Month: October 2007

Reactions to the Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas Verdict

Here are some reactions to the Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas verdict.

Web/Web 2.0 Resources and Tools

Here’s a list of a few Web/Web 2.0 resources and tools that developers may find useful.

RIAA Wins in Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas

The RIAA scored a victory in its first file sharing lawsuit to go before a jury. Defendent Jammie Thomas was ordered to pay $220,000 ($9,250 each for 24 songs).

Here are the Ars Technica postings that deal with the case:

Further coverage about the verdict can be found in these CNET News.com articles:

Taylor & Francis Expands iOpenAccess Program

In a liblicense-l message, Taylor & Francis has announced that it has added "31 journals in environmental and agricultural sciences, behavioural sciences and development studies" to its iOpenAccess program. It notes that: "This is in addition to the 175 journals from T&F's Chemistry, Mathematics and Physics portfolios, 7 behavioural science journals from Psychology Press, and medical and bioscience journals from Informa Healthcare."

DCMI Scholarly Communications Community

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has established the DCMI Scholarly Communications Community, which currently includes a mailing list and a wiki.

Here's an excerpt from the home page:

The DCMI Scholarly Communications Community is a forum for individuals and organisations to exchange information, knowledge and general discussion on issues relating to using Dublin Core for describing research papers, scholarly texts, data objects and other resources created and used within scholarly communications. This includes providing a forum for discussion around the Eprints Application Profile, also known as the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP) and for other existing and future application profiles created to describe items of scholarly communication.

Digital Lives Research Project

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Digital Lives project is investigating personal digital collections.

Here's an excerpt from the About Digital Lives page:

Digital Lives is a major research project focusing on personal digital collections and their relationship with research repositories. It brings together expert curators and practitioners in digital preservation, digital manuscripts, literary collections, web-archiving, history of science, and oral history from within the British Library (one of the world’s leading research libraries) with researchers in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London, and The Centre for Information Technology and Law at the University of Bristol.

The Project's proposal provides detailed information about it's research methods.

RIAA Loses Money on File Sharing Lawsuits

Testifying in Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas (formerly known as Virgin v. Thomas), Jennifer Pariser of Sony BMG, admitted that the RIAA's lawsuits against file sharing result in a net loss for the organization.

Here's an excerpt from "RIAA Anti-P2P Campaign a Real Money Pit, According to Testimony":

One of the biggest bombshells from the cross-examination was Pariser's admission that the RIAA's legal campaign isn't making the labels any money, and that, furthermore, the industry has no idea of the actual damages it suffers due to file-sharing. . . .

The next line of questioning was how many suits the RIAA has filed so far. Pariser estimated the number at a "few thousand." "More like 20,000," suggested Toder. "That's probably an overstatement," Pariser replied. She then made perhaps the most startling comment of the day. Saying that the record labels have spent "millions" on the lawsuits, she then said that "we've lost money on this program."

Source: Bangeman, Eric. "RIAA Anti-P2P Campaign a Real Money Pit, According to Testimony." Ars Technica, 2 October 2007.

Digital Library Federation Forum for NSF DataNet Grant Proposals

The Digital Library Federation has established a forum for those who want to collaborate or get further information about the NSF's Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet) grant program. Participation in the forum is open, but registration is required.

Podcasts about the Long-Term Use of Research Data

Podcasts about the Long-Term Use of Research Data

The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories has released MP3 and PDF files from its Long-lived Collections: The Future of Australia's Research Data Presentations symposium.

Here are selected MP3 files:

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (10/3/07)

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: "Evaluating Institutional Repository Deployment in American Academe Since Early 2005: Repositories by the Numbers, Part 2"; "Flipping a Journal to Open Access"; "Measuring and Comparing Participation Patterns in Digital Repositories: Repositories by the Numbers, Part 1"; "Motivating and Impeding Factors Affecting Faculty Contribution to Institutional Repositories"; "Moving Out of Oldenbourg's Long Shadow: What Is the Future for Society Publishing?"; "Of the Rich and the Poor and Other Curious Minds: On Open Access and 'Development'"; "Public Policy and the Politics of Open Access"; "PRISM: Enough Rope?"; "Reading Books in the Digital Age Subsequent to Amazon, Google and the Long Tail"; "Services Make the Repository"; and Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture.

Cyberscholarship Report

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh has released The Future of Scholarly Communication: Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship. Report of a Workshop Held in Phoenix, Arizona, April 17 to 19, 2007, Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Joint Information Systems Committee.

Here's an excerpt from the "Summary of Conclusions and Recommendations" section:

  • The widespread availability of digital content is creating opportunities for new forms of research and scholarship that are qualitatively different from the traditional way of using academic publications and research data. We call this "cyberscholarship". . . .
  • The widespread availability of content in digital formats provides an infrastructure for novel forms of research. To support cyberscholarship it must be captured, managed, and preserved in ways that are significantly different from conventional methods. . . .
  • Development of the infrastructure requires coordination at a national and international level. . . . In the United States, since there is no single agency with this mission, we recommend a coordinating committee of the appropriate federal agencies. . . .
  • Development of the content infrastructure requires a blend of research – both discipline-specific and in the enabling computer science – and implementation. . . .
  • We propose a seven year timetable for implementation of the infrastructure. The first three years will emphasize a set of prototypes, followed by implementation of a coordinated group of systems and services.

Scriblio Beta Released: A WordPress-Based CMS and OPAC

The Scriblio beta version has been released.

Here's a description of Scriblio from the About Scriblio page:

Scriblio (formerly WPopac) is an award winning, free, open source CMS and OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress. Scriblio is a project of Plymouth State University, supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

  • Free and open source
  • Represents bibliographic collections — library catalogs and such — in an easily searchable, highly remixable web-based format
  • Leverages WordPress to offer rich content management features for all a library’s content
  • Free and open source

NSF Solicits Grant Proposals for up to $20 Million for Dataset Access and Preservation

National Science Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastructure has announced the availability of grants to U.S. academic institutions under its Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet) program.

Here's an excerpt from the solicitation:

Science and engineering research and education are increasingly digital and increasingly data-intensive. Digital data are not only the output of research but provide input to new hypotheses, enabling new scientific insights and driving innovation. Therein lies one of the major challenges of this scientific generation: how to develop the new methods, management structures and technologies to manage the diversity, size, and complexity of current and future data sets and data streams. This solicitation addresses that challenge by creating a set of exemplar national and global data research infrastructure organizations (dubbed DataNet Partners) that provide unique opportunities to communities of researchers to advance science and/or engineering research and learning.

The new types of organizations envisioned in this solicitation will integrate library and archival sciences, cyberinfrastructure, computer and information sciences, and domain science expertise to:

  • provide reliable digital preservation, access, integration, and analysis capabilities for science and/or engineering data over a decades-long timeline;
  • continuously anticipate and adapt to changes in technologies and in user needs and expectations;
  • engage at the frontiers of computer and information science and cyberinfrastructure with research and development to drive the leading edge forward; and
  • serve as component elements of an interoperable data preservation and access network.

By demonstrating feasibility, identifying best practices, establishing viable models for long term technical and economic sustainability, and incorporating frontier research, these exemplar organizations can serve as the basis for rational investment in digital preservation and access by diverse sectors of society at the local, regional, national, and international levels, paving the way for a robust and resilient national and global digital data framework.

These organizations will provide:

  • a vision and rationale that meet critical data needs, create important new opportunities and capabilities for discovery, innovation, and learning, improve the way science and engineering research and education are conducted, and guide the organization in achieving long-term sustainability;
  • an organizational structure that provides for a comprehensive range of expertise and cyberinfrastructure capabilities, ensures active participation and effective use by a wide diversity of individuals, organizations, and sectors, serves as a capable partner in an interoperable network of digital preservation and access organizations, and ensures effective management and leadership; and
  • activities to provide for the full data management life cycle, facilitate research as resource and object, engage in computer science and information science research critical to DataNet functions, develop new tools and capabilities for learning that integrate research and education at all levels, provide for active community input and participation in all phases and all aspects of Partner activities, and include a vigorous and comprehensive assessment and evaluation program.

Potential applicants should note that this program is not intended to support narrowly-defined, discipline-specific repositories. . . .

Award Information

Anticipated Type of Award: Cooperative Agreement

Estimated Number of Awards: 5 — Two to three awards are anticipated in each of two review cycles (one review cycle for fiscal year FY2008 awards and one for FY2009) for a total of five awards, contingent on the quality of proposals received and pending the availability of funds. Each award is limited to a total of up to $20,000,000 (direct plus indirect costs) for up to 5 years. The initial term of each award is expected to be 5 years with the potential at NSF's sole discretion for one terminal renewal for another 5 years, subject to performance and the availability of funds. Such performance is to include serving the needs of the relevant science and engineering research and education communities and catalyzing new opportunities for progress. If a second five-year award is made, NSF funding is expected to decrease in each successive year of the award as the Partner transitions to a sustainable economic model with other sources of support. The actual amount of the annual decrease in NSF support will be established through the cooperative agreement. Note that the maximum period NSF will support a DataNet Partner is 10 years.

Anticipated Funding Amount: $100,000,000 — Up to $100,000,000 over a five year period is expected to be available contingent on the quality of proposals received and pending the availability of funds.