Announcements – Page 7

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (3/7/07)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Assessment of Self-Archiving in Institutional Repositories: Depositorship and Full-Text Availability"; "Datasets, a Shift in the Currency of Scholarly Communication: Implications for Library Collections and Acquisitions"; "Digital Rights Management and the Process of Fair Use"; "Digitization in Australasia"; "Disruptive Technologies: Taking STM Publishing into the Next Era"; "Electronic Thesis Initiative: Pilot Project of McGill University, Montreal"; "Every Library’s Nightmare? Digital Rights Management and Licensed Scholarly Digital Resources"; "The Ides of February in Europe: The European Commission Plan for Open Access"; "Perspectives on Access to Electronic Journals for Long-Term Preservation"; "Preparing Academic Scholarship for an Open Access World"; and "Shifting from Print to Electronic Journals in ARL University Libraries."

For weekly updates about news articles, Weblog postings, and other resources related to digital culture (e.g., copyright, digital privacy, digital rights management, and Net neutrality), digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing, see the latest DigitalKoans Flashback posting.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (2/19/07)

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (2/5/07)

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (1/22/07)

2006 PACS Review Use Statistics

The Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review) was a freely available e-journal, which I founded in 1989. It allowed authors to retain their copyrights, and it had a liberal copyright policy for noncommercial use. It’s last issue was published in 1998.

In 2006, there were 763,228 successful requests for PACS Review files, 2,091 average successful requests per day, 751,264 successful requests for pages, and 2,058 average successful requests for pages per day. (A request is for any type of file; a page request is for a content file, such as an HTML, PDF, or Word file). These requests came from 41,865 distinct host computers.

The requests came from 134 Internet domains. Leaving aside requests from unresolved numerical addresses, the top 15 domains were: .com (Commercial), .net (Networks), .edu (USA Higher Education), .cz (Czech Republic), .jp (Japan), .ca (Canada), .uk (United Kingdom), .au (Australia), .de (Germany), .nl (Netherlands), .org (Non Profit Making Organizations), .in (India), .my (Malaysia), .it (Italy), and .mx (Mexico). At the bottom were domains such as .ms (Montserrat), .fm (Micronesia), .nu (Niue), .ad (Andorra), and .az (Azerbaijan).

Rounded to the nearest thousand, there had previously been 3.5 million successful requests for PACS Review files.

This is the last time that use statistics will be reported for the PACS Review.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (1/8/07)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Eliminating E-Reserves: One Library’s Experience," "Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s Critique of Google: Private Sector Book Digitization and Digital Library Policy," "Open Access in 2006," Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Final Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences, "The Research University and Scholarly Publishing: The View from a Provost’s Office," "Self-Archiving and the Copyright Transfer Agreements of ISI-ranked Library and Information Science Journals," "Using the Audit Checklist for the Certification of a Trusted Digital Repository as a Framework for Evaluating Repository Software Applications," and "Why Digital Asset Management? A Case Study."

That’s All Folks (for This Year)

This year’s been a total bummer. Hopefully 2007 will be better.

Blogging resumes the week of 1/8/07.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (12/18/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: The Complete Copyright Liability Handbook for Librarians and Educators, "Copyright Concerns in Online Education: What Students Need to Know," Digital Archiving: From Fragmentation to Collaboration, "Fixing Fair Use," "Mass Digitization of Books," MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, "Open Access: Why Should We Have It?," "Predictions for 2007," "Readers’ Attitudes to Self-Archiving in the UK," "The Rejection of D-Space: Selecting Theses Database Software at the University of Calgary Archives," "Taming the Digital Beast," and Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice.

The SEPW URL has changed. Use:

http://sepw.digital-scholarship.org/

or http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepw/sepw.htm

There is a mirror site at:

http://www.digital-scholarship.com/sepb/sepw/sepw.htm

The RSS feed is unaffected.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (11/20/06)

QuickTime Videos and PowerPoints from the Transforming Scholarly Communication Symposium

When I was chairing the Scholarly Communications Public Relations Task Force at the UH Libraries, the task force initiated a series of projects to increase awareness of key issues on the UH campus under the name "Transforming Scholarly Communication": a Website, a Weblog, and a symposium.

I’m pleased to announce that both the PowerPoint presentations and the QuickTime videos of the symposium speeches are now available. Thanks again to our speaker panel for participating in this event.

Ray English, Director of Libraries at Oberlin College and Chair of the SPARC Steering Committee, kicked things off with a talk on "The Crisis in Scholarly Communication" (PowerPoint, QuickTime Video, and "Sites and Cites for the Struggle: A Selective Scholarly Communication Bibliography").

Next, Corynne McSherry, Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of Who Owns Academic Work?: Battling for Control of Intellectual Property, spoke on "Copyright in Cyberspace: Defending Fair Use" (PowerPoint and QuickTime Video).

Finally, Peter Suber, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Senior Researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and the Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge, discussed "What Is Open Access?" (PowerPoint and QuickTime Video).

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (11/6/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Building an Information Infrastructure in the UK," "Considering a Marketing and Communications Approach for an Institutional Repository," "Creative Commons Licences in Higher and Further Education: Do We Care?," "Examining the Claims of Google Scholar as a Serious Information Source," "Fedora and the Preservation of University Records Project," "The Mandates of October," "The Need to Archive Blog Content," "No-Fee Open-Access Journals," "Risk Assessment and Copyright in Digital Libraries," and To Stand the Test of Time: Long-Term Stewardship of Digital Data Sets in Science and Engineering.

Code for My OA Google Custom Search Engines

For those who might be interested in including one of my Google Custom Search Engines in their Web pages, see "Code for Bailey’s Google Search Engines"

New OA Google Custom Search Engines

I’ve enhanced Open Access Update with four new Google Custom Search Engines:

Open Access Mailing Lists (these are lists that have general discussion of OA topics)
Open Access Serials
Open Access Weblogs
Open Access Wikis

The indexed works contain significant information about open access topics and are freely available.

See Open Access Update for details about the included works.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (10/23/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Copyright Jungle," "Disruptive Beneficence: The Google Print Program and the Future of Libraries," "DLF-Aquifer Asset Actions Experiment: Demonstrating Value of Actionable URLs," "Ideas on Creating a Consumer Market for Scholarly Journals," "An Interoperable Fabric for Scholarly Value Chains," IWAW’ 06: Proceeding of the 6th International Web Archiving Workshop, "Moving into the Digital Age: A Conceptual Model for a Publications Repository," "The Publishing Imperative: The Pervasive Influence of Publication Metrics," and "Strategies and Frameworks for Institutional Repositories and the New Support Infrastructure for Scholarly Communications."

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update ( 10/9/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "As We May Read," "CDSware (CERN Document Server Software)," "Delay between Online and Offline Issue of Journals: A Critical Analysis," Fedora and the Preservation of University Records, Final Project Report to Atlantic Philanthropies: Creating an Open Access Paradigm for Scholarly Publishing, "InCommon: Watch This Space!," "Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects on Libraries and Information Policy," "OA Wrap-up on the Last Congress," "Open Access and Quality," Research Communication Costs in Australia: Emerging Opportunities and Benefits, and UK Scholarly Journals: 2006 Baseline Report: An Evidence-Based Analysis of Data Concerning Scholarly Journal Publishing.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (9/25/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Books without Boundaries: A Brief Tour of the System-Wide Print Book Collection"; The Complete Copyright Liability Handbook for Librarians and Educators; Digital Preservation; "Effect of E-Printing on Citation Rates in Astronomy and Physics"; Evaluating DRM: Building a Marketplace for the Convergent World; "Integration and Collaboration within Recently Established Australian Scholarly Publishing Initiatives"; "Nine Questions for Hybrid Journal Programs"; "Open Access Perspective Part I: Pioneer Journals: The Arc of Enthusiasm, Five Years Later"; "Open Access Perspective, Part II: Pioneer OA Journals: Preliminary Additions from DOAJ"; "Publishing Cooperatives: An Alternative for Non-Profit Publishers"; "Repository Librarian and the Next Crusade: The Search for a Common Standard for Digital Repository Metadata"; and Technical Evaluation of Selected Open Source Repository Solutions

Open Access Update Web Page: New Aggregate Feed

The Blogdigger feed was not updating properly, and it has been deleted.

I’ve created a MySyndicaat Feedbot feed to replace it. The aggregate feed provides recent postings for the current week for selected Weblogs and other sources (currently 14 sources). The Open Access Update page’s feed has been switched to the MySyndicaat feed and the number of possible postings increased to 50. The MySyndicaat Feedbot Web page is now available as well.

Although the MySyndicaat Feedbot is set to the shortest update cycle, keep in mind that there are bound to be some feed update delays.

Open Access Update Web Page

Building on an earlier effort by Lesley Perkins, I’ve created a new Blogdigger aggregate feed for open access Weblogs that includes a wider selection of Weblogs. I’ve also created an Open Access Update Web page that presents the latest 30 headlines from the aggregate feed and provides links to OA-related mailing list archives, Peter Suber’s OA overview, OA-related journals, and OA-related Wikis.

Postscript: There were technical problems with updating the Blogdigger feed, and it has been deleted. See: "Open Access Update Web Page: New Aggregate Feed."

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (8/25/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "The Acquisition of Open Access Research Articles"; "The Economics of Open Access Publishing"; Institutional Repositories SPEC Kit 292; "Let’s Get it Started!"; Lifecycle Information for E-Literature: A Summary from the LIFE Project Report Produced for the LIFE Conference 20 April 2006, Report of the Task Force on Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics; "Unlocking Scholarly Access: ETDs, Institutional Repositories and Creators: Highlights of ETD 2006, the 9th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations"; and "What Deep Log Analysis Tells Us about the Impact of Big Deals: Case Study OhioLINK."

ARL Institutional Repositories SPEC Kit

The Institutional Repositories SPEC Kit is now available from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). This document presents the results of a thirty-eight-question survey of 123 ARL members in early 2006 about their institutional repositories practices and plans. The survey response rate was 71% (87 out of 123 ARL members responded). The front matter and nine-page Executive Summary are freely available. The document also presents detailed question-by-question results, a list of respondent institutions, representative documents from institutions, and a bibliography. It is 176 pages long.

Here is the bibliographic information: University of Houston Libraries Institutional Repository Task Force. Institutional Repositories. SPEC Kit 292. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 2006. ISBN: 1-59407-708-8.

The members of the University of Houston Libraries Institutional Repository Task Force who authored the document were Charles W. Bailey, Jr. (Chair); Karen Coombs; Jill Emery (now at UT Austin); Anne Mitchell; Chris Morris; Spencer Simons; and Robert Wright.

The creation of a SPEC Kit is a highly collaborative process. SPEC Kit Editor Lee Anne George and other ARL staff worked with the authors to refine the survey questions, mounted the Web survey, analyzed the data in SPSS, created a preliminary summary of survey question responses, and edited and formatted the final document. Given the amount of data that the survey generated, this was no small task. The authors would like to thank the ARL team for their hard work on the SPEC Kit.

Although the Executive Summary is much longer than the typical one (over 5,100 words vs. about 1,500 words), it should not be mistaken for a highly analytic research article. Its goal was to try to describe the survey’s main findings, which was quite challenging given the amount of survey data available. The full data is available in the "Survey Questions and Responses" section of the SPEC Kit.

Here are some quick survey results:

Thirty-seven ARL institutions (43% of respondents) had an operational IR (we called these respondents implementers), 31 (35%) were planning one by 2007, and 19 (22%) had no IR plans.
Looked at from the perspective of all 123 ARL members, 30% had an operational IR and, by 2007, that figure may reach 55%.
The mean cost of IR implementation was $182,550.
The mean annual IR operation cost was $113,543.
Most implementers did not have a dedicated budget for either start-up costs (56%) or ongoing operations (52%).
The vast majority of implementers identified first-level IR support units that had a library reporting line vs. one that had a campus IT or other campus unit reporting line.
DSpace was by far the most commonly used system: 20 implementers used it exclusively and 3 used it in combination with other systems.
Proquest DigitalCommons (or the Bepress software it is based on) was the second choice of implementers: 7 implementers used this system.
While 28% of implementers have made no IR software modifications to enhance its functionality, 22% have made frequent changes to do so and 17% have made major modifications to the software.
Only 41% of implementers had no review of deposited documents. While review by designated departmental or unit officials was the most common method (35%), IR staff reviewed documents 21% of the time.
In a check all that apply question, 60% of implementers said that IR staff entered simple metadata for authorized users and 57% said that they enhanced such data. Thirty-one percent said that they cataloged IR materials completely using local standards.
In another check all that apply question, implementers clearly indicated that IR and library staff use a variety of strategies to recruit content: 83% made presentations to faculty and others, 78% identified and encouraged likely depositors, 78% had library subject specialists act as advocates, 64% offered to deposit materials for authors, and 50% offered to digitize materials and deposit them.
The most common digital preservation arrangement for implementers (47%) was to accept any file type, but only preserve specified file types using data migration and other techniques. The next most common arrangement (26%) was to accept and preserve any file type.
The mean number of digital objects in implementers’ IRs was 3,844.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (8/14/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Augmenting Interoperability Across Scholarly Repositories," "The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material in the Digital Age," "Digital Preservation in the Context of Institutional Repositories," The Economic Impact of Enhanced Access to Research Findings, "The Movement for Open Access Law," "The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Policy on Enhancing Public Access: Tracking Institutional Contribution Rates," "Open Access: Implications for Scholarly Publishing and Medical Libraries," "Repositories for Research: Southampton’s Evolving Role in the Knowledge Cycle," and "Using OAI-PMH and METS for Exporting Metadata and Digital Objects between Repositories."

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (7/31/06)

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (7/17/06)

Especially interesting are: "The CARL Institutional Repositories Project: A Collaborative Approach to Addressing the Challenges of IRs in Canada"; "Distributed Preservation in a National Context NDIIPP at Mid-Point"; Factors Affecting Science Communication: A Survey of Scientists and Engineers; "Google Scholar and 100 Percent Availability of Information"; "Institutional Repositories: Review and an Information Systems Perspective"; "Institutional Strategies and Policies for Electronic Theses and Dissertations"; Mass Digitization: Implications for Information Policy; "Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality"; "Open Access in the United States"; Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects; "An Overview of Portico: An Electronic Archiving Service"; "Three Options for Citation Tracking: Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science"; and "University of Waterloo Electronic Theses: Issues and Partnerships."

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (6/19/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Certification in a Digital Era," "Digital Rights Management": Report of an Inquiry by the All Party Internet Group, "Fair Use in Theory and Practice: Reflections on Its History and the Google Case," "Investigating the ‘Public’ in the Public Library of Science: Gifting Economics in the Internet Community," Linking UK Pepositories: Technical and Organisational Models to Support User-Oriented Services across Institutional and Other Digital Repositories, "Managing Risk and Opportunity in Creative Commons Enterprises," "Reviving a Culture of Scientific Debate," and "Strategies for Developing Sustainable Open Access Scholarly Journals."

dLIST Information Sciences Digital Archive Announces New Editors

From the press release:

We are pleased to announce the dynamic new team of editors for dLIST, the Digital Library of Information Science & Technology. These Information/Library & Information Science faculty and librarians will be
responsible for specific subjects.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Asst. Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development, University of Houston Libraries, Houston

Anita Coleman, Asst. Prof., University of Arizona, Tucson

Marija Dalbello, Assoc. Prof., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick

Fernando Elichirigoity, Asst. Prof., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Kristin R. Eschenfelder, Assoc. Prof., University of Wisconsin at Madison

Cheryl Knott Malone, Assoc. Prof., University of Arizona, Tucson

Paul Marty, Asst. Prof., Florida State University, Tallahassee

Michael May, Adult Services Librarian, Carnegie-Stout Public Library, Dubuque

Soo Young Rieh, Asst. Professor, University of Michigan

dLIST is a cross-institutional, subject-based, open access digital archive for the Information Sciences, including Archives and Records Management, Library and Information Science, Information Systems, Museum Informatics, and other critical information infrastructures. The dLIST vision is to serve as a trusted archive and source for scholarly communication in the Information Sciences, broadly understood. dLIST seeks to positively impact and shape scholarly communication in our closely related fields. Editors represent diverse sub-disciplinary communities and work closely with scholars in different fields such as Digital Humanities and Digital Libraries (Marija Dalbello), Government Information and Social Informatics (Kristin Eschenfelder), Information Behaviors (Soo Young Rieh), Museum Informatics (Paul Marty), Scholarly Communication (Charles Bailey), Science Technology Studies (Fernando Elichirigoity), and Classics (Michael May). More information about each of the dLIST editors is available at http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/editors.html.

The new team invites you to self-register, self-archive and explore the many unique features of dLIST.

Some dLIST features are:

DL-Harvest, an open access aggregator, which brings together materials from 14 global and open access archives in the Information Sciences for meta-searching and access to the full-text.

Detailed Usage Statistics, provide usage statistics of each item in dLIST .

RSS feeds and subscription alerts for items deposited in dLIST are available both by individual subjects (example: Academic Libraries) as well as the entire archive and anybody can be alerted automatically and quickly about new dLIST works.

A streamlined new web-based submission interface that lets authors upload and deposit their works easily.

Software patches and modifications (useful to Eprints archive maintainers) by Joseph Roback.

dLIST Classics is a new project that will be making fundamental and leading Library and Information Science texts openly accessible in dLIST.

For more information about dLIST and to self-register please visit http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/ or email dlist at u dot arizona dot edu.

dLIST, Digital Library of Information Science & Technology
Email: dlist at u dot arizona dot edu
Contact: Garry Forger, Learning Technologies at the University of Arizona

Anita Coleman