The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Kate Wittenberg, Director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC), will leave that post on June 30. Wittenberg says that she was told that Columbia University plans to shut down its electronic publishing operation.
Read more about it at "Is E-Publishing at Columbia U. on the Ropes?"
Presentations from VALE’s Next Generation Academic Library System Symposium are now available.
The Cornell University Library and Duke University Press have announced that they will collaborate on the future development of Project Euclid.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Effective July 2008, Duke will provide publishing expertise in marketing, sales, and order fulfillment to Project Euclid's participating publishers and institutional subscribers. Duke will work to broaden and deepen Project Euclid's subscriber base, resulting in greater global exposure for 54 journals and a growing number of monographs and conference proceedings. Cornell will continue to provide and support the vital IT infrastructure for Project Euclid and assume responsibility for archiving and preservation activities, ensuring robust and reliable access to the content deposited with Project Euclid for future scholars, researchers, and students.
Now home to 93,000 journal articles (75% of which are open access), along with 60 monographs and conference proceedings, Project Euclid and its partner publishers will benefit from Duke's commitment to Project Euclid's mission and from the Press's publishing proficiency, reputation for quality consciousness, and university-based value system. Duke's recent initiative to expand its journals publishing program into science, technology and medicine further ensures that together the Cornell Library and Duke University Press will achieve Project Euclid's goal to become a primary destination site for mathematicians and statisticians. . . .
This joint venture was undertaken in cooperation with the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations, created by the Association of Research Libraries.
Leadership for Project Euclid will be assumed by management at both Cornell and Duke.
Simon Fraser University Library's Linux-based reSearcher, which is widely used in Canada, is an open source software suite that includes:
EDUCAUSE has released a podcast of an interview with Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information at the CNI Spring 2008 Task Force Meeting. Lynch discusses cyberinfrastructure, the role of universities in disseminating the knowledge they create, and other topics.
The Association of Research Libraries has released an Excel file that contains tables from the ARL Annual Salary Survey 2007-08.
Isilon Systems has announced that its IQ Clustered Storage System will be used to support the Michigan Digitization Project and the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive.
Here's an excerpt from the press release about Michigan:
Isilon Systems . . . today announced that the University of Michigan (U-M) has selected Isilon's IQ clustered storage system as the primary repository for its Michigan Digitization Project. In partnership with Google, the University of Michigan and its Michigan Digitization Project are digitizing more than 7.5 million books, ensuring these valuable resources are available to the public into perpetuity. This enormous undertaking includes the storage of digital copies of all unique books within the libraries of the entire Big-Ten Conference and directly supports Google Book Search, which aims to create a single, comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages. The University of Michigan, in partnership with Indiana University (IU), is leveraging Isilon's IQ clustered storage system to create a Shared Digital Repository (SDR) of the universities' published library materials. Using Isilon IQ, U-M and IU are able consolidate digital copies of millions of books into one, single, shared pool of storage to meet the rapidly growing storage demand of its massive book digitization project. . . .
In conjunction with the Committee for Institutional Cooperation (CIC), an academic partnership formed by the universities of the Big-Ten Conference and the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan and Indiana University are working to create a Shared Digital Repository (SDR) which will mirror the content from U-M and the CIC libraries found in Google Book Search. Using Isilon IQ clustered storage, featuring its OneFS® operating system software, U-M has eliminated disparate data silos to create a shared pool of storage for the digitization efforts of these partner institutions. Each digitized book is approximately 55 MB in size, downloading at a rate of 3 MB/second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the entire six year duration of the project. Isilon IQ reduces storage management time, enabling U-M to accelerate the book scanning process, preserve valuable materials, and ultimately expand the research and learning capabilities for millions of users across the globe.
Here's an excerpt from the press release about Rice:
Isilon . . . today announced that Rice University has selected Isilon's IQ clustered storage system as its central repository for digital multimedia, including video of selected speeches by international dignitaries and musical performances from the Shepherd School of Music. In an effort to preserve the many historic events held at these prestigious venues and ensure the productions are available to the public into perpetuity, Rice has deployed Isilon clustered storage to consolidate hundreds of recorded musical performances and keynote speeches into a single, highly scalable and reliable shared pool of storage for the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive, an institutional repository based on the DSpace software platform. . . .
Through a cooperative effort between Rice University's Digital Library Initiative, Fondren Library and Central IT department, the university has created a central repository for all its critical multi-media content, enabling a variety of departments to execute on vital, content-driven projects simultaneously, activity that was impossible with traditional storage. Prior to using Isilon IQ, Rice's storage management for the Digital Scholarship archiving system was unable to effectively support management of large digital video and audio files that required streaming for delivery. These assets, therefore, were stored on a variety of streaming servers by various groups across campus, creating multiple access bottlenecks that led to inefficient storage management and undue IT cost and complexity. By unifying all of its digital content onto one, easy to use, "pay as you grow" clustered storage system, Rice University has removed costly data access and management barriers and dramatically simplified its storage architecture. Additionally, using Isilon's SmartQuotas provisioning and quota management software application, Rice is also storing its Language Center's multi-media course work and its Central IT department's webcasts on Isilon IQ, delivering immediate, concurrent data access to multiple users and user groups, further reducing storage management costs to maximize system efficiency.
Rice University will stream its collection of musical performances from the Shepherd School, as well as its video library of the many world leaders and dignitaries that have spoken at the Baker Institute, to thousands of users online. This operation necessitates the use of multiple media servers, using Windows, Quicktime and Real Player formats. Isilon clustered storage communicates natively over CIFS, NFS FTP, and HTTP, as well as interoperating with Windows, Mac and Linux environments, enabling seamless integration with Rice's variety of server formats and enabling all content to be streamed from one, central, easily and immediately accessible storage system. With Isilon IQ, Rice's entire collection of multi-media is accessible to all its servers 24x7x365, ensuring that the media streaming operations are not only efficient and cost-effective, but prepared to meet high user demand.
Sunny Yoon, Digital Resources Coordinator at the City University of New York, posted a query on the CODE4LIB list about the use of e-journal publishing software and its integration into institutional repositories.
She has now posted an interesting summary of responses to her query.
You can also read the replies that were posted to the list under the heading "e-journal publishing software."
The RIOJA project has released Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives: Results from an Online Questionnaire Survey.
Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":
The Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives (RIOJA) project (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/rioja) is an international partnership of members of academic staff, librarians and technologists from UCL (University College London), the University of Cambridge, the University of Glasgow, Imperial College London and Cornell University. It aims to address some of the issues around the development and implementation of a new publishing model, that of the overlay journal – defined, for the purposes of the project, as a quality-assured journal whose content is deposited to and resides in one or more open access repositories. The project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) and runs from April 2007 to June 2008.
The RIOJA project will create an interoperability toolkit to enable the overlay of certification onto papers housed in subject repositories. The intention is that the tool will be generic, helping any repository to realise its potential to act as a more complete scholarly resource. The project will also create a demonstrator overlay journal, using the arXiv repository and OJS software, with interaction between the two facilitated by the RIOJA toolkit.
To inform and shape the project, a survey of Astrophysics and Cosmology researchers has been conducted. The findings from that survey form the basis of this report.
The project team will also undertake formal and informal discussion with publishers and with academic and managing members of editorial boards. The survey and supplementary discussions will help to ensure that the RIOJA outputs address the needs and expectations of the research community. Finally, the overall long-term sustainability of a repository-overlay journal will be assessed. The project will examine the costs of adding peer review to arXiv deposits, of implementing and maintaining the functionality which the survey shows to be most valued by researchers, and of providing long-term preservation of content, and will aim to identify and appraise possible cost-recovery business models.
Ten vendors and application developers have agreed to support standard ILS interfaces that will permit integration and interoperability with emerging discovery services. These interfaces will be developed by the Digital Library Federation's ILS-Discovery Interface Committee. The participants are AquaBrowser, BiblioCommons, California Digital Library, Ex Libris, LibLime, OCLC, Polaris Library Systems, SirsiDynix, Talis, and VTLS.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
On March 6, representatives of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), academic libraries, and major library application vendors met in Berkeley, California to discuss a draft recommendation from the DLF for standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. Such standard interfaces will allow libraries to deploy new discovery services to meet ever-growing user expectations in the Web 2.0 era, take full advantage of advanced ILS data management and services, and encourage a strong, innovative community and marketplace in next-generation library management and discovery applications.
At the meeting, participants agreed to support a set of essential functions through open protocols and technologies by deploying specific recommended standards.
These functions are:
- Harvesting. Functions to harvest data records for library collections, both in full, and incrementally based on recent changes. Harvesting options could include either the core bibliographic records, or those records combined with supplementary information (such as holdings or summary circulation data). Both full and differential harvesting options are expected to be supported through an OAI-PMH interface.
- Availability. Real-time querying of the availability of a bibliographic (or circulating) item. This functionality will be implemented through a simple REST interface to be specified by the ILS-DI task group.
- Linking. Linking in a stable manner to any item in an OPAC in a way that allows services to be invoked on it; for example, by a stable link to a page displaying the item's catalog record and providing links for requests for that item. This functionality will be implemented through a URL template defined for the OPAC as specified by the ILS-DI task group.
The Edward G. Miner Library of the University of Rochester Medical Center has a very useful page (Publishers' Policies on the NIH Public Access Policy) that includes excerpts from selected publisher's policies about the NIH Public Access Policy. However, this page does not include the URLs for the policies.
I've identified the URL's (listed below in the same order as in the original document), provided updates where appropriate, and included the publisher's fee-based open access option if available.
Presentations from the JISC/British Library/Digital Preservation Coalition What to Preserve? Significant Properties of Digital Objects Workshop are now available.
BioOne has released its Model Author Agreement. An Informational Sheet is also available.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
BioOne (www.bioone.org) is pleased to announce the release of a model publication agreement that addresses current trends in copyright assignment and requirements by NIH and other funding agencies for digital repository deposits. While the Agreement was developed at the request of several BioOne publishers, it may be of interest to any scholarly publishing organization that is seeking a clear, concise, and legally vetted publication agreement.
In March 2007, the legal firm Morrison & Foerster LLC (www.mofo.com) generously agreed to provide pro bono legal assistance to BioOne in drafting a Model Publication Agreement. Ms. Pamela Pasti, Of Counsel in the Technology Transactions Group of Morrison & Foerster's San Francisco office, was assigned to the project. Over the course of the following year, Ms. Pasti worked with BioOne to review existing publication agreements, notable author's addenda, and articles describing emerging trends in copyright law as it relates to academic publishing.
The resulting agreement allows author(s) to retain copyright, while granting the publisher both a temporally limited and exclusive right to first publish, and a perpetual, non-exclusive right to publish, distribute, and sublicense. In response to NIH's Public Access Policy (passed by Congress in December 2007) and other institutional and subject repository deposit mandates, the Agreement allows authors to deposit their work in digital repositories directly, or permits the publisher to deposit to the National Library of Medicine on their behalf.
In a survey conducted by the British Library, 87% of respondents supported copyright use exceptions and fair use (called fair dealing in UK) for digital materials. (Thanks to the ResourceShelf.)
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
87% of respondents stated they should be able to use exceptions and fair dealing in the digital age. Fair dealing is the 'right' to make a copy from an in-copyright work without permission from, or remuneration to, the rights holder for non-commercial research, private study, criticism, review and news reporting. For example, most individual copying by researchers at university for academic purposes is done under the fair dealing provision in UK law. 68% of the survey respondents are opposed to having different fair dealing laws for material in paper or electronic format. The British Library will be putting these points, on behalf of researchers, to the UK Intellectual Property Office in the current consultation on copyright exceptions. . . .
The British Library's position in the IP debate has been guided by five principles:
1. Public Interest
Public interest policy formation must consider the impact on the creator, the citizen, the economy, the education system and our culture—for today, and for future generations to come.
2. Balance
Creativity, innovation and a democratic civil society requires copyright law to strike a balance between the private interest of the creator being recognised and remunerated for their work, and the interest of the citizen in ensuring access to information and ideas.
3. Digital is Not Different
Copyright law should enshrine the principles of creativity, access, recognition and remuneration as it always has done. Exceptions should apply to all formats including digital formats.
4. Law Aligned with Realities
Rationalisation and simplification of the law will lead to understanding and respect for copyright.
5. Technology Neutral
Copyright law must be informed by technological advances, but must be kept generic as opposed to specific technologies being enshrined in law.
The British Library will be submitting its response to the UK Intellectual Property Office's consultation on copyright exceptions on 8 April 2008.
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.
The University of Oregon Libraries have become the 18th U.S. institution to join the SCOAP3consortium and to commit funds previously used to subscribe to high-energy physics journals to the consortium.
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."
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 are now available.
Here are selected project briefing reports:
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."
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."
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."
Omeka 0.9.1 has been released. This recommended upgrade fixes over 20 bugs. (See "Omeka 0.9.0 Released: Software for Digital Collections and Exhibits" for a description of Omeka.)
Read more about it at "Omeka 0.9.1 Is Available."
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.
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.
