A contract language change by Simon & Schuster that makes all its books available by print-on-demand technology "in print" has raised the hackles of the Authors Guild. The issue is that as long as a book is in print the rights do not revert back to the author, who could then look for another publisher who would actively promote the book and boost sales.
Source: Rich, Motoko. "Publisher and Authors Parse a Term: Out of Print." The New York Times, 18 May 2007, C3.
Twenty-nine membership organizations and big media companies have launched the Copyright Alliance to advocate stronger copyright laws that protect their intellectual property.
Here’s an excerpt from the press release:
The Alliance comprises 29 member organizations from the worlds of entertainment, arts, technology and sports, and represents an estimated 11 million Americans working in copyright-related industries. Its Executive Director, Patrick Ross, is a former journalist and think tank senior fellow with more than 10 years of expertise writing about and advocating for the importance of intellectual property.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) welcomed the coalition’s formation in a statement read at the launch event, which also featured a panel discussion with Grammy-winning musicians, a noted academic expert, and working artists.
"Strong copyright laws are essential to protect the livelihoods of millions of artists and inventors," said Conyers. "But just as importantly, strong copyright is important to all Americans by driving creativity and innovation in our economy." . . .
Members of the Copyright Alliance include: American Federation of Television & Radio Artists, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers; American Society of Media Photographers; Association of American Publishers; Broadcast Music, Inc.; Business Software Alliance; CBS Corporation; Directors Guild of America; Entertainment Software Association; Magazine Publishers of America; Major League Baseball; Microsoft; Motion Picture Association of America; National Association of Broadcasters; National Collegiate Athletic Association; National Music Publishers’ Association; NBA Properties, Inc.; NBC Universal; News Corporation; Newspaper Association of America; Professional Photographers of America; Recording Artists’ Coalition; Recording Industry Association of America; Software & Information Industry Association; Sony Pictures Entertainment; Time Warner; Viacom; Vin Di Bona Productions; and The Walt Disney Company.
DigitalKoans is back, and it’s open for business.
DigitalKoans postings will resume the week of 5/21/07.
The next SEPW posting will be on 5/23/07.
If you thought the era of big iron was dead, think again.
According to the New York Times, IBM is rolling out a "gameframe" that is "capable of permitting hundreds of thousands of computer users to interact in a three-dimensional simulated on-screen world described as a ‘metaverse.’"
Meanwhile, Sun is rolling out a video server that is "potentially powerful enough to transmit different standard video streams simultaneously to everyone watching TV in a city the size of New York."
Source: Markoff, John. "Sun and I.B.M. to Offer New Class of High-End Servers." The New York Times, 26 April 2006, C10.
The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography archive file has been updated to include version 67. SEPB was redesigned in version 67 using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The ZIP archive file is about 37 MB in size.
There is quite a buzz in blogosphere about John Wiley & Sons indicating that it would take legal action against Shelley Batts over the use of (in her words) "a panel a figure, and a chart" from a Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture article in her posting "Antioxidants in Berries Increased by Ethanol (but Are Daiquiris Healthy?)." After she redid the figures in Excel, Wiley was apparently satisfied. Batts is a Neuroscience doctoral student at the University of Michigan.
Fair use or not? You can read more about it in "When Fair Use Isn’t Fair."
Led by UKOLN, The JISC SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) Project is developing "a prototype ‘smart deposit’ tool" to "facilitate easier and more effective population of repositories."
Here’s an excerpt from the project plan:
The effective and efficient population of repositories is a key concern for the repositories community. Deposit is a crucial step in the repository workflow; without it a repository has no content and can fulfill no further function. Currently most repositories exist in a fairly linear context, accepting deposits from a single interface and putting them into a single repository. Further deployment of repositories, encouraged by JISC and other funders, means that this situation is changing and we are beginning to see an increasingly complex and dynamic ecology of interactions between repositories and other services and systems. By and large developers are not creating repository systems and software from scratch, rather they are considering how repositories interface with other applications within institutions and the wider information landscape. A single repository, or multiple repositories, might interact with other components, such as VLEs, authoring tools, packaging tools, name authority services, classification services and research systems. In terms of content, resources may be deposited in a repository by both human and software agents, e.g. packaging tools that push content into repositories or a drag-and-drop desktop tool. The type of resource being deposited will also influence the choice of deposit mechanism. If the resources are complex packaged objects then a web service will need to support the ingest of multiple packaging standards.
There is currently no standard mechanism for accepting content into repositories, yet there already exists a stable and widely implemented service for harvesting metadata from repositories (OAI-PMH—Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). This project will implement a similarly open protocol or specification for deposit. By taking a similar approach, the project and the resulting protocol and implementations will gain easier acceptance by a community already familiar with the OAI-PMH.
This project aims to develop a Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD)—a lightweight deposit protocol that will be implemented as a simple web service within EPrints, DSpace, Fedora and IntraLibrary and tested against a prototype ‘smart deposit’ tool. The project plans to take forward the lightweight protocol originally formulated by a small group working within the Digital Repositories Programme (the ‘Deposit API’ work) . The project is aligned with the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) Mellon-funded two-year project by the Open Archives Initiative, which commenced in October 2006. Members of the SWORD project team are represented on its Technical and Liaison Committees. . . . . The SWORD project is not attempting to duplicate work being done being done by ORE, but seeks to build on existing work to support UK-specific requirements whilst feeding into the ongoing ORE project.
Several individuals, including John Unsworth, have issued a call for the formation of a network of digital humanities centers.
Here’s an excerpt from the call:
If you represent something that you would consider a digital humanities center, anywhere in the world, we are interested in including you in a developing network of such centers. The purpose of this network is cooperative and collaborative action that will benefit digital humanities and allied fields in general, and centers as humanities cyberinfrastructure in particular. It comes out of a meeting hosted by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Maryland, College Park, April 12-13, 2007 in Washington, D.C., responding in part to the report of the American Council of Learned Societies report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, published in 2006.
We leave the definition of "digital humanities" up to you, but we intend to be inclusive, and we know that there will be cross-over into the social sciences, media studies, digital arts, and other related areas. If you think your center is a digital humanities center, in whole or in part, then we’d be glad to have you as part of the network. This might include humanities centers with a strong interest in or focus on digital platforms. The definition of "center" is only slightly more prescriptive: a center should be larger than a single project, and it should have some history or promise of persistence.
Some early initiatives are likely to include
- workshops and training opportunities for faculty, staff, and students
- developing collaborative teams that are, in effect, pre-positioned to apply for predictable multi-investigator, multi-disciplinary, multi-national funding opportunities, beginning with an upcoming RFP that invites applications for supercomputing in the humanities
- exchanging information about tools development, best practices, organizational strategies, standards efforts, and new digital collections, through a digital humanities portal
For further information (including how to respond), see the call.
Michele Kimpton, formerly of the Internet Archive, has been appointed the Executive Director of the newly formed DSpace nonprofit organization.
Here’e an excerpt from the announcement:
I am happy to report that we are making good progress on establishing the new non-profit organization, and I would like to take this opportunity to announce that Michele Kimpton has accepted the position as Executive Director for the organization. The DSpace non-profit corporation will initially provide organizational, legal and financial support for the DSpace open source software project. Prior to joining DSpace, Michele Kimpton was one of the founding Directors at Internet Archive, in charge of Web archiving technology and services. . . .
Michele developed an organization within Internet Archive to help support and fund open source software and web archiving programs, so she comes to us with a lot of experience in both open source software and long-term digital curation. Her organization worked primarily with National Libraries and Archives around the world, so she is familiar with large, widely diverse and distributed communities. Michele was one of the co-founders of the IIPC ( International Internet Preservation Consortium, netpreserve.org), whose mission is to work collaboratively to develop tools, standards and processes for archiving and preservation of web material.
The DSpace non-profit corporation is in the final stages of completing filing status as a not-for-profit corporation of Massachusetts. By summer 2007 we expect to have this legal entity in place, and a complete Board of Directors. Both MIT and Hewlett Packard have provided the start up funding to establish the organization over the next several years. . . .
The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.
Especially interesting are: "The CIC Metadata Portal: A Collaborative Effort in the Area of Digital Libraries," "Design and Implementation of a Custom OAI Search and Discovery Service," "A Digital Decade: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going in Digital Preservation?," "Digital Imaging—How Far Have We Come and What Still Needs to be Done?," "Google Print and the Principle of Functionality," "Open Access and the Progress of Science," "Open Access on a Zero Budget: A Case Study of Postcolonial Text," Researchers’ Use of Academic Libraries and Their Services: A Report Commissioned by the Research Information Network and the Consortium of Research Libraries, "Serial Wars," and Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices 2000-2006.
For weekly updates about news articles, Weblog postings, and other resources related to digital culture (e.g., copyright, digital privacy, digital rights management, and Net neutrality), digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing, see the latest DigitalKoans Flashback posting.
Position papers from the NSF/JISC Repositories Workshop are now available.
Here’s an excerpt from the Workshop’s Welcome and Themes page:
Here is some background information. A series of recent studies and reports have highlighted the ever-growing importance for all academic fields of data and information in digital formats. Studies have looked at digital information in science and in the humanities; at the role of data in Cyberinfrastructure; at repositories for large-scale digital libraries; and at the challenges of archiving and preservation of digital information. The goal of this workshop is to unite these separate studies. The NSF and JISC share two principal objectives: to develop a road map for research over the next ten years and what to support in the near term.
Here are the position papers:
Dan Cohen has created a Digital Humanities Wiki in response to "a common need expressed at the digital humanities centers summit at NEH in April, 2007."
It currently includes sections on:
In this podcast ("Content Recruitment and Development: A Proactive Approach to Building an Institutional Repository"), Marjorie Hassen describes the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ strategy for developing and supporting the ScholarlyCommons@Penn, an institutional repository based on the Digital Commons platform.
In the latest issue of RLG DigiNews, Jim Michalko and Lorcan Dempsey announce significant changes to this journal. RLG DigiNews has been a five-star journal that has been essential reading for digital library and preservation specialists. I’d encourage my readers to voice support for its continued excellence as indicated in the below excerpt from the article:
The issue in front of you is the last of RLG DigiNews in its current form. As RLG continues to shape its combination with OCLC and create the new Programs and Research division, we are rethinking the publication program that will support our new agenda while providing readers and authors with the kind of vehicle that supports the re-invention of cultural institutions in the research, teaching, and learning process. RLG DigiNews will be an important part of this program. Expect to see it back with a renewed editorial direction. There’s much to do and coordinate but we’ve committed both the talent and the resources to make this happen. Watch for your next RLG DigiNews no later than January, 2008.
Thank you for your support. Let those responsible know that you’re looking forward to the future.
Presentations from Friday’s sessions of the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication in Geneva are now available.
Here are a few highlights from this major conference:
(You may want to download PowerPoint Viewer 2007 if you don’t have PowerPoint 2007).
Presentations from Thursday’s sessions of the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication in Geneva are now available.
Here are a few highlights from this major conference:
(You may want to download PowerPoint Viewer 2007 if you don’t have PowerPoint 2007).
The OpenDOAR project has announced the availability of an API for accessing digital repository data in their database.
Here’s an excerpt from the press release:
OpenDOAR, as a SHERPA project, is pleased to announce the release of an API that lets developers use OpenDOAR data in their applications. It is a machine-to-machine interface that can run a wide variety of queries against the OpenDOAR Database and get back XML data. Developers can choose to receive just repository titles & URLs, all the available OpenDOAR data, or intermediate levels of detail. They can then incorporate the output into their own applications and ‘mash-ups’, or use it to control processes such as OAI-PMH harvesting. . . .
OpenDOAR is a continuing project hosted at the University of Nottingham under the SHERPA Partnership. OpenDOAR maintains and builds on a quality-assured list of the world’s Open Access Repositories. OpenDOAR acts as a bridge between repository administrators and the service providers who make use of information held in repositories to offer search and other services to researchers and scholars worldwide.
A key feature of OpenDOAR is that all of the repositories we list have been visited by project staff, tested and assessed by hand. We currently decline about a quarter of candidate sites as being broken, empty, out of scope, etc. This gives a far higher quality assurance to the listings we hold than results gathered by just automatic harvesting. OpenDOAR has now surveyed over 1,100 repositories, producing a classified Directory of over 800 freely available archives of academic information.
Presentations from Wednesday’s sessions of the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication in Geneva are now available.
Here are a few highlights from this major conference:
(You may want to download PowerPoint Viewer 2007 if you don’t have PowerPoint 2007).
Library Journal has published its annual review of serials prices. This year, its title is "Serial Wars."
There is considerable discussion of open access issues in the article, and Peter Suber has commented: "This is an excellent picture of where OA stands today. If you have colleagues who want to know what’s been happening and only have time for one article, give them this URL."
As usual, the big bucks in serials are for STM journals (see the table below from the article), and, no surprise, the country with the highest average price per title is the Netherlands.
TABLE 1 AVERAGE 2007 PRICE FOR SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINES
Discipline Average Price Per Title Chemistry $3,429 Physics 2,865 Engineering 2,071 Biology 1,676 Technology 1,502 Astronomy 1,426 Geology 1,424 Food Science 1,345 Math & Computer Science $1,313 Zoology 1,308 Health Sciences 1,199 Botany 1,179 General Science 1,139 Geography 1,050 Agriculture 898
What about next year?: "Expect overall price increases to be in the seven percent to nine percent range for 2008 subscriptions."
In a recent SSP-L message, Mark Johnson, Journal Manager of HighWire Press, identified three journals that offer podcasts or digital audio files:
Here are a few others:
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 WileyKey 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.
The JISC Repositories and Preservation program has established the Depot, so that researchers who do not have an institutional repository can deposit digital postprints and other digital objects.
Here’s an excerpt from the press release:
The general strategy being adopted in the UK is that every university should develop and establish its own institutional repository (IR), as part of a comprehensive ‘JISC RepositoryNet’. Many researchers can already make use of the IRs set up in their institution, but that is not (yet) the case for all. A key purpose for The Depot is to bridge that gap during the period before all have such provision, and to provide a deposit facility that will enable all UK researchers to expose their publications to readers under terms of Open Access.
The Depot will also have a re-direct function to link researchers to the appropriate home pages of their own institutional repositories. The end result should be more content in repositories, making it easier for researchers and policy makers to have peer-reviewed research results exposed to wider readership under Open Access. . . .
The principal focus for The Depot is the deposit of post-prints, digital versions of published journal articles and similar items. There are plans to include links to places for depositing other digital materials, such as research datasets and learning materials. As indicated, The Depot helps provide a level-playing field for all UK researchers and their institutions, especially when deposit under Open Access is required by grant funding bodies. It may also become a useful facility for institutions as they implement and manage their own repositories, helping to promote the habit of deposit among staff, with the simple message, ‘put it in the depot’.
The Depot is based on E-Prints software and is compliant with the Open Archive Initiative (OAI), which promotes standards for repository interoperability. Its contents will be harvested and searched through the Intute Repository Search project. It offers a redirect service, UK Repository Junction, to ensure that content that comes within the remit of an extant repository is correctly placed there instead of in The Depot.
Additionally, as IRs are created, The Depot will offer a transfer service for content deposited by authors based at those universities, to help populate the new IRs. The Depot will therefore act as a ‘keepsafe’ until a repository of choice becomes available for deposited scholarly content. In this way, The Depot will avoid competing with extant and emerging IRs while bridging gaps in the overall repository landscape and encouraging more open access deposits.
A Depot FAQ is available.
LITA has formed the Next Generation Catalog Interest Group. There is also an associated mailing list.
Here is an excerpt from the LITA-L announcement:
NGCIG gives LITA a discussion space devoted to developments in the library catalog, its nature and scope, and its interfaces. It provides a forum for presentations and sharing of innovation in catalogs and discussion of future directions. Collaborations with other LITA interest groups, such as in the areas of emerging technologies and open source software, will provide opportunities for programming.
The Research Information Network (RIN) and the The Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles (CURL) have published a new report titled Researchers’ Use of Academic Libraries and Their Services.
Here’s an excerpt from the report’s Web page:
This study was designed to provide an up-to-date and forward-looking view of how researchers interact with academic libraries in the UK. Harnessing empirical data and qualitative insights from over 2250 researchers and 300 librarians, the RIN and CURL hope that the results will be useful in informing the debate about the future development of academic libraries and the services they provide to researchers.
This is an important moment in the relationship between researchers and research libraries in the UK. The foundations of the relationship are beginning to be tested by shifts in the way that researchers work. The rise of e-research, interdisciplinary work, cross-institution collaborations, and the expectation of massive increases in the quantity of research output in digital form all pose new challenges. These challenges are about how libraries should serve the needs of researchers as users of information sources of many different kinds, but also about how to deal with the information outputs that researchers are creating.
Currently, the majority of researchers think that their institutions’ libraries are doing an effective job in providing the information they need to do their work, but it is time to consider the future roles and responsibilities of all those involved in the research cycle—researchers, research institutions and national bodies, as well as libraries—in meeting the challenges that are coming.
