Year: 2007

National Archives Seeks Comments on Draft Digitization Plan

The National Archives and Records Administration is soliciting comments on its draft Plan for Digitizing Archival Materials for Public Access, 2007-2016.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The document is divided into several sections. The first section, INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND, provides information on NARA's mission, our archival holdings, and our past experience with digitization, to give you the context of the draft Plan for Digitizing Archival Materials for Public Access, 2007-2016. Section II, PLAN OVERVIEW, describes our planned goals, activities, and priorities for digitization. Sections III through V provide listings of current digitization activities being carried out by NARA and through partnerships to digitize and make available archival materials. Appendix A contains draft operating principles that we are using as we enter into partnerships and Appendix B references relevant NARA guidance that applies to handling of archival materials being digitized and the technical guidelines for image creation and description.

Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture

The MIT Press has published Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture by Tarleton Gillespie.

Here's an excerpt from the author's description:

In Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture, Tarleton Gillespie examines this shift to "technical copy protection" and its profound political, economic, and cultural implications.

Gillespie reveals that the real story is not the technological controls themselves but the political, economic, and cultural arrangements being put in place to make them work. He shows that this approach to digital copyright depends on new kinds of alliances among content and technology industries, legislators, regulators, and the courts, and is changing the relationship between law and technology in the process. The film and music industries, he claims, are deploying copyright in order to funnel digital culture into increasingly commercial patterns that threaten to undermine the democratic potential of a network society.

Leslie Carr on What to Do with Dead Repositories

In his "Decommissioning Repositories" posting, EPrints guru Leslie Carr grapples with the issue of what to do with repositories that have served their purpose and that no one wants to maintain.

Here's an excerpt:

But now the party's over, there is no more funding, and none of the partner institutions has offered to keep the repository going in perpetuity. Not even the hosting institution or the ex-manager wants to keep their repositories going. We know that even if we don't turn them off their hosting hardware will fail in a few of years. That sounds like very bad news because a repository is supposed to be forever! Was it irresponsible to create these repositories in the first place? Should it be forbidden to create a public repository whose life is guaranteed to be less than a decade? Or perhaps that should be factored into the original policy-making—"this repository and all its contents are guaranteed up to 31st December 2017 but not after." If that were machine readable then the community could have decided whether they want to mirror the collection, or selected bits of it.

Source: Carr, Leslie. "Decommissioning Repositories." RepositoryMan, 10 September 2007.

A Closer Look at OncologySTAT: Elsevier's Version of Open Access?

In a prior posting, I discussed Elsevier's release of OncologySTAT. In this one, I'll take a closer look at the system.

It appears that OncologySTAT permits registration by any type of user. As noted previously, it gathers fairly detailed registration information.

Is it an open access system? Let's look at it from the point of view of Peter Suber's' Open Access Overview. The barrier of registration exists, but the system removes price barriers. Since it doesn't change the underlying copyright terms of the included journals, it doesn’t remove permission barriers. However, as Suber states:

While removing price barriers without removing permission barriers is not enough for full OA under the BBB definition [see this explanation], there's no doubt that price barriers constitute the bulk of the problem for which OA is the solution. Removing price barriers alone will give most OA proponents most of what they want and need.

Moreover, some major open access advocates, such as Stevan Harnad, argue that free access is sufficient.

How is OncologySTAT funded? Here's an excerpt from the About OncologySTAT page:

OncologySTAT is commercially supported by online advertising, sponsorship, and educational grants. Individual access to OncologySTAT is free, based on users registering with the site.

The Advertise page offers a more detailed description of advertising options:

OncologySTAT offers an array of online advertising and sponsorship opportunities including:

  • Run-of-Site Online Advertising
  • Targeted Online Advertising: Behavioral, Contextual or Keyword
  • E-Newsletters: OncologySTAT InfoBLAST weekly e-newsletter
  • 27 Cancer-Type Sponsorships (Breast, Lung, Prostate, etc)
  • Banners, Spotlights, Skyscrapers, Keyword Search
  • iPanels – Interactive expandable ad units
  • Section and Content Sponsorship (Video, Chemotherapy Regimens, Article Downloads, etc.)
  • MicroSites: custom branded content/advertorial
  • Interactive live and on-demand Webinars

Here's what Suber says about ways that open access journals can be funded (italics added):

OA journals pay their bills very much the way broadcast television and radio stations do: those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Sometimes this means that journals have a subsidy from the hosting university or professional society. Sometimes it means that journals charge a processing fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author's sponsor (employer, funding agency). OA journals that charge processing fees usually waive them in cases of economic hardship. OA journals with institutional subsidies tend to charge no processing fees. OA journals can get by on lower subsidies or fees if they have income from other publications, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services.

OncologySTAT is unusual in that the journals it covers also remain available under free-based, restricted-use licenses and as print subscriptions. However, if anyone can obtain free access though registration, is this a significant issue or an artifact of an older business model?

It appears that OncologySTAT is a limited open access experiment embedded in a larger conventional fee-based, restricted-access publishing model.

It will be interesting to see how OncologySTAT affects library subscriptions to these expensive medical journals. Cancellation decisions will be influenced by how permanent OncologySTAT appears to be: it will be more tempting to cancel subscriptions if the system shifts into a more permanent mode. Since there appears to be no change in underlying digital preservation arrangements, cancellation decisions will also be affected by how strongly libraries are committed to the long-term access to and preservation of these journals vs. short-term access to them. An immediate, massive rush to cancellation doesn't seem highly probable, and consequently OncologySTAT is more likely to add revenue than subtract it.

Elsevier Experiments with Free, Ad-Sponsored Access for Oncologists

Reed Elsevier has launched OncologySTAT, which offers oncologists free access to its medical journals in exchange for registration. Users will also have access to summaries of relevant research published elsewhere. Elsevier plans to support the service with online ads and the sale of mailing lists.

Here's an excerpt from "A Medical Publisher’s Unusual Prescription: Online Ads":

. . . Reed Elsevier executives hope that OncologySTAT.com users will be an attractive target for advertisers, providing a model for an array of portals they could set up for health care professionals. Future sites may focus on specialties like neurology, psychiatry, cardiology and infectious diseases, company officials said. . . .

Monique Fayad, an Elsevier senior vice president, said the total online advertising market was growing “in double digits” and added, “We expect it will be a $1 billion opportunity within the next two years.” . . .

Source: Freudenheim, Milt. "A Medical Publisher’s Unusual Prescription: Online Ads" The New York Times, 10 September 2007, C1, C5.

Copyright and the First Amendment: Golan v. Gonzales

On September 4th, Christopher Sprigman announced that the 10th Circuit Court has decided in favor of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society's appeal in Golan v. Gonzales.

Here's an excerpt from Sprigman's posting that explains the case:

The Golan case challenges the constitutionality of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, by which, among other things, Congress removed thousands of books, films, songs, and other creative works from the public domain and “restored” them to copyright. The Golan plaintiffs, a group of conductors and film distributors who used these public domain works, challenged Congress’s depredation of the public domain. The primary ground for the challenge was that Congress, by removing works from the public domain, departed from the “traditional contours of copyright protection” in a way that limited free speech in violation of the First Amendment. Limited how? By making the use of the former public domain works subject to the approval of the owners of the “restored” copyrights. By, in short, imposing copyright burdens on free speech where none had existed before.

The Golan plaintiffs’ First Amendment theory was built on something the Supreme Court said in Eldred v. Ashcroft. . . . . Where Congress does not act in accordance with history, but instead alters copyright’s “traditional contours”, courts must conduct a more searching First Amendment review to ensure that whatever Congress has done to the copyright law—which is, of course, a regulation of speech—does not burden speech in ways that cannot be justified.

Since Sprigman's post, there has been further commentary in the blogosphere. Here's a selection of postings:

Peter Murray-Rust Presentation on the Scientific E-Thesis

Peter Murray-Rust's presentation at Caltech on "The Power of the Scientific eThesis" is now available. (You may be asked to install an ActiveX control by MediaSite; you can run the presentation without it.)

Source: Smart, Laura J. "Peter Murray-Rust at Caltech." Repositories for the Rest of Us, 7 September 2007.

Hi Tech Companies Win House Patent Battle

In a big win for high technology companies, the House passed a bill that would limit patent litigation.

Here's an excerpt from "House Passes Bill to Curb Suits by Patent Owners":

The measure passed by the House would change the rules at the Patent and Trademark Office so patents would go to the first person to file an application, not necessarily the first inventor. . . . It would also allow third parties to introduce evidence against applications and would create a system, called post-grant opposition, to challenge new patents.

Source: Bloomberg News. "House Passes Bill to Curb Suits by Patent Owners." The New York Times, 8 September 2007, B4.

Is Net Neutrality Dead?: Ten Reasons That It Might Be

In "Ten Things That Finally Killed Net Neutrality," Declan McCullagh examines why the Net Neutrality movement has failed.

The culprits? The AT&T merger, the Bush administration, Congressional gridlock, the decline of the It's Our Net coalition, the FCC, lack of evidence of wrongdoing by broadband providers, and Nancy Pelosi, among others.

Source: McCullagh, Declan. "Ten Things That Finally Killed Net Neutrality." CNET News.Com, 6 September 2007.

LIFE (Life Cycle Information for E-Literature) Project

LIFE (Life Cycle Information for E-Literature) is a joint, JISC-funded project of the University College London Library Services and the British Library that is investigating life cycle issues involved in collecting and preserving digital materials.

Here's an excerpt from the home page:

The LIFE Project has developed a methodology to model the digital lifecycle and calculate the costs of preserving digital information for the next 5, 10 or 100 years. For the first time, organisations can apply this process and plan effectively for the preservation of their digital collections.

Currently the LIFE Project is in its second phase ("LIFE2"), an 18 month project running from March 2007 to August 2008.

Documentation from the first and second phases of the project is available.

The project has just established a weblog.

Amazon and Google E-Book Developments

Amazon is expected to release a wireless e-book reader this October called Kindle. It's anticipated to be priced in $400-$500 range.

Also in the fall, Google is expected to offer charged access to the complete contents of digital books, with pricing to be determined by publishers.

Source: Stone, Brad. "Are Books Passé? Envisioning the Next Chapter for Electronic Books." The New York Times, 6 September 2006, C1, C9.

ARL Changes Public Ranking Methodology

Beginning with the 2005–06 report, ARL is using an Expenditures-Focused Index instead of its traditional Membership Criteria Index in public ranking reports. The Chronicle of Higher Education has published the "Index of Expenditures at University Research Libraries, 2005-6" (requires subscription).

Here's an excerpt from the ARL Index page:

Starting with 2005–06 data, ARL is calculating an Expenditures-Focused Index as an alternative to the ARL Membership Criteria Index. The Expenditures-Focused Index replaces the public availability of the ARL Membership Criteria Index. The Expenditures-Focused Index is highly correlated with the Membership Criteria Index and less affected by changes in the collections variables. The methodology behind this new index is described by Bruce Thompson in his October 2006 paper, "Some Alternative Quantitative Library Activity Descriptions/Statistics that Supplement the ARL Logarithmic Index."

67 Plagiarized Papers from Turkey Removed from arXiv

The arXiv archive has removed 67 plagiarized papers, which were written by 15 Turkish physicists. Questions about the physics expertise of two of the authors emerged during their oral dissertation defenses, and the investigation widened from there.

Source: “Turkish Professors Uncover Plagiarism in Papers Posted on Physics Server.” The Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, 6 September 2007.

Digital Scholarship Survey Results and Changes

Thanks to the 179 respondents who filled out the Digital Scholarship survey.

Asked the question "The following free digital publications are important sources of information for me," respondents' favorable ratings (five-point Likert Scale, with "Agree" and "Strongly agree" responses added together) were:

  1. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (established 10/96): 80.5%
  2. Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (established 3/05): 73.2%
  3. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (established 9/97): 70.4%
  4. Open Access Webliography (established 8/05): 64.3%
  5. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (established 6/01): 59.2%
  6. DigitalKoans (established 4/05): 36.9%
  7. FlashBack (established 6/05): 19.5%

High levels of "Neither agree or disagree" responses for DigitalKoans (54.2%) and FlashBack (64.8%), combined with reader comments, suggested that readers were not as familiar with these publications as with the others.

The top-ranked publications in terms of continuation were: (1) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, (2) Open Access Bibliography, and (3) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources.

Annual paperback editions were of interest to 33.5% of respondents (both "agree" categories) for the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography and the 30.1% of respondents for the Open Access Bibliography. The acceptable price range was most frequently between $30 and $50.

Based on this survey and on use data (which does not always correlate well with the survey), I'm making the following changes:

  • Flashback has been discontinued. I'll cover a few of the most interesting items in regular DigitalKoans postings.
  • The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog will be published monthly instead of biweekly.
  • Version two of the Open Access Webliography will be written.
  • A print-on-demand edition of the 2007 annual version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography will be published. (The HTML SEPB version and Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources will continue to be published quarterly and they will continue to be freely available).

I'll take the high level of interest in the Open Access Bibliography under advisement. Like SEPB, the OAB is a major undertaking. It took nine months of more than full-time effort to write a draft for submission and a considerable amount of follow-up time to finalize it for publication.

Finally, a clarification. Some readers apparently assume that the above digital publications have been the result of a team effort. With the exceptions of the Open Access Webliography (which has a co-author), the Open Access Bibliography PDF file, and prior use of UH search engines for SEPB/SEPW, this has never been true. In addition to content creation, I have done all of the related Web and other digital production work myself, including creating and maintaining the Digital Scholarship site.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (9/5/07)

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, technical reports, and white papers.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog will now be published on the first Wednesday of each month unless otherwise noted.

Especially interesting are: "Collaboration: Paradigm of the Digital Cultural Content Environment," "Digital Object Identifiers and Their Use in Libraries," "'Doing Much More Than We Have So Far Attempted'," Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication: Survey Findings from the University of California, Institutional Repositories: Content and Culture in an Open Access Environment, "Online Information Drives Growth," Peer Review: The Challenges for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Unlocking the Potential through Creative Commons: An Industry Engagement and Action Agenda, and "Will Open Access Undermine Peer Review?"

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.

AONS: Scanning Repositories for Obsolete Digital Formats

The APSR AONS II project has released a beta version of the Automatic Obsolescence Notification System (AONS).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement on apsr_announcements:

Users can register with the service by providing a URL to a repository's format scan summary. The AONS service will display the summary and allow a repository manager to compare the formats of items in their repository with information from format registries such as PRONOM and Library of Congress. These registries flag any formats that are likely to become obsolete. Repository managers can then make curation decisions about any items at risk, such as upgrading their formats.

By downloading and installing an AONS locally, an institution can also take advantage of a pilot risk metrics implementation. . . .

The AONS software is the result of the AONS II project funded under APSR and developed by David Pearson, David Levy and Matthew Walker from the National Library of Australia (NLA) with an administrative user interface developed by David Berriman at ANU.

The software is able to be downloaded from Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/aons and a mailing list is also available for support and feedback. As this is a beta release we welcome feedback to the Sourceforge mailing list to inform our testing which will continue until mid-September.

Please try out the pilot service by sending an email to cosi@apsr.edu.au to register with the service, and tell us which institution you are from. . . .

PRISM Controversy Recap

While the Association of American Publishers' Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM) initiative didn't get a warm welcome from library and open access bloggers, it certainly got a heated one.

Peter Suber has pointed out a few of the more incisive responses: "Andrew Leonard on PRISM," "Has PRISM Violated Copyright?," "John Blossom on PRISM," "More Comments on PRISM [1]," "More Comments on PRISM [2]," "More on PRISM [1]," "More on PRISM [2]," "More on PRISM [3]," "More on PRISM [4]," "Much More on PRISM," and "Stevan Harnad on PRISM." As usual, Suber's own analysis is one of the most cogent: "Publishers Launch an Anti-OA Lobbying Organization." Matt Hodgkinson's post, "PRISM Are Scum," offers another link roundup. Rick Anderson, a frequent critic of the open access movement, disclaimed any affiliation with PRISM in a 8/30/07 liblicense-l message after the organization included his "Open Access: Clear Benefits, Hidden Costs" paper in its In the News: Articles page.

Jonathan A. Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Davis, said the following in his "Calling for a Boycott of AAP—Association of American Publishers" posting:

I think academics and the public need to fight back against this attempt to mislead the public about the issues surrounding Open Access publishing. And one way to fight back is to recommend that the members of AAP drop out or request termination of the PRISM effort. So here is a list (see below for the full list) with links of the members of AAP. If you are involved or have connections to any of these groups, consider writing or calling them and suggesting they reconsider involvement in AAP. Look, for example at all the University presses. If they do not back out of PRISM we should consider launching a boycott of AAP members.

So far, no official PRISM response to this tsunami of criticism that I'm aware of.

Last Call for the Digital Scholarship Publications Survey

If you are interested in the continuation of Digital Scholarship publications, such as DigitalKoans/Flashback, the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography/Weblog/Resources, and the Open Access Bibliography/Webliography, please take a short survey on this matter (six multiple-choice questions and two optional questions).

The survey will remain open through August 31, 2007.

What's in Your Wallet? Three Librarian Salary Surveys

Three surveys of librarian salaries have been recently published.

The Association of Research Libraries has published the ARL Annual Salary Survey 2006-07. PDF and Excel versions are freely available.

ALA has published the 2007 editions of the ALA-APA Salary Survey: Librarian—Public and Academic and the ALA-APA Salary Survey: Non-MLS—Public and Academic. Various priced access options are available.

Here's an excerpt from the ALA press release:

Analysis of data from more than 800 public and academic libraries showed the mean salary for librarians with ALA-accredited Master’s Degrees increased 2.8 percent from 2006, up $1,550 to $57,809. The median ALA MLS salary was $53,000. Salaries ranged from $22,048 to $225,000.

For the first time the non-MLS salary survey data, including 62 non-MLS positions, reported salaries for staff employed as librarians but who do not have ALA-accredited Master’s Degrees in Library Science. Non-MLS salaries ranged $10,712 to $143,700.

RIAA v. The People: Four Years Later

With is focus on entertainment, digital audio/video file-sharing would appear to have little to do with digital scholarship; however, file-sharing is the canary in the digital copyright coal mine. Since the financial stakes are high, the legal battle over file-sharing is fierce, and it is where a growing body of digital copyright case law is being written. These rulings are legal precedents that may affect a wider range of digital materials in the future. File-sharing is also where the fate of digital rights management (DRM) is being largely decided, and this could have a major impact on future digital scholarship as well. That’s why I cover file-sharing legal issues in DigitalKoans.

The EFF has issued a new report, RIAA v. The People: Four Years Later, that examines the track record of one of the major legal combatants in the file-sharing war, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Here's a brief excerpt from the report:

Are the lawsuits working? Has the arbitrary singling out of more than 20,000 random American families done any good in restoring public respect for copyright law? Have the lawsuits put the P2P genie back in the bottle or restored the record industry to its 1997 revenues?

After four years of threats and litigation, the answer is a resounding no.