Based on a recent study published in Nature, it is possible that there may be as many as 200,000 duplicate articles (either articles that were published in multiple journals or plagiarized) in journals indexed by Medline. To conduct the study, Mounir Errami and Harold Garner utilized the eTBLAST software to analyze samples of Medline article abstracts in order to estimate the prevalence of duplicate articles.

Duplicate detection is an issue of great concern to both publishers and scholars. The CrossCheck project is allowing eight publishers to test the duplicate checking as part of the editorial process in a closed-access environment. In the project's home page, it states:

Currently, existing PD [plagiarism detection] systems do not index the majority of scholarly/professional content because it is inaccessible to crawlers directed at the open web. The only scholarly literature that is currently indexed by PD systems is that which is available openly (e.g. OA, Archived or illegitimately posted copies) or that which has been made available via third-party aggregators (e.g. ProQuest). This, in turn, means that any publisher who is interested in employing PD systems in their editorial work-flow is unable to do so effectively. Even if a particular publisher doesn't have a problem with plagiarized manuscripts, they should have an interest in making sure that their own published content is not plagiarized or otherwise illegitimately copied.

In order for CrossRef members to use existing PD systems, there needs to be a mechanism through which PD system vendors can, under acceptable terms & conditions, create and use databases of relevant scholarly and professional content.

Open access advocates have pointed out that one advantage of OA is that it allows the unrestricted analysis and manipulation of the full text of freely available works. Open access makes it possible for all interested parties, including scholars and others who might not have access to closed duplicate verification databases, to conduct whatever analysis as they wish and to make the results public without having to consider potential business impacts.

Read more about it at: "Copycat Articles Seem Rife in Science Journals, a Digital Sleuth Finds" and "How Many Papers Are Just Duplicates?"

The Motion Picture Association of America has said that a 2005 study that claimed that college students accounted for 44% of illegal downloads of movies is incorrect: the correct number is 15%. The MPAA had used the higher figure to argue for measures that would address higher education downloading abuse.

Meanwhile, the EFF Deeplinks blog is reminding its readers ("Troubling 'Digital Theft Prevention' Requirements Remain in Higher Education Bill) that the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007, which the House may take up in February, still contains this wording asking institutions to "develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity."

Read more about it at: "Downloading by Students Overstated," "MPAA Admits Mistake on Downloading Study," "Oops: MPAA Admits College Piracy Numbers Grossly Inflated," and "Why the MPAA and RIAA Can't Stand College Students."

The Greenstone Digital Library project has released an alpha version of an OAI-PHM metadata analysis tool that can be used to "generate statistics and visualisations of OAI repositories." Several sample reports are available, including one for the University of Illinois IDEAL repository.

The European Parliament's Cultural Industries in Europe Committee has voted against amendments to the Cultural industries in the Context of the Lisbon Strategy report that would have filtered the Internet, removed or blocked infringing content, terminated the connectivity of infringers, and extended the term of copyright protection. The report will next be voted on in a European Parliament plenary meeting.

Read more about it at "Filtering and Copyright Extension Fail to Find a Home in EU" and "Proposed EU ISP Filtering and Copyright Extension Shot Down."

The University of Minnesota Libraries have released a brief (about six minutes) Adobe Presenter overview of author rights issues aimed at faculty and other researchers.

The Publishing Research Consortium has released "Peer Review in Scholarly Journals: Perspective of the Scholarly Community—An International Study."

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":

The survey thus paints a picture of academics committed to peer review, with the vast majority believing that it helps scientific communication and in particular that it improves the quality of published papers. They are willing to play their part in carrying out review, though it is worrying that the most productive reviewers appear to be overloaded. Many of them are in fact willing to go further than at present and take on responsibility for reviewing authors’ data. Within this picture of overall satisfaction there are, however, some sizeable pockets of discontent. This discontent does not always translate into support for alternative methods of peer review; in fact some of those most positive about the benefits of peer review were also the most supportive of post-publication review. Overall, there was substantial minority support for post-publication review as a supplement to formal peer review, but much less support for open review as an alternative to blinded review.

Read more about it at "Peer Review Study."

Noah Wardrip-Fruin's draft of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, which will be published by MIT Press, is undergoing an open peer-review process on the Grand Text Auto Weblog using a new plug-in version of CommentPress. The book is also undergoing a conventional peer-review process.

Read more about it at "Blog Comments and Peer Review Go Head to Head to See Which Makes a Book Better"and "Expressive Processing: An Experiment in Blog-Based Peer Review."

According to "Canadian Copyright Lobby Seeking Mandated ISP Filtering," the Canadian Recording Industry Association is asking the Canadian government to consider copyright filtering of the Internet.

Here's an excerpt:

[CRIA's] Henderson cites with approval several initiatives to move toward ISP filtering of content, pointing to a French report, comments from the UK that such legislation could be forthcoming, and the AT&T negotiations in the U.S. Later in the conversation, the group is asked what their dream legislation would look like. The first response? ISP liability, with the respondent pointing to Belgium as an example of an ideal model ("the file sharing issue will go away there as ISPs take down people"). Last summer, a Belgian court ordered an ISP to install filtering software to identify and block copyrighted content (the decision is currently being appealed).

If this reflects the current strategy—and there is reason to believe it does—it marks a dramatic change in the lobbying efforts. It suggests that not only are these groups seeking a Canadian DMCA, but they would like Industry Minister Jim Prentice to go even further by enacting constitutionally-dubious legislation requiring ISPs to identify and filter out content that is alleged to infringe copyright.

Presentations from eResearch Australasia 2007 are now available.

Here are selected presentations:

• "Andrew Treloar: Supporting the e-Research Lifecycle from Acquisition through to Annotation: the DART/ARCHER Experience"
• "Brian Fitzgerald and Scott Kiel-Chisholm: The Legal Framework for e-Research Project"
• "Ian Johnson: Beyond Bibliographies: Integrating Research Data in a Unified Collaborative Framework"
• "Jane Hunter: Harvesting Community Tags and Annotations to Augment Institutional Repository Metadata"
• "Keith Webster: eResearch and the Future of Research Libraries"
• "Kerry Kilner: The Resource for Australian Literature"
• "Paul Arthur: Going Digital: Humanities and the eResearch Revolution"
• "Richard Levy and Austin McLean, ProQuest: Institutional Repositories: A Gateway to e-Research"
• "Ross Coleman: A Maturing Partnership: eHumanities and the Digital Library"
• "Sarah Howard and John Byron: Humanities Technologies: Research Methods and ICT Use by Humanities Researchers"
• "Toby Burrows and Elzbieta Majocha: Building Infrastructures for Web-based Collaboration in Humanities Research Networks"

The Humanities-oriented TextGrid Project is part of the larger German D-Grid initiative.

Here's an excerpt from the About TextGrid page:

TextGrid aims to create a community grid for the collaborative editing, annotation, analysis and publication of specialist texts. It thus forms a cornerstone in the emerging e-Humanities. . . .

Despite modern information technology and a clear thrust towards collaboration, text scientists still mostly work in local systems and project-oriented applications. Current initiatives lack integration with already existing text corpora, and they remain unconnected to resources such as dictionaries, lexica, secondary literature and tools. . . .

Integrated tools that satisfy the specific requirements of text sciences could transform the way scholars process, analyse, annotate, edit and publish text data. Working towards this vision, TextGrid aims at building a virtual workbench based on e-Science methods.

The installation of a grid-enabled architecture is obvious for two reasons. On the one hand, past and current initiatives for digitising and accessioning texts already accrued a considerable data volume, which exceeds multiple terabytes. Grids are capable of handling these data volumes. Also the dispersal of the community as well as the scattering of resources and tools call for establishing a Community Grid. This establishes a platform for connecting the experts and integrating the initiatives worldwide. The TextGrid community is equipped with a set of powerful software tools based on existing solutions and embracing the grid paradigm.

As scholarly digital information has proliferated in many formats and versions on the Internet, it has become increasing difficult to identify works that are by the same author or by the same institution. Recently, Thomson Scientific has begun work on author and institution identifiers.

Here's an excerpt from "Thomson Scientific Tagging Researchers: ResearcherID.com."

Thomson Scientific (http://scientific.thomson.com) has opened up a new web service called ResearcherID.com (www.researcherid.com) that allows researchers to establish their own identities and, with some restrictions, to identify their writings. . . .

Currently, all the registrants must have authorized access to Thomson Scientific's Web of Knowledge. In addition, all the registrants on the site are there by invitation only, but Pringle expects the service will be open to all Web of Knowledge users by the end of the month. Since Thomson estimates the access to that service to be 20 million users worldwide, this restriction would still make the service broad-based, if researchers choose to use it.

Here's an excerpt from "But What About Corporate Authors? NISO Institutional Identifier Project Underway."

Thomson Scientific (http://scientific.thomson.com) has joined an effort with the National Information Standards Organization (NISO; www.niso.org) to build an open standard for identifying institutions. The initial NISO effort will focus on academic and research institutions, the kind often referred to in author affiliation or corporate author fields. . . .

The charge from the voting membership to the new working group is to study and propose an identifier that will uniquely identify institutions and describe relationships between entities within institutions. In the course of developing a proposed identifier, the group will consider the minimum set of data consistent with account privacy and security issues, as well as other data used to support different business models.

In "Reading Bad News Between the Lines of Google Book Search" (Chronicle of Higher Education subscription required), Peter Brantley, Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation, discusses his concerns about Google Book Search.

Here's an excerpt:

Q. Why are you concerned about Google Book Search?

A. The quality of the book scans is not consistently high. The algorithm Google uses to return search results is opaque. Then there's the commercial aspect. Google will attempt to find ways to make money off the service.