As other ISPs try to reduce and shape P2P traffic, Verizon has taken a different tack: investigating how to improve throughput with the new Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P (P4P) protocol. In tests with file sharing company Pando, use of P4P boosted performance between 200 and 600 percent.
Read more about it at: "Goodbye, P2P! P4P is Coming" "Verizon Embraces P4P, a More Efficient Peer-to-Peer Tech" and "With Eyes Open, Verizon Peers into the Future."
Peggy Hoon, Special Assistant to the Provost for Copyright Administration at North Carolina State University, has won the 2008 L. Ray Patterson Copyright Award.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Peggy Hoon is the 2008 recipient of the L. Ray Patterson Copyright Award: In Support of Users’ Rights, which was established to recognize the contributions of an individual who pursues and supports the Constitutional purpose of U.S. copyright law, fair use, and the public domain.
Ms. Hoon currently serves as Special Assistant to the Provost for Copyright Administration at North Carolina State University. In that role, Ms. Hoon helps shape the university’s policies and regulations with regard to copyright, and she has shared that knowledge with countless other libraries and universities, through a busy speaking schedule and strong presence on the Internet.
Ms. Hoon has also prepared position statements on several pieces of federal legislation, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act. Further, numerous public interest groups that fought the Federal Communications Commission’s broadcast flag rule are beneficiaries of Ms. Hoon’s statement to the court. Her affidavit challenging the rule established standing for the petitioners (including ALA), which allowed the D.C. Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals to review the case on its own merit and ultimately rule against the broadcast flag.
MFA students at the University of Iowa have been upset about a requirement that would make their theses available as open access documents either immediately or in two years (if they ask for an extension). A number of student blog postings have protested this requirement. Part of the problem is that MFA theses can be creative works (or other types of works, such as nonfiction works) that may have commercial potential. Peter Suber has analyzed the situation in his "Controversy over OA for Fine Arts Theses and Dissertations" posting.
The Interim Provost, Lola Lopes, has now issued a statement about the conflict.
Here's an excerpt from that statement:
For some time now our library, like most major academic research libraries, has been exploring ways to make its collections more accessible by digitizing some materials. As part of that process, there has been discussion about the possibility of making graduate student dissertations and theses available in electronic format. But any such process must be preceded by developing policies and procedures that allow authors to decide whether and when to allow distribution.
On Monday, March 17, I will begin pulling together a working group with representatives from the Graduate College, University Libraries, our several writing programs, and all other constituencies who wish to be part of the process. Under the leadership of Carl Seashore in 1922, Iowa became the first university in the United States to award MFA degrees based on creative projects. Although this has been a rocky start, I like to think that Iowa will again lead the way by developing policies and procedures that safeguard intellectual property rights while preserving materials for the use of scholars in generations to come.
Read more about it at "Iowa's 'Open Access' Policy Is Nothing but a Trojan Horse"; "Students, UI Grapple over Online Publishing"; "Thesis Policy Sparks Uproar"; "U. of Iowa Writing Students Revolt Against a Plan They Say Would Give Away Their Work on the Web"; and "Writing Students Want UI Not to Give Away Their Work."
The Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) project has released White Paper: Representation Information Registries.
Here's the "Executive Summary":
This document is a report on the state-of-the-art in the field of Representation Information Registries (RIRs). RIRs are widely recognised as a critical component of digital preservation architecture in general, and a number of such registries are being developed as part of the Planets architecture in particular. This document discusses the development of the concept of representation information, and of the use of registries as a means of exposing that information for use by digital preservation services; it describes the RIR implementations which currently exist or are under development globally; it assesses planned and potential future developments in this area; it discusses the role which RIRs play within the Planets project, and concludes with recommendations for future areas of research within Planets and beyond.
Library Journal has published its 2008 Movers & Shakers awards (see the March 15th issue table of contents).
It has also released a complete list of all Movers & Shakers award winners by state.
Special congratulations to current and former Texas winners (institutional affiliation listed at the time of the award):
Four Japanese ISP organizations, representing around 1,000 ISPs, have said that they will terminate service to customers who use Winny and other file-sharing software to illegally download copyrighted material if they fail to heed warning e-mails from ISPs that are based on violation information provided by copyright holders.
Read more about it at "ISPs in Japan Agree with Copyright Owners to Ban Persistant File Sharing," "Rising Sun Sets on Illegal Downloaders," and "Winny Copiers to Be Cut Off from Internet."
Gail Rebuck, Chairman and Chief Executive of The Random House Group, recently delivered the Stationers' Company Annual Lecture on "New Chapter or Last Page? Publishing Books in a Digital Age." Among other topics in this interesting, wide-ranging presentation, she discussed publishers' digital copyright concerns and Google Book Search, including saying:
Piracy threatens to erode the copyright protection that is the cornerstone of our creative industries and their successful exports. Vigilant policing and joined-up legislation across all countries is essential. Education is vital, too, to show that these crimes are in no sense 'victimless,' however harmless they may seem. Indifference to copyright protection and copyright worth will prove highly destructive. . . .
For texts held in the public domain the project [Google Book Search], seems entirely laudable, even exciting, since it brings an inconceivably rich library to anyone's desktop. But Google's initial willingness to capture copyrighted works without first asking permission was, to say the least, surprising. . . .
Google’s attitude towards copyright is merely a corporate expression of the individualist, counter-cultural attitudes of many of the Internet pioneers. As Stewart Brand, author of The Whole Earth Catalog once declared, 'information wants to be free.'
In an opinion article in Svenska Dagbladet, Swedish Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask and Minister of Culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth have said that they will propose a law that requires ISPs to reveal the identity of illegal file sharers to copyright holders after they provide evidence that infringement has occurred.
Read more about it at "Sweden to Clamp Down on File Sharing" and "Sweden to Get Tough on File-Sharers."
Jan Velterop has posted "Onwards from Open Access" on his Weblog The Parachute in which he discusses his decision to leave his position Director of Open Access at Springer to join Knewco.
Here's an excerpt from the posting:
As many of my readers will already know, I have recently decided to leave my position of Director of Open Access at Springer for that of CEO of Knewco Inc. Several reactions that I have since received indicate to me that my move is not necessarily understood by everyone, and I've even seen speculations that my leaving open access might mean that it is not going anywhere at Springer.
Let me say the following to that. First of all, OA has developed some very solid roots within Springer and I am most confident that OA is being further developed with alacrity by my successors at Springer.
Secondly, I don’t feel that I am leaving open access. Open access is not some club that one is a member of or not; it is a 'thought form' that one adheres to. And open access is only one of the ways in which the speed, efficiency and quality of scientific discovery can be enhanced. . . .
If the underlying motive is, however, to get the most out of the scientific knowledge that has been gathered, which it is in my case, then moving on from open access to the semantic web—the concept web, if you wish—feels, at least to me, an entirely logical step. . . . We are in a situation of overwhelming—and growing—abundance of scientific information, and methods that deal with that abundance are clearly needed. This is what Knewco people are working on, and I am very excited to join them.
The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress has released Carl Fleischhauer's presentation on "Video Formatting and Preservation" at the Digital Library Federation 2007 Fall Forum.
Here's an excerpt about the presentation from the March 2008 issue of the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter:
Fleischhauer discussed content wrappers, bitstream encodings, metadata and format profiles for born-digital content. He also spoke about emerging reformatting practices at the Library’s new facility for audiovisual collections and a handful of notable NDIIPP projects.
Google has released the Google Book Search Book Viewability API.
Here's an excerpt from the API home page:
The Google Book Search Book Viewability API enables developers to:
- Link to Books in Google Book Search using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers
- Know whether Google Book Search has a specific title and what the viewability of that title is
- Generate links to a thumbnail of the cover of a book
- Generate links to an informational page about a book
- Generate links to a preview of a book
Read more about it at "Book Info Where You Need It, When You Need It."
Jim Griffin, Managing Director of OneHouse LLC, has suggested that ISP users should pay a small monthly surcharge to compensate music companies and performers for lost revenues from file sharing. This public proposal by a music industry consultant suggests that there may have been a shift in the industry's thinking since the EFF released "A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing" in 2004, which suggested a similar plan that was dismissed by the industry.
Read more about it "$5 a Month for Legal P2P Could Happen Sooner Than You Think" and "Music Industry Proposes a Piracy Surcharge on ISPs."
France's Gallica 2 digital book project will go live after the Paris Book Fair, which ends on March 19th. Initially, it will contain 62,000 digital works, mostly from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Publishers will have the option to charge various kinds of access fees.
Read more about it at "France Launches Google Books Rival."
After an Israeli court ordered ISP providers to block HttpShare, a torrent search engine and link-only site, traffic sharply increased as a result of news coverage. The site now has a banner that says "Big Thanks to IFPI that bring us alot traffic!"
Read more about it at "'IFPI Advertising' Boosts Visitors to Blocked File-Sharing Site," "IFPI Gets Israeli ISPs to Block Hebrew Peer-to-Peer Site," "IFPI Pressure Forces ISPs to Block Another File-Sharing Site," and "'Year of Filters' Turning into Year of Lawsuits against ISPs."
Berkeley Electronic Press, a low-cost scholarly journal publisher whose Digital Commons institutional repository software is widely used, has named Gordon Tibbitts, former President of Blackwell Publishing, as its Chief Executive Officer.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Tibbitts comes to bepress after seven years as President of Blackwell Publishing, where he grew the company into the world's leading society publisher, and led the effort to develop an online platform for Blackwell journals. Tibbitts first entered the publishing field in 1980 as Director of Information Systems at Aster Publishing (later Advanstar), before moving to the Thomson Corporation in 1993, where he served as a vice-president until 1999. He holds a BS degree in Computer Science and an MBA from the University of Oregon.
"Gordon Tibbitts is a great match for Berkeley Electronic Press," said Chairman and Co-founder Aaron Edlin. "The past years have seen some great successes at bepress, and we are poised for substantial growth. Gordon is the right person to make it happen—a dynamic, energetic leader with valuable technical and publishing experience and vision."
In addition to his 25 years of experience at major publishing firms, Tibbitts is a founder and board chair of CLOCKSS and board member of LOCKSS, and has served on the Google publishing advisory board and as an advisor to ScholarOne and Atypon Systems, Inc. He frequently speaks and moderates at publishing, library, and technology meetings.
The Oxford e-Research Centre has released Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management, a project plan for determining the requirements for handling data in a federated digital repository at Oxford University.
Here's an excerpt from the "Aims and Objectives" section:
Objectives:
- Capture and document researchers’ requirements for digital repository services to handle research data.
- Participate actively in the development of an interoperability framework for the federated digital repository at Oxford.
- Make recommendations to improve and coordinate the provision of digital repository services for research data.
- Initiate and develop collaborations with the different repository activities already occurring to ensure that communication takes place in between them.
- Raise awareness at Oxford of the importance and advantages of the active management of research data.
- Communicate significant national and international developments in repositories to relevant Oxford stakeholders, in order to stimulate the adoption of best practices.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded $474,474 to Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants recipients.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Note: The We the People program encourages and strengthens the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture. Grants bearing this designation have been recognized for advancing the goals of this program.
ALASKA
Fairbanks
University of Alaska, Fairbanks $50,000
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Siri Tuttle
We the People Project Title: Minto Songs Project Description: The collection, digitization, organization, and archival storage, as well as dissemination among the Minto Athabascan community, of recorded performances of Alaskan Athabascan songs.ARIZONA
Tucson
University of Arizona $25,000
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Douglas Gann
Project Title: Virtual Vault
Project Description: Electronic access to the world's largest collection of whole pottery vessels from the American Southwest through digital renderings of Arizona State University's Pottery Vault and relevant prehistoric archaeological sites as well as interviews with anthropologists, conservators, and Native American potters.ILLINOIS
Lake Forest
Lake Forest College $25,000
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Davis Schneiderman
We the People Project Title: Virtual Burnham Initiative
Project Description: The development of the Virtual Burnham Initiative (VBI), a multimedia project that would examine the history and legacy of Daniel H. Burnham's and Edward H. Bennett's Plan of Chicago (1909).MARYLAND
College Park
University of Maryland, College Park $11,708
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Matthew Kirschenbaum
Project Title: Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use
Project Description: A series of planning meetings and site visits aimed at developing archival tools and best practices for preserving born-digital documents produced by contemporary authors.MASSACHUSETTS
Boston
University of Massachusetts, Boston $24,748
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Joanne Riley
We the People Project Title: Online Social Networking for the Humanities: the Massachusetts Studies Network Prototype
Project Description: The development and evaluation of a social networking platform for the members of the statewide Massachusetts Studies Project.Norton
Wheaton College $41,950
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Mark LeBlanc
Project Title: Pattern Recognition through Computational Stylistics: Old English and Beyond
Project Description: Development of a prototypical suite of computational tools and statistical analyses to explore the corpus of Old English literature using the genomic approach of tracing information-rich patterns of letters as well as that of literary analysis and interpretation.MISSISSIPPI
Mississippi State
Mississippi State University $50,000
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Paul Jacobs
Project Title: Distributed Archives Transaction System
Project Description: Development of open source web tools for accessing online digitized collections in the humanities via a system that communicates with multiple database types while protecting the integrity of the original data sets.NEW YORK
Brooklyn
Unaffiliated Independent Scholar $23,750
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Daniel Visel
Project Title: Sophie Search Gateway
Project Description: The development of an interoperable portal within the Web authoring program, "Sophie," for locating and incorporating multi-media sources from the Internet Archive.Hempstead
Hofstra University $23,591
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: John Bryant
We the People Project Title: Melville, Revision, and Collaborative Editing: Toward a Critical Archive
Project Description: The development of the TextLab scholarly editing tool to allow for analysis of texts that exist in multiple versions or editions, beginning with the Melville Electronic Library.New York City
New York University $49,657
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Brian Hoffman
Project Title: MediaCommons: Social Networking Tools for Digital Scholarly Communication
Project Description: Development of a set of networking software tools to support a "peer-to-peer" review structure for MediaCommons, a scholarly publishing network in the digital humanities.RHODE ISLAND
Providence
Brown University $49,992
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Julia Flanders
Project Title: Encoding Names for Contextual Exploration in Digital Thematic Research Collections
Project Description: The advancement of humanities text encoding and research by refining and expanding the automated representation of personal names and their contexts.TEXAS
Austin
University of Texas, Austin $49,251
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Samuel Baker
Project Title: The eCommentary Machine Project
Project Description: Development of a web-based collaborative commentary and annotation tool.VIRGINIA
Charlottesville
University of Virginia $49,827
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Scot French
We the People Project Title: Jefferson's Travels: A Digital Journey Using the HistoryBrowser
Project Description: Development of an interactive web-based tool to integrate primary documents, dynamic maps, and related information in the study of history, with the prototype to be focused on Thomas Jefferson's trip to England in 1786.
The International Data Corp has released The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth through 2011.
According to the report: "But the number of digital 'atoms' in the digital universe is already bigger than the number of stars in the universe. And, because the digital universe is expanding by a factor of 10 every five years, in 15 years it will surpass Avogadro's number." (Avogadro's number is 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000.)
Read more about it at "Study: Digital Universe and Its Impact Bigger Than We Thought" and "Web Users Warned about Online Exposure."
EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner have taken Ireland's biggest ISP, Eircom, to court to force it to stop illegal music downloads on its network.
Read more about it at "Eircom Taken to Court over Illegal Music Downloads" and "IFPI Takes ISP to Court to Impose Music Piracy Filter."
The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced 149 awards and offers, totaling $11.9 million (Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants are included in this announcement).
The awards are contained in three files: Alaska-Indiana, Kansas-Ohio, and Oklahoma-Wisconsin and American scholars abroad.
The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (PSP), and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) have released the "STM/PSP/ALPSP Statement on Journal Publishing Agreements and Copyright Agreement 'Addenda'."
Here's an excerpt from the STM press release:
The debate on the rights that authors have (or indeed it is claimed inaccurately, do not have) over their published works continues to rage, and much coverage has been given to purportedly restrictive practices or policies, when in fact they do not exist for the majority of publishers.
The most recent examples surround the vote of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard for university ownership and distribution of research papers (February 2008). One advocate of the Harvard policy claims that this step was taken because "the scholarly publishing system has become far more restrictive than it need be [… m]any publishers will not even allow scholars to use and distribute their own work." (See http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/02.14/99-fasvote.html).
This is not only an inaccurate perception of the role of publishers and copyright, but also means that advocating authors to modify existing journal publishing agreements with "copyright addenda" is simply a call for needless bureaucracy. . . .
STM publishers invariably allow the authors of journal articles to use their published papers in their own teaching and for educational purposes generally within their institutions. Most journals have policies that permit authors to provide copies of their papers to research colleagues, and to re-use portions of their papers in further works or books. Although some news-oriented science and medical magazines have a few restrictions on pre-publication posting, almost all research journals permit the posting by the author or the author's institution of some version of the paper on the Internet.
The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography archive file has been updated to include version 71. The archive ZIP file is about 44 MB in size.
Although there appears to have been no formal public announcement about its roll out, the DSpace-based Texas Digital Library Repository is available.
The TDL Repository contains some initial materials (mainly ETDs and Seventeenth-Century News) from three of the four founding TDL members (Texas A&M University at College Station, Texas Tech University at Lubbock, and the University of Texas at Austin; there are no materials from the University of Houston) as well as from the University of Texas at Arlington.
Using Open Journal Systems, TDL also provides access to the Journal of Digital Information, which is supported by the Texas A&M University Libraries.
The Texas Digital Library Shibboleth Federation has made progress in providing Shibboleth access to TDL for three of the four founding members (the status as of August 2007 was: Texas A&M University at College Station: fully deployed, Texas Tech University at Lubbock: agreement reached, and the University of Texas at Austin: fully deployed; there was no activity at the University of Houston). Progress was also being made for Shibboleth access for Baylor University, Texas State University, and the University of North Texas.
The Council on Library and Information Resources has released essays from its recent Core Functions of the Research Library in the 21st Century meeting.
Here's an excerpt from the meeting home page that lists the essays:
"The Future of the Library in the Research University," by Paul Courant
"Accelerating Learning and Discovery: Refining the Role of Academic Librarians," by Andrew Dillon
"A New Value Equation Challenge: The Emergence of eResearch and Roles for Research Libraries," by Richard E. Luce
"Co-teaching: The Library and Me," by Stephen G. Nichols
"Groundskeepers to Gatekeepers: How to Change Faculty Perceptions of Librarians and Ensure the Future of the Research Library," by Daphnee Rentfrow
"The Research Library in the 21st Century: Collecting, Preserving, and Making Accessible Resources for Scholarship," by Abby Smith
"The Role of the Library in 21st Century Scholarly Publishing," by Kate Wittenberg
SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) has released presentations from its SCOAP3 US Focal meeting at the University of California at Berkeley.
Here is an excerpt from the announcement that lists the presentations:
- What is Open Access, anyhow (Rick Luce, Emory University)
- The SCOAP3 model (Salvatore Mele, CERN)
- Fund-raising in Europe (Jens Vigen, CERN)
- SCOAP3: Expectations of a large research institution (Ralf Schimmer, Max Planck Digital Library)
- US consortia in SCOAP3 (Ivy Anderson, California Digital Library)
- Individual US libraries and SCOAP3—I (Miriam Blake, Los Alamos National Laboratory)
- Individual US libraries and SCOAP3—II (Kimberly Douglas, Caltech)
- OA synergies: Repositories for High Energy Physics (Travis Brooks, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center)
To find out more about SCOAP3, see the About SCOAP3 page.
