In a brief, Google has asked the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the class certification decision by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in The Authors Guild et al. v. Google Inc. case.
Here's the brief.
Read more about it at "Google Asks Court to Ax Book-Scanning Suit from Authors Guild."
| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |
The Authors Guild is appealing the Authors Guild, Inc. et al. v. HathiTrust et al. ruling.
Here's an excerpt from the "LCA Issues Statement on Authors Guild's Appeal of HathiTrust Decision":
We are deeply disappointed by the Authors Guild's decision to appeal Judge Baer's landmark opinion acknowledging the legality, and the extraordinary social value, of the HathiTrust Digital Library. Libraries have a moral and a legal obligation to provide the broadest possible access to knowledge for all of our users, and the HathiTrust and its partners have assembled an invaluable digital resource that will ensure for the first time that library print collections can be made available on equitable terms to our print-disabled users. The database also facilitates preservation and cutting-edge scholarship, all with no harm to authors or publishers. As we predicted, Judge Baer did not look kindly on the Guild's shortsighted and ill-conceived lawsuit, saying, "I cannot imagine a definition of fair use that . . . would require that I terminate this invaluable contribution to the progress of science and cultivation of the arts that at the same time effectuates the ideals espoused by the ADA." If there is an upside to this misguided appeal, it is that the Second Circuit will now have the opportunity to affirm that powerful insight.
Read more about it at "Google Scanning Is Fair Use Says Judge" and "Unintended Consequences in the HathiTrust Case"
| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |
The Research Councils UK has announced its open access funding plan.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Research Councils UK has today, 8th November, announced the details of the block grant funding mechanism that it is introducing to aid implementation of its policy on Open Access that was announced in July and is due to come into effect in April 2013. . . .
In the first year (2013/14), RCUK will provide funding to enable around 45% of Research Council funded research papers to be published using Gold Open Access growing to over 50% in the second year. By the fifth year (2017/18) funding is expected to be provided to enable approximately 75% of Research Council funded research papers to be published using Gold Open Access. The remaining 25% of Research Council funded papers, it is expected will be delivered via the Green Open Access model. The same compliance expectation applies to Research Council institutes, and separate funding arrangements are being put in place to facilitate this.
Universities will receive APC publication funding in proportion to the amount of direct labour costs awarded on grants that they have received over the three years from April 2009 to March 2012. Direct labour costs have been used as a proxy of research effort leading to the generation of publications.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Royal Society Publishing is converting all its journals, hosted on HighWire Press, to a continuous publication model. This initiative emphasizes the fact that the online version is the authoritative, most complete and up-to-date record, and ensures peer-reviewed papers can be cited immediately.
The introduction of a continuous publication model is a logical step forward from the current 'publish ahead of print' feature (known as FirstCite) and will provide many benefits for the scientific community: researchers will have full citation details available upon publication; an author's published article will accumulate citations without delay; and journal impact factors won't be skewed by articles whose FirstCite and issue publications span two different years. Continuous publication also means that page numbers will no longer appear within a citation; instead, each article will have its own CrossRef-compliant, unique identifier, found near the top right-hand margin on every page of an article.
| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog | Digital Scholarship |
The OECD has released E-books: Developments and Policy Considerations.
Here's an excerpt:
The essential distinction between permanent and effective ownership of a physical book, and conditional rights of access to the e-book, has, so far, been somewhat obscured by marketing strategies and use of visual images, which tend to present e-books as a superior, but also substitutable, version of the print book product. Given the virtual reality of "traditional books" presented by e-Book platforms, buyers of e-books are likely to confuse their rights (i.e. after purchase) with the property rights model for print books. Users may be surprised to find that they are prevented from doing certain things7 with their e-book, within their private/ personal sphere.
| Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications | Digital Scholarship |
UK PubMed Central has been renamed as Europe PubMed Central.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
As announced in July, the European Research Council (ERC) becomes the third European funder to join UKPMC, following Telethon Italy and the Austrian Research Fund. As a result of this participation, the 18 existing UK and European funders agreed that the UKPMC service should be rebranded as Europe PMC by 1 November 2012. . . .
UKPMC was originally launched in January 2007, initially as a mirror of the US National Institute of Health's PubMed Central (PMC), providing international preservation of open- and free-access biomedical literature. The UKPMC funders require that research papers funded by them must be made freely available via UKPMC no later than 6 months after publication.
| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |
The California Digital Library has launched eScholarship PLUS.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
The California Digital Library is pleased to announce a new print-on-demand (POD) and ebook distribution/sales service for books and journals published in eScholarship, the University of California's open access (OA) publishing platform. This service will enable publishing units within UC to develop hybrid OA business models for their publications. Books and journals enrolled in this service will be freely accessible via eScholarship while simultaneously offered for sale in POD and ebook formats via self-branded ecommerce storefronts and through retail affiliates such as Amazon.com.
In order to support this new publishing model, eScholarship has contracted with Lulu to provide a POD/ebook publishing and ecommerce platform. Working with the Lulu-powered platform will offer many significant advantages to publishing units.
The University of North Texas Libraries have released the UNT Libraries: Open Access Fund Research Report.
Here's the abstract:
This report discusses Open Access (OA) funds created at universities in order to assist faculty authors with Article Processing Charges (APCs). Building on the research initiatives of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), thirty North American universities' OA fund initiatives were reviewed on their sponsors, eligibility, reimbursement criteria, and stipulations related to the fund. In addition, fifteen OA journal funding models and twelve hybrid journal funding models were reviewed on their average APCs and their licensing policies. This report serves as a framework for building upon emerging best practices and outlining possible approaches and considerations for the University of North Texas.
| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |
C.E. Petit has published "Suing HathiTrust" in Scrivener's Error: Warped Weft.
Here's an excerpt:
This is an initial review only of the third segment of the Google BookScan lawsuits, generally known as the "HathiTrust suit" and formally known as Authors' Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust, No. 11-6351 (S.D.N.Y.) (Baer, J.). The first two segments were the Authors' Guild's lawsuit against Google, and the publishers' lawsuit against Google (which were later consolidated… and at this writing may be severing). As a side note, the HathiTrust matter was referred to Judge Chin for further consolidation with the existing GBS suits, but was rejected as not sufficiently related… and inconsistent with Judge Chin's elevation to the Second Circuit, although the rejection did not emphasize that issue.
| A Look Back at 23 Years as an Open Access Publisher | Digital Scholarship |
What open access book has had over 11 million file requests? Answer: the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. As of the end of 2011, it had over 11.9 million file requests.
The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography presents selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. The bibliography covers a wide range of topics, such as digital copyright, digital libraries, digital preservation, digital repositories, e-books, e-journals, license agreements, metadata, and open access.
Since initial publication, the digital versions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography have been freely available. On July 13, 2004, the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography was put under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.
The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography was published by the University of Houston Libraries from 10/25/1996 to 10/17/2006 (versions 1 to 64).
Digital Scholarship began publishing the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography with version 65 of the bibliography (11/02/2006).
Over the years, the bibliography has been made available in a variety of formats: HTML, Microsoft Word, paperback, PDF, and XHTML. Currently, 80 HTML/XHTML versions and three paperback/PDF versions have been published (Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008 Annual Edition, Digital Scholarship 2009, and Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010).
The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is archived at Digital Scholarship and the Internet Archive. The University of Houston Libraries have an incomplete archive that contains versions 60, 61, and 62.
IOP Publishing will use the CC-BY licence for open access articles and bibliographic metadata.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
As a result of this move, the company will adopt a more liberal Creative Commons licence (CC-BY 3.0) for future articles published on a 'gold' open access basis. This licence allows others to distribute, remix, amend, and build upon a piece of work as long as they credit the original creation. The licences grant rights to the users of the content but do not replace the copyright, which remains with the copyright holder. . . .
In addition to the change in licence for open access articles, the basic metadata of the articles in IOP's own journals will also be available for use under a CC-BY licence. This is intended to increase the visibility of such data and to help clarify to third parties what they can and cannot do with metadata.
| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010: "SEP [Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography] is compiled with utter professionalism. It reminds me of the work of the best artisans who know not only every item that leaves their workshops, but each component used to create them—providing the ideal quality control." — Péter Jacsó ONLINE 27, no. 3 (2003): 73-76. | Digital Scholarship |
Sean Sherlock, Minister of State, has announced that the Irish government has adopted the "National Principles for Open Access Policy Statement."
Here's an excerpt:
1. Peer reviewed journal articles and other research outputs resulting in whole or in part from publicly-funded research should be deposited in an Open Access repository and made publicly discoverable, accessible and re-usable as soon as possible and on an on-going basis. . . .
2. Repositories shall release the metadata immediately upon deposit. Open access to the full text paper should be made immediately upon deposit or upon the publication date at the latest. . . .
3. Researchers are encouraged to publish in Open Access Journals but publishing through Open Access Journals is not necessary to comply with this Open Access policy. Payment of additional Open Access charges through the 'Gold' Open Access model is not necessary to comply with this policy. . . .
4. A repository is suitable for this purpose when it provides free public access to its contents, supports interoperability with other repositories and with other research information and reporting systems, is harvestable by national portal/s and international aggregators and takes steps toward long-term preservation.
5. Research data should be deposited whenever this is feasible, and linked to associated publications where this is appropriate.
Read more about it at "Ireland Sets Open-Access Mandate."
| Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals | Digital Scholarship |
ALA has joined the Owners' Rights Initiative.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
Today, the American Library Association announced that it has joined—as a founding member—the Owners' Rights Initiative (ORI)—a coalition of retailers, libraries, educators, Internet companies and associations working to protect ownership rights in the United States.
The coalition was formed to champion "first-sale rights," or ownership rights, as the issue will be taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Kirtsaeng vs. Wiley & Sons, Inc. on October 29, 2012. The Supreme Court's decision could have adverse consequences for libraries and call into question libraries' abilities to lend books and materials that were manufactured overseas.
| Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications | Digital Scholarship |
Birgit Schmidt and Kathleen Shearer have published "Licensing Revisited: Open Access Clauses in Practice" in the Future Issue section of LIBER Quarterly.
Here's an excerpt:
Open access increases the visibility and use of research outputs and promises to maximize the return on our public investment in research. However, only a minority of researchers will "spontaneously" deposit their articles into an open access repository. Even with the growing number of institutional and funding agency mandates requiring the deposit of papers into the university repository, deposit rates have remained stubbornly low. As a result, the responsibility for populating repositories often falls onto the shoulders of library staff and/or repository managers. Populating repositories in this way—which involves obtaining the articles, checking the rights, and depositing articles into the repository—is time consuming and resource intensive work.
The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), a global association of repository initiatives and networks, is promoting a new strategy for addressing some of the barriers to populating repositories, involving the use of open access archiving clauses in publisher licenses. These types of clauses are being considered by consortia and licensing agencies around the world as a way of ensuring that all the papers published by a given publisher are cleared for deposit into the institutional repository. This paper presents some use cases of open access archiving clauses, discusses the major barriers to implementing archiving language into licenses, and describes some strategies that organizations can adopt in order to include such clauses into publisher licenses.
| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography: "This work gives an outstanding overview of scholarship relating to the growing Open Access movement." — George Machovec, The Charleston Advisor 12, no. 2 (2010): 3. | Digital Scholarship |
Mikael Laakso and Bo-Christer Björk have published "Anatomy Of Open Access Publishing: A Study of Longitudinal Development and Internal Structure" in BMC Medicine.
Here's an excerpt:
The primary aim of this study was to measure the volume of scientific articles published in full immediate OA journals from 2000 to 2011, while observing longitudinal internal shifts in the structure of OA publishing concerning revenue models, publisher types and relative distribution among scientific disciplines. The secondary aim was to measure the share of OA articles of all journal articles, including articles made OA by publishers with a delay and individual author-paid OA articles in subscription journals (hybrid OA), as these subsets of OA publishing have mostly been ignored in previous studies.
| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography: "This bibliography is recommended for everyone interested in open access publishing." — M. Blobaum, Journal of the Medical Library Association 100, no. 1 (2012): 73. | Digital Scholarship |
Rowland Lorimer has published "Libraries, Scholars, and Publishers in Digital Journal and Monograph Publishing" in the latest issue of Scholarly and Research Communication.
Here's an excerpt:
In the 1970s, research libraries developed data systems and expertise that, in the 1990s, led to new services such as institutional repositories and journal hosting and, in the 2000s, led to forays into monograph publishing. In contrast, also beginning in the 1970s, university presses found themselves being cast out of their traditional role as providers of research publishing services that created the public record of knowledge and into the marketplace. Continued development of information and communication technology (ICT) in library operations and in research activity stimulated entrepreneurship and scholar/library partnerships with scholar-controlled digital journal publishing. Again in contrast, the market orientation of university presses, combined with a lack of appreciation in the library community for the value added by professional publishers, hampered the extension of collaboration into three-way partnerships among scholars, libraries, and publishing professionals. Recognition of the roles of all parties holds the greatest promise for the evolution of digital scholarly publishing.
| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |
Matthew L. Jockers, Matthew Sag, and Jason Schultz have self-archived "Brief of Digital Humanities and Law Scholars as Amici Curiae in Authors Guild v. Google" in SSRN.
Here's an excerpt:
The brief argues that, just as copyright law has long recognized the distinction between protection for an author's original expression (e.g., the narrative prose describing the plot) and the public's right to access the facts and ideas contained within that expression (e.g., a list of characters or the places they visit), the law must also recognize the distinction between copying books for expressive purposes (e.g., reading) and nonexpressive purposes, such as extracting metadata and conducting macroanalyses. We amici urge the court to follow established precedent with respect to Internet search engines, software reverse engineering, and plagiarism detection software and to hold that the digitization of books for text-mining purposes is a form of incidental or intermediate copying to be regarded as fair use as long as the end product is also nonexpressive or otherwise non-infringing.
ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) has launched a researcher registry.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Understanding the "who" and "what" of research has been hampered by lack of data standards, and in particular a standard for identifying individuals. Universities and other research organizations, as well as membership organizations like the American Physical Society (APS) are working to integrate ORCID identifiers into their systems. "For scholars, ORCID provides a persistent identifier that unambiguously distinguishes you as the author or creator of your published works in systems that adopt ORCID. Through integration in workflows such as manuscript and grant submission as well as researcher profiles, ORCID promises to help scholars and institutions manage academic information and, ultimately, to provide both with more control over their own record of scholarship," said Amy Brand, Assistant Provost for Faculty Appointments and Information at Harvard University. Currently, Boston University, New York University Langone Medical Center, Cornell University, and the California Institute of Technology, and the research information system vendors Avedas, Symplectic, and Thomson Reuters are actively working on integration with the ORCID registry.
| E-science and Academic Libraries Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |
The Harvard Open Access Project has released Good Practices For University Open-Access Policies.
Here's an excerpt:
This is a guide to good practices for university open-access (OA) policies. It’s based on the type of policy adopted at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, U of Kansas, U of Oregon, Trinity, Oberlin, Rollins, Wake Forest, Duke, U of Puerto Rico, Hawaii-Manoa, Columbia, Strathmore U, Emory, Princeton, Jomo Kenyatta, Utah State, Bifrõst, Miami, California-San Francisco, and the U Massachusetts Medical School (listing some but not all, and in chronological order). However, it includes recommendations that should be useful to institutions with other sorts of OA policy as well.
The guide is designed to evolve. No early version will cover every point on which good practices would be desirable or might be discernible. We plan to revise and enlarge it over time, building on our own experience and the experience of colleagues elsewhere. We welcome suggestions.
| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |
Thomson Reuters has launched the Data Citation Index within the Web of Knowledge.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
This new research resource from Thomson Reuters creates a single source of discovery for scientific, social sciences and arts and humanities information. It provides a single access point to discover foundational research within data repositories around the world in the broader context of peer-reviewed literature in journals, books, and conference proceedings already indexed in the Web of Knowledge. . . .
The Thomson Reuters Data Citation Index makes research within the digital universe discoverable, citable and viewable within the context of the output the data has informed. Thomson Reuters partnered with numerous data repositories worldwide to capture bibliographic records and cited references for digital research, facilitating visibility, author attribution, and ultimately the measurement of impact of this growing body of scholarship.
| Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works | Digital Scholarship |
ALA has released E-Books And Libraries: An Economic Perspective.
Here's an excerpt:
This paper provides a preliminary economic analysis of how publishers provide digital content to libraries, focusing mainly on the value that libraries place on access to e-books and how that is affected by the various restrictions that publishers place on access and use. However, because publishers are just starting to adapt to the new environment, and appear uncertain as to how to adapt, we consider not only the behavior of publishers that we currently observe in the marketplace but also possible "models" of the library-publisher relationship that may come into existence in the future.
| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog | Digital Scholarship |
Joseph J. Esposito has released PDA and the University Press.
Here's an excerpt:
Patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) is a method by which libraries acquire books that delays purchase until the moment of first use. The aim of this report is to provide guidance to publishers, especially university presses, as to how to offset any sales losses from PDA and, through a tighter weaving of publishers' and libraries' interests, even identify means to augment sales and to improve the service that libraries provide for their constituencies.
| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |
Alawi A. Alsheikh-Ali et al. have published "Public Availability of Published Research Data in High-Impact Journals" in PLOS ONE.
Here's an excerpt:
We reviewed the first 10 original research papers of 2009 published in the 50 original research journals with the highest impact factor. For each journal we documented the policies related to public availability and sharing of data. Of the 50 journals, 44 (88%) had a statement in their instructions to authors related to public availability and sharing of data. However, there was wide variation in journal requirements, ranging from requiring the sharing of all primary data related to the research to just including a statement in the published manuscript that data can be available on request. Of the 500 assessed papers, 149 (30%) were not subject to any data availability policy. Of the remaining 351 papers that were covered by some data availability policy, 208 papers (59%) did not fully adhere to the data availability instructions of the journals they were published in, most commonly (73%) by not publicly depositing microarray data. The other 143 papers that adhered to the data availability instructions did so by publicly depositing only the specific data type as required, making a statement of willingness to share, or actually sharing all the primary data. Overall, only 47 papers (9%) deposited full primary raw data online. None of the 149 papers not subject to data availability policies made their full primary data publicly available.
The Copyright Clearance Center has launched a new service for Publishers called Open Access Solutions.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
CCC helps publishers manage variable Open Access (OA) models through its RightsLink™ platform, which supports unique pricing rules, licenses and messaging for OA journals, encouraging compliance with funding agency requirements. . . .
CCC makes it easier for publishers to charge different Open Access fees pre-publication based on variables such as author affiliation/membership, funding source and journal type; communicates publisher-specified reuse rights post-publication to users seeking permissions for all content including Open Access articles; captures valuable data about user interest in and reuse of publishers' Open Access publications; and provides the ability for publishers to add RightsLink to its content wherever it resides online, even in third-party repositories such as HighWire or PubMed Central.
| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |
Jorge L. Contreras has self-archived "Confronting the Crisis in Scientific Publishing: Latency, Licensing and Access" in the American University Washington College of Law Digital Commons.
Here's an excerpt:
In this article, I propose an alternative private ordering solution based on latency values observed in open access stakeholder negotiation settings. Under this proposal, research institutions would collectively develop and adopt publication agreements that do not transfer copyright ownership to publishers, but instead grant publishers a one-year exclusive period in which to publish a work. This limited period of exclusivity should enable the publisher to recoup its costs and a reasonable profit through subscription revenues, while restoring control of the article copyright to the author at the end of the exclusivity period. This balanced approach addresses the needs of both publishers and the scientific community, and would, I believe, avoid many of the challenges faced by existing open access models.
