Category: Scholarly Communication

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (11/7/07)

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: "A Critical Theory of Open Access: Libraries and Electronic Publishing"; "The DARE Chronicle: Open Access to Research Results and Teaching Material in the Netherlands"; "Developing an Integrated Institutional Repository at Imperial College London"; "DRIVER: Building the Network for Accessing Digital Repositories across Europe"; "The Effect of 'Open Access' on Citation Impact: An Analysis of ArXiv's Condensed Matter Section"; "Linking Repositories: Scoping the Development of Cross-Institutional User-Oriented Services"; "Newfound Press: The Digital Imprint of the University of Tennessee Libraries"; "Open Access to Open Publish: National Library of Australia"; "Opening Up Scholarly Information at the University of Illinois at Chicago"; "The Prevalence of Additional Electronic Features in Pure E-Journals"; "Redefining Scholarly Publishing as a Service Industry"; "Rethinking Collections—Libraries and Librarians in an Open Age: A Theoretical View"; Scholarly Communication Education Initiatives, SPEC Kit 299; "Society Publishers with Open Access Journals"; and "Victory in the Senate: Update on the Bill to Mandate Open Access at the NIH."

SPARC/ACRL Explore Sustainability Issues with Three Open Access Journal Publishers

SPARC and ACRL have released podcasts/transcripts of interviews about sustainability issues with Bryan Vickery (BioMed Central), Mark Patterson (Public Library of Science), and Paul Peters (Hindawi Publishing Corporation). It has also released a matrix that analyzes the responses of these OA journal publishers about sustainability issues.

Paul Courant on Michigan’s Mass Digitization Project with Google

In "On Being in Bed with Google," Paul N. Courant, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, vigorously rebuts arguments against research libraries participating in the Google Books Library Project.

Here's an excerpt:

Since 2005, Siva Vaidhyanathan has been making and refining the argument that libraries should be digitizing their collections independently, without corporate financing or participation, and that those who don’t are failing to uphold their responsibility to the public. "Libraries should not be relinquishing their core duties to private corporations for the sake of expediency."

"Expediency" is a bit of a dirty word. Vaidhyanathan’s phrase suggests that good people don’t do things simply because they are "expedient." But I view large-scale digitization as expeditious. We have a generation of students who will not find valuable scholarly works unless they can find them electronically. At the rate that OCA is digitizing things (and I say the more the merrier and the faster the better) that generation will be dandling great-grandchildren on its knees before these great collections can be found electronically. At Michigan, the entire collection of bound print will be searchable, by anyone in the world, about when children born today start kindergarten.

ARL Publishes Scholarly Communication Education Initiatives SPEC Kit

The Association of Research Libraries has published Scholarly Communication Education Initiatives, SPEC Kit 299. The front matter and Executive Summary are freely available.

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary" of this very interesting SPEC Kit:

The majority of respondents [there were 73] indicated that the leadership for these [scholarly communication] education initiatives comes from within the library. Only 11 (17%) indicated that a group outside of the library plays a leadership role. In 25 cases (39%), leadership is shared by some combination of library SC committee, SC librarian, other library staff member, and outside group or is otherwise distributed across the organization. In most of the remaining cases there is a single leader. Twenty-one institutions reported that this is a library committee, eight that it is a chief SC librarian, three another library staff member, and two a committee outside the library.

Twenty-one respondents (32%) identified a "Chief SC Librarian" who has primary responsibility for education initiatives. About half of these are at the Assistant/Associate Librarian level. Only three of these librarians (14%) devote 100% of their time to SC initiatives. Most of the chief SC librarians have split appointments and all but a few devote less than 30% of their time to this work. Judging from their titles, they frequently also have responsibility for collections. . . .

It was anticipated that many institutions would not have a chief SC librarian yet would have another librarian who was shouldering the primary SC responsibility. Eighteen respondents (28%) indicated this was the case and 12 identified the position. The survey results showed that, again, this responsibility most frequently is assumed by a collections or science librarian. . . .

The most frequently mentioned effective means to deliver the SC message were one-on-one conversations and presentations. One-on-one interactions, in person or via personal e-mails, were good for reaching individuals such as faculty editors, department heads, or regular faculty members. Presentations were an effective means to reach groups such as graduate students, librarians, and the Faculty Senate Committee on the Library. Many also reported that symposia are effective; several reported that their campuses hold annual symposia. Several listed Web sites as effective tools, without much explanation. Other activities that were mentioned multiple times were marketing campaigns, passage of Senate SC resolutions, and newsletter items. Workshops—both library-sponsored and campus-sponsored—were also an effective means to reach the campus. A number of institutions have found it effective to work through their Faculty Senate Committee on the Library.

The SPEC Kit also highlights the many significant challenges involved in offering a successful scholarly communication program, which must educate library staff about key issues and outreach to university administrators, faculty, graduate students, and other constituencies. I found this to be true at my former employer, the University of Houston Libraries, where I chaired a Scholarly Communications Public Relations Task Force that produced a Transforming Scholarly Communication website and a weblog (although the weblog is still active, the website does not appear to have been updated or enhanced since my departure), organized a Transforming Scholarly Communication Symposium (conceived of as an annual event, but no follow-up is evident), and engaged in other activities.

SPEC Kit readers should make particular note of one issue: support from the library administration. This is a make-or-break issue: if top-level library administrators do not have a strong interest in and adequate understanding of scholarly communication issues as well as a real commitment to foster change, scholarly communication programs are hamstrung, and they become token efforts or die.

International Coalition of Library Consortia Protests AAAS Decision to Drop JSTOR

The International Coalition of Library Consortia, which represents 72 consortia, has issued a statement regarding the American Association for the Advancement of Science decision to sever its relationship to JSTOR.

Here's an excerpt from the statement:

The ICOLC strongly objects to the recent decision by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to discontinue its participation in JSTOR, including withholding future issues of its premier publication, Science, from the JSTOR archive and prohibiting JSTOR from making issues of Science currently held in the archive available to new JSTOR participants.

JSTOR has been a singular success in meeting the needs of students, scholars, librarians, and publishers. JSTOR offers a robust platform for cross-disciplinary discovery and integration of content that extends the multi-disciplinary reach of Science to students and faculty, including those in non-scientific disciplines. In addition, JSTOR offers to publishers a moving wall policy that protects their ability to obtain current subscription revenue to support ongoing publication.

Science is an outstanding source of high-quality, vetted information covering all areas of science, the inclusion of which enhances the value, breadth, and quality of the JSTOR archive. The decision to discontinue participation in JSTOR is in conflict with AAAS' mission, as a non-profit, membership-based organization, of advancing science and serving society. Withholding future issues of Science from JSTOR, and prohibiting JSTOR from making previously archived Science content available to future JSTOR participants, is an action which diminishes the value and contribution of both AAAS and JSTOR to the international community of researchers, the academy, and society.

Inhofe Withdraws Amendments, NIH Open Access Mandate Passes Senate

Peter Suber reports that Sen. James Inhofe withdrew his amendments to the FY 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill that would have deleted or weakened the NIH open access mandate, and that the bill has passed the Senate with the mandate intact.

The House and Senate bills will be reconciled in the fall, and President Bush should receive the final bill by year's end. It is anticipated that President Bush will veto the bill; however, the mandate's strong showing during Congressional deliberations should help ensure its future passage in post-veto legislation.

Here's an excerpt from "Defying President Bush, Senate Passes Spending Bill for Health and Education Programs" (subscription required for full access):

The president has threatened to veto the measure over what he has called "irresponsible and excessive" spending. It would take a two-thirds majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives to override a veto. The Senate, which approved the bill 75 to 19, apparently could muster that margin, but the House might not. It passed its version of the bill in July by a vote of 276 to 140, 14 votes shy of the two-thirds mark.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued a press release about the legislative victory.

Read more about it at "More on Inhofe" and "OA Mandate at NIH Passes the Senate."

Brewster Kahle on Libraries Going Open

Brewster Kahle's "Libraries Going Open" document provides some details on where the Internet Archive and the Open Content Alliance are going with projects involving mass digitization of microfilm, mass digitization of journals, ILL of scanned out-of-print books, scanning books on demand, and other areas.

The Lowdown on the MITH/Rice University Our Americas Archive Project

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities has posted a description of its IMLS-funded Our Americas Archive Project.

Here's an excerpt:

Rice University, in partnership with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland has received a three-year National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in the amount of $979,578 for the Our Americas Archive Project (OAAP), with an additional $980,613 provided in cost share by the institutions. The project will develop an innovative approach to helping users search, browse, analyze, and share content from distributed online collections. OAAP will incorporate recent Web 2.0 technologies to help users discover and use relevant source materials in languages other than English and will improve users’ ability to find relevant materials using domain-specific vocabulary searches. Two online collections of materials in English and Spanish, The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA), and a new digital archive of materials to be developed at Rice, will provide an initial corpus for testing the tools. Rice principle investigators, Geneva Henry (Executive Director, Digital Library Initiative) and Caroline Levander (HRC Director), along with MITH co-PI Neil Fraistat are undertaking this innovative digital humanities project with a view to supporting scholarly inquiry into the Americas from a hemispheric perspective. As Geneva Henry says, “our goal is to develop new ways of doing research as well as new objects of study—to create a new, interactive community of scholarly inquiry.”

Two significant online collections of materials in English and Spanish supporting the interdisciplinary field of hemispheric American Studies—Maryland’s Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) [http://www.mith2.umd.edu/eada/] and a new digital archive of multilingual materials being developed at Rice [http://rudr.rice.edu/handle/1911/9219]—provide an initial corpus for developing and testing these new digital tools. The two multilingual archives illustrate the complex politics and histories that characterize the American hemisphere, but they also provide unique opportunities to further digital research in the humanities. Geographic visualization as well as new social tagging and tag cloud cluster models are just some of the new interface techniques that the Our Americas Archive Partnership will develop with the goal of creating innovative research pathways. As Caroline Levander comments, “we see this as a first step in furthering scholarly dialogue and research across borders by making hemispheric material available open access worldwide. Our goal is to further develop innovative research tools that will help generate a collaborative, transnational research community.” Ralph Bauer, MITH Fellow, general editor of the Early Americas Digital Archive, and collaborator on the project adds, “the added digital materials and tools to navigate seamlessly through these two collections is enabling new forms of scholarship. Because the OAAP makes available materials that are dispersed in different geographic locations, it facilitates collaboration and intellectual exchange among an international audience. The digital medium offers rich opportunities for multicultural exchanges and is therefore uniquely suited for a hemispheric approach to history.”

DLF and if:book Ponder Mass Digitization Issues

The Digital Library Federation and if:book are seeking comments on a series of questions about mass digitization issues that they will raise in invited brainstorming sessions as part of a project they are calling "The Really Modern Library."

Here's a suggestion: use CommentPress or a wiki to further refine ideas as the project evolves.

Source: Vershbow, Ben. "The Really Modern Library." if:book, 8 October 2007.

Taylor & Francis Expands iOpenAccess Program

In a liblicense-l message, Taylor & Francis has announced that it has added "31 journals in environmental and agricultural sciences, behavioural sciences and development studies" to its iOpenAccess program. It notes that: "This is in addition to the 175 journals from T&F's Chemistry, Mathematics and Physics portfolios, 7 behavioural science journals from Psychology Press, and medical and bioscience journals from Informa Healthcare."

DCMI Scholarly Communications Community

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has established the DCMI Scholarly Communications Community, which currently includes a mailing list and a wiki.

Here's an excerpt from the home page:

The DCMI Scholarly Communications Community is a forum for individuals and organisations to exchange information, knowledge and general discussion on issues relating to using Dublin Core for describing research papers, scholarly texts, data objects and other resources created and used within scholarly communications. This includes providing a forum for discussion around the Eprints Application Profile, also known as the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP) and for other existing and future application profiles created to describe items of scholarly communication.

Podcasts about the Long-Term Use of Research Data

Podcasts about the Long-Term Use of Research Data

The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories has released MP3 and PDF files from its Long-lived Collections: The Future of Australia's Research Data Presentations symposium.

Here are selected MP3 files:

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (10/3/07)

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: "Evaluating Institutional Repository Deployment in American Academe Since Early 2005: Repositories by the Numbers, Part 2"; "Flipping a Journal to Open Access"; "Measuring and Comparing Participation Patterns in Digital Repositories: Repositories by the Numbers, Part 1"; "Motivating and Impeding Factors Affecting Faculty Contribution to Institutional Repositories"; "Moving Out of Oldenbourg's Long Shadow: What Is the Future for Society Publishing?"; "Of the Rich and the Poor and Other Curious Minds: On Open Access and 'Development'"; "Public Policy and the Politics of Open Access"; "PRISM: Enough Rope?"; "Reading Books in the Digital Age Subsequent to Amazon, Google and the Long Tail"; "Services Make the Repository"; and Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture.

Cyberscholarship Report

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh has released The Future of Scholarly Communication: Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship. Report of a Workshop Held in Phoenix, Arizona, April 17 to 19, 2007, Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Joint Information Systems Committee.

Here's an excerpt from the "Summary of Conclusions and Recommendations" section:

  • The widespread availability of digital content is creating opportunities for new forms of research and scholarship that are qualitatively different from the traditional way of using academic publications and research data. We call this "cyberscholarship". . . .
  • The widespread availability of content in digital formats provides an infrastructure for novel forms of research. To support cyberscholarship it must be captured, managed, and preserved in ways that are significantly different from conventional methods. . . .
  • Development of the infrastructure requires coordination at a national and international level. . . . In the United States, since there is no single agency with this mission, we recommend a coordinating committee of the appropriate federal agencies. . . .
  • Development of the content infrastructure requires a blend of research – both discipline-specific and in the enabling computer science – and implementation. . . .
  • We propose a seven year timetable for implementation of the infrastructure. The first three years will emphasize a set of prototypes, followed by implementation of a coordinated group of systems and services.

Open Access Documentary Project Grant

The Open Society Institute has given BioMed Central and Intelligent Television a grant to fund the Open Access Documentary Project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Open Society Institute has awarded a grant to support the production and distribution of the Open Access Documentary Project, a collection of online videos celebrating the benefits of open access to scientific and medical research. Intelligent Television and BioMed Central are co-producers of the Project.

The Open Access Documentary Project will facilitate the ongoing work of BioMed Central and Intelligent Television in promoting open access to science and medicine in fields as diverse as malaria research and particle physics.

The producers are now assembling an international editorial board and contacting institutions that hold archival and production resources that will be vital to the project. Principal production has begun in London, New York, and at CERN in Geneva, featuring video interviews with publishers and consumers of scientific and medical information in the developed and developing world—and with other stakeholders in open access including foundations, government agencies, and the media.

Contact the Senate Now to Support the NIH Public Access Policy Mandate

If you are a U.S. citizen, now is the time to contact your Senators if you want to support the NIH open access mandate.

You can easily contact your senators using the ALA Action Alert Web form with my cut-and-paste version of ALA/ATA text or you can use the same form to write your own text.

If you want to write your own message, Peter Suber has gathered together key documents for talking points. If you use my cut-and-paste text, add a few sentences at the start of the text to personalize it.

Here's what Peter Suber has to say about the Senate fight:

This year is our best chance ever to win an OA mandate at the NIH. But the opposition from the publishing lobby is fierce. Remember that the AAP/PSP has launched PRISM, the behemoth Copyright Alliance has weighed in, and Elsevier has hired an extra lobbying firm. If you're a US citizen, please do what you can: contact your Senators and spread the word.

Version 69, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 69 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,120 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

Here's Some Advice That Won't Cost the AAP $500K

After the PRISM fiasco, it may be time for the Association of American Publishers to consider a new initiative: CIA (Change Instead of Annihilation).

CIA would have a single goal: to develop new business strategies so that AAP members could survive and thrive in a scholarly communication system where open access prevails. The AAP doesn't have to embrace open access to launch CIA—CIA can be a contingency plan. However, CIA will fail if its participants do not take the underlying premise that open access can succeed seriously, and CIA will require intense brainstorming that lets go of long-held beliefs about conventional publishing models.

To that end, why not let the barbarians at the gate in and have lunch? Who better to bring fresh perspectives than open access advocates? After all, open advocates are not generally anti-publisher—they just want to change publishing models to support open access. If Elsevier, Wiley, and others can do it, so be it.

It may sound crazy, but ask yourself this: Who do you want to be if open access gains enough momentum to trigger the collapse of conventional publishing models, the guy with a plan or the guy without a plan? It looks to me like Elsevier is starting to think outside of the box with initiatives such as OncologySTAT and Scirus, and Elsevier has always been a tough, smart competitor in the publishing marketplace. If the day of reckoning comes, how far behind Elsevier do you want to be?

Which brings us to why the AAP may never do CIA. Having an open access plan is a competitive advantage, and publishers may not want to share that advantage. But, that doesn't mean they can't have their own internal planning process, even if it's clandestine.

So, is it time to dance with the devil?

The Dezenhall Proposal: What Would $300K to $500K Buy the AAP?

The leaked text of Eric Dezenhall's anti-open-access proposal to the Association of American Publishers has been made available as part of a NewScientist article by Jim Giles, who broke the Dezenhall story in January.

This is a must read for those interested in open access issues.

Source: Suber Peter. "Background on the AAP Hiring of Eric Dezenhall." Open Access News, 20 September 2007.

National E-Books Observatory Project Studies Free E-Book Use

The JISC National E-Books Observatory Project has begun an in-depth study of the use of free e-books.

Here's an excerpt from the weblog posting:

JISC has funded a collection of e-books that will be freely available to students in all UK universities.

The aim of the JISC national e-books observatory project is to gather much needed evidence:

  • Evidence for publishers about the impact of e-books on traditional print sales to students
  • Evidence for publishers about how to create exciting e-books that will engage the digital native
  • Evidence for publishers and libraries about the pricing models for the future
  • Evidence for libraries about how to promote the use of e-books

The e-books, chosen, include some of the most popular texts in Business and Management Studies, Medicine, Engineering and Media Studies.

JISC is funding CIBER to study just what happens when these books are freely available to students. How will they find them? Will they use them? Will the e-books impact on their learning? Will medical students behave differently to Media Studies students? Will the Business and Management students stop buying from the bookshops? Will Engineering students use the e-books more or less than the other groups?

Publishers are collaborating by providing these e-books via Ingram Digital Group’s MyiLibrary platform and the Books@Ovid platform. Funding by JISC enables these publishers to experiment in a managed environment and mitigates any risk of revenue loss.

SPARC Consulting Group’s Latest Member: Greg Tananbaum

Greg Tananbaum, former President of The Berkeley Electronic Press, has joined the SPARC Consulting Group.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

Tananbaum is best known for his leadership as recent President of The Berkeley Electronic Press, though also for writing a regular column on emerging developments in scholarly communication for Against the Grain and for his work as past Director of Product Marketing for EndNote. He holds a Master’s Degree from the London School of Economics and a B.A. from Yale University. Since leaving The Berkeley Electronic Press in 2006, Tananbaum has offered a range of consulting services at the intersection of technology, content, and academia.

Wiley Reports Strong First Quarter Growth

Boosted by its acquisition of Blackwell, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. reported strong earnings growth in the first quarter.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (NYSE:JWa) (NYSE:JWb) announced today that revenue for the first quarter of fiscal year 2008 of $389 million increased 48% from $263 million in the previous year, including $116 million of revenue from Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (Blackwell), which Wiley acquired on February 2, 2007. Revenue excluding Blackwell increased 3% over last year's strong first quarter to $273 million, or 2% excluding favorable foreign exchange. . . .

U.S. STM revenue of $56 million was flat with the previous year's first quarter mainly due to the timing of journal, book and backfile releases. In addition to healthy journal license renewals, several new Enhanced Access Licenses were signed by academic and corporate customers around the world. Direct contribution to profit as a percent of revenue declined in the first quarter mainly due to the flat top-line results. Excluding Blackwell, global STM revenue was up 4%, including the favorable effect of foreign exchange. . . .

During the first quarter, U.S. STM signed several new, renewed, and extended contracts with societies to publish their journals, including a multi-year agreement with the American Association of Anatomists, with whom Wiley already partners, to publish Anatomical Sciences Education; the International Society for Autism Research to publish Autism Research; and the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB) to publish IUBMB Life. . . .

According to the Thomson ISI® 2006 ISI Journal Citation Reports, Wiley and Blackwell combined now publish more journals in the Social Science Citation Index than any other publisher. A third of these titles experienced significant increases in impact factors, more than any other publisher.

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