Category: Scholarly Communication

Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives: Results from an Online Questionnaire Survey

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.

ARL Releases "The Audacity of SCOAP3" Preprint

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.

ARL Publishes Research Library Publishing Services: New Options for University Publishing

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.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (4/2/08)

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."

University of California Issues Report on Publishing Needs and Opportunities at the University of California

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.

Peter Suber at Harvard on What Can Universities Do to Promote Open Access

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.

NYU Libraries and Institute for the Future of the Book Partner to Develop New Digital Scholarly Communication Tools

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 Open Access Collections Workshop Now Available

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.

Essays from the Core Functions of the Research Library in the 21st Century Meeting

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

"Leveraging Digital Technologies in Service to Culture and Society: The Role of Libraries as Collaborators," by Lee Zia

Presentations from the SCOAP3 US Focal Meeting

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:

To find out more about SCOAP3, see the About SCOAP3 page.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (3/5/08)

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."

Version 71, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 71 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,250 articles, books, and other digital and printed sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2006 Annual Edition is also available from Digital Scholarship. Annual editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are PDF files designed for printing.

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are in italics):

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History
2.2 General Works
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals
3.4 General Works
3.5 Library Issues
3.6 Research
4 General Works
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights
5.2 License Agreements
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
6.2 Digital Libraries
6.3 General Works
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation
7 New Publishing Models
8 Publisher Issues
8.1 Digital Rights Management
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
Digital Libraries
Electronic Books and Texts
Electronic Serials
General Electronic Publishing
Images
Legal
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
SGML and Related Standards

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (2/6/08)

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: "Carrots and Sticks: Some Ideas on How to Create a Successful Institutional Repository"; A DRIVER's Guide to European Repositories; The European Repository Landscape: Inventory Study into Present Type and Level of OAI Compliant Digital Repository Activities in the EU; "India, Open Access, the Law of Karma and the Golden Rule"; Investigative Study of Standards for Digital Repositories and Related Services; "The Mandates of January"; "The Preservation of Digital Materials"; "Open Access and Quality"; "Open Access to Electronic Theses and Dissertations"; "Planets: Integrated Services for Digital Preservation"; "PRONOM-ROAR: Adding Format Profiles to a Repository Registry to Inform Preservation Services"; "SPARC: Creating Innovative Models and Environments for Scholarly Research and Communication"; and "Usage Impact Factor: The Effects of Sample Characteristics on Usage-Based Impact Metrics."

SPARC Author Rights Forum Established

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition has established a new mailing list: the SPARC Author Rights Forum.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has introduced a new discussion forum on the topic of author rights. The SPARC Author Rights Forum provides a private and moderated venue for academic librarians to explore copyright and related issues in teaching and research—especially questions arising from the development of digital repositories and recent public access mandates.

The SPARC Author Rights Forum has been established to support educational outreach to authors on issues related to retaining their copy rights. Topics relevant to the list include, but are not limited to:

  • Ensuring copyright compliance with public access policies, including the new National Institutes of Health mandate
  • Rights of faculty under copyright and contract law
  • Availability and use of author addenda
  • Working with publishers to secure agreements to retain needed rights
  • Experiences in developing institutional copyright policies and educational programs

The list will focus primarily on the U.S. and Canadian legal environments, though members of the international community are welcome to join. Educators, researchers, policy makers, librarians, legal counsel, and all who have an interest in responsible author copyright management are encouraged to contribute. The SPARC Author Rights Forum is moderated by Kevin Smith, J.D., Scholarly Communications Officer for Duke University Libraries.

List membership is subject to approval and posts are moderated for appropriate topical content. To request membership in the SPARC Author Rights Forum, send any message to sparc-arforum-feed@arl.org.

Scholarship in the Age of Abundance: Enhancing Historical Research with Text-Mining and Analysis Tools Project

The Center for History and New Media's Scholarship in the Age of Abundance: Enhancing Historical Research with Text-Mining and Analysis Tools project has been awarded a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Here's an excerpt from "Enhancing Historical Research with Text-Mining and Analysis Tools":

We will first conduct a survey of historians to examine closely their use of digital resources and prospect for particularly helpful uses of digital technology. We will then explore three main areas where text mining might help in the research process: locating documents of interest in the sea of texts online; extracting and synthesizing information from these texts; and analyzing large-scale patterns across these texts. A focus group of historians will be used to assess the efficacy of different methods of text mining and analysis in real-world research situations in order to offer recommendations, and even some tools, for the most promising approaches.

A Dialog with the Mellon Foundation's Don Waters on the Grand Text Auto Open Peer Review Experiment

Previously ("Book to Be Published by MIT Press Undergoing Blog-Based Open Peer Review"), DigitalKoans reported on an open-peer-review experiment on the Grand Text Auto Weblog.

Now, if:book has published a dialog between its staff, the book's author, and Donald J. Waters, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Program Officer for scholarly communications, about the experiment.

Here's an excerpt from the posting:

[Waters] As I understand the explanations, there is a sense in which the experiment is not aimed at "peer review" at all in the sense that peer review assesses the qualities of a work to help the publisher determine whether or not to publish it. What the exposure of the work-in-progress to the community does, besides the extremely useful community-building activity, is provide a mechanism for a function that is now all but lost in scholarly publishing, namely "developmental editing." It is a side benefit of current peer review practice that an author gets some feedback on the work that might improve it, but what really helps an author is close, careful reading by friends who offer substantive criticism and editorial comments. . . . The software that facilitates annotation and the use of the network, as demonstrated in this experiment, promise to extend this informal practice to authors more generally.

DISC-UK Report on Web 2.0 Data Visualization Tools

JISC has released DISC-UK DataShare: Web 2.0 Data Visualisation Tools: Part 1—Numeric Data.

Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":

Part 1 of this briefing paper will highlight some examples of new collaborative web services using Web 2.0 technologies which venture into the numeric data visualisation arena. These mashups allow researchers to upload and analyse their own data in ‘open’ and dynamic environments. Broadly speaking the numeric data being referred to could be micro-data (data about the individual), macro-data2 or country-level data, derived or summary data.

Research Blogging: Identifying, Indexing, and Presenting Posts about Peer-Reviewed Literature

Research Blogging is a new service that identifies, indexes, and presents new Weblog posts about peer-reviewed literature.

Here's an excerpt from its About page:

  • Bloggers—often experts in their field—find exciting new peer-reviewed research they'd like to share. They write thoughtful posts about the research for their blogs.
  • Bloggers register with us and use a simple one-line form to create a snippet of code to place in their posts. This snippet not only notifies our site about their post, it also creates a properly formatted research citation for their blog.
  • Our software automatically scans registered blogs for posts containing our code snippet. When it finds them, it indexes them and displays them on our front page—thousands of posts from hundreds of blogs, in one convenient place, organized by topic.
  • The quality of the posts listed on our site is monitored by the member bloggers. If a post doesn't follow our guidelines, it is removed from our database. Borderline cases may be discussed in our forums.

Are There 200,000 "Duplicate" Articles in Journals Indexed by Medline?

Based on a recent study published in Nature, it is possible that there may be as many as 200,000 duplicate articles (either articles that were published in multiple journals or plagiarized) in journals indexed by Medline. To conduct the study, Mounir Errami and Harold Garner utilized the eTBLAST software to analyze samples of Medline article abstracts in order to estimate the prevalence of duplicate articles.

Duplicate detection is an issue of great concern to both publishers and scholars. The CrossCheck project is allowing eight publishers to test the duplicate checking as part of the editorial process in a closed-access environment. In the project's home page, it states:

Currently, existing PD [plagiarism detection] systems do not index the majority of scholarly/professional content because it is inaccessible to crawlers directed at the open web. The only scholarly literature that is currently indexed by PD systems is that which is available openly (e.g. OA, Archived or illegitimately posted copies) or that which has been made available via third-party aggregators (e.g. ProQuest). This, in turn, means that any publisher who is interested in employing PD systems in their editorial work-flow is unable to do so effectively. Even if a particular publisher doesn't have a problem with plagiarized manuscripts, they should have an interest in making sure that their own published content is not plagiarized or otherwise illegitimately copied.

In order for CrossRef members to use existing PD systems, there needs to be a mechanism through which PD system vendors can, under acceptable terms & conditions, create and use databases of relevant scholarly and professional content.

Open access advocates have pointed out that one advantage of OA is that it allows the unrestricted analysis and manipulation of the full text of freely available works. Open access makes it possible for all interested parties, including scholars and others who might not have access to closed duplicate verification databases, to conduct whatever analysis as they wish and to make the results public without having to consider potential business impacts.

Read more about it at: "Copycat Articles Seem Rife in Science Journals, a Digital Sleuth Finds" and "How Many Papers Are Just Duplicates?"

International Study of Peer Review

The Publishing Research Consortium has released "Peer Review in Scholarly Journals: Perspective of the Scholarly Community—An International Study."

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":

The survey thus paints a picture of academics committed to peer review, with the vast majority believing that it helps scientific communication and in particular that it improves the quality of published papers. They are willing to play their part in carrying out review, though it is worrying that the most productive reviewers appear to be overloaded. Many of them are in fact willing to go further than at present and take on responsibility for reviewing authors’ data. Within this picture of overall satisfaction there are, however, some sizeable pockets of discontent. This discontent does not always translate into support for alternative methods of peer review; in fact some of those most positive about the benefits of peer review were also the most supportive of post-publication review. Overall, there was substantial minority support for post-publication review as a supplement to formal peer review, but much less support for open review as an alternative to blinded review.

Read more about it at "Peer Review Study."

Book to Be Published by MIT Press Undergoing Blog-Based Open Peer Review

Noah Wardrip-Fruin's draft of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, which will be published by MIT Press, is undergoing an open peer-review process on the Grand Text Auto Weblog using a new plug-in version of CommentPress. The book is also undergoing a conventional peer-review process.

Read more about it at "Blog Comments and Peer Review Go Head to Head to See Which Makes a Book Better"and "Expressive Processing: An Experiment in Blog-Based Peer Review."

ResearcherID.com and NISO Institutional Identifier

As scholarly digital information has proliferated in many formats and versions on the Internet, it has become increasing difficult to identify works that are by the same author or by the same institution. Recently, Thomson Scientific has begun work on author and institution identifiers.

Here's an excerpt from "Thomson Scientific Tagging Researchers: ResearcherID.com."

Thomson Scientific (http://scientific.thomson.com) has opened up a new web service called ResearcherID.com (www.researcherid.com) that allows researchers to establish their own identities and, with some restrictions, to identify their writings. . . .

Currently, all the registrants must have authorized access to Thomson Scientific's Web of Knowledge. In addition, all the registrants on the site are there by invitation only, but Pringle expects the service will be open to all Web of Knowledge users by the end of the month. Since Thomson estimates the access to that service to be 20 million users worldwide, this restriction would still make the service broad-based, if researchers choose to use it.

Here's an excerpt from "But What About Corporate Authors? NISO Institutional Identifier Project Underway."

Thomson Scientific (http://scientific.thomson.com) has joined an effort with the National Information Standards Organization (NISO; www.niso.org) to build an open standard for identifying institutions. The initial NISO effort will focus on academic and research institutions, the kind often referred to in author affiliation or corporate author fields. . . .

The charge from the voting membership to the new working group is to study and propose an identifier that will uniquely identify institutions and describe relationships between entities within institutions. In the course of developing a proposed identifier, the group will consider the minimum set of data consistent with account privacy and security issues, as well as other data used to support different business models.

Digital Video on JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments)

In a digital video from the Google Tech Talks series, Moshe Pritsker, Editor-in-Chief of JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments), discusses that video-based journal.

Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

Contrasting the rapid advancement of scientific research itself, scientific communication still heavily relies on traditional print journals. Print journals however, lack the necessary characteristics to allow enable an effective transfer of knowledge, which is significantly impeding scientific progress. Addressing this problem, the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE, www.jove.com) implemented a novel, video-based approach to scientific publishing, based on visualization of experimental studies. Created with the participation of scientists from leading research institutions (e.g. Harvard, MIT, and Princeton), JoVE provides solutions to the "bottleneck" of the contemporary biological research: transparency and reproducibility of biological experiments. JoVE has so far released 9 monthly issues that include over 150 video-protocols on experimental approaches in developmental biology, neuroscience, microbiology and other fields.

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