Wildfire Institutional Repository Software

One of the interesting findings of my brief investigation of open access repository software by country was the heavy use of Wildfire in the Netherlands.

Wildfire was created by Henk Druiven, University of Groningen, and it is used by over 70 repositories. It runs on a PHP, MySQL, and Apache platform.

Here is a brief description from In Between.

Wildfire is the software our library uses for our OAI compatible repositories. It is a flexible system for setting up a large number of repositories that at the same time allows them to be aggregated in groups. A group acts like yet another repository with its own harvest address and user interface.

There are several descriptive documents about Wildfire, but most are not in English.

Nontraditional Professionals in Research Libraries

There is an interesting article by Stanley Wilder in the "Careers" section of the February 23, 2007 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education ("The New Library Professional").

Using 2005 data, he notes that 23% of the professionals in ARL libraries are in nontraditional positions (e.g., development, human resources, and IT), and 39% of under-35 professionals are in these type of positions. In this under-35 group, 24% of nontraditional professionals earn $54,000 (or more). Forty-seven percent of under-35 computer professionals make $50,000 or more. (Needless to say, traditional librarians have not done as well salary-wise, leading to equity concerns.) The number of professionals who do not have an MLS has skyrocketed by 142% since 1985.

I wonder if there are significant differences in this trend by ARL library rank, with it being stronger at more larger, more affluent libraries or at libraries in private institutions.

My own experience during the last 20 years or so at a small public ARL library was that it was a constant struggle to get approval for new computer professional positions; to be able to recruit at salaries that, while not truly competitive, were at least not laughable; to upgrade existing positions so that they more adequately reflected job duties and marketplace values; and to retain staff. This was more difficult for non-MLS professionals than for MLS professionals.

More than once I, as an Assistant Dean/Director of Systems, had to take direct responsibility for Web support because of lengthy recruitment difficulties, including one two-year stretch where I did 100% of all Web support work in addition to my normal duties (I also ran the branch libraries for one year of that period). As an Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development, I had no staff and no prospect of getting any.

At some research libraries, non-MLS professionals may find that they have no career path or a short one. Taking computer professionals as an example, the issue is how far up the hierarchy can non-MLS professionals go before they hit the "must have an accredited MLS" ceiling? Can they become unit heads, department heads, ADs, or Deans/Directors? The answer may vary by library. Another issue is, generous salaries aside, are nontraditional professionals treated as second-class citizens in other ways than advancement (e.g., they may not be given the same level of support for professional travel and activities, especially if MLS librarians have faculty or faculty-like status and are adequately supported in their efforts to move up the academic ranks). Given that 39% of under-35 professionals are in nontraditional jobs, these are important issues to address, especially if Boomer librarians manage to retire en masse as some predict. It would not be a pretty sight to have Boomers heading out the door just as younger nontraditional librarians bump their heads on the MLS ceiling and start considering other career options.

This is a liminal period for research libraries, and, to a significant degree, nontraditional staff will determine their future success.

Source: Wilder, Stanley. "The New Library Professional." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 February 2007, C1, C4.

Open Access Repository Software Use By Country

Based on data from the OpenDOAR Charts service, here is snapshot of the open access repository software that is in use in the top five countries that offer such repositories.

The countries are abbreviated in the table header column as follows: US = United States, DK = Germany, UK = United Kingdom, AU = Australia, and NL = Netherlands. The number in parentheses is the reported number of repositories in that country.

Read the country percentages downward in each column (they do not total to 100% across the rows).

Excluding "unknown" or "other" systems, the highest in-country percentage is shown in boldface.

Software/Country US (248) DE (109) UK (93) AU (50) NL (44)
Bepress 17% 0% 2% 6% 0%
Cocoon 0% 0% 1% 0% 0%
CONTENTdm 3% 0% 2% 0% 0%
CWIS 1% 0% 0% 0% 0%
DARE 0% 0% 0% 0% 2%
Digitool 0% 0% 1% 0% 0%
DSpace 18% 4% 22% 14% 14%
eDoc 0% 2% 0% 0% 0%
ETD-db 4% 0% 0% 0% 0%
Fedora 0% 0% 0% 2% 0%
Fez 0% 0% 0% 2% 0%
GNU EPrints 19% 8% 46% 22% 0%
HTML 2% 4% 4% 4% 0%
iTor 0% 0% 0% 0% 5%
Milees 0% 2% 0% 0% 0%
MyCoRe 0% 2% 0% 0% 0%
OAICat 0% 0% 0% 2% 0%
Open Repository 0% 0% 3% 0% 2%
OPUS 0% 43% 2% 0% 0%
Other 6% 7% 2% 2% 0%
PORT 0% 0% 0% 0% 2%
Unknown 31% 28% 18% 46% 23%
Wildfire 0% 0% 0% 0% 52%

Snapshot Data from OpenDOAR Charts

OpenDOAR has introduced OpenDOAR Charts, a nifty new service that allows users to create and view charts that summarize data from its database of open access repositories.

Here’s what a selection of the default charts show today. Only double-digit percentage results are discussed.

  • Repositories by continent: Europe is the leader with 49% of repositories. North America places second with 33%.
  • Repositories by country: In light of the above, it is interesting that the US leads the pack with 29% of repositories. Germany (13%) and the UK follow (11%).
  • Repository software: After the 28% of unknown software, EPrints takes the number two slot (21%), followed by DSpace (19%).
  • Repository types: By far, institutional repositories are the leader at 79%. Disciplinary repositories follow (13%).
  • Content types: ETDs lead (53%), followed by unpublished reports/working papers (48%), preprints/postprints (37%), conference/workshop papers (35%), books/chapters/sections (31%), multimedia/av (20%), postprints only (17%), bibliographic references (16%), special items (15%), and learning objects (13%).

This is a great service; however, I’d suggest that University of Nottingham consider licensing it under a Creative Commons license so that snapshot charts could be freely used (at least for noncommercial purposes).

Creative Commons Version 3.0 Licenses Released

The Creative Commons has released version 3.0 of its popular licenses.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release that explains the changes:

Separating the “generic” from the US license

As part of Version 3.0, we have spun off the “generic” license to be the CC US license and created a new generic license, now known as the “unported” license. For more information about this change, see this more detailed explanation.

Harmonizing the treatment of moral rights & collecting society royalties

In Version 3.0, we are ensuring that all CC jurisdiction licenses and the CC unported license have consistent, express treatment of the issues of moral rights and collecting society royalties (subject to national differences). For more information about these changes, see this explanation of the moral rights harmonization and this explanation of the collecting society harmonization.

No Endorsement Language

That a person may not misuse the attribution requirement of a CC license to improperly assert or imply an association or relationship with the licensor or author, has been implicit in our licenses from the start. We have now decided to make this explicit in both the Legal Code and the Commons Deed to ensure that — as our licenses continue to grow and attract a large number of more prominent artists and companies — there will be no confusion for either the licensor or licensee about this issue. For a more detailed explanation, see here.

BY-SA — Compatibility Structure Now Included

The CC BY-SA 3.0 licenses will now include the ability for derivatives to be relicensed under a “Creative Commons Compatible License,” which will be listed here. . . . More information about this is provided here.

Clarifications Negotiated With Debian & MIT

Finally, Version 3.0 of the licenses include minor clarifications to the language of the licenses to take account of the concerns of Debian (more details here) and MIT (more details here).

CNI-COPYRIGHT List Moves and Changes Its Name

The CNI-COPYRIGHT mailing list is moving and changing its name.

The list is now called PIJIP-COPYRIGHT, and its e-mail address is PIJIP-COPYRIGHT@roster.wcl.american.edu.

The list’s new home page is:

http://roster.wcl.american.edu/archives/pijip-copyright.html

Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at the Washington College of Law, American University is now in charge of the list.

Census of Institutional Repositories in the United States

The Council on Library and Information Resources has published the Census of Institutional Repositories in the United States: MIRACLE Project Research Findings, which was written by members of the University of Michigan School of Information’s MIRACLE (Making Institutional Repositories a Collaborative Learning Environment) Project. The report is freely available in digital form.

Here is an excerpt from the CLIR press release:

In conducting the census, the authors sought to identify the wide range of practices, policies, and operations in effect at institutions where decision makers are contemplating planning, pilot testing, or implementing an IR; they also sought to learn why some institutions have ruled out IRs entirely.

The project team sent surveys to library directors at 2,147 institutions, representing all university main libraries and colleges, except for community colleges, in the United States. About 21% participated in the census. More than half of the responding institutions (53%) have done no IR planning. Twenty percent have begun to plan, 16% are actively planning and pilot testing IRs, and 11% have implemented an operational IR.

While the study confirms a number of previous survey findings on operational IRs—such as the IR’s disproportionate representation at research institutions and the leading role of the library in planning, testing, implementing, and paying for IRs—the census also offers a wealth of new insights. Among them is the striking finding that half of the respondents who had not begun planning an IR intend to do so within 24 months.

Other institutional repository surveys include the ARL Institutional Repositories SPEC Kit and the DSpace community survey.

Stanford’s President and the Google Book Search Library Project

The Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy article about the personal finances of John L. Hennessy, president of Stanford University, today ("The Golden Touch of Stanford’s President"). It kicks off by noting that Hennessy made $1 million last November that didn’t come from Stanford.

The last seven paragraphs are of interest, since they discuss Stanford’s relationship to the Google Book Search Library Project. The Executive Director of the Author’s Guild says that Hennessy’s Google holdings are a "great concern" and there "seems to be both a personal and institutional profit motive here." The Stanford general counsel indicates that Hennessy was not part of discussions about Google Book Search Library Project. Another issue is Google’s $2 million gift to the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society to promote fair use. Lawrence Lessig denies that the Google gift had any "quid pro quo" implications, and the former Law School Dean indicates that Hennessy had no part in the Google gift.

Concerns about potential conflict of interest may be fueled by Hennessy’s $11 million gains from sale of Google stock and use of stock options, his current Google stock holdings valued at $2.3 million, and his Google stock options that may be worth $15.8 million if exercised.

Source: Hechinger, John, and Rebecca Buckman. "The Golden Touch of Stanford’s President." The Wall Street Journal, 24 Febuary 2007, A1, A10.

Swinburne Online Journals

The Swinburne University of Technology’s Information Resources Group is leading ARROW’s (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) open access journal publishing effort.

Using Open Journal Systems, Swinburne Online Journals currently publishes 4 open access journals:

  • The Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society: "The Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society (AJETS) is a multi-disciplinary journal, focusing on the complex relationship between science and technology and their wider socio-cultural contexts. Perhaps more importantly, AJETS is designed as a forum for informed discussion and debate about the role of technology in society, drawing on a variety of viewpoints from all branches of the social and behavioural sciences and humanities."
  • Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy: "Cosmos and History is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal of natural and social philosophy. It serves those who see philosophy’s vocation in questioning and challenging prevailing assumptions about ourselves and our place in the world, developing new ways of thinking about physical existence, life, humanity and society, so helping to create the future insofar as thought affects the issue. Philosophy so conceived is not exclusively identified with the work of professional philosophers, and the journal welcomes contributions from philosophically oriented thinkers from all disciplines."
  • E-Journal of Applied Psychology: The E-Journal of Applied Psychology: "The E-Journal of Applied Psychology (E-JAP) is a web-based international outlet for original research articles which apply psychological theories to clinical and social issues."
  • Bukker Tillibul: Peer-reviewed journal about online writing that includes scholarly articles and creative works.

(Prior postings about digital presses.)

National Library of Australia’s Open Publish Service

Using Open Journal Systems, the National Library of Australia’s Open Publish service currently publishes five open access journals:

  • » Australasian Victorian Studies Journal: "The Australasian Victorian Studies Journal is published by the Australasian Victorian Studies Association whose inter-disciplinary nature it reflects: articles from disciplines as diverse as archeology, architecture, art, economics, history, landscape gardening, literature, medicine, philosophy, psychology, science, sociology, spiritualism, town planning and theatre are likely to appear in its pages. The journal is refereed and each issue is normally devoted to a theme." Archived using the LOCKSS system.
  • » Gateways: "Gateways is the National Library of Australia’s online journal for the Australian library profession and community."
  • » Harold White Fellowship Journal: Publishes articles by fellowship holders. Archived using the LOCKSS system.
  • » Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature: "JASAL is a peer-reviewed journal, published annually by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. JASAL welcomes essays that consider Australian literature in all its forms (fictional, critical, print, filmic, and so on) and in terms of its socio-political and cultural contexts."
  • » Reviews in Australian Studies: "Reviews in Australian Studies is a journal of the British Australian Studies Association (BASA). BASA was established in 1982 to bring together individuals and institutions concerned with the study of Australia, and/or the teaching of Australian topics in secondary and tertiary education." Archived using the LOCKSS system.

You can read more about Open Publish in Bobby Graham’s Information Online 2007 paper "Open Publish: Open Access to Scholarly Research."

(Prior postings about digital presses.)

All Hindawi Journals Now Open Access

Hindawi’s EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing and International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences journals are now open access, finishing the conversion of Hindawi’s 64 journals to the open access model.

Excerpt from the press release:

"We didn’t have a firm time frame for completing our OA transition when we started this process in late 2004," said Ahmed Hindawi, co-founder and CEO of Hindawi. "However, we are pleased to have completed the process in a bit over two years. Now that we have the legacy publishing model behind us, it is time to fully concentrate on aggressively growing our OA publishing program."

Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science Coalition Statement

Hard on the heels of the "Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing" by STM publishers, the Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science Coalition has issued a statement condemning the Federal Research Public Access Act and similar measures.

An excerpt from the press release follows:

"The long tradition of methodical scientific inquiry and information sharing through publication in scholarly journals has helped advance medicine to where it is today," said Martin Frank of the American Physiological Society and coordinator of the coalition. "We as independent publishers must determine when it is appropriate to make content freely available, and we believe strongly it should not be determined by government mandate."

The Coalition also reaffirmed its ongoing practice of making millions of scientific journal articles available free of charge, without an additional financial burden on the scientific community or on funding agencies. More than 1.6 million free articles are already available to the public free of charge on HighWire Press.

"The scholarly publishing system is a delicate balance between the need to sustain journals financially and the goal of disseminating scientific knowledge as widely as possible. Publishers have voluntarily made more journal articles available free worldwide than at any time in history — without government intervention," noted Kathleen Case of the American Association for Cancer Research.

The Coalition expressed concern that a mandatory timetable for free access to all federally funded research could harm journals, scientists, and ultimately the public. Subscriptions to journals with a high percentage of federally funded research would decline rapidly. Subscription revenues support the quality control system known as peer review and also support the educational work of scientific societies that publish journals.

Undermining subscriptions would shift the cost of publication from the publisher who receives subscription revenue to the researcher who receives grants. Such a shift could:

Divert scarce dollars from research. Publishers now pay the cost of publication out of subscription revenue; if the authors have to pay, the funds will come from their research grants. Nonprofit journals without subscription revenue would have to rely on the authors’ grant funds to cover publication costs, which would divert funding from research.

Result in only well-funded scientists being able to publish their work. The ability to publish in scientific journals should be available equally to all.

Reduce the ability of journals to fund peer review. Most journals spend 40% or more of their revenue on quality control through the peer review system; without subscription income and with limitations on author fees, peer review would suffer.

Harm those scientific societies that rely on income from journals to fund the professional development of scientists. Revenues from scholarly publications fund research, fellowships to junior scientists, continuing education, and mentoring programs to increase the number of women and under-represented groups in science, among many other activities.

Prominent open access advocates Stevan Harnad and Peter Suber have both critiqued the statement in detail.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (2/19/07)

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: "Analysis of the Use of Open Archives in the Fields of Mathematics and Computer Science," "Copyrights and the Paradox of Scholarly Publishing," Developing the UK’s e-Infrastructure for Science and Innovation, "The Double Bind of E-Journal Collections," "Exploring the Willingness of Scholars to Accept Open Access: A Grounded Theory Approach," "In Google’s Broad Wake: Taking Responsibility for Shaping the Global Digital Library," and "Making Research Cyberinfrastructure a Strategic Choice."

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.

The Brussels Declaration: You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows

The recent "Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing" by major scholarly publishers, such as Elsevier and Wiley, can be boiled down to: the scholarly publishing system ain’t broke, so don’t try to fix it. It provides an interesting contrast to the 2004 "Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science" by not-for-profit publishers, which outlined a variety of strategies for making content freely available.

Sadly, it suggests that the "Brussels Declaration" publishers fail to fully understand that the decades-old serials crisis has deeply alienated several generations of librarians, who are their primary customers. Publishers count on libraries being captive customers because scholarly publishing is monopolistic in nature (e.g., one journal article does not substitute for another article) and, consequently, demand is relatively inelastic, regardless of price. However, it is a rare business that thrives by alienating its customers. As the SPARC initiative and similar efforts illustrate, many librarians want to dramatically change the existing scholarly publishing system.

Driven by endless library serials cuts for journals in their disciplines, a growing belief that scholarly literature needs to be freely available for global scholarship to flourish, and excitement over the new potentials of digital publishing, scholars increasingly want to change the system as well. As has often been noted, the open access movement is not anti-publisher, but it is publisher-neutral, meaning that, as long as certain critical functions (such as peer review) are adequately performed, it does not matter how freely available scholarly works are published.

In my view, publishers add significant value to scholarly journals and other works. Some of these value-added functions are currently difficult to replicate; however, given technological advances in open-source digital publishing software, the number of these functions has been dwindling. A key question is: How long will it be before the most difficult production-oriented functions can be easily replicated, leaving non-technical functions, such as branding and prestige, to be dealt with? Another is: How long will it be before viable new modes of scholarly publishing, supported by open source software, are developed that compete with existing publishing models?

The clock is ticking. The more intransigent publishers are, the stronger the incentive for those who want change to improve open source publishing tools, to fund low-cost or open access publishing alternatives, to seek remedies from governments and other organizations that fund research, and to develop new modes of scholarly publishing.

Dialog, openness to new funding strategies and publishing practices, compromise, and imagination may serve publishers better in the long run than denial, rigidity, and attack. A more flexible outlook may reveal opportunities, not just dangers, in a scholarly publishing system in flux.

Open Access Petition Given to European Commission

A petition that asks the European Commission to endorse the recommendations of the 2006 Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe was delivered to Janez Potocnik, EU Commissioner for Science and Research.

The petition has over 20,000 signatures, including those of senior officials from 750 education, research, and cultural organizations and several Nobel laureates.

See the JISC press release for further details.

Nestor Project Will Continue until 2009

The Nestor (Network of Expertise in Long-Term Storage of Digital Resources) Project will continue operations until 2009.

Here is a brief description of the project from its home page:

The project’s objective is to create a network of expertise in long-term storage of digital resources for Germany. As the perspective of current and future archive users is central to the project, the emphasis is put on long-term accessibility. Within the project the following offers will be created: a web-based information forum, a platform for information and communication, criteria for trusted digital repositories, recommendations for certification procedures of digital repositories, recommendations for collecting guidelines and selection criteria of digital resources to be archived, guidelines and policies, the concept for a permanent organisation form of the network of expertise in digital preservation. The long-term goal is a permanent distributed infrastructure for long-term preservation and long-term accessability of digital resources in Germany comparable e.g. to the Digital Preservation Coalition in the UK.

Two new working groups have been established for phase two of the project: Standards for Metadata, Transfer of Objects to Digital Repositories and Object Access Working Group and Interlinking of eScience and Long-Term Preservation Working Group.

An English version of Nestor’s Criteria Catalogue for Trusted Repositories is now available.

Know Your Copy Rights Initiative

The Association of Research Libraries and Peggy Hoon, Scholarly Communication Librarian at the North Carolina State University Libraries, have established the Know Your Copy Rights initiative "for librarians who are developing positive educational programs for academic users of copyrighted materials in US not-for-profit institutions."

A variety of useful documents are available (and more are being developed): "Assessing Campus Copyright Education Needs & Opportunities," "Know Your Copy Rights—What You Can Do" (faculty brochure), and "Using Copyrighted Works in Your Teaching—FAQ: Questions Faculty and Teaching Assistants Need to Ask Themselves Frequently."

NISO Shared E-Resource Understanding Working Group

If you are tired of negotiating a license for every commercial information product that you purchase, there may be hope on the horizon.

The NISO Shared E-Resource Understanding Working Group (SERU), co-chaired by Karla Hahn, Association of Research Libraries, and Judy Luther, Informed Strategies, is addressing this issue.

Here is the group’s charge:

The working group is charged with developing Recommended Practices to be used to support a new mechanism for publishers to sell e-resources without licenses if they feel their perception of risk has been adequately addressed by current law and developing norms of behavior.

The document will be an expression of a set of shared understandings of publisher and library expectations regarding the sale of an electronic resource subscription. Negotiation between publisher perspectives and library perspectives will be needed to develop a useful set of practices.

The working group will build on considerable work to identify key elements of a best practices document already begun during a one-day meeting sponsored by ARL, ALPSP, SSP, and SPARC. All of the participants in that scoping meeting expressed a strong desire to continue to work on this project and form the proposed working group to develop best practices.

A recent article provides more details about SERU as does its FAQ.

There is also a mailing list. Send a message to SERUinfo-subscribe@list.niso.org to subscribe.

Economists’ Self-Archiving Behavior

Ted C. Bergstrom and Rosemarie Lavaty have deposited an eprint in eScholarship that studies the self-archiving behavior of economists ("How Often Do Economists Self-Archive?").

They summarize their findings in the paper’s abstract:

To answer the question of the paper’s title, we looked at the tables of contents from two recent issues of 33 economics journals and attempted to find a freely available online version of each article. We found that about 90 percent of articles in the most-cited economics journals and about 50 percent of articles in less-cited journals are available. We conduct a similar exercise for political science and find that only about 30 percent of the articles are freely available. The paper reports a regression analysis of the effects of author and article characteristics on likelihood of posing and it discusses the implications of self-archiving for the pricing of subscription-based academic journals.

Their conclusion suggests that significant changes in journal pricing could result from self-archiving:

As more content becomes available in open access archives, publishers are faced with greater availability of close substitutes for their products and library demand for journals is likely to become more price-elastic. The increased price-responsiveness means that profit-maximizing prices will fall. As a result, it can be hoped that commercial publishers will no longer be able to charge subscription prices greatly in excess of average cost. Thus the benefits of self-archiving to the academic community are twofold. There is the direct effect of making a greater portion of the body of research available to scholars everywhere and the secondary effect of reducing the prices charged by publishers who exploit their monopoly power.

Senate Poised to Slash NDIIPP Funding

The Disruptive Library Technology Jester and Free Range Librarian blogs have sounded a warning that $47 million of unobligated current-year funding for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program is in serious danger of being rescinded.

House Joint Resolution 20 has been passed in the House and is now being considered by the Senate.

The NDIIPP 2005 Annual Review provides a detailed look at the work of this important Library of Congress program.

See Murray’s Jester posting for the cutback details and check out his protest letter to Ohio’s Senators.

American Society for Cell Biology Issues Open Access Position Paper

The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) has issued an open access position paper ("ASCB Position on Public Access to Scientific Literature").

Here is an excerpt:

The ASCB believes strongly that barriers to scientific communication slow scientific progress. The more widely scientific results are disseminated, the more readily they can be understood, applied, and built upon. The sooner findings are shared, the faster they will lead to new scientific insights and breakthroughs. This conviction has motivated the ASCB to provide free access to all of the research articles in Molecular Biology of the Cell two months after publication, which it has done since 2001. . . .

Some publishers argue that providing free access to their journal’s content will catastrophically erode their revenue base. The experience of many successful research journals demonstrates otherwise; these journals make their online content freely available after a short embargo period that protects subscription revenue. For example, as noted above, the content of Molecular Biology of the Cell is free to all after only two months, yet the journal remains not only financially sound, but profitable. The data clearly show that free access and profitability are not mutually exclusive.

Our goal should be to make research articles freely available as soon as feasible so that science and the public benefit from their expanded use and application. At the same time, it is important that nonprofit societies and other publishers generate sufficient revenues to sustain the costs of reviewing and publishing articles. We believe that a six-month embargo period represents a reasonable compromise between the financial requirements of supporting a journal and the need for access to current research.

Princeton Joins Google Book Search Library Project

The Princeton University Library has announced that it has joined the Google Book Search Library Project.

From the press release:

A new partnership between the Princeton University Library and Google soon will make approximately 1 million books in Princeton’s collection available online in a searchable format.

In a move designed to open Princeton’s vast resources to a broad international audience, the library will work with Google over the next six years to digitize books that are in the public domain and no longer under copyright. . . .

"We will be working with Google in the next several months to choose the subject areas to be digitized and the timetable for the work," [Karin] Trainer said. "Library staff, faculty and students will be invited to suggest which parts of our distinctive collections should be digitized."

Princeton is the 12th institution to join the Google Books Library Project. Books available in the Google Book Search also include those from collections at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of California, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas-Austin, the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the New York Public Library, the University Complutense of Madrid and the National Library of Catalonia.

Google also announced the new partnership in its Inside Google Book Search blog.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (2/5/07)

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: Community Created Content: Law, Business and Policy, "A Comparison of OpenURL Link Resolvers: The Results of a University of Connecticut Libraries Environmental Scan," "Continuing Use of Print-Only Information by Researchers," "A Dublin Core Application Profile for Scholarly Works," "Mandate Momentum in 2007," and "U.S. Institutional Repositories: A Census."

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.

Oregon State University Libraries Release LibraryFind Metasearch Software

The Oregon State University Libraries have released version 0.7 of LibraryFind, which is open source metasearch software.

LibraryFind features noted in the press release include:

  • 2-click user workflow (one click to find, one click to get)
  • Integrated OpenURL resolver
  • 2-tiered caching system to improve search response time
  • Customizable user interface

According to the installation instructions, the software requires Ruby 1.8.4 and Rails 1.1.6.