Month: April 2008

ARL Releases "The Audacity of SCOAP3" Preprint

The Association of Research Libraries has released a preprint of Ivy Anderson's article "The Audacity of SCOAP3." Anderson is the Director of Collections, California Digital Library.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

SCOAP3 is a new model for scholarly communication proposed by a community of scientists. Physicists interested in expanding access to their literature have designed a novel approach to garner support from individual libraries, library consortia, research institutions, and even nation states to turn a core set of journals in the high energy physics discipline into open access publications.

The project principals have estimated that the total amount of money currently spent by the library community on these titles worldwide is about $15M US. They estimate that the US commitment to make the publications open access would be $4.5M. The plan involves providing a financial base of support by creating a consortium of institutions that would “redirect” the money they currently pay for subscription access to support open access publication.

On February 29, 2008, the University of California, Berkeley, hosted a meeting for the US community during which the SCOAP3 model was described and organizers reported on financial commitments received to date. Anderson’s essay was inspired largely by the discussions at that meeting.

In her essay, Anderson discusses three key elements that distinguish SCOAP3 from other open access initiatives:

  • SCOAP3 is a funding consortium that seeks to mediate between author and publisher, while still conceiving of payment as a supply-side activity.

  • SCOAP3 is non-disruptive to authors—and to a substantial degree, to publishers and societies.

  • SCOAP3 has the potential to fundamentally alter the role of libraries in the publishing process.

Anderson encourages “everyone interested in the grand experiment of open access [OA] publishing, whether pro or con, [to] sit up and take notice of this audacious new OA accelerator that is SCOAP3.” She also calls for “all libraries who envision a future in which academic libraries assume new roles in building and supporting the research cyberinfrastructure, or who seek to advance the convergence of libraries and academic publishing, [to] join the experiment and boldly accelerate its findings.”

Accompanying Anderson’s essay is a brief article by Julia Blixrud, Assistant Executive Director, External Relations, ARL, and Assistant Director, Public Programs, SPARC, presenting four steps that libraries and consortia can take to move SCOAP3 forward.

See the ARL Web site for the preprint essay by Ivy Anderson, “The Audacity of SCOAP3,” and article by Julia Blixrud, “Taking Action on SCOAP3,” ARL: A Bimonthly Report, no. 257 (April 2008), http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br257.shtml. This issue of the Bimonthly Report will be in print by mid-April.

Slides and videos of the presentations given at the February 29 meeting in Berkeley are available on the SCOAP3 Web site http://www.scoap3.org/focalmeeting.html.

Cultural Industries in Europe Committee Opposes ISP Disconnection of Alleged Infringers

The European Parliament's Cultural Industries in Europe Committee's Cultural industries in the Context of the Lisbon Strategy report now includes a proposed amendment that:

Calls on the Commission and the Member States to recognise that the Internet is a vast platform for cultural expression, access to knowledge, and democratic participation in European creativity, bringing generations together through the information society; calls on the Commission and the Member States, therefore, to avoid adopting measures conflicting with civil liberties and human rights and with the principles of proportionality, effectiveness and dissuasiveness, such as the interruption of Internet access.

This is far cry from an earlier amendment by Chris Heaton-Harris that was pro-blocking, pro-filtering, and pro-disconnection that was voted down by the committee.

Read more about it at "EU Politicians Strikes Back against Three Strikes" and "Sweden Rejects Sarkozy’s War on File Sharing."

Open Repositories 2008 Presentations

Presentations from the Open Repositories 2008 conference are available in the OR08 Publications repository.

The easiest way to find presentations is to use the Browse by Subject capability; however, both simple and advanced search functions are available as well.

Currently, the repository holds over 90 documents. You can track new additions at the Latest Additions to OR08 Publications page (RSS feed). It's anticipated that all documents will be available by 4/13/08.

Here's a brief selection of available presentations:

Project Reports from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's 2008 Research in Information Technology Retreat

Project reports from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's 2008 Research in Information Technology retreat are now available.

Here are selected project briefing reports:

How to Deal with 10 Petabytes of Data a Year? CERN’s New Grid

CERN's new Large Hadron Collider, which will come online this summer, is expected to generate 10 petabytes of data a year: roughly 1% of the world's entire data output. To deal with this data, CERN is using grid technology with a fiber optic network that links 55,000 servers in 11 global data centers at speeds that are 10,000 times faster than a normal broadband connection.

CERN's GridCafè Web site provides a concise, clear, and easily understood introduction to CERN's grid and grid technology in general.

Read more about it at "Coming Soon: Superfast Internet."

William Patry Reviews Three P2P "Making Available" Copyright Infringement Cases

Of late, there has been increased attention by the courts about the legality of having digital music files in P2P software folders where other P2P users could retrieve them.

Noted copyright attorney William Patry has reviewed three cases (Atlantic v. Brennan, Elektra v. Barker, and London-Sire v. Doe) involving this issue in "The Recent Making Available Cases."

ISPs Allow Ad Agencies to Conduct Massive Deep-Packet Inspection of Customers' Internet Traffic

As many as 10% of all U.S. ISP customers may be subject to deep-packet inspection of their Internet traffic. Unnamed ISPs have contracts with ad agencies, such as Front Porch and NebuAd, that permit them to monitor customers' activities. Front Porch can track 100,000 U.S. users and NebuAd can track up to 10% of all U.S. users.

How can ISPs do this? It's because customers agreed to let them monitor their Internet activity by accepting the terms of their ISP's service contract.

Read more about it at "Can an Eavesdropper Protect Your Privacy?," "Every Click You Make: Internet Providers Quietly Test Expanded Tracking of Web Use to Target Advertising," "I.S.P. Tracking: The Mother of All Privacy Battles," and "Web Service Contracts Say ISPs Can Block Sites, Snoop."

Open Access to Knowledge and Information: Scholarly Literature and Digital Library Initiatives—The South Asian Scenario Published

UNESCO has published Open Access to Knowledge and Information: Scholarly Literature and Digital Library Initiatives—The South Asian Scenario.

Here's the abstract from the dLIST record for the book:

The South Asia sub-region is now in the forefront of the Open Access movement within developing countries in the world, with India being the most prominent partner in terms of its successful Open Access and Digital Library initiatives. Institutional and policy frameworks in India also facilitate innovative solutions for increasing international visibility and accessibility of scholarly literature and documentary heritage in this country. This publication has its genesis in the recommendations and proceedings of UNESCO-supported international conferences and workshops including the 4th International Conference of Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL2001, Bangalore); the International Conferences on Digital Libraries (ICDL2004 & ICDL2006, New Delhi); and the International Workshop on Greenstone Digital Library Software (2006, Kozhikode), where many information professionals of this sub-region demonstrated their Digital Library and Open Access initiatives. This book describes successful digital library and open access initiatives in the South Asia sub-region that are available in the forms of open courseware, open access journals, metadata harvesting services, national-level open access repositories and institutional repositories. This book may be considered an authoritative Source-book on Open Access development in this sub-region.

Audiovisual Research Collections and Their Preservation Published

TAPE (Training for Audiovisual Preservation in Europe) has published Audiovisual Research Collections and Their Preservation.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

Digital technology has conquered audiovisual production, post-processing, and archiving. Audio has totally become part of the IT world, and video is about to follow the same way. All dedicated audio formats are dead, and soon the same will be the case for video formats. The pace by which dedicated audio and video formats are becoming obsolete is breathtaking. The problem is not so much the survival of the original documents, but the availability of highly specialised replay equipment which disappears from the market soon after a format has been abandoned commercially. Today audiovisual archives associations estimate the time window still open for the transfer of dedicated analogue and digital carriers into digital repositories to be not more than just 20 years.

PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata, Version 2.0 Released

The PREMIS Editorial Committee has released PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata, Version 2.0. A draft XML schema, which will be reviewed for a month before being released in final form, is also available.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This document is a revision of Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata: Final report of the PREMIS Working Group, issued in May 2005. The PREMIS Data Dictionary and its supporting documentation is a comprehensive, practical resource for implementing preservation metadata in digital archiving systems. Preservation metadata is defined as information that preservation repositories need to know to support digital materials over the long term.

This document is a specification that emphasizes metadata that may be implemented in a wide range of repositories, supported by guidelines for creation, management and use, and oriented toward automated workflows. It is technically neutral in that no assumptions are made about preservation technologies, strategies, syntaxes, or metadata storage and management. Members of the PREMIS Editorial Committee revised the original data dictionary based on comments and experience from implementers and potential implementers since its release. The Editorial Committee kept the preservation community informed about issues being discussed, solicited comments on proposed revisions, and consulted outside experts where appropriate. . . .

Major changes in this revision include:

  • Expanded rights metadata
  • More extensive significant properties and preservation level information
  • Mechanism for extensibility for a number of metadata units

Weblog Reports from Open Repositories 2008

Below are selected Weblog reports from Open Repositories 2008.

ARL Publishes Research Library Publishing Services: New Options for University Publishing

The Association of Research Libraries has published Research Library Publishing Services: New Options for University Publishing by Karla L. Hahn.

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":

To foster a deeper understanding of an emerging research library role as publishing service provider, in late 2007 the Association of Research Libraries surveyed its membership to gather data on the publishing services they were providing. Following the survey, publishing program managers at ten institutions participated in semi-structured interviews to delve more deeply into several aspects of service development: the sources and motivations for service launch, the range of publishing services, and relationships with partners.

The survey verified that research libraries are rapidly developing publishing services. By late 2007, 44% of the 80 responding ARL member libraries reported they were delivering publishing services and another 21% were in the process of planning publishing service development. Only 36% of responding institutions were not active in this arena.

These libraries are publishing many kinds of works, but the main focus is journals; 88% of publishing libraries reported publishing journals compared to 79% who publish conference papers and proceedings, and 71% who publish monographs. Established journal titles dominate this emerging publishing sector and are the main drivers of service development, although new titles are also being produced. Although the numbers of titles reported represent a very thin slice of the scholarly publishing pie, the survey respondents work with 265 titles: 131 are established titles, 81 are new titles, and 53 were under development at the time of the survey. On average, these libraries work with 7 or 8 titles with 6 currently available. . . .

Peer reviewed works dominate library publishing programs and editors or acquisitions committees typically maintain their traditional roles in identifying quality content. Libraries often provide technical support for streamlined peer review workflows, but they are not providing peer review itself. The manuscript handling services provided by some publishing programs were a significant attraction to the editors of established publications.

Library publishing program managers report substantial demand for hosting services. Libraries increasingly are positioned to provide at least basic hosting services. Open source software such as the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems and DPubs along with new commercial services such as those offered by The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) through Digital Commons allows libraries to support basic journal hosting relatively easily.

Advice and consulting regarding a variety of publishing practices and decisions are perhaps even more popular services. There are pressing demands for information and advice about issues such as moving print publications into electronic publishing, discontinuing print in favor of electronic alternatives, publishing works with limited revenue-generating capability, revenue generation, standards of various sorts, markup and encoding, metadata generation, preservation, contracting with service providers, and copyright management.

National Science Digital Library NCore Team Releases NSDL Search, MediaWiki Extensions, and WordPress MU Plug-Ins

The National Science Digital Library NCore team has released three applications:

Creative Commons Gets New Leader and $4 Million Grant

Joi Ito, an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and free culture advocate, has been named CEO of the Creative Commons, replacing Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is leading a new effort, Change Congress. He will serve as a Creative Commons board member.

The organization has received a $4 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ($2.5 million of general funding for five years and $1.5 million to support ccLearn).

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Although I have changed my focus, I’m still very much committed to Creative Commons and the Free Culture cause," Lessig said. "The work I intend to do with Change Congress is in many ways complementary to the work of Creative Commons. Both projects are about putting people in power and enabling them to build a better system. I could not be more pleased to hand off the leadership of Creative Commons to the extraordinarily passionate and qualified Joi Ito."

"Under Larry’s management, Creative Commons has grown from an inspirational idea to an essential part of the technical, social, and legal landscape involving organizations and people in 80 countries," said Ito. "With it, the organization has grown in size and complexity, and I am excited to increase the level of my participation to help manage this amazing group of people. The Hewlett Foundation has been a major supporter of ours from the beginning and we could not be more grateful for their support going forward into the future."

Founding board member and Duke law professor James Boyle will become chair of the board, replacing Ito, who remains on the board. "Jamie has demonstrated his commitment to Creative Commons from its founding," said Lessig. "He led the formation of Science Commons and ccLearn, our divisions focused on scientific research and education respectively. There is no person better suited to lead the Creative Commons board."

Boyle is optimistic about Creative Commons' future. "If one looks at all the amazing material that has been placed under our licenses—from MIT’s Open Courseware and the Public Library of Science to great music, from countless photographs and blogs to open textbooks—one realizes that, under Larry's leadership, the organization has actually helped build a global 'creative commons' in which millions of people around the world participate, either as creators or users. My job will be to use the skills of the remarkable people on our board—including a guy called Larry Lessig, who has promised me he isn’t going away any time soon to make sure that mission continues and expands."

The Hewlett Foundation grant consists of $2.5 million to provide general support to Creative Commons over five years and $1.5 million to support ccLearn, the division of Creative Commons that is focused on open educational resources. "The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been a strong supporter of openness and open educational resources in particular," said Catherine Casserly, the Director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative at Hewlett. "Creative Commons licenses are a critical part of the infrastructure of openness on which those efforts depend." The Hewlett grant was a vital part of a five-year funding plan which also saw promises of support from Omidyar Network, Google, Mozilla, Red Hat, and the Creative Commons board.

Creative Commons also announces two other senior staff changes. Diane Peters joins the organization as General Counsel. Peters arrives from the Mozilla Corporation, serves on the board of the Software Freedom Law Center, and was previously General Counsel for Open Source Development Labs and the Linux Foundation. She has extensive experience collaborating with and advising nonprofit organizations, development communities, and high-tech companies on a variety of matters.

Vice President and General Counsel Virginia Rutledge, who joined Creative Commons last year from Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, will take on a new role as Vice President and Special Counsel. In her new role, Rutledge will focus on development and external relations, while continuing to lead special legal projects.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (4/2/08)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, e-prints, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "Adventures in Open Data," "Architectures for Collaboration: Roles and Expectations for Digital Libraries," "The Australian METS Profile—A Journey about Metadata," "The Fifth Blackbird: Some Thoughts on Economically Sustainable Digital Preservation," "Journals at bepress: New Twists on an Old Model," "Library Access to Scholarship: Harvard & Institutional Repositories," "OPAC Integration in the Era of Mass Digitization: The MBooks Experience," "The Open Access Mandate at Harvard," and "Taking the Plunge: Open Access at the Canadian Journal of Sociology."

Anne Kenney Named Cornell University’s Carl A. Kroch University Librarian

Anne Kenney, Cornell University's interim university librarian since February 2007, has been named the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian of that institution, subject to the approval of the Executive Committee of the Cornell Board of Trustees. Kenney has been an administrator at the Cornell University Library for over 20 years.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"During the course of our search for this pivotal position, it became clear that Anne Kenney's innovative leadership, breadth of knowledge, and national and international reputation make her a superb choice for university librarian," said Cornell Provost Carolyn Martin. "I am pleased that we can continue to benefit from Anne's vision and proven ability to engage the university community as she guides our library system into the future, a future toward which Cornell will continue to lead."

As Cornell university librarian—the chief academic and administrative officer of the university's extensive library system—Kenney will be leading one of the world's largest research libraries, with a total budget of over $50 million, a staff of more than 450 and over 7.5 million volumes. Cornell has 20 constituent libraries located in Ithaca, Geneva (N.Y.), New York City and Doha (Qatar), and it also actively serves scholars around the globe.

"I am honored to be selected as Cornell's 11th university librarian," Kenney said. "Cornell University Library combines international leadership in digital library development with an abiding commitment to traditional scholarly resources. It consistently tops user surveys for the excellence of its services and holdings, ranking as the key campus service by graduating seniors and among the top criteria contributing to faculty work satisfaction. Based on our strengths—first-rate collections, outstanding staff, central campus locations, constituent support—the library is well positioned to address key challenges of the next decade and maintain its preeminent academic place. I can't think of an institution that I would more enjoy leading in this work."

Kenney came to Cornell Library in 1987 and served as associate director for the Department of Preservation and Conservation until 2001. During that time, and from 2002 to 2006 as associate university librarian for instruction, research and information services, she helped spearhead a period of change and growth that has made Cornell Library the envy of its peers for pioneering work in digitization, network access and scholarly publishing. Active in the archival and preservation communities, Kenney is a fellow and past president of the Society of American Archivists. She currently serves on the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Libraries and Archives of Cuba and is a member of Advisory Committee of Portico, a nonprofit digital preservation service. She has served as a commissioner of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (National Archives), the National Science Foundation/European Union Working Group on a Digital Preservation Research Agenda, and was a member of the Clinton/Gore presidential transition team.

Kenney is known internationally for her ground-breaking work in developing standards for digitizing library materials that have been adopted by organizations around the world, including important scholarly archives such as JSTOR. She is the co-author of three award-winning monographs and more than 50 articles and reports. She was the recipient of: Yahoo! en español's award for online "Tutorial de Digitalización de Imágenes" as the best of the year 2002 in the category "Internet y computadoras"; the Society of American Archivists' Best Book Award (Leland Prize) in 1997 and 2000 for books on digital imaging for libraries and archives, and the SAA Preservation Publication Award in 1995 and 2004; and she was the recipient of the 2001 LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology from the American Library Association. More recently, her research in organizational aspects of digital preservation has resulted in publication of influential reports of e-journal archiving and a training program that has had an international impact.

She received her bachelor's degree from Duke University in 1972, a master's degree in history from the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 1975 and a master's degree in library services in 1979 from the University of Missouri-Columbia. An avid hiker, Kenney scaled Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania this past February.

How STM Thinks Orphan Works Searches Should Be Done

In its 2007 "Safe Harbor Provisions for the Use of Orphan Works for Scientific, Technical and Medical Literature" position paper, STM (International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers) outlines how orphan works searches should be conducted.

Here's an excerpt:

The publishers do believe that in virtually all cases searches and reviews must be conducted of these kinds of resources identified generically as:

  • Published indexes of published material relevant for the publication type and subject matter;
  • Indexes and catalogs from library holdings and collections;
  • Sources that identify changes in ownership of publishing houses and publications (see below comment on imprints) including from local reprographic rights organizations;
  • Biographical resources for authors;
  • Searches of recent relevant literature to determine if the citation to the underlying work has been updated by other users or authors;
  • Relevant business or personal directories or search engine searches of businesses or persons; and
  • Sources on the history of relevant publishing houses or scientific, technical or medical disciplines.

In "Orphan Works Legislation: Round Two," Georgia Harper calls this procedure "daunting." She goes on to say:

It was clearly designed with other publishers in mind, given their corporate resources, and their likely intent to profit from the use of the work contributing to their willingness to spend considerable time and money chasing down every rabbit track. This does not seem like a good idea for nonprofit entities making nonprofit uses. As I commented at the time, the proposal suggested that all the rigor of adopting real human orphans should be applied to making even nonprofit uses of abandoned copyrighted works.

Federal Judge Rules That Having Music Files in P2P Folder Violates Distribution Right

In a ruling in the Elektra v. Barker case, United States District Judge Kenneth M. Karas has ruled that having digital music files in a KaZaA shared folder is a violation of copyright holders' distribution rights. EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann said that the ruling was an important precedent.

Read more about it at "New Ruling May 'Grease the Wheels" of RIAA Litigation Machine."

University of California Issues Report on Publishing Needs and Opportunities at the University of California

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that the University of California system has issued a report on Publishing Needs and Opportunities at the University of California. The report, based on interviews with over 100 UC faculty and administrators, was written by Catherine H. Candee, Executive Director of Strategic Publishing and Broadcast Initiatives, and Lynne Withey, Director of the University of California Press. It does not appear to be currently available on the Internet, and the office of the Executive Director of Strategic Publishing and Broadcast Initiatives does not appear to have a Web presence.

The article describing the report, "U. of California Assesses Its Publishing Needs," is restricted to CHE subscribers.

Surprisingly, UC faculty seem to be generally content with their publishing options, whereas administrators are more concerned with the erosion of options, especially for humanists. New digital publishing options are thriving. Candee and Withey are working together to provide a wide range of options for faculty, embracing everything from open access to restricted, subscription-based access models.

Postscript: The report is now available online.