ARL has released presentations from its 152nd membership meeting, which was titled "Institutional Strategies Supporting E-Scholarship & Multidisciplinary Research."
Here's a selection of the presentations:
The host service that supports digital-scholarship.com is back up.
Keep in mind for any future service outages that Digital Scholarship has two sites that largely mirror each other and use different hosting services:
It is unlikely that both sites would be unavailable at the same time.
For further details, see "Digital Scholarship Publications Overview":
The Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 2 is now available.
This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.
The Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, Version 2 is now available from Digital Scholarship.
This bibliography presents selected English-language articles, conference papers, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.
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: "Case Study: Open Access Yields Solid Growth for Hindawi," "Implementing the New NIH Policy," "In the Kingdom of the Blind: Successfully Implementing Institutional Repositories in the United Kingdom and the SHERPA Partnership Experience," "Institutional Repositories: The Experience of Master's and Baccalaureate Institutions," "The Justification of Intellectual Property: Contemporary Philosophical Disputes," Key Concerns within the Scholarly Communication Process: Report to the JISC Scholarly Communications Group, Open Doors and Open Minds: What Faculty Authors Can Do to Ensure Open Access to Their Work through Their Institution, Research Library Publishing Services: New Options for University Publishing, and "Supporting the Research Base: The Research Information Network and Scholarly Communications in the United Kingdom."
The Open Access Directory, a Wiki for factual information (vs. narrative descriptions) about the open access movement has been launched.
Here's the press release:
Peter Suber and Robin Peek have launched the Open Access Directory (OAD), a wiki where the open access community can create and maintain simple factual lists about open access to science and scholarship. Suber, a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Peek, an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, conceived the project in order to collect OA-related lists for one-stop reference and searching.
The wiki will start operating with about half a dozen lists—for example, conferences devoted to open access, discussion forums devoted to open access, and journal "declarations of independence"—and add more over time.
The goal is to harness the knowledge and energy of the open access community itself to enlarge and correct the lists. A list on a wiki, revised continuously by its users, can be more comprehensive and up to date than the same list maintained by an individual. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD will make it easier for users, especially newcomers, to discover them and use them for reference. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about open access.
The URL for the Open Access Directory is oad.simmons.edu.
The wiki is represented by an editorial board consisting of prominent figures in the open access movement. The Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at Simmons College hosts and provides technical support to the OAD.
Editors and administrators
- Robin Peek. Editor, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College
- Athanasia Pontika. Assistant Editor, Doctoral Student, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College
- Terry Plum. Technical Coordinator, Assistant Dean for Technology and Director, Simmons College
Editorial board members
- Charles Bailey. Publisher, Digital Scholarship
- Leslie Chan. Program Supervisor for New Media Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough
- Heather Joseph. Executive Director, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
- Melissa Hagemann. Open Society Institute
- Peter Suber. Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School, and Senior Researcher at SPARC
- Alma Swan. Key Perspectives Ltd
- John Wilbanks. Vice President, Creative Commons
Read more about it at "Launch of the Open Access Directory."
The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2007 Annual Edition is now available from Digital Scholarship.
Annual editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are PDF files designed for printing. Each annual edition is based on the last HTML version published during the edition's year.
The SEPB 2007 Annual Edition is based on Version 70 (12/18/2007). The printed bibliography is over 260 pages long. The PDF file is over 1 MB.
In addition to updated URLs, hundreds of additional URLs have been added to the SEPB 2007 Annual Edition. (The additional URLs will be added to Version 72 of the SEPB HTML edition.)
CRIA has released Strategies for Open and Permanent Access to Scientific Information in Latin America: Focus on Health and Environmental Information for Sustainable Development, a report about the 2007 workshop of the same name.
Read more about it at "Workshop Report: Strategies for Open, Permanent Access to Scientific Information."
CrossRef and iParadigms will launch CrossCheck in June, which will allow publishers to analyze content in both publisher systems and Internet Web sites in order to identify works that may have been plagiarized.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
CrossRef is partnering with iParadigms, LLC to offer its members—leading scholarly and professional publishers—the opportunity to verify the originality of works submitted for publication using the iThenticate service to check against a vast database of proprietary as well as open web content. Until now, there was no automated way to check submissions against previous publications because the published literature had not been indexed and "text fingerprinted" for this purpose. The CrossCheck database will include the full-text journals of leading academic publishers, and is expected to grow very rapidly over the coming months as CrossRef member publishers sign up for the service.
CrossCheck will be available to all CrossRef members who opt to contribute their content to the database. To use the service publishers will need to integrate the checking tool into their editorial processes and develop suitable policies and guidelines. CrossRef is working with iParadigms, member publishers, and editorial system software producers on appropriate technical information and guidelines for CrossCheck.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Kate Wittenberg, Director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC), will leave that post on June 30. Wittenberg says that she was told that Columbia University plans to shut down its electronic publishing operation.
Read more about it at "Is E-Publishing at Columbia U. on the Ropes?"
The Cornell University Library and Duke University Press have announced that they will collaborate on the future development of Project Euclid.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Effective July 2008, Duke will provide publishing expertise in marketing, sales, and order fulfillment to Project Euclid's participating publishers and institutional subscribers. Duke will work to broaden and deepen Project Euclid's subscriber base, resulting in greater global exposure for 54 journals and a growing number of monographs and conference proceedings. Cornell will continue to provide and support the vital IT infrastructure for Project Euclid and assume responsibility for archiving and preservation activities, ensuring robust and reliable access to the content deposited with Project Euclid for future scholars, researchers, and students.
Now home to 93,000 journal articles (75% of which are open access), along with 60 monographs and conference proceedings, Project Euclid and its partner publishers will benefit from Duke's commitment to Project Euclid's mission and from the Press's publishing proficiency, reputation for quality consciousness, and university-based value system. Duke's recent initiative to expand its journals publishing program into science, technology and medicine further ensures that together the Cornell Library and Duke University Press will achieve Project Euclid's goal to become a primary destination site for mathematicians and statisticians. . . .
This joint venture was undertaken in cooperation with the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations, created by the Association of Research Libraries.
Leadership for Project Euclid will be assumed by management at both Cornell and Duke.
EDUCAUSE has released a podcast of an interview with Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information at the CNI Spring 2008 Task Force Meeting. Lynch discusses cyberinfrastructure, the role of universities in disseminating the knowledge they create, and other topics.
The RIOJA project has released Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives: Results from an Online Questionnaire Survey.
Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":
The Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives (RIOJA) project (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/rioja) is an international partnership of members of academic staff, librarians and technologists from UCL (University College London), the University of Cambridge, the University of Glasgow, Imperial College London and Cornell University. It aims to address some of the issues around the development and implementation of a new publishing model, that of the overlay journal – defined, for the purposes of the project, as a quality-assured journal whose content is deposited to and resides in one or more open access repositories. The project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) and runs from April 2007 to June 2008.
The RIOJA project will create an interoperability toolkit to enable the overlay of certification onto papers housed in subject repositories. The intention is that the tool will be generic, helping any repository to realise its potential to act as a more complete scholarly resource. The project will also create a demonstrator overlay journal, using the arXiv repository and OJS software, with interaction between the two facilitated by the RIOJA toolkit.
To inform and shape the project, a survey of Astrophysics and Cosmology researchers has been conducted. The findings from that survey form the basis of this report.
The project team will also undertake formal and informal discussion with publishers and with academic and managing members of editorial boards. The survey and supplementary discussions will help to ensure that the RIOJA outputs address the needs and expectations of the research community. Finally, the overall long-term sustainability of a repository-overlay journal will be assessed. The project will examine the costs of adding peer review to arXiv deposits, of implementing and maintaining the functionality which the survey shows to be most valued by researchers, and of providing long-term preservation of content, and will aim to identify and appraise possible cost-recovery business models.
The Association of Research Libraries has released a preprint of Ivy Anderson's article "The Audacity of SCOAP3." Anderson is the Director of Collections, California Digital Library.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
SCOAP3 is a new model for scholarly communication proposed by a community of scientists. Physicists interested in expanding access to their literature have designed a novel approach to garner support from individual libraries, library consortia, research institutions, and even nation states to turn a core set of journals in the high energy physics discipline into open access publications.
The project principals have estimated that the total amount of money currently spent by the library community on these titles worldwide is about $15M US. They estimate that the US commitment to make the publications open access would be $4.5M. The plan involves providing a financial base of support by creating a consortium of institutions that would “redirect” the money they currently pay for subscription access to support open access publication.
On February 29, 2008, the University of California, Berkeley, hosted a meeting for the US community during which the SCOAP3 model was described and organizers reported on financial commitments received to date. Anderson’s essay was inspired largely by the discussions at that meeting.
In her essay, Anderson discusses three key elements that distinguish SCOAP3 from other open access initiatives:
SCOAP3 is a funding consortium that seeks to mediate between author and publisher, while still conceiving of payment as a supply-side activity.
SCOAP3 is non-disruptive to authors—and to a substantial degree, to publishers and societies.
SCOAP3 has the potential to fundamentally alter the role of libraries in the publishing process.
Anderson encourages “everyone interested in the grand experiment of open access [OA] publishing, whether pro or con, [to] sit up and take notice of this audacious new OA accelerator that is SCOAP3.” She also calls for “all libraries who envision a future in which academic libraries assume new roles in building and supporting the research cyberinfrastructure, or who seek to advance the convergence of libraries and academic publishing, [to] join the experiment and boldly accelerate its findings.”
Accompanying Anderson’s essay is a brief article by Julia Blixrud, Assistant Executive Director, External Relations, ARL, and Assistant Director, Public Programs, SPARC, presenting four steps that libraries and consortia can take to move SCOAP3 forward.
See the ARL Web site for the preprint essay by Ivy Anderson, “The Audacity of SCOAP3,” and article by Julia Blixrud, “Taking Action on SCOAP3,” ARL: A Bimonthly Report, no. 257 (April 2008), http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br257.shtml. This issue of the Bimonthly Report will be in print by mid-April.
Slides and videos of the presentations given at the February 29 meeting in Berkeley are available on the SCOAP3 Web site http://www.scoap3.org/focalmeeting.html.
The University of Oregon Libraries have become the 18th U.S. institution to join the SCOAP3consortium and to commit funds previously used to subscribe to high-energy physics journals to the consortium.
The Association of Research Libraries has published Research Library Publishing Services: New Options for University Publishing by Karla L. Hahn.
Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":
To foster a deeper understanding of an emerging research library role as publishing service provider, in late 2007 the Association of Research Libraries surveyed its membership to gather data on the publishing services they were providing. Following the survey, publishing program managers at ten institutions participated in semi-structured interviews to delve more deeply into several aspects of service development: the sources and motivations for service launch, the range of publishing services, and relationships with partners.
The survey verified that research libraries are rapidly developing publishing services. By late 2007, 44% of the 80 responding ARL member libraries reported they were delivering publishing services and another 21% were in the process of planning publishing service development. Only 36% of responding institutions were not active in this arena.
These libraries are publishing many kinds of works, but the main focus is journals; 88% of publishing libraries reported publishing journals compared to 79% who publish conference papers and proceedings, and 71% who publish monographs. Established journal titles dominate this emerging publishing sector and are the main drivers of service development, although new titles are also being produced. Although the numbers of titles reported represent a very thin slice of the scholarly publishing pie, the survey respondents work with 265 titles: 131 are established titles, 81 are new titles, and 53 were under development at the time of the survey. On average, these libraries work with 7 or 8 titles with 6 currently available. . . .
Peer reviewed works dominate library publishing programs and editors or acquisitions committees typically maintain their traditional roles in identifying quality content. Libraries often provide technical support for streamlined peer review workflows, but they are not providing peer review itself. The manuscript handling services provided by some publishing programs were a significant attraction to the editors of established publications.
Library publishing program managers report substantial demand for hosting services. Libraries increasingly are positioned to provide at least basic hosting services. Open source software such as the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems and DPubs along with new commercial services such as those offered by The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) through Digital Commons allows libraries to support basic journal hosting relatively easily.
Advice and consulting regarding a variety of publishing practices and decisions are perhaps even more popular services. There are pressing demands for information and advice about issues such as moving print publications into electronic publishing, discontinuing print in favor of electronic alternatives, publishing works with limited revenue-generating capability, revenue generation, standards of various sorts, markup and encoding, metadata generation, preservation, contracting with service providers, and copyright management.
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: "Adventures in Open Data," "Architectures for Collaboration: Roles and Expectations for Digital Libraries," "The Australian METS Profile—A Journey about Metadata," "The Fifth Blackbird: Some Thoughts on Economically Sustainable Digital Preservation," "Journals at bepress: New Twists on an Old Model," "Library Access to Scholarship: Harvard & Institutional Repositories," "OPAC Integration in the Era of Mass Digitization: The MBooks Experience," "The Open Access Mandate at Harvard," and "Taking the Plunge: Open Access at the Canadian Journal of Sociology."
The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that the University of California system has issued a report on Publishing Needs and Opportunities at the University of California. The report, based on interviews with over 100 UC faculty and administrators, was written by Catherine H. Candee, Executive Director of Strategic Publishing and Broadcast Initiatives, and Lynne Withey, Director of the University of California Press. It does not appear to be currently available on the Internet, and the office of the Executive Director of Strategic Publishing and Broadcast Initiatives does not appear to have a Web presence.
The article describing the report, "U. of California Assesses Its Publishing Needs," is restricted to CHE subscribers.
Surprisingly, UC faculty seem to be generally content with their publishing options, whereas administrators are more concerned with the erosion of options, especially for humanists. New digital publishing options are thriving. Candee and Withey are working together to provide a wide range of options for faculty, embracing everything from open access to restricted, subscription-based access models.
Postscript: The report is now available online.
A digital video of open access advocate Peter Suber's presentation at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society on "What Can Universities Do to Promote Open Access?" is now available.
Stevan Harnad has commented on the talk in his "Peter Suber's Talk at Harvard's Berkman Center: 'What Can Universities Do to Promote Open Access?"' posting.
The New York University Division of Libraries and the Institute for the Future of the Book will work together to develop new digital scholarly communications tools.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
"We are constantly watching the unfolding digital landscape for new paths we might want to take," said Carol A. Mandel, dean of the NYU Libraries. "IFB is a thought leader in the future of scholarly communication. We will work together to develop new software and new options that faculty can use to pubish, review, share, and collaborate at NYU and in the larger academic community."
For the past three years, IFB has been researching, prototyping, and sketching out models for how university presses could expand their publishing programs to include digital and networked formats. IFB is best known for its series of "networked book" experiments, which modify popular blogging technologies to create social book formats for the Web. Among these are: "Without Gods" by NYU’s Mitchell Stephens, "The Googlization of Everything" by Siva Vaidhyanathan, "Gamer Theory" by McKenzie Wark (the first fully networked digital monograph), and "Expressive Processing" by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, which is currently undergoing the first blog-based peer review.
Out of these projects, IFB developed CommentPress, an extension for the WordPress blog platform that enables paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text. IFB is also at work on a powerful open source digital authoring environment called Sophie, the first version of which has just been released.
"We are thrilled to be working with NYU," said IFB Director Bob Stein. "We now have the benefit not only of the Libraries’ first-rate technical support, but also of working with world-class faculty, many of whom are leading innovators in digital scholarly communications."
In an auspicious start to their partnership, NYU Libraries and IFB have been awarded a start-up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to design a set of networking tools that will serve as the membership system for MediaCommons, an all-electronic scholarly publishing network in the digital humanities that IFB has been instrumental in developing.
Under the agreement, three of IFB’s leaders will serve as visiting scholars at NYU. They are Bob Stein; Ben Vershbow, IFB editorial director; and researcher Dan Visel. They will work with NYU librarians; with the digital library team, headed by James Bullen; and with Monica McCormick, the Libraries’ program officer for digital scholarly publishing.
Read more about it at "Major News: IFB and NYU Libraries to Collaborate."
Presentations from the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories' Open Access Collections workshop are now available. Presentations are in HTML/PDF, MP3, and digital video formats. The workshop was held in association with the Queensland University Libraries Office of Cooperation and the University of Queensland Library.
The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography archive file has been updated to include version 71. The archive ZIP file is about 44 MB in size.
The Council on Library and Information Resources has released essays from its recent Core Functions of the Research Library in the 21st Century meeting.
Here's an excerpt from the meeting home page that lists the essays:
"The Future of the Library in the Research University," by Paul Courant
"Accelerating Learning and Discovery: Refining the Role of Academic Librarians," by Andrew Dillon
"A New Value Equation Challenge: The Emergence of eResearch and Roles for Research Libraries," by Richard E. Luce
"Co-teaching: The Library and Me," by Stephen G. Nichols
"Groundskeepers to Gatekeepers: How to Change Faculty Perceptions of Librarians and Ensure the Future of the Research Library," by Daphnee Rentfrow
"The Research Library in the 21st Century: Collecting, Preserving, and Making Accessible Resources for Scholarship," by Abby Smith
"The Role of the Library in 21st Century Scholarly Publishing," by Kate Wittenberg
SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) has released presentations from its SCOAP3 US Focal meeting at the University of California at Berkeley.
Here is an excerpt from the announcement that lists the presentations:
- What is Open Access, anyhow (Rick Luce, Emory University)
- The SCOAP3 model (Salvatore Mele, CERN)
- Fund-raising in Europe (Jens Vigen, CERN)
- SCOAP3: Expectations of a large research institution (Ralf Schimmer, Max Planck Digital Library)
- US consortia in SCOAP3 (Ivy Anderson, California Digital Library)
- Individual US libraries and SCOAP3—I (Miriam Blake, Los Alamos National Laboratory)
- Individual US libraries and SCOAP3—II (Kimberly Douglas, Caltech)
- OA synergies: Repositories for High Energy Physics (Travis Brooks, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center)
To find out more about SCOAP3, see the About SCOAP3 page.
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, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.
Especially interesting are: "The ARROW Project: A Consortial Institutional Repository Solution, Combining Open Source and Proprietary Software"; "Collecting Metadata from Institutional Repositories"; Developing Open Access Journals: A Practical Guide; "ePrints@IISc: India's First and Fastest Growing Institutional Repository"; "Institutional Repositories and E-Journal Archiving: What Are We Learning?"; "The Open Access Mandate at Harvard"; A Review and Analysis of Academic Publishing Agreements and Open Access Policies; "SWORD: Simple Web-Service Offering Repository Deposit"; "Talk about Talking about New Models of Scholarly Communication"; and "Version Identification: A Growing Problem."
