Profile of John Sack, Director of the HighWire Press

The Society for Scholarly Publishing has published a profile of John Sack, Director of the HighWire Press.

Here's an excerpt:

[Sack:] Some of the next "wave" of innovation in scholarly publishing will come from the rate at which other sorts of non-journal content (such as books) is going online. . . . Standards—or perhaps “best practices”—will emerge for finding, linking, and integrating book content with journal content (and we may even see the functional distinction between books and journals being to merge), integrating audio and video, integrating new mobile devices (Kindle, iPhone), etc.

An earlier profile of Amy Brand, Program Manager of the Harvard Office of Scholarly Communication, may also be of interest.

New from Amazon: Kindle for iPhone and iPod Touch

Amazon has released the Kindle for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today introduced "Kindle for iPhone and iPod touch," a new application available for free from Apple's App Store that lets customers enjoy over 240,000 books, including 104 of 112 New York Times Bestsellers, on the iPhone and iPod touch using Apple's Multi-Touch user interface. Amazon's new Whispersync technology saves and synchronizes a customer's bookmark across their original Kindle, Kindle 2, iPhone and iPod touch, so customers always have their reading with them and never lose their place. Kindle customers can read a few pages on their iPhone or iPod touch and pick up right where they left off on their Kindle or Kindle 2. . . .

The Kindle application for iPhone and iPod touch lets customers bring their Kindle books with them wherever they go and takes full advantage of Apple's Multi-Touch user interface. With the new Kindle for iPhone and iPod touch application, customers can:

  • Shop for hundreds of thousands of books on their Kindle or online at http://www.amazon.com/kindlestore, and wirelessly transfer the books to their iPhone or iPod touch
  • Access their entire library of previously purchased Kindle books stored on Amazon’s servers
  • Adjust the text size of books
  • Add bookmarks and view notes and highlights

Kindle for iPhone and iPod touch is available for free from Apple’s App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

Thomson Reuters Scientific's 2008 Revenues Were $604 Million

Thomson Reuters Scientific had revenues of $604 million, which represented a 8% increase "before currency," partially fueled by the ISI Web of Knowledge/Web of Science's double-digit growth.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Full-year operating profit grew 4% to $171 million with the related margin decreasing 70 basis points to 28.3%, primarily due to incremental investments in Asia.

Free at Your Campus: The ACRL Scholarly Communications 101 Road Show

If your institution meets its criteria, ACRL is offering to bring its Scholarly Communications 101 Road Show to your campus at no cost.

Here's an excerpt from the Road Show Web site:

Participants will:

  • Understand scholarly communication as a system to manage the results of research and scholarly inquiry and be able to describe system characteristics, including academic libraries and other major stakeholders and stakeholder interests, major types and sources of current stress and evolution, and key indicators of size, complexity, and rates of change
  • Enumerate new modes and models of scholarly communication; business models; research & social interaction models (from blogs, curated websites, etc), and peer review models and examples of the ways in which academic libraries have or can initiate or support those models
  • Be able to select and cite key principles, facts, and messages relevant to current or nascent scholarly communication plans and programs in their institutions, e.g. as preparation for library staff or faculty outreach, to contextualize collection development decisions

Following the Money Trail: MAPLight.org Report on Campaign Contributions and the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act

MAPLight.org has released "Report on HR 801, Fair Copyright in Research Works Act: Report Shows Campaign Contributions Given to Sponsors of Fair Copyright in Research Works Act." (Thanks to the Huffington Post and Open Access News.)

Here's an excerpt:

MAPLight.org's research team released data today showing campaign contributions given to members of the House Committee on the Judiciary from publishing interests during the 2008 election cycle (Jan. 2007 through Dec. 2008). MAPLight.org analyzed campaign contribution data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics and determined that the publishing industry gave an average of $5,150 to each of the bill's five bill sponsors and an average of $2,506 to each of the other 34 non-sponsor members of the Committee. Total publishing industry contributions given to the House Committee on the Judiciary were $110,950.

DPE Digital Preservation Video Training Course

DigitalPreservationEurope has released its Digital Preservation Video Training Course, a series of digital videos recorded at the DPE/Planets/CASPAR/nestor Joint Training Event: Starting out: Preserving Digital Objects-Principles and Practice in October 2008.

Here's an excerpt from the course page:

The training introduces participants to a number of key digital preservation principles. Participants will leave with:

  • an awareness and understanding of key digital preservation issues and challenges,
  • an appreciation of the range of roles and responsibilities involved with digital preservation activity,
  • knowledge about the reference model for Open Archival Information System (OAIS),
  • a familiarity with file formats currently considered beneficial for preservation,
  • a developed understanding of the role and use of metadata and representation information,
  • knowledge of the preservation planning process and its benefits to overall digital preservation strategies,
  • an insight into the concepts of trust and trustworthiness in the context of digital preservation,
  • a working knowledge of the issues surrounding audit methodologies and self-certification of digital repositories.

The New Creative Commons License: CC0 1.0 Universal Lets Rights Holders Waive Their Rights

The Creative Commons has released CC0 1.0 Universal, the "no rights reserved" license.

Here's an excerpt from the CC0 FAQ:

Are CC0 and CC's Public Domain Dedication and Certification ("PDDC") the same?

No. PDDC was intended to serve two purposes—to allow copyright holders to "dedicate" a work to the public domain, and to allow people to "certify" a work as being in the public domain. Our experience with PDDC shows that having a single tool performing both of these functions can be confusing.

CC0 is a single purpose tool, designed to take on the dedication function PDDC has been performing, but in a more complete and legally robust way. CC0 is universal in its applicability, intended for use world-wide by anyone anywhere holding copyright or database interests in a work. PDDC is based on U.S. law, and the enforceability of its dedication function outside of the U.S. is not certain.

Read more about it at "CC0: Waiving Copyrights" and "Want to Waive Copyright? Creative Commons Has a Tool for You."

iPRES 2008: Proceedings of The Fifth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects

The British Library has released iPRES 2008: Proceedings of The Fifth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects: Joined Up and Working: Tools and Methods for Digital Preservation, The British Library, London. 29–30 September.

Here's an excerpt:

This volume brings together the proceedings of iPRES 2008, the Fifth International Conference on Digital Preservation, held at The British Library on 29-30 September, 2008. From its beginnings five years ago, iPRES has retained its strong international flavour. This year, it brings together over 250 participants from 33 countries and four continents. iPRES has become a major international forum for the exchange of ideas and practice in Digital Preservation. . . .

The iPRES 2008 conference theme and the papers gathered together here represent a major shift in the state-of-the-art. For the first time, this progress enabled the Programme Committee to establish two distinct tracks. The practitioner track is designed for those with an interest in practically preserving digital content within their organisation. The technical track is designed for those with an interest in underpinning concepts and digital preservation technology. Readers will find valuable insights to draw from in both areas.

University of Rochester Releases New Institutional Repository System, IR Plus

The University of Rochester has released version alpha 0.1 of its new open source institutional repository system, IR Plus. A test version of the system is available, and a discussion group has been established on Google.

Here are the documentation links:

"Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box"

Library Journal has published "Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box" by Andrew Richard Albanese.

Here's an excerpt:

If [Clifford] Lynch is "queasy," it's because he questions whether institutions—in particular, libraries—are biting off more than they can chew and swallow by conflating IRs with an alternative publishing mission. "I think it is short-sighted. I know many of these institutions are feeling great pain from pressure on their acquisition budgets and would like to mitigate that," he says. "But that's a short-term economic thing, and I'm sorry to see it getting mixed up with IRs."

"Toward the Design of an Open Monograph Press"

As part of a thematic issue on open access, The Journal of Electronic Publishing has published a paper by John Willinsky titled "Toward the Design of an Open Monograph Press."

Here's the abstract:

This paper reviews and addresses the critical issues currently confronting monograph publishing as a matter of reduced opportunities for scholars to pursue book-length projects. In response, it proposes an alternative approach to monograph publishing based on a modular design for an online system that would foster, manage, and publish monographs in digital and print forms using open source software developments, drawn from journal publishing, and social networking technologies that might contribute to not only to the sustainability of monograph publishing but to the quality of the resulting books.

ACLS Humanities E-Book XML Conversion Experiment: Report on Workflow, Costs, and User Preferences

The American Council of Learned Societies has released ACLS Humanities E-Book XML Conversion Experiment: Report on Workflow, Costs, and User Preferences.

Here's an excerpt:

In 2008, ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB)—a subscription-based online collection of over 2,200 digital titles in the humanities—undertook an experiment to investigate the possibility of a future mass conversion of e-books preexisting in a scanned, page-image format into XML-encoded files. . . .

HEB had 20 sample page-image titles from its backlist converted to XML, using OCR-derived text files that had been created during the initial scanning process to enable searching. The books were tagged using a simplified version of HEB's standard specifications, to reduce the need for editorial intervention. . . . The cost of creating the XML titles was considerably greater than that associated with scanning (about $400 versus $170 per title).

The XML books were presented in the HEB collection side by side with their page-image counterparts. Despite any conversion-related flaws, our subsequent user survey indicated that readers preferred the XML format by a margin of about two to one, the most relevant factors cited in this regard being readability, accessible text, and additional features and functions not available in the page-image version.

Former Congressman Thomas H. Allen Named President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers

Thomas H. Allen, former Democratic six-term House of Representatives member from Maine, has been named President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"In this age of rapidly changing technology, we must not lose sight of the abiding importance of the written word to our culture, society and our democratic institutions," Mr. Allen said. "AAP advocates on issues of paramount importance ranging from free speech and education to the protection of intellectual property rights and international freedom to publish. I am excited about tackling the challenges of this new position and its responsibilities to the publishing industry and the reading public."

Wolters Kluwer's Subscription and Other Non-Cyclical Revenues 2,441 Million Euros in 2008, Up 3%

Wolters Kluwer's subscription and other non-cyclical revenues were 2,441 million euros in 2008, up 3% from 2007.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

While market contractions were felt in all geographies, the company benefited from a resilient portfolio with a majority of revenue streams derived from subscription and other non-cyclical products, driven by legislative change, medical discoveries, and the increasing productivity needs of the professionals the company serves. Two thirds of revenues are subscription based with improving retention rates. The balance of the portfolio is comprised of transactional products including books, mortgage and corporate lending-based products, advertising and promotional services, and training. It is in these transactional areas that Wolters Kluwer experienced the pressure of the economic slow down.

Amazon Lets Publishers Decide on Whether Their Books Can Be Read Aloud by Kindle on Title-by-Title Basis

Amazon will let publishers determine whether their e-books can be read aloud by the Kindle on a title-by-title basis.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Kindle 2's experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given. Furthermore, we ourselves are a major participant in the professionally narrated audiobooks business through our subsidiaries Audible and Brilliance. We believe text-to-speech will introduce new customers to the convenience of listening to books and thereby grow the professionally narrated audiobooks business.

Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat.

Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rightsholders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is.

As reported previously, the Authors Guild was opposed to an unbridled read aloud Kindle capability. Here's an excerpt from "The Engadget Interview: Paul Aiken, Executive Director of the Authors Guild."

[Aiken] Well, the legal objections fall in a couple categories. One is the basic copyright objection which I know has been bandied about a lot online, and that objection comes in two parts. There's the unauthorized reproduction of the work which is one claim under copyright law—for that there has to be fixation of the copy and there's a legal question as to whether or not there's adequate fixation in the Kindle. The second claim is that text-to-speech creates a derivative work, and under most theories of copyright law, there doesn't have to be fixation for there to be a derivative work created.

Amazon's decision has been controversial. For example,here's an excerpt from Lawrence Lessig's "Caving into Bullies (Aka, Here We Go Again)":

We had this battle before. In 2001, Adobe released e-book technology that gave rights holders (including publishers of public domain books) the ability to control whether the Adobe e-book reader read the book aloud. The story got famous when it was shown that one of its public domain works—Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—was marked to forbid the book to be read aloud. . . .

But the bigger trend here is much more troubling: Innovative technology company (Amazon (Kindle 2), Google (Google Books)) releases new innovative way to access or use content; so-called "representatives" of rights owners, Corleone-like, baselessly insist on a cut; innovative technology company settles with baseless demanders, and we're all arguably worse off.

We're worse off with the Kindle because if the right get set by the industry that publishers get to control a right which Congress hasn't given them—the right to control whether I can read my book to my kid, or my Kindle can read a book to me—users and innovators have less freedom. And we may be worse off with Google Books, because (in ways not clear when the settlement was first reported) the consequence of the class action mechanism may well disable users and innovators from doing what fair use plainly entitled Google to do.

ACRL, ALA, and ARL Will File Google Book Search Settlement Amicus Brief

The American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Association of Research Libraries will file an amicus brief authored by Jonathan Band about the Google Book Search Settlement.

Read more about it at "Library Organizations to File Amicus Brief in Google Book Search Settlement."

Frankfurt Book Fair Survey on Digitization Impacts on the Future of Publishing

The Frankfurt Book Fair has released a press release that describes the results of a survey of over 1,000 industry professionals from over 30 countries about the impact of digitization on the future of publishing. (Thanks to HangingTogether.)

Here's an excerpt:

The survey also reveals that current opinion is divided on the future of the e-books and digital content versus the printed word. 40 per cent of respondents expect e-content to overtake traditional book sales as early as 2018—whereas a third predict that this will never happen.

Perhaps more surprisingly still, almost 60 per cent of respondents do not currently use e-books and e-readers at all, and 66 per cent of industry professionals still expect traditional books to dominate the market in five years time, with very few expecting e-books (seven per cent) or e-readers (two per cent) to be the main sources of revenue by 2013.

The Economic Downturn and Its Impact on IT: Suggestions for EDUCAUSE Response

EDUCAUSE has released The Economic Downturn and Its Impact on IT: Suggestions for EDUCAUSE Response.

Here's an excerpt:

  • Two-thirds of respondents indicate that their institution has experienced budget cuts of an average of 7% overall. These cuts are expected to rise to 9%.
  • The average cut for IT units is the same as for the total institution (7%), with about half currently facing budget reductions.
  • Public institutions are more affected than private colleges and universities. Also, large public institutions are more likely to have cuts, and the cuts are larger compared to smaller, public institutions. Variances by FTE for private institutions were not significant.
  • CIOs report cuts more frequently than do faculty. Among faculty who report cuts, however, a larger proportion report deeper cuts, compared to the CIO respondents.
  • Most CIOs (88%) have at least some discretion in how to allocate cuts, but 61% have had mandatory restrictions. Among those without complete discretion, the most common budget reduction strategy is a hiring freeze, either through leaving positions unfilled (75%) or not hiring new positions (69%). Nearly half (43%) have travel freezes.

Lirolem. A Virtual Studio/Institutional Repository for the University of Lincoln

JISC has released Lirolem. A Virtual Studio/Institutional Repository for the University of Lincoln: Final Project Report.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The primary aim of the Lirolem project was initially to build a repository capable of handling the material that was generated by the students of the Lincoln School of Architecture, with a view to using it as teaching material in future years. A second aim was to provide an Institutional Repository that was capable of handling research materials in a variety of formats. . . .

The principal output of the project has been the establishment of the Lincoln Institutional Repository (http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk) in which all members of the University are able to deposit material. A review process is in place, whereby members of the project team can assess the quality of submissions and either make them live in the Repository, or return them to the original author with suggestions for improvement. The Repository facilitates the deposit of full text material, or metadata only records. The public release of full text material can be embargoed for public release for a period of time to comply with publishers’ requirements, or if preferred this material can be made available to registered users of the Repository

Other outputs have been the production of Service Usage Model Document, which describes the services that the Repository uses, the production of user guides and the production of a conference paper, which was delivered at the MACE conference in Venice, 20-21 September 2008, briefing papers for management on Open Access, interim and completion reports to JISC and a project wiki that contains all these documents which is available at http://learninglab.lincoln.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Institutional_Repository.

Digital Library Jobs: Librarian—Copyright and Scholarly Communication at UT-Pan American

The University of Texas-Pan American Library is recruiting a Librarian—Copyright and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

  • Serves as the library's advisor for copyright and intellectual property issues; work as a liaison with faculty members and Copyright Clearance Center.
  • Assist with formation of UTPA scholarly communications database. Create and maintain UTPA library website for copyright issues.
  • Assist faculty in obtaining copyrights for materials stored in online classes or in the library. Work at reference desk as scheduled; Make sure updated copyright information is provided to faculty, staff and students when needed.
  • Teach some bibliographic instruction classes. Assist Library administration with information regarding the copyright issues.

"Publishing an E-Journal on a Shoe String: Is It a Sustainable Project?"

Pietro Cavaleri, Michael Keren, and Giovanni B. Ramello have made "Publishing an E-Journal on a Shoe String: Is It a Sustainable Project?" available in EconPapers. (Thanks to Open Access News.)

Here's the abstract:

The aim of this article is to report on an experiment in publishing an open access journal and learn from it about the larger field of open access publishing. The experiment is the launch of the European Journal of Comparative Economics (EJCE), an on-line refereed and open access journal, founded in 2004 by the European Association for Comparative Economic Studies and LIUC University in Italy. They embarked upon this project in part to respond to the rising concentration in the market for scientific publishing and the resulting use of market power to raise subscription prices and restrict access to scientific output. We had hoped that open access journals could provide some countervailing power and increase competition in the field. Our experience running a poorly endowed journal has shown that entry to the field may be easy, yet that making it a sustainable enterprise is not straightforward.

Long-Term Open Access Medical Journal Restricts Some Content

Starting with the January 2009 issue, The Journal of Clinical Investigation, which went open access in 1996, began restricting some content. Research articles, corrigenda, and erratum remain freely available. Access to other content, such as book reviews and commentary, is restricted to subscribers.

Read more about it at "End of Free Access."

Automatic Metadata Generation for Repositories: MetaTools: Final Report

JISC has released MetaTools: Final Report .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Automatic metadata generation has sometimes been posited as a solution to the 'metadata bottleneck' that repositories and portals are facing as they struggle to provide resource discovery metadata for a rapidly growing number of new digital resources. Unfortunately there is no registry or trusted body of documentation that rates the quality of metadata generation tools or identifies the most effective tool(s) for any given task.

The aim of the first stage of the project was to remedy this situation by developing a framework for evaluating tools used for the purpose of generating Dublin Core metadata. . . .

A test program was then implemented using metrics from the framework. It evaluated the quality of metadata generated from 1) Web pages (html) and 2) scholarly works (pdf) by four of the more widely-known metadata generation tools—Data Fountains, DC-dot, SamgI, and the Yahoo! Term Extractor. . . .

It was found that the output from Data Fountains was generally superior to that of the other tools that the project tested. But the output from all of the tools was considered to be disappointing and markedly inferior to the quality of metadata that Tonkin and Muller report that PaperBase has extracted from scholarly works. Over all, the prospects for generating high-quality metadata for scholarly works appear to be brighter because of their more predictable layout. . . .

In the third stage of the project SOAP and RESTful Web Service interfaces were developed for three metadata generation tools—Data Fountains, SamgI and Kea. This had a dual purpose. Firstly, the creation of an optimal metadata record usually requires the merging of output from several tools each of which, until now, had to be invoked separately because of the ad hoc nature of their interfaces. As Web services, they will be available for use in a network such as the Web with well-defined interfaces that are implementation-independent. These services will be exposed for use by clients without them having to be concerned with how the service will execute their requests. Repositories should be able to plug them into their own cataloguing environments and experiment with automatic metadata generation under more 'real-life' circumstances than hitherto. Secondly, and more importantly (in view of the relatively poor quality of current tools) they enabled the project to experiment with the use of a high-level ontology for describing metadata generation tools.