Publications Environments," "How to Publish Data Using Overlay Journals: The OJIMS Project," "Increasing the Productivity of Interactions between Subject and Institutional Repositories," "Open Access and the Google Book Settlement" and "SCOAP3 and Open Access."

JISC has released JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme: Final Evaluation Report.

Here's an excerpt:

This report provides an evaluation of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme (RPP) as it reached its conclusion. The Repositories and Preservation Programme was a £14m investment in Higher Education repository and digital content infrastructure running between April 2006 and March 2009. The programme funded a wide range of initiatives to support the development of digital repositories and related activities. The programme was established in order to achieve a number of benefits for the JISC community and related stakeholders.

The aim of this report is to draw together various data sources and provide a high level evaluation of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme. The Repositories and Preservation Programme team has taken a benefit led approach to the evaluation of the programme based around the Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) methodology. Twenty one benefits were identified and developed to reflect what the programme sought to achieve. The purpose of the final evaluation was to ascertain whether the benefits had been achieved or are likely to be achieved due to the work of the programme. Data for the evaluation was drawn from a variety of sources.

PARSE.Insight (INSIGHT into issues of Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe) has released Insight into Digital Preservation of Research Output in Europe.

Here's an excerpt:

This report . . . describes the results of the surveys conducted by PARSE.Insight to gain insight into research in Europe. Major surveys were held within three stake-holder domains: research, publishing and data management. In total, almost 2,000 people responded; they provided us with interesting insights in the current state of affairs in digital preservation of digital research data (including publications), the outlook of data preservation, data sharing, roles & responsibilities of stakeholders in research and funding of research.

The Cornell University Library has given about 80,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

In an effort to make its materials globally accessible, Cornell University Library is sharing tens of thousands of digitized books with the Internet Archive.

"We have been carefully preserving and storing materials for years, and now we're diversifying the channels for them to be studied and used," said Oya Reiger, associate university librarian for information technologies. "We have the ability to take books to the places where readers are."

The new collaboration repurposes nearly 80,000 books that the Library has already digitized in-house or through its partnership with Microsoft and Kirtas Technologies. All the books are in the public domain, printed before 1923 mainly in the United States. They cover a host of subject areas, including American history, English literature, astronomy, food and wine, general engineering, the history of science, home economics, hospitality and travel, labor relations, Native American materials, ornithology, veterinary medicine and women's studies. . . .

"Expanding access to knowledge is one of the Library's core principles, and we are excited to participate in the open-access vision of the Internet Archive," said Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian.

The collaboration with Internet Archive is another step in Cornell University Library's cutting-edge participation in mass digitization initiatives. Earlier this year, the Library announced an expanded print-on-demand partnership with Amazon.com that allows readers to pay for reprinting of books on an individual basis.

"The Internet Archive is proud to process and host the books from Cornell — these collections are priceless," said Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive. "We are happy that Microsoft put no restrictions on the scanned public domain books and Cornell is encouraging maximum readership and research use."

Performing a simple search for one of Cornell University Library's digitized books now brings up both a copy on Amazon and a free online copy on the Internet Archive.

Version 77 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,620 articles, books, and other digital and printed sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008 Annual Edition is available as a paperback book and as a Kindle e-book.

For a discussion of the numerous changes in my digital publications since my resignation from the University of Houston Libraries, see the "Digital Scholarship Publications Overview."

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are in italics):

Dedication
1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History
2.2 General Works
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals
3.4 General Works
3.5 Library Issues
3.6 Research
4 General Works
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights
5.2 License Agreements
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
6.2 Digital Libraries
6.3 General Works
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation
7 New Publishing Models
8 Publisher Issues
8.1 Digital Rights Management and User Authentication
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Presentations from the Berlin 7 Open Access Conference are now available.

• Slides
• Videos

The Florida State University Library is recruiting a Head of Library Systems.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Responsible for the maintenance and development of information technology in the University Libraries including over 20 servers and over 600 networked staff and public workstations and associated equipment across three facilities. The position heads the unit supporting the local and remote library information technology services provided to a large public research university and reports to the Associate Director for Technology.

Columbia University Libraries/Information Services have joined the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Columbia University has joined several leading institutions of higher learning in a commitment to a Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity. Other signatories to the compact are Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley.

The compact commits signatories to the timely establishment of mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication fees for open access journal articles authored by researchers without alternative funding. The effort around the compact arose as a result of discussions within the university community about providing sustainable, efficient, and effective business models for journal publishing. "The growth of this new strategy for support for high quality scholarly communication in the expanding number of open access journals requires our participation and support," said Jim Neal, Columbia's Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian.

In today's scholarly publishing environment, financial strain is motivating libraries to seek means other than traditional subscription journals for providing access to intellectual content. OA journals offer such an alternative, while providing the same services common to scholarly journals such as management of the peer-review process, filtering, production, and distribution.

Following from the compact commitment, Columbia University Libraries/Information Services is establishing a fund to help support Columbia faculty, staff, and students who wish to publish in OA journals. The Libraries are currently formulating policy and eligibility requirements for the fund, which will be administered by the Scholarly Communication Program, based at the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS). CDRS currently offers free and for-cost publishing services for Columbia-based scholarly journals, and specializes in support for open access publications.