The University of Washington Press will begin to publish some converted print books as e-books for the Kindle. It also plans to begin to use Amazon's print-on-demand BookSurge service for some books.
Read more about it at "UW Press Dabbles with Kindle, Amazon Print on Demand."
In "Scholarly (Scientific) Journals vs Total Serials: % Price Increase 1990-2009," Bill Hooker analyzes serials cost data from various sources to generate price trends for STM disciplines.
In "Some Wishes Come True," he examines 1989-2009 price trend data for core clinical journals.
Thanks to Open Access News.
Lightning Source will work with selected publishers on a pilot project to offer print-on-demand of books using the On Demand Books' Espresso Book Machine at point-of-sale locations.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Participating publishers in the pilot include John Wiley & Sons, Hachette Book Group, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, Clements Publishing, Cosimo, E-Reads, Bibliolife, Information Age Publishing, Macmillan, University of California Press and W.W. Norton. The pilot, being offered initially to a small group of publishers that currently work with Lightning Source, will enable these publishers to enhance the availability of their titles at point-of-sale EBM locations. Approximately 85,000 titles from these publishers will be available for purchase at EBM locations in the USA in May 2009.
Upon the completion of a successful pilot, publishers that print and distribute books with Lightning Source will have the option to participate in the EBM channel. Complete channel automation is expected in the first half of this year, and rollout of the program to publishers globally is expected to follow shortly thereafter.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has issued a call for grant proposals for its Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Program.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
The Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program supports projects that provide an essential foundation for scholarship, education, and public programming in the humanities. Thousands of libraries, archives, museums, and historical organizations across the country maintain important collections of books and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings and moving images, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, art and material culture, electronic records, and digital objects. Funding from this program strengthens efforts to extend the life of such materials and make their intellectual content widely accessible, often through the use of digital technology. Awards are also made to create various reference resources that facilitate use of cultural materials, from works that provide basic information quickly to tools that synthesize and codify knowledge of a subject for in-depth investigation.
Applications may be submitted for projects that include or combine the following activities:
- arranging and describing archival and manuscript collections;
- cataloging collections of printed works, photographs, recorded sound, moving images, art, and material culture;
- implementing preservation measures, such as basic rehousing, reformatting, deacidification, or conservation treatment;
- digitizing collections, or preserving and improving access to born-digital resources;
- developing databases, virtual collections, or other electronic resources to codify information on a subject field or to provide integrated access to selected humanities materials;
- creating encyclopedias;
- preparing linguistic tools, such as historical and etymological dictionaries, corpora, and reference grammars (separate funding is available for endangered language projects in partnership with the National Science Foundation);
- developing tools for spatial analysis and representation of humanities data, such as atlases and geographical information systems (GIS); and
- designing digital tools to facilitate use of humanities resources.
In "EPrints and its Development," Leslie Carr provides a diagram of the architecture of EPrints and discusses EPrints 3.2 enhancements.
OCLC has released presentations and other documents related to its recent event, A Symposium for Publishers and Librarians.
Here's an excerpt from the symposium report:
On March 18th and 19th representatives from libraries, the publisher supply chain and organizations supporting these communities met at OCLC's Conference Center in Dublin, Ohio to discuss metadata needs, practices, lifecycle and economics across the communities and to explore opportunities for change.
James Grimmelmann of the New York Law School has self-archived "The Google Book Search Settlement: Ends, Means, and the Future of Books" in SSRN.
Here's an excerpt:
The settlement tackles the orphan works problem, but through the judicial process. Laundering orphan works legislation through a class action lawsuit is both a brilliant response to legislative inaction and a dangerous use of the judicial power. Many of the public interest safeguards that would have been present in the political arena are attenuated in a seemingly private lawsuit; the lack of such safeguards is evident in the terms of the resulting settlement. The solution is to reinsert these missing public interest protections into the settlement.
Stevan Harnad has self-archived "Waking OA's 'Slumbering Giant': The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access" in the ECS EPrints Repository.
Here's an excerpt:
Open Access (OA) will not come until universities, the universal research-providers, make it part of their mandate not only to publish their research findings, as now, but also to see to it that the few extra keystrokes it takes to make those published findings OA—by self-archiving them in their institutional repositories, free for all online—are done too. Students and junior faculty—the next generation of researchers and users—are in a position to help convince their universities to go ahead and mandate OA self-archiving, at long last.
Richard Wallis has posted a digital audio interview with Peter Brantley, the Internet Archive's new Director, on Panlibus.
Here's an excerpt from the post:
In this conversation we look back over the last couple of years at the DLF [Digital Library Federation] and then forward in to his new challenge and opportunity at the Internet Archive.
We go on to discuss his thoughts and plans to make it easy to identify books and information and their locations in a way that is currently not possible with the processes and protocols we use today.
Pamela Samuelson, Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley, has posted an eprint of "Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement" on O'Reilly Radar.
Here's an excerpt:
This column argues that the proposed settlement of this lawsuit is a privately negotiated compulsory license primarily designed to monetize millions of orphan works. It will benefit Google and certain authors and publishers, but it is questionable whether the authors of most books in the corpus (the "dead souls" to which the title refers) would agree that the settling authors and publishers will truly represent their interests when setting terms for access to the Book Search corpus.
(Note: See the Wikipedia entry on Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls.)
John Robertson of JISC CETIS has overviewed developments in major digital repository software in his "Repository Software Update" post.
Here's an excerpt:
Over the past couple of months I've had a chance to hear updates from a number of repository software developers (at a Fedora training day, at DEV8D and on a number of blogs). Albeit slightly delayed by holidays, here's a bit of a snapshot of where ePrints, DSpace, Fedora, Microsoft's repository are at. There's a lot more information about Fedora than the others as I've heard a couple of updates from them. The usual caveat that I may have misunderstood what some of these are or how developed they are should apply. Much of this development is building up to releases at Open Repositories 2009.
The Open Grid Forum has established a Digital Repositories Research Group.
Here's an excerpt from the home page:
The goal of the Digital Repositories Research Group (DR-RG) is to analyze how digital repositories can be built on top of federated storage infrastructure, focusing on the exploitation of existing data-related standards and the identification of need for new or revised data-related standards.
The Internet Archive has sent a letter to Judge Denny Chin asking for a conference about a motion to intervene in the Author's Guild v. Google suit.
Here's its letter.
The University of Vermont Libraries' Center for Digital Initiatives is recruiting a Digital Initiatives Metadata Librarian.
Here's an excerpt from the ad (search for posting no. 032645):
The Digital Initiatives Metadata Librarian will provide expertise and leadership in the creation and maintenance of metadata for digital content acquired or created by the CDI. The Digital Initiatives Metadata Librarian will help to develop, refine, and implement policies, procedures, workflows, and metadata standards for the CDI; manage digitization projects; and participate in the overall management of the CDI.
Randal C. Picker of the University of Chicago Law School has self-archived "The Google Book Search Settlement: A New Orphan-Works Monopoly?" in SSRN.
Here's an excerpt:
The settlement agreement is exceeding complex but I have focused on three issues that raise antitrust and competition policy concerns. First, the agreement calls for Google to act as agent for rights holders in setting the price of online access to consumers. Google is tasked with developing a pricing algorithm that will maximize revenues for each of those works. Direct competition among rights holders would push prices towards some measure of costs and would not be designed to maximize revenues. As I think that level of direct coordination of prices is unlikely to mimic what would result in competition, I have real doubts about whether the consumer access pricing provision would survive a challenge under Section 1 of the Sherman Act.
Second, and much more centrally to the settlement agreement, the opt out class action will make it possible for Google to include orphan works in its book search service. Orphan works are works as to which the rightsholder can't be identified or found. That means that a firm like Google can't contract with an orphan holder directly to include his or her work in the service and that would result in large numbers of missing works. The opt out mechanism—which shifts the default from copyright's usual out to the class action's in—brings these works into the settlement. . . .
Third, there is a risk that approval by the court of the settlement could cause antitrust immunities to attach to the arrangements created by the settlement agreement. As it is highly unlikely that the fairness hearing will undertake a meaningful antitrust analysis of those arrangements, if the district court approves the settlement, the court should include a clause—call this a no Noerr clause—in the order approving the settlement providing that no antitrust immunities attach from the court's approval.
As an outcome of An International Repositories Infrastructure Workshop in March, the International Repositories Infrastructure Wiki has been launched (thanks to Da Blog).
Here's an excerpt from the home page:
This wiki is for those interested in:
- developing coordinated action plans for specific areas of repository development
- pursuing those plans
- coordinating that activity internationally
Specify 6, an open source biological specimen database system for museums, has been released. (Thanks to Peter Scott’s Library Blog.)
Here's an excerpt from the project home page:
After more than twelve developer years of design and engineering and over two million USD of investment, the Specify Software Team is delighted to release today, April 10, 2009, Specify 6 for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux desktops.
Specify is a client-server database platform for museums and herbaria which processes specimen information for computerizing holdings, managing collection management transactions, and for mobilizing species occurrence data to the web. Specify is free and open source software licensed under the GNU GPL2. Downloadable installation packages for all three desktop flavors as well as Specify's Java source code are linked to this site. . . .
Non-profit U.S. research collections are eligible for our helpdesk and data conversion services thanks to our financial support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Biological Infrastructure. We look forward to working with you to increase the research impact of your institution's investment in biodiversity collection curation and specimen data management.
David S. H. Rosenthal's CNI plenary presentation on "How Are We “Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents'?" is now available (see also "Spring CNI Plenary: The Remix").
A digital video of Stuart M. Shieber, James O. Welch, Jr., and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard, addressing open access issues at the California Institute of Technology is available (thanks to Open Access Authoring @ Caltech).
Dorothea Salo has self-archived "Name Authority Control in Institutional Repositories" in MINDS@UW.
Here's an excerpt:
Neither the standards nor the software underlying institutional repositories anticipated performing name authority control on widely disparate metadata from highly unreliable sources. Without it, though, both machines and humans are stymied in their efforts to access and aggregate information by author. Many organizations are awakening to the problems and possibilities of name authority control, but without better coordination, their efforts will only confuse matters further. Local heuristics-based name-disambiguation software may help those repository managers who can implement it. For the time being, however, most repository managers can only control their own name lists as best they can after deposit while they advocate for better systems and services.
The University of Houston-Downtown Library is recruiting a Web Management Librarian.
Here's an excerpt from the ad:
- Analyzes customer's needs and creates content for the library website in collaboration with subject librarians;
- Coordinates the implementation of library databases, proxy servers, and other web-based technologies;
- Provides reference services and one-on-one instruction in use of library resources in person, through telephone, e-mail, chat and WebCT bulletin board system to a diverse clientele including students, faculty and other affiliated patrons;
- Serves as subject librarian and faculty liaison, performing collection development through review, selection and marketing of library resources;
- Provides library instruction in both classroom and online settings; and
- All other duties as assigned.
Gobbledygook has interviewed CrossRef's Geoffrey Bilder about author identifiers.
Here's an excerpt:
Of course, lots of the same issues can be raised with CrossRef, right? What guarantees that CrossRef won’t become evil and co-opt all of our identities? This, of course is the big fear underlining the knee-jerk reaction against "centralized systems" in favor of "distributed systems". The problem with this, as I mentioned in the FriendFeed thread is that my personal and unfashionable observation is that "distributed" begets "centralized." For every distributed service created, we’ve then had to create a centralized service to make it useable again (ICANN, Google, Pirate Bay, CrossRef, DOAJ, ticTocs, WorldCat, etc.). This gets us back to square one and makes me think the real issue is- how do you make the centralized system that eventually emerges accountable? This is, of course, a social issue more than a technical issue and involves making sure that whatever entity emerges has clearly defined data portability policies and a "living will" that attempts to guarantee that the service can be run in perpetuity- even if by another organization. For the record, I don’t think adopting the slogan "don’t be evil" is enough ;).
The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Campus Libraries are recruiting a Metadata Strategist.
Here's an excerpt from ad:
The metadata strategist is responsible for providing leadership, training, and project coordination and management for initiatives and projects in the application of metadata, and serves as the local authority for metadata standards. The position is responsible for providing expert counsel on decisions about data platforms, data model development, interoperability for enhanced discovery, and the development of new digital and metadata services. The metadata strategist collaborates closely with the Libraries Digital Library Development Lab, the Digital Collections Unit, other Libraries units, Technical Services leadership, and campus units outside the Libraries.
A group of scholars and the Open Access Trust have sent a letter to Judge Denny Chin asking for a conference about a motion to intervene in the Author's Guild v .Google suit.
Here's their letter.
The PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) project has released Draft Report on the Provision of Usage Data and Manuscript Procedures for Publishers and Repository Managers.
Here's an excerpt:
This draft report sets out specifications for deposit procedures for both publishers and authors, and the reporting in log files of subsequent usage. Since this report is presented in draft format, it is anticipated that such specification will be adjusted as a result of actual implementation experience. Until the ultimate formulation of specifications and guidelines is achieved, a support mechanism is envisaged to assist both publisher and repository communities to share the experience gained. . .
This report is designed to be preliminary investigation of the issues addressed herein. As such, it forms the basis for a common understanding of the expected outcomes of the PEER project, and it highlights the issues of concern that need to be monitored and evaluated in the final report. Significantly, it indicates workflows, procedures and best practices that will be explored towards the establishment of best practice shared by publisher and library communities to ensure the future of scholarly communication.
