In a recent SSP-L message, Mark Johnson, Journal Manager of HighWire Press, identified three journals that offer podcasts or digital audio files:

• BJM
• JAMA
• New England Journal of Medicine

Here are a few others:

• ACS Chemical Biology
• Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine
• The Journal of Law, Economics and Policy
• The Journal of Neurologic Physical Therapy
• The Lancet
• Nature
• Science

LISU, which is based in the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University, has released Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices 2000-2006, a report commissioned by Oxford Journals.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

The research updates the previous findings on pricing for biomedical journals, and has also been extended to analyze pricing for social science titles. Findings within the report show little variation to the original data published in 2004: there are continued trends in price variance across publishers, including median price increases ranging from 42% to 104% for biomedical titles, and 47% to 120% for social science titles. Median journal prices also continue to vary widely between publishers for both these disciplines, ranging from £198 to £859 in biomedical titles, and £119 to £513 in the Social Sciences. . . .

Further information on the report:

• Over 8,000 journals were included in the analysis.

• Publishers included in the analysis were:

o Blackwell Publishing

o Cambridge University Press

o Elsevier

o Lippincott Williams and Wilkins

o Nature (specialist journals)

o Oxford Journals

o Springer

o Sage

o Taylor and Francis

o University of Chicago Press

o Wiley

Key Findings

• Median journal prices ranged from £198 to £859 for biomedical titles, and £119 to £513 for social science titles in 2006

• Increases in the median journal price between 2000 and 2006 varied from 42% to 104% in biomedical titles and 47% to 120% for social science titles.

• Median price per page ranged from 31p to £1.06 for biomedical titles, and 13p to 93p for social science titles in 2006

• Median price per point of impact factor ranged from £110 to £775 for biomedical titles in 2006, and from £186 to £552 for social science titles.

There has been lively discussion about whether it is time to stop printing journals on Liblicense-l of late (March archive and April archive).

Here’s my take.

There are two aspects to this question: (1) Is the print journal format still required for reading purposes?; and (2) Is the print journal format still required to insure full access to journals given that many e-journals are under licenses (and are not owned by libraries) and digital preservation is still in its infancy?

It appears that the answer to (1) may finally be “no, for many users.” However, this may be contingent to some degree on the fact that many commercial e-journals are composed of article PDF files that allow users to print copies that replicate printed articles.

The answer to (2) is less clear, since continued access is contingent on periodic license negotiations and the changing business practices of publishers. Embargoes, ILL restrictions, incomplete back runs, and similar issues may give libraries pause. Very promising digital preservation efforts, such as LOCKSS and Portico still need to pass the test of time. Few libraries believe that publishers by themselves can be relied on to preserve e-journals (for one thing, publishers go out of business).

However, the reality for many libraries is that they have no choice but to dump print whenever possible for strictly economic reasons: print plus electronic is increasingly unaffordable for a variety of reasons.

Julian Fisher, Managing Director of the Scholarly Exchange, has announced that Dr. John Hoey has joined the Scholarly Exchange Board.

Here’s an excerpt from the SPARC-OAForum announcement:

Dr. Hoey is the former editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal and long an advocate of open access publishing. A specialist in community medicine and internal medicine, he is Professor of Medicine (adjunct) at Queen’s University and a Special Advisor to the Principal on Public Health.

Scholarly Exchange, Inc. has eliminated a major obstacle in starting open access journals by providing a free and fully supported e-publishing platform. Combining Open Journal Systems public-domain software with complete hosting and support, this service offers scholars unrivaled freedom and flexibility to produce academic journals at a price that fosters the open access model. It also develops tools and methods to promote and support open access journals.

EBSCOhost databases will include licensed blog content from Newstex.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), the world’s premier database aggregator, and Newstex, the Content On Demand™ company, today announced an alliance to deliver Newstex Content On Demand™ and Newstex Blogs On Demand™ via nearly 100 EBSCO databases to customers worldwide. As part of the distribution agreement, full-text blog content from premier Weblogs with historical archives in a wide variety of categories including art, career, economics, environment, finance, food, health, law, marketing, medical, technology, and many more will be made available in online aggregated databases for the first time.

Unlike existing Web-based blog aggregation services, Newstex actually licenses influential blog content directly from independent bloggers and then takes in each carefully selected blog feed in text format and uses its proprietary NewsRouter technology to scan it in real-time. The resulting blog feeds, news feeds, and historical archives are delivered to EBSCO for distribution to customers in applicable databases.

In the Winter 2006-2007 issue of The Library Connection, the Syracuse University Library indicates that the Syracuse University Press now reports to the SU Library.

Here’s a excerpt from the relevant article:

In September Syracuse University interim vice chancellor and provost Eric F. Spina announced that Syracuse University Press would report to Suzanne Thorin, university librarian and dean of libraries. The new relationship enables SU Press to take advantage of the Library’s infrastructure to contain costs.

The NISO Shared E-Resource Understanding (SERU) Working Group has released a draft best practices document (The SERU Approach to E-Resource Subscriptions: Framework for Development and Use of SERU).

According to the press release, this document "presents a shared set of understandings to which publishers and libraries can point when negotiating the sale of electronic content. The framework offers publishers and libraries a solution to the often-burdensome process of bilateral negotiation of a formal license agreement by allowing the sale of e-resources without licenses if both parties feel their perception of risk has been adequately addressed by current law and developing norms of behavior."

(Prior posting on SERU.)

Polimetrica Publisher is a scientific open access book publisher. It has published a number of books in the areas of applied, pure, and human sciences.

This excerpt from its "Our Open Access Manifesto" describes its philosophy and business model:

Polimetrica Publisher works from a simple premise: that for a better future of the people it’s possible to disseminate the knowledge by publishing innovative books freely accessible to anyone in the world who might be interested.

Informed by that premise, we’re trying to build a new model of scientific publishing that embraces economic self-subsistence, openness, and fairness; the model is based on the following elements:

1. each scientific book is published in two editions: a printed edition, available in the market, and an electronic edition, freely available through the web; both editions are identified by a different ISBN code.
2. each scientific book is edited in collaboration with universities or with authoritative professors or specialists.
3. the printed edition is distributed on the international market.
4. the electronic edition is free access through the Polimetrica web site.
5. Polimetrica pays to the author or to the academic institution on all sales of the printed edition a 10% royalty of the net receipts.
6. each scientific publication is funded by a contribution of 1.500 Euros about.
7. anyone interested in our activities is encouraged to buy a membership; the members will have access to special conditions. Additional information are at the page
   http://www.polimetrica.com/main/membership.php

Polimetrica Publisher currently has three membership options that provide a specified number of books on CD-ROM/DVD, discount prices, and newsletters.

To download free digital book, the user fills out a form providing name, country, and e-mail address. A download link is sent to the provided e-mail address.

A book that may be of particular interest to DigitalKoans readers is Open Access: Open Problems.

AALL, ALA, ACRL, the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, Public Knowledge, SPARC, and other organizations have initiated the Petition for Public Access to Publicly Funded Research in the United States.

The petition states:

We, the undersigned, believe that broad dissemination of research results is fundamental to the advancement of knowledge. For America’s taxpayers to obtain an optimal return on their investment in science, publicly funded research must be shared as broadly as possible. Yet too often, research results are not available to researchers, scientists, or the members of the public. Today, the Internet and digital technologies give us a powerful means of addressing this problem by removing access barriers and enabling new, expanded, and accelerated uses of research findings.

We believe the US Government can and must act to ensure that all potential users have free and timely access on the Internet to peer-reviewed federal research findings. This will not only benefit the higher education community, but will ultimately magnify the public benefits of research and education by promoting progress, enhancing economic growth, and improving the public welfare.

We support the re-introduction and passage of the Federal Research Public Access Act, which calls for open public access to federally funded research findings within six months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

The petition follows a similar effort in the European Union, the Petition for Guaranteed Public Access to Publicly-Funded Research Results, which was signed by over 23,000 individuals and organizations.

Microsoft Associate General Counsel Thomas Rubin took off the gloves at the Association of American Publishers meeting on Tuesday. The target: Google Book Search. The goal: to contrast Google’s approach to copyright issues associated with digitizing books with Microsoft’s more publisher-friendly approach.

Rubin’s comments included the following:

The stated goal of Google’s Book Search project is to make a copy of every book ever published and bring it within Google’s vast database of indexed content. While Google says that it doesn’t currently intend to place ads next to book search results, Google’s broader business model is straightforward—attract as many users as possible to its site by providing what it considers to be "free" content, then monetize that content by selling ads. I think Pat Schroeder put it best when she said Google has "a hell of a business model—they’re going to take everything you create, for free, and sell advertising around it."

To accomplish its book search goals, Google persuaded several libraries to give it unfettered access to their collections, both copyrighted and public domain works. It also entered into agreements with several publishers to acquire rights to certain of their copyrighted books. Despite such deals, in late 2004 Google basically turned its back on its partners. Concocting a novel "fair use" theory, Google bestowed upon itself the unilateral right to make entire copies of copyrighted books not covered by these publisher agreements without first obtaining the copyright holder’s permission.

Google’s chosen path would no doubt allow it to make more books searchable online more quickly and more cheaply than others, and in the short term this will benefit Google and its users. But the question is, at what long-term cost? In my view, Google has chosen the wrong path for the longer term, because it systematically violates copyright and deprives authors and publishers of an important avenue for monetizing their works. In doing so, it undermines critical incentives to create. . . .

Google defends its actions primarily by arguing that its unauthorized copying and future monetization of your books are protected as fair use. . . .

In essence, Google is saying to you and to other copyright owners: "Trust us—you’re protected. We’ll keep the digital copies secure, we’ll only show snippets, we won’t harm you, we’ll promote you." But Google’s track record of protecting copyrights in other parts of its business is weak at best.

Rubin also discussed Microsoft’s Live Search Academic and Live Search Books in some detail.

Here are some of the more interesting articles and postings about the speech:

• "Microsoft Attacks Google Over Book Search"
• "Microsoft Chastises Google on Copyrights"
• "Microsoft’s Accusations Against Google Don’t Impress Copyright Gurus"
• "Microsoft’s Copyright Assault on Google"
• "Working Together"

Meanwhile, the Bavarian State Library has just joined Google’s library partners, adding about one million books to the project.

Haworth Press now has a policy of requiring a copyright transfer prior to peer review.

For example, the "Instructions to Authors" for the Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserve states: "Copyright ownership of your manuscript must be transferred officially to The Haworth Press, Inc., before we can begin the peer-review process."

This raises the interesting question of what happens when a paper is rejected: Haworth now owns the copyright, so how can the author now submit the rejected paper elsewhere?

Postscript: Haworth has posted a liblicense-l message indicating that it is clarifying its copyright transfer requirements.

Fred Moody has been chosen to head the reborn-digital Rice University Press. Based in Seattle (where he will remain), Moody is a journalist and author of books such as I Sing The Body Electronic, Seattle and the Demons of Ambition: From Boom to Bust in the Number One City of the Future, and The Visionary Position: the Inside Story of the Digital Dreamers Who Are Making Virtual Reality a Reality. Moody holds an MLS from the University of Michigan.

Below is an excerpt from the Rice News article ("Moody Tapped to Head Rice University Press"):

The press will start out publishing art history books and grow as peer review panels are added. A second imprint at the press—called Long Tail Press—will be added so publishing can be done in partnership with other university presses. It will allow for previously published books to be published again on a digital platform. It will also allow for books that have been accepted at fellow university presses, but haven’t been printed because of cost, to be published.

"My goal is to grow Rice’s reputation for quality first, and to grow the size of the press—in terms both of number of books published and number of disciplines published—almost as fast," Moody said. "The idea is not so much to grow a huge business as to grow the best forum in the world for scholarly research."

(Prior postings about digital presses.)