Month: October 2006

SEPW and SEPB Now Searchable Using a Google Custom Search Engine

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog is now searchable using a Google Custom Search Engine. The new search box is near the bottom of the Weblog’s home page.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is also now searchable using a Google Custom Search Engine. This will be incorporated into a future version of SEPB. Only the bibliography sections of the document are searchable using this method (e.g., SEPW and SEPR are excluded).

Keep in mind when you search that you will retrieve bibliography section file or Weblog archive file titles with a single representative search result shown from that file. To see all hits, click on the cached page, which shows the retrieved search term(s) in the file highlighted in yellow.

For those who might be interested in including these Google Custom Search Engines in their Web pages, see "Code for Bailey’s Google Search Engines"

New OA Google Custom Search Engines

I’ve enhanced Open Access Update with four new Google Custom Search Engines:

  1. Open Access Mailing Lists (these are lists that have general discussion of OA topics)
  2. Open Access Serials
  3. Open Access Weblogs
  4. Open Access Wikis

The indexed works contain significant information about open access topics and are freely available.

See Open Access Update for details about the included works.

Open Access Bibliography Now Searchable

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals is now searchable using a Google Custom Search Engine. The new search box is just before the table of contents in the bibliography’s home page. Only the bibliography sections of the document are searchable (e.g., the "Key Open Access Concepts" section is excluded).

Keep in mind when you search that you will retrieve bibliography section file titles with a single representative search result shown from that section. To see all hits in a section, click on the cached page, which shows the retrieved search term(s) in the section highlighted in yellow.

Rice University Press Publishes Its First Open Access Digital Document

The recently re-established Rice University Press, which was reborn as a digital press, has published its first e-report: Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age by Hilary Ballon (Professor and Director of Art Humanities at the Columbia University Department of Art History and Archaeology) and Mariet Westermann (Director and Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University).

The introduction notes:

Just as we were finishing our report, Rice University Press announced that it would re-launch itself as a fully electronic press with a special commitment to art history. We were delighted to find Rice willing to partner with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to publish our report electronically, with the kinds of hyper-linking, response capability, and print-on-demand options we consider vital to the success of scholarly publication on line. At Rice University Press, Chuck Henry, Chuck Bearden, and Kathi Fletcher generously steered us through the technological and legal process. We received enthusiastic support at CLIR from Susan Perry, Michael Ann Holly, Kathlin Smith, and Ann Okerson.

Like all digital works to be published by the press, this one is under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. At this time, it does not appear that a print-on-demand version of the work is available from Rice University Press.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (10/23/06)

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, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Copyright Jungle," "Disruptive Beneficence: The Google Print Program and the Future of Libraries," "DLF-Aquifer Asset Actions Experiment: Demonstrating Value of Actionable URLs," "Ideas on Creating a Consumer Market for Scholarly Journals," "An Interoperable Fabric for Scholarly Value Chains," IWAW’ 06: Proceeding of the 6th International Web Archiving Workshop, "Moving into the Digital Age: A Conceptual Model for a Publications Repository," "The Publishing Imperative: The Pervasive Influence of Publication Metrics," and "Strategies and Frameworks for Institutional Repositories and the New Support Infrastructure for Scholarly Communications."

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.

10th Anniversary Version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 64 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over 2,780 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

This is the 10th anniversary version of SEPB, whose first version was published in October 1996.

The PDF version of SEPB is produced annually. The 2005 PDF file is available (Version 60, published 12/9/2005).

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by the same author, provides much more in-depth coverage of the open access movement and related topics (e.g., disciplinary archives, e-prints, institutional repositories, open access journals, and the Open Archives Initiative) than SEPB does.

The "Open Access Webliography" (with Ho) complements the OAB, providing access to a number of Websites related to open access topics.

Changes in This Version

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

Table of Contents

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
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
Digital Libraries
Electronic Books and Texts
Electronic Serials
General Electronic Publishing
Images
Legal
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
SGML and Related Standards

Further Information about SEPB

The HTML version of SEPB is designed for interactive use. Each major section is a separate file. There are links to sources that are freely available on the Internet. It can be can be searched using Boolean operators.

The HTML document includes three sections not found in the Acrobat file:

  1. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (biweekly list of new resources; also available by mailing list and RSS feed)
  2. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (directory of over 270 related Web sites)
  3. Archive (prior versions of the bibliography)

The 2005 annual PDF file is designed for printing. The printed bibliography is over 210 pages long. The PDF file is over 560 KB.

Related Article

An article about the bibliography has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

It’s Time to Support the Creative Commons

The Creative Commons has launched it’s 2006 fund raising campaign, and I’d urge my readers to support it as generously as they can.

Why? The reason is simple: it’s easier to restore balance in copyright by convincing content creators to embrace Creative Commons licenses than it is to influence copyright legislation that rolls back lengthy copyright protection periods that are in danger of becoming virtually perpetual, that constricts the ever-widening scope of copyright, and that permits realistic fair use of DRM-protected digital materials. Moreover, the Creative Commons fosters what Lawrence Lessig calls a "read-write" digital culture that permits digital material to be freely used and remixed vs. a read-only-maybe digital culture where digital materials are often hidden behind access barriers and cannot be remixed without permission, which may be impossible to obtain. If you doubt that this can work, consider this quote from the Creative Commons: "From January 2006 to July 2006 there was a growth from 40,000,000 to 140,000,000 linkbacks to our licenses!"

So, donate. At the $75 level or above you’ll get a t-shirt as well as the button and sticker that are available at lower donation levels. Or, don’t donate, but help out by buying Creative Commons gear at their store.

OAI’s Object Reuse and Exchange Initiative

The Open Archives Initiative has announced its Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) initiative:

Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) will develop specifications that allow distributed repositories to exchange information about their constituent digital objects. These specifications will include approaches for representing digital objects and repository services that facilitate access and ingest of these representations. The specifications will enable a new generation of cross-repository services that leverage the intrinsic value of digital objects beyond the borders of hosting repositories. . . . its real importance lies in the potential for these distributed repositories and their contained objects to act as the foundation of a new digitally-based scholarly communication framework. Such a framework would permit fluid reuse, refactoring, and aggregation of scholarly digital objects and their constituent parts—including text, images, data, and software. This framework would include new forms of citation, allow the creation of virtual collections of objects regardless of their location, and facilitate new workflows that add value to scholarly objects by distributed registration, certification, peer review, and preservation services. Although scholarly communication is the motivating application, we imagine that the specifications developed by ORE may extend to other domains.

OAI-ORE is being funded my the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a two-year period.

Presentations from the Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories meeting are a good source of further information about the thinking behind the initiative as is the "Pathways: Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories" preprint.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update ( 10/9/06)

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, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "As We May Read," "CDSware (CERN Document Server Software)," "Delay between Online and Offline Issue of Journals: A Critical Analysis," Fedora and the Preservation of University Records, Final Project Report to Atlantic Philanthropies: Creating an Open Access Paradigm for Scholarly Publishing, "InCommon: Watch This Space!," "Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects on Libraries and Information Policy," "OA Wrap-up on the Last Congress," "Open Access and Quality," Research Communication Costs in Australia: Emerging Opportunities and Benefits, and UK Scholarly Journals: 2006 Baseline Report: An Evidence-Based Analysis of Data Concerning Scholarly Journal Publishing.

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.

"Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia?" Postprint

The "Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia?" postprint is now available.

The abstract is below:

Three critical issues—dramatic expansion of the scope, duration, and punitive nature of copyright laws; the ability of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems to lock-down digital content in an unprecedented fashion; and the erosion of Net neutrality, which ensures that all Internet traffic is treated equally—are examined in detail and their potential impact on libraries is assessed. How legislatures, the courts, and the commercial marketplace treat these issues will strongly influence the future of digital information for good or ill.

If you would like a more detailed description, see my posting about the preprint.