King's College London's Archives and Corporate Records Services and its Centre for eResearch are recruiting a Digital Preservation Archivist.
Here's an excerpt from the ad:
The Digital Preservation Archivist will play a leading role in the JISC-funded PEKin (Preservation Exemplar at King's) project. This exciting new project (a joint venture between ACRS and CeRch) has a high profile across the sector and its findings will impact significantly at King's and beyond.
In "Rip My Book, Please," Andrew Richard Albanese interviews Chris Anderson, Wired editor-in-chief and author of The Long Tail, about free publishing models. Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, is scheduled for publication in July.
Bowker reports that print-on-demand and short-run book titles grew 132% in 2008, and, for the first time, they exceeded traditional book titles.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Based on preliminary figures from U.S. publishers, Bowker is projecting that U.S. title output in 2008 decreased by 3.2%, with 275,232 new titles and editions, down from the 284,370 that were published in 2007.
Despite this decline in traditional book publishing, there was another extraordinary year of growth in the reported number of "On Demand" and short-run books produced in 2008. Bowker projects that 285,394 On Demand books were produced last year, a staggering 132% increase over last year’s final total of 123,276 titles. This is the second consecutive year of triple-digit growth in the On Demand segment, which in 2008 was 462% above levels seen as recently as 2006.
"Our statistics for 2008 benchmark an historic development in the U.S. book publishing industry as we crossed a point last year in which On Demand and short-run books exceeded the number of traditional books entering the marketplace," said Kelly Gallagher, vice president of publisher services for New Providence, N.J.-based Bowker. "It remains to be seen how this trend will unfold in the coming years before we know if we just experienced a watershed year in the book publishing industry, fueled by the changing dynamics of the marketplace and the proliferation of sophisticated publishing technologies, or an anomaly that caused the major industry trade publishers to retrench."
JISC has released the Sound Archives Film Image Repository Project's SAFIR Final Report.
Here's an excerpt:
The SAFIR project has achieved what it set out to do, to begin the task of building a multimedia repository infrastructure for the University of York. The project has successfully implemented software for the storage layer (Fedora Commons), along with an interface (Muradora) and has populated that repository with a pilot collection of images. It has implemented a degree of access control, developed metadata profiles, recommendations, policies, licences and copyright clearance procedures, implemented a basic level of interoperability and gathered knowledge and expertise. SAFIR has been a success although there is much more work ahead at York. There is a balance to be struck between taking time to consult and absorb best practice in order to make the best, sustainable decisions and the pressures of immediate needs and project deadlines. Having a JISC deadline has kept the project focussed and although we have tried to ensure that the right decisions were made, we may have sacrificed "best possible" in order to meet an immediate need, for example in our metadata profile decisions or our use of Muradora as an interface. In choosing open source software, in particular Fedora Commons, our development and implementation path is made longer, but the benefits of increased flexibility, building sustainable in-house skill and working in the wider context were seen to outweigh the benefits offered by a commercial solution. Whether this was the right decision remains to be seen, but the enthusiasm and commitment of the Digital Library team have galvanised around that decision. We have already faced a number of technical delays because of unforeseeable issues with the software and we must continue to ensure that sufficient development time is allocated to tasks. We have significant concerns about the maturity and support of some of the software tested for the project. Managing expectations and working with users is an ongoing process and requires significant attention.
Fred Benenson has released a Creative Commons License Facebook application.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
Last weekend I spent Saturday morning writing the Creative Commons License Application for Facebook. The premise is simple: installing the application allows Facebook users choose and place a CC license badge on their profile page indicating which license they want their content to be available under. Alongside the badge is text that explains what content (Photos, Videos and Status & Profile text are currently available as options) is licensed.
This surrounding text also contains RDFa, though this is of limited utility to search engines since Facebook profiles are not yet publicly indexed.
The University of Washington Faculty Senate has passed a "Resolution Concerning Scholarly Publishing Alternatives and Authors' Rights." (Thanks to Open Access News.)
Here's an excerpt:
BE IT RESOLVED, that
1. the University of Washington prepare for a future in which academic publications are increasingly available through open sources by encouraging faculty members to:
- assess the pricing practices and authors' rights policies of journals with which they collaborate (as authors, reviewers, and editors) and advocate for improvements therein; and
- adopt and use an Addendum to Publication Agreement such as that provided by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) in order to retain their rights to use their work in the classroom and in future publications and to archive final accepted manuscripts; and
- publish scholarly works in moderately priced journals, in journals published by professional societies and associations, or in peer-reviewed "open access" journals; and
- archive their work in the UW's ResearchWorks or other repositories supported by research institutions, professional societies, or government agencies in order to provide the widest and most affordable access to their scholarship; and
2. UW Libraries is encouraged to
- provide relevant, current information regarding journal publishers, pricing, and authors' rights to departments and individual faculty members; and
- maintain and further develop ResearchWorks and related services; and
- allocate personnel to facilitate the deposit of faculty publications in ResearchWorks, and to obtain publishers' permission to deposit previously published works when possible; and
3. the University of Washington administration is encouraged to:
- provide resources to the Libraries and to academic units to foster these efforts; and
- work with departments and colleges to assure that the review process for promotion, tenure and merit takes into consideration these new trends and realities in academic publication.
Patricia Akester's Technological Accommodation of Conflicts between Freedom of Expression and DRM: The First Empirical Assessment is available in the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law repository.
Here's an excerpt from the abstract:
When technological measures were under consideration in the mid 1990s two stark scenarios presented themselves: on the one hand, an ideal world where copyright owners could use DRM to make their works available under a host of different conditions in a way that responded to the diversity of consumer demand; on the other, a more bleak environment where all users of copyright material (and much non-copyright material) would be forced to obtain permission and pay to access material that previously would have been available to all. . . . Patricia Akester examines how these issues are working out in practice. Based on a series of interviews with key organisations and individuals, involved in the use of copyright material and the development and deployment of DRM, she provides a sober assessment of the current state of affairs.
The University of Tennessee has launched its institutional repository using Digital Commons.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
"Trace, the Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange, will promote the visibility and permanence of the UT community's research, scholarship and creative activity," said Barbara Dewey, dean of the UT Libraries.
"Trace will provide global access to UT's scholarly and creative output. The collective excellence of our faculty and students will be highlighted with every click on the website," Dewey said.
Trace content may include technical reports, grant proposals, digital media, campus publications, conference proceedings, extension service publications, and internal archives, as well as scholarly work published in peer-reviewed journals and books when copyright permits. Works deposited receive the same stewardship as other resources in the university's growing digital library. The UT Office of Research, the Science Alliance, and the Office of the Provost are cooperating with UT Libraries to sponsor the repository. The Berkeley Electronic Press Digital Commons platform will host the service for the first three years.
The Center for Social Media at American University has released Remix Culture: Fair Use is Your Friend.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
Last summer the release of the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video nearly crashed our servers with people downloading the document. Based on this demand, we created Remix Culture: Fair Use Is Your Friend is a collaboration with the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property—a program of AU's Washington College of Law—along with Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project. The video was funded by Google.
See also the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video.
Microsoft has released the Research-Output Repository Platform Version 1.0, which is called "Zentity."
Here's an excerpt from the announcement (includes download link):
The platform is based on Microsoft’s technologies (SQL Server 2008 and .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1) hence taking advantage of their robustness, their quality support infrastructure, and the plethora of developer-focused tools and documentation.. . . The platform focuses on the management of academic assets—such as people, books/papers, lectures, presentations, videos, workflows, datasets, and tags — as well as the semantic relationships between them. In this latest release, developers can declaratively (or at runtime) easily introduce their own asset and relationship types. Support for various formats and services such as full-text search, OAI-PMH, RSS and Atom Syndication, BibTeX import and export, SWORD, AtomPub, RDFS, and OAI-ORE are included as part of the distribution.
Scribd has launched the Scribd Store.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
The Scribd Store (www.scribd.com/store) expands Scribd's library of free original documents to include for-purchase works, many of which are new, exclusive or hard-to-find anywhere else on the Internet. In a radical departure from industry norms, the Scribd Store offers a generous revenue sharing agreement that gives sellers 80% of revenue. Prices are set by the seller and currently range from $1 for a graphic novel panel to $5,000 for an in-depth China market research report. Sellers can also choose Scribd's automated pricing option, which generates an optimal price tag based on a cost-sales analysis of similar items in the Scribd Store. . . .
The company will soon launch an iPhone application to give readers and buyers access to documents across multiple platforms; the mobile-optimized version of Scribd.com is already very popular. At launch, the beta version of Scribd Store will be open to buyers and sellers in the United States, with international launches to follow. . . .
With Scribd Store's flexible pricing, publishers have complete control over price and packaging. Sellers can specify selling whole documents, a chapter or an exact selection of pages, or in installments. They can also choose whether to serialize their books for $1.00/chapter; now, instead of having to purchase a country guide travelers can buy a standalone city chapter from Lonely Planet. Documents can be read on Scribd.com, downloaded to a PC, printed, or made accessible through web-enabled mobile phones. . . .
Sellers on Scribd Store must own the digital rights to the works they wish to sell and provide detailed information about their ownership of those works in order to sell their works through Scribd Store. Sellers can also easily manage their digital rights—choosing viewing/reading options such as "View on Scribd only," "Download PDF," "Download PDF with DRM" or "Download ePub with DRM." Sellers have the flexibility to make real-time changes to pricing and preview options for their works at any time.
Read more about it at "Scribd Launches Online Book Market," "Scribd Store a Welcome Addition to Ebook Market (and 650 O'Reilly Titles Included)," and "Site Lets Writers Sell Digital Copies ."
S. A. Jottkandt has self-archived "No-Fee OA Journals in the Humanities, Three Case Studies: A Presentation by Open Humanities Press" in E-LIS.
Here's the abstract:
Open Humanities Press (OHP) is the first open access publisher devoted to contemporary critical theory. OHP was created as a grassroots movement of academics, librarians, journal editors and technology specialists to address the growing inequality of readers' access to critical materials necessary for our research. In this presentation, I offer case studies of journals edited by the founders of the new OA academic journal consortium, Open Humanities Press, as a starting point for a discussion of how professional open access publishing may be achieved without author-side fees (a "business model" that for both practical and cultural reasons is inappropriate in the context of humanities publishing). While reputable open access publishing in the humanities confronts significant challenges, the problem of how to finance it—the problem that is frequently raised as the Gold path's chief obstacle in the sciences—appears far and away the least pressing.
The Gustavus Adolphus College library faculty have adopted an open access pledge. (Thanks to Open Access Archivangelism.)
Here's the pledge:
The Gustavus library faculty believes that open access to scholarship is critical for scholarly communication and for the future of libraries. For that reason we pledge to make our own research freely available whenever possible by seeking publishers that have either adopted open access policies, publish contents online without restriction, and/or allow authors to self-archive their publications on the web. We pledge to link to and/or self-archive our publications to make them freely accessible.
Librarians may submit their work to a publication that does not follow open access principles and will not allow self archiving only if it is clearly the best or only option for publication; however, librarians will actively seek out publishers that allow them to make their research available freely online and, when necessary, will negotiate with publishers to improve publication agreements.
Presentations from the Digital Library Federation Spring Forum 2009 are now available.
Here's a quick selection:
The San Jacinto College Central Campus Library is recruiting a Systems Librarian.
Here's an excerpt from the ad:
Manages the Millennium (III) Integrated Library System. Plans and implements upgrades for the Integrated Library System. Serves as District liaison with Innovative Interfaces Inc. Trains staff at all District libraries for the Millennium System. Assists in developing new electronic resources in close cooperation with the public services librarians in support of public services. Acts as technical contact for electronic database vendors and the TexShare Library Consortium. Manages and updates Library website. Serves as a liaison between the District libraries and Information Technology Services. Some reference duties including library orientations, bibliographic instruction and reference services.
College & Research Libraries has made a preprint of "Leading Change in the System of Scholarly Communication: A Case Study of Engaging Liaison Librarians for Outreach to Faculty" available.
Here's an excerpt:
This narrative, single-case study examines how liaison librarians at the University of Minnesota (UMN) came to include advocating for reform of the scholarly communication system among their core responsibilities. While other libraries may hire a coordinator or rely on a committee to undertake outreach programs, UMN has defined baseline expertise in scholarly communication for all librarians who serve as liaisons to disciplinary faculty members. By “mainstreaming” scholarly communication duties, UMN is declaring these issues central to the profession.1 This intrinsic study uses evidence gathered from open-ended interviews with three participants, supplemented by documentation. It explores the context of these changes, systems thinking, and new mental models.
The University of Ottawa Library is recruiting a Scholarly Communication Librarian.
Here's an excerpt from the ad:
Reporting to the Associate University Librarian (Access), the incumbent will serve the research and scholarly support needs of the faculty and graduate students through the promotion and provision of web-based publishing and repository services. Current digital initiatives include hosting open-access journals and deployment of an institutional repository (UOttawa Research) for E-Theses and other digital scholarly content created by the campus community.
Leonie Hayes, Teula Morgan, and Tom Ruthven have self-archived Research Repository Case Studies in ResearchSpace at the University of Auckland.
Here's an excerpt from the abstract:
A Research Repository Managers Symposium invites managers to submit a "Case Study" outlining the way that their institution has decided to deliver the requirements for ERA—Excellence in Research for Australia and PBRF Performance-Based Research Fund in New Zealand. The symposium session asks authors of the case studies to briefly share their case studies, followed by a guided discussion session determined by participants. The Case Studies will be compiled into a comprehensive document for public distribution via the Educause Australasia 2009 Conference site. . . . The focus of this symposium is how Research Repositories support tertiary institutions in delivering Research Data Collection in Australia and New Zealand.
EPrints Services is sponsoring a Ph.D. scholarship in Digital Rights and Digital Scholarship at the EPSRC Web Science Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Southampton.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
The Web has had a huge impact on society and on the scientific and scholarly communications process. As more attention is paid to new e-research and e-learning methodologies it is time to stand back and investigate how rights and responsibilities are understood when "copying", "publishing" and "syndicating" are fundamental activities of the interconnected digital world.
Applicants with a technical background (a good Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Information Science, Information Technology or similar) are invited for this 4-year research programme, which begins in October 2009 with a 1-year taught MSc in Web Science and is followed by a three year PhD supervised jointly by the School of Law and the School of Electronics and Computer Science. The full four-year scholarships (including stipend) is available to UK residents.
Jennifer L. Marill and Edward C. Luczak have published "Evaluation of Digital Repository Software at the National Library of Medicine" in the latest issue of D-Lib Magazine.
Here's an excerpt:
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Library of Medicine® (NLM) undertook an 18-month project to evaluate, test and recommend digital repository software and systems to support NLM's collection and preservation of a wide variety of digital objects. This article outlines the methodology NLM used to analyze the landscape of repository software and select three systems for in-depth testing. Finally, the article discusses the evaluation results and next steps for NLM. This project followed an earlier NLM working group, which created functional requirements and identified key policy issues for an NLM digital repository to aid in building NLM's collection in the digital environment.
CERN's High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine is no longer available at the CERN site. Hopefully, some institution has archived this born-digital journal, which published a number of open access articles between 2000 and 2006.
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: Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use, "The Economics of Open Access Publishing," "Estimating the Potential Impacts of Open Access to Research Findings," "Fair to Whom?," "Making the Case for an Institutional Repository to Your Provost," Policy-making for Research Data in Repositories: A Guide, "Self-Archiving Journal Articles: A Case Study of Faculty Practice and Missed Opportunity," "The Stratified Economics of Open Access," and "Where There's a Will There's a Way?: Survey of Academic Librarian Attitudes about Open Access."
The Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon has adopted an open access mandate that includes a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States license requirement. (Thanks to Open Access News).
Here's the policy from the announcement:
Resolved, that the UO Romance Languages Faculty adopts the following policy in support of deposit of scholarly works in Scholars' Bank:
The Romance Languages Faculty of the University of Oregon are committed to disseminating the fruits of their research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy:
Every Romance Language tenure-track faculty member is required to self-archive in UO Scholars' Bank a postprint version of every peer-reviewed article or book chapter published while the person is a member of the Romance Languages faculty. The URLs of these postprints will be included in all materials submitted internally to the Romance Languages Department for purposes of review and promotion.
Self-archiving in UO Scholars' Bank means that each Romance Languages faculty member gives to the University of Oregon nonexclusive permission to use and make available that author's scholarly articles for the purpose of open dissemination. Specifically, each Romance Languages faculty member grants to the UO a Creative Commons "Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States" license to each of his or her scholarly articles. The license will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Romance Languages Faculty except for any articles accepted for publication before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy.
The Department of Romance Languages will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author, who informs the Department of the reason.
It is strongly recommended that faculty link publications listed on their Departmental website faculty profile to the corresponding self-archived postprints, and also that they self-archive postprints of articles and book chapters published prior to the adoption of this policy.
To facilitate distribution of the scholarly articles, as of the date of publication, each faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article and full citation at no charge to a designated representative of the UO Libraries in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the Libraries. After publication, the University of Oregon Libraries will make the scholarly article available to the public in the UO's institutional repository.
The Center for History and New Media has released Zotero 2.0. (Note: the Zotero site lists a beta version, 2.0b3.)
Characterized as a "major upgrade" the new release adds new synchronization, personal page, and public/private group features among other new capabilities.
The digital videos for selected Code4Lib 2009 conference presentations are now available (QuickTime format).
