The University of Michigan Law Library is recruiting a Systems Librarian. Salary: $49,000 minimum.
Here's an excerpt from the ad:
The Systems Librarian, as a member of the Electronic & Systems Services Unit, cross-departmental work groups, and committees, is responsible for setting and achieving long range plans and short term goals in conjunction with library wide goals. The Systems Librarian works under the supervision of the Head of Electronic & Systems Services.
ARL has released Proceedings of the 157th ARL Membership Meeting.
Here's a brief selection of presentations:
The Georgetown University Law Library is recruiting a Server and Systems Coordinator.
Here's an excerpt from the ad:
Coordinates application development for the Electronic Resources & Services section of the library, including support to create and manage web-based applications delivering library content and services.
Collaborates with the Law Center Information Systems Technology Department on server management, security and authentication issues, including:
- Upgrades, patches, replacement, FTP software and accounts;
- Analysis of statistics and server logs;
- Security configurations for library servers;
- Authentication for electronic subscriptions, the Law Library's intranet, and other electronic resources; and
- Permissions for server software programs and applications.
Research Libraries UK has issued a press release about needed serials price reductions.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
At its recent conference, RLUK announced it would not support future journal big deals unless they showed real price reductions. With a cut to the teaching grant and research budgets flat at best, RLUK members believe that unless this happens they will be forced to cancel significant numbers of subscriptions which will fatally compromise the UK's capacity for research.
For the past several years JISC Collections have negotiated with the publishers on behalf of UKHE. RLUK is so worried about the current situation that it has instructed JISC Collections to secure contracts which will not only rescind the unreasonable price rises of the last three years, but also offer affordable deals for the future. If reasonable deals cannot be struck RLUK libraries will be forced to provide information resources to their researchers and students in other ways.
"The capacity of UK universities to continue to pay such large year-on-year increases for access to scholarly journals is not infinite," said Professor Michael Arthur, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds and Chair of the Russell Group of Universities. "To ensure the continued vitality of the UK's world-beating research base we need to reassess the costs of electronic access and find a new balance between the value added by publishers and the charges they make. We realise that finding such a balance may not be easy, but if we fail to address the problem now there will be serious long-term consequences for research and teaching in the UK."
"The UK Higher Education sector now spends almost £200m per year on access to journals and databases," explained David Prosser, RLUK's Executive Director. "This is 10% of the total QR funding the sector receives and increases above inflation each year. We understand the value publishers add to the publication process, but publishers must also understand that they cannot continue to increase prices at a time when budgets are so tight. We do not wish to cancel big deals, but we shall have no alternative unless the largest publishers substantially reduce their prices."
"Some RLUK members now pay over £1m a year to access journals from the largest publisher," said Phil Sykes, Chair of RLUK and Librarian at Liverpool University. "With annual journal price inflation running at double the rate of RPI since 2000, it has distorted the acquisition policies of libraries, with an ever-increasing proportion of budgets being spent on electronic big deals. This leads to diminishing funds for monographs, textbooks, and journals from smaller publishers, which cannot but damage scholarship and teaching in UKHE."
David E. Millard et al. have self-archived "MePrints: Building User Centred Repositories" in the ECS EPrints Repository.
Here's an excerpt:
Teaching and Learning Repositories learning from the best practices of Web 2.0. Over this time we have successfully deployed a number of innovative repositories, including Southampton University EdShare, The Language Box, The HumBox, Open University’s LORO and Worcester Learning Box. A key part of this work has been the development of an extension for the EPrints repository platform, called MePrints, that enables configurable profile pages, and works alongside existing extensions such as IRStats and SNEEP in order to give users live feeds about repository events that matter to them. Through these deployments we have discovered that more sophisticated profile pages give users a home within a repository, act as a focus for their work, and help them feel more ownership of the work that they deposit. This increases the visibility of the repository and encourages more deposits.
The University of Houston Libraries are recruiting a Head of Electronic Resources. Salary: $64,000 to $68,000 anticipated hiring range.
Here's an excerpt from the ad:
The Head of Electronic Resources will lead and manage a newly formulated department. Reporting to the Associate Dean for Access and Technical Services, this position is responsible for deploying and ensuring access to a wide range of electronic resources. The position will initially supervise one librarian and one staff member. Responsibilities include oversight of electronic resource management and discovery tools, and troubleshooting electronic resource access issues in conjunction with Acquisitions, Cataloging, Web Services and Systems departments. This position participates in the evaluation of electronic resources as a member of the Collection Management Committee.
The Research Information Network has released E-Only Scholarly Journals: Overcoming the Barriers.
Here's an excerpt:
This study is prompted by a concern from publishers and librarians that the retention of both printed and e-journal formats adds unnecessary costs throughout the supply chain from publisher to library to user. In view of the many advantages of electronic journals, this report sets out to understand the barriers to a move to e-only provision of scholarly journals in the UK, and to investigate what various players within the scholarly communications system could do in order to encourage such a move.
This study involved a thorough literature review, gathering and analysing information provided by publishers and librarians, and interviews with a range of publishers, librarians and academics. The results are presented in this report, along with some recommendations for action.
Version five of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship as an XHTML website with live links to many included works. This selective bibliography includes articles, books, conference papers, technical reports, unpublished e-prints and other scholarly textual sources that are useful in understanding electronic theses and dissertations. The bibliography does not cover digital media works (such as MP3 files), editorials, e-mail messages, interviews, letters to the editor, news articles, presentation slides or transcripts, or weblog postings. All included works are in English. It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
The following recent Digital Scholarship publications may also be of interest:
See also: Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications.
ARL has released the Guide for Research Libraries: The NSF Data Sharing Policy.
Here's an excerpt:
The Association for Research Libraries has developed this guide primarily for librarians, to help them make sense of the new NSF requirement. It provides the context for, and an explanation of, the policy change and its ramifications for the grant-writing process. It investigates the role of libraries in data management planning, offering guidance in helping researchers meet the NSF requirement. In addition, the guide provides a resources page, where examples of responses from ARL libraries may be found, as well as guides for data management planning created by various NSF directorates and approaches to the topic created by international data archive and curation centers.
A Google Custom Search Engine has been added to the XHTML version of Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography.
In related news, Amazon is now offering the paperback version of Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography at the discount price of $11.48.
In case you missed the tweets, here are jobs from 10/28/10-11/28/10 during the DigitalKoans blog hiatus.
Gary Ward has been named Chairman of the Public Library of Science.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
We're delighted to announce that the PLoS board of directors has appointed Gary Ward as board chairman, effective January 1, 2011. Gary has a longstanding association with PLoS as a charter member of the PLoS Biology Editorial Board, has a deep understanding of Open Access and a strong devotion to its widespread adoption.
Gary received his PhD from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and did post doc work at UC San Francisco with Marc Kirschner. He was a Senior Staff Fellow at the NIH’s Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases, and Treasurer and Member of the Executive Committee of the American Society for Cell Biology. He is currently Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Vermont.
Gary’s Open Access credentials are as impressive as his scholarly credentials: he is Chair (through year-end) of the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central National Advisory Committee, a past member of the NLM Public Access Working Group, and member of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Open Access working group.
On November 15, 2010, the Harvard Divinity School adopted an open access policy. Five other Harvard units have an open access policy: the Business School, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School of Education, the Kennedy School of Government, and the Law School.
Here's an excerpt:
The Faculty of the Harvard Divinity School is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. More specifically, each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy applies to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed 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 Dean or Dean's designate will waive application of the license for a particular article or delay access for a specified period of time upon express direction by a Faculty member.
Each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the author's final version of each article no later than the date of its publication at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost's Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost's Office. The Provost's Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.
The National Archives and Records Administration has joined the Association of Research Libraries.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
At its 2010 Fall Membership Meeting held October 13-14, 2010, in Washington, DC, the membership of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) voted to invite the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to join as its 126th member. David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, accepted the invitation.
"The National Archives is delighted to become a member of ARL," said Ferriero. "This is a very exciting time for libraries and archives. Information policy is a burgeoning field with a myriad of opportunities. Becoming a member of ARL will offer the National Archives, which is the largest archives in the United States, an opportunity to share our expertise and experience in archives and records management with our new colleagues. We also look forward to learning new ideas and fresh approaches to the challenges that we all face."
The vote of membership followed a process that considered both qualitative and quantitative documentation and involved a site visit by members of the ARL Membership Committee. The review also examined the unique breadth and depth of NARA’s collections, services to the public and research community, and potential contributions to research and scholarship. The review committee noted in particular NARA’s leadership in records and archival management activities, an area of increasingly strategic importance for research libraries.
The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available. It provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, e-prints, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.
An institutional repository is a digital repository specific to a single institution that contains diverse types of digital works that deal with the disciplines associated with that institution.
Version three of the Institutional Repository Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship as an XHTML website with live links to many included works. It primarily includes published articles, books, and technical reports. A limited number of conference papers and unpublished e-prints are also included. All included works are in English. It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
The bibliography has the following sections (all sections have been updated):
1 General
2 Country and Regional Institutional Repository Surveys
3 Multiple-Institution Repositories
4 Specific Institutional Repositories
5 Institutional Repository Digital Preservation Issues
6 Institutional Repository Library Issues
7 Institutional Repository Metadata Issues
8 Institutional Repository Open Access Policies
9 Institutional Repository R&D Projects
10 Institutional Repository Research Studies
11 Institutional Repository Software
12 Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Institutional Repositories
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
The following recent Digital Scholarship publication may also be of interest:
See also: Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications.
In "Thanks but No Thanks Emerald," Kristin Eschenfelder reproduces and discusses a letter that she received from the Emerald Group Publishing Limited. In short, this letter says that Emerald is expanding it's use of Attributor to detect copyright violations from "cyberlockers" to "the full breadth of the internet," and it requests the URLs for her personal, institutional, and corporate websites so that they can be excluded from Attributor searches and its "legally-binding takedown notices."
Will this expanded use of Attributor affect self-archiving of articles from Emerald journals?
Emerald's publication policies are detailed in its Authors' Charter and its Review Copyright Assignment Form. Emerald requires that authors assign their article copyrights to Emerald as a condition of publication.
The Authors' Charter states that (I have added italics in certain places in the below quotes):
Authors are not required to seek Emerald's permission to re-use their own work. As an author with Emerald you can use your paper in part or in full, including figures and tables if you want to do so in a book, in another article written for us or another publisher, on your website, or any other use, without asking us first.
It further states that:
It does NOT, in any way, restrict your right or academic freedom to contribute to the wider distribution and readership of your work. This includes the right to: . . . .
2. Reproduce your own version of your article, including peer review/editorial changes, in another journal, as content in a book of which you are the author, in a thesis, dissertation or in any other record of study, in print or electronic format as required by your university or for your own career development.
3. Deposit an electronic copy of your own final version of your article, pre- or post-print, on your own or institutional website. The electronic copy cannot be deposited at the stage of acceptance by the Editor.
Authors are requested to cite the original publication source of their work and link to the published version — but are NOT required to seek Emerald's permission with regard to the personal re-use of their work as described above. Emerald never charges its authors for re-use of any of their own published works. Emerald does not allow systematic archiving of works by third parties into an institutional or subject repository.
The Review Copyright Assignment Form says:
This assignment of copyright to Emerald Group Publishing Limited is done so on the understanding that permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited is not required for me/us to reproduce, republish or distribute copies of the Work in whole or in part.
Given the above, it would appear that the author can: (1) self-archive an article on his or her personal website, (2) self-archive an article in his or her institutional repository, and (3) self-archive an article in a subject archive (the restriction is for “systematic archiving of works by third parties,” not self-archiving). Institutional repository staff or subject repository staff cannot archive articles for authors.
If this is not correct, it would be helpful to hear from Emerald what its interpretation of these documents is.
Unlike the RIAA and the MPAA, scholarly journal publishers have a limited primary customer base—academic libraries. Moreover, academic librarians are authors as well as customers, and, for some publishers, they are a significant subset of their authors. The endless serials crisis has already seriously strained relations between academic librarians and publishers. Hopefully, scholarly journal publishers will be sensible and sensitive to customer concerns in their attempts to cope with difficult digital copyright issues.
[See Emerald's reply in the comments.]
