Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (7/31/06)

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, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Accessing Digital Libraries: A Study of ARL Members’ Digital Projects," "Building a Distributed, Standards-based Repository Federation: The China Digital Museum Project," "Lessons for the Future Internet: Learning from the Past" "On the Tips of Their Tongues: Authors and Their Views on Scholarly Publishing," "Open Archives and Their Impact on Journal Cancellations," and "A Service Framework for Libraries."

For weekly updates about news articles, Weblog postings, and other resources related to digital culture (e.g., copyright, digital privacy, digital rights management, and Net neutrality), digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing, see the latest DigitalKoans "Flashback" posting.

More on ALA and Open Access

Peter Suber has provided clarification of ALA’s stance on open access in the below Open Access News posting excerpt:

Comment. This is the most detailed discussion I’ve seen of this question. You should read the whole thing, as I’ve had to omit most of the detail on which Charles’ conclusion rests. I’d only add that (1) the ALA Washington office has a page on OA, (2) the ALA Council adopted a resolution in support of FRPAA at its June 2006 annual meeting, and (3) the ALA has signed on to several public statements in support of OA, most recently a July 12 letter in support of FRPAA and a May 31 letter in support of the EC report on OA.

To further clarify this matter, FRPAA (Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006) and the European Commission’s Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe both deal with open access to publicly-funded research. This is certainly a major open access issue; however, ALA journals are unlikely to publish a high percentage of papers that result from such publicly-funded research. Consequently, the direct impact of FRPAA or, especially, the EC report on ALA’s journal publishing operations is likely to be minimal.

In contrast to this support for FRPAA and the EU report, ALA has not signed the "Budapest Open Access Initiative" (as other library organizations such as the Association of Academic Health Services Libraries, ALA’s Association of College and Research Libraries Division, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries have), the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities," or the "Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science" (as many association publishers have).

The path from the ALA home page to the Washington Office page is: Home–> Washington Office –> Issues–> Copyright Issues–> Open Access to Research. The ALA Web site is quite large and deep, and one would not expect an OA page to be on the top level. The question is: Can this page be found by someone who doesn’t know that open access is a Washington Office concern? It appears that issues of primary concern to ALA are under the home page heading "Issues & Advocacy" (Home –> Issues & Advocacy).

Whether ALA provides more active support for the open access movement and its reform strategies is, of course, up to its officers and members. These two postings on the matter have been descriptive, not prescriptive. Further clarifications to ALA’s stance on open access or discussion of it are welcome, and can be submitted as comments to either posting.

The American Library Association and Open Access

Does the American Library Association (ALA) support open access and, if so, are its journal publishing practices congruent with open access journal publishing and self-archiving?

What is the American Library Association?

For non-librarians, a brief overview of the American Library Association (ALA) from its Web site may be helpful before considering its open access policies and practices

The American Library Association is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 64,000 members. Its mission is to promote the highest quality library and information services and public access to information.

ALA’s Mission and Strategic Plans

Several key documents outline ALA’s mission and strategic goals:

Although the ALA’s mission and goals have become less library-centric over time, there is no explicit statement of support for open access in any of these documents.

ALA Memberships in Organizations That Support Open Access Initiatives

ALA is a member of at least two organizations that support open access initiatives: (1) the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), and (2) the SPARC Open Access Working Group. (ALA is not a member of SPARC, but its Association of College and Research Libraries division, known as ACRL, is.)

Information about these ARL memberships certainly exists in the ALA Web site, but it is deeply buried and difficult to find by navigating the site’s menu structure (see the Google site searches for ATA and the SPARC Open Access Working Group).

ALA’s Journal Copyright Agreements

ALA has two copyright agreements: (1) Copyright Assignment Agreement and (2) Copyright License Agreement.

In the Copyright Assignment Agreement, the author: "hereby grants to Publisher all right, title and interest in and to the Work, including copyright in all means of expression by any method now known or hereafter developed, including electronic format." ALA then grants back to the author one broad self-archiving right: "The right to use and distribute the Work on the Author’s Web site." It also grants a narrow right: "The right to use and distribute the Work internally at the Author’s place of employment, and for promotional and any other non-commercial purposes." Authors who use this agreement cannot self-archive in public sections of institutional repositories or in disciplinary archives.

In the Copyright License Agreement, the author retains copyright and then grants to ALA the rights needed to publish the article, with the only restriction on the author being that: "Author agrees not to publish the Work in print form prior to the publication of the Work by the Publisher." Authors who can choose this option can self-archive where ever they want.

ALA’s Journals

ALA publishes a number of serials. This section only considers its major journals. Since it is impossible to determine from their Web sites if some ALA journals are peer-reviewed, there has been no effort to distinguish peer-reviewed journals from those with other editorial policies.

  1. Children and Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children: The Web site provides no table of contents information or online access at all, although there is a link that says: "Click here to subscribe to Children and Libraries online now!" The Policies and Procedures page says: "All material in CAL is subject to copyright by ALA and may be reprinted or photocopied and distributed for the noncommercial purpose of educational or scientific advancement." There are no links to the ALA copyright forms. Verdict: Not an open access journal and, since it is unclear whether the Copyright License Agreement is accepted, it may only support limited self-archiving.
  2. College & Research Libraries: There is a six-month embargo period, after which issues are freely available at the Web site. Volume 57 (1996) through volume 66 (2005) are freely available. The journal page solely links to the Copyright License Agreement. Verdict: Not an open access journal, but fully supports self-archiving.
  3. Information Technology and Libraries: Recently, the journal’s access policy changed. There will be a six-month embargo period, after which issues will be freely available at the Web site. Selected articles from volume 20 (2001) through volume 23 (2004) are freely available. The home page links to both ALA copyright agreements. Verdict: Not an open access journal, but fully supports self-archiving. (Disclosure: Since ALA Annual, I have been on the Editorial Board.)
  4. Library Administration and Management: Web site only provides access to table of contents information. No discussion of copyright agreements in Author Instructions. Verdict: Not an open access journal and, since it is unclear whether the Copyright License Agreement is accepted, it may only support limited self-archiving.
  5. Library Resources & Technical Services: Web site provides access to table of contents information and the full-text of volumes 44 (2000) through 46 (2002). Instructions to Authors page links to both ALA copyright agreements. Not an open access journal, but fully supports self-archiving.
  6. Public Libraries: Web site provides free access to volume 42 (2002) through volume 44 (2005). There is no discussion of copyright in the Public Libraries Editorial Guidelines page, and there are no links to the ALA copyright forms. Verdict: Not an open access journal and, since it is unclear whether the Copyright License Agreement is accepted, it may only support limited self-archiving.
  7. RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage: Volume 13 (1998) (of the prior journal) through volume 6 (2005) are freely available. No links to ALA copyright agreements. Guidelines for Submission of Articles to RBM page states: "Articles published in RBM are copyrighted by the American Library Association, and subsequent inquiries for reprinting articles are referred to the ALA Office of Rights and Permissions." Verdict: Not an open access journal. Since it is unclear whether the Copyright License Agreement is accepted, it may only support limited self-archiving.
  8. Reference & User Services Quarterly: Web site only provides access to table of contents information and article abstracts. Information for Authors, Advertisers, and Subscriptions page links to both ALA copyright agreements. Not an open access journal, but fully supports self-archiving.
  9. School Library Media Research: Web site provides free access to all issues. Manuscript Policy page links to both ALA copyright agreements. An open access journal under the most liberal definition of that term (i.e., free, immediate access without using a Creative Commons Attribution License or similar license) that fully supports self-archiving.
  10. Young Adult Library Services: Web site only provides access to table of contents information. Author Guidelines page states: "A manuscript published in the journal is subject to copyright by ALA for Young Adult Library Services." There are no links to the ALA copyright forms. Verdict: Not an open access journal and, since it is unclear whether the Copyright License Agreement is accepted, it may only support limited self-archiving.

It should be noted that the Science and Technology Section of ACRL publishes Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship, a freely available e-journal whose Instructions for Authors page does not discuss copyright at all; however, ALA does not list this journal on its American Library Association Periodicals page, which "is a list of the various newsletters, magazines, and journals published within the American Library Association, including those which are only available over the Internet."

Summary

This brief investigation has not attempted to determine whether the divisions of ALA more vigorously support and enact open access principles than the parent organization. The Association of College and Research Libraries is certainly known for its general support (e.g., see ACRL Taking Action, Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication, and Scholarly Communication Toolkit).

A user starting at the ALA home page would be hard pressed to find any information that suggests that ALA is an advocate of open access without using the search function. Yet, there are a number of pages on the site that deal with it, although many are ACRL Web site pages or serial articles.

ALA’s mission statements and plans reveal no explicit support for open access; however, ALA belongs to at least two organizations that support it: (1) the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), and (2) the SPARC Open Access Working Group.

Out of ten major journals that it publishes, ALA only publishes one open access journal: School Library Media Research. Two journals (College & Research Libraries and Information Technology and Libraries) have a clear six-month embargo policy. Two more (Public Libraries and RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage) may also be operating under an embargo policy. One provides free access to a subset of older back volumes (Library Resources & Technical Services). The rest only provide table of contents information, some with abstracts, or, in one case, no information at all.

Five journals (College & Research Libraries, Information Technology and Libraries, Library Resources & Technical Services, Reference & User Services Quarterly, School Library Media Research) clearly offer authors the option of the Copyright License Agreement, which fully supports all types of self-archiving. For the rest, it is unclear from the journal’s Web sites if this option is permitted, and only the Copyright Assignment Agreement may be available, which only permits self-archiving on the author’s Web site or on internal systems at the author’s place of employment (presumably including an access-restricted part of an institutional repository). It may be the case that all ALA journals permit the use of the Copyright License Agreement; however, this is impossible to determine from some their Web sites, a subset of which have language that appears to indicate otherwise.

As a whole, the American Library Association appears to support the open access movement to a limited extent. If this is incorrect and its support is strong, ALA appears to be having difficulty making its commitment visible and "walking the talk."

ARL Institutional Repositories, Version 2

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) currently has 123 member libraries in the US and Canada. Below is an update of an earlier list of operational institutional repositories at ARL libraries.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (7/17/06)

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, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "The CARL Institutional Repositories Project: A Collaborative Approach to Addressing the Challenges of IRs in Canada"; "Distributed Preservation in a National Context NDIIPP at Mid-Point"; Factors Affecting Science Communication: A Survey of Scientists and Engineers; "Google Scholar and 100 Percent Availability of Information"; "Institutional Repositories: Review and an Information Systems Perspective"; "Institutional Strategies and Policies for Electronic Theses and Dissertations"; Mass Digitization: Implications for Information Policy; "Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality"; "Open Access in the United States"; Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects; "An Overview of Portico: An Electronic Archiving Service"; "Three Options for Citation Tracking: Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science"; and "University of Waterloo Electronic Theses: Issues and Partnerships."

For weekly updates about news articles, Weblog postings, and other resources related to digital culture (e.g., copyright, digital privacy, digital rights management, and Net neutrality), digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing, see the latest DigitalKoans "Flashback" posting.

Open Access to Books: The Case of the Open Access Bibliography

In March 2005, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) published my book the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 License. At the same time, a PDF version of the book was made freely available at the University of Houston Libraries Web site, and a PDF of the frontmatter, "Preface," and "Key Open Access Concepts" sections of the book was made freely available at the ARL Web site. The complete OAB PDF was moved to my new escholarlypub.com Web site in June, and an HTML version of "Key Open Access Concepts" was made available as well. In February 2006, author and title indexes for the OAB were made available in HTML form, and, in March 2006, the entire OAB was made available in HTML form.

The OAB deals with a topic that is of keen interest to a relatively small segment of the reading public. Moreover, it’s primarily a very detailed bibliography. The question is: Was it worth putting up all of these free digital versions of the book and creating these auxiliary digital materials?

From March through May 2005, there were 29,255 requests for the OAB PDF. From June 2005 through June 2006, there were another 15,272 requests for the OAB PDF; 17,952 requests for chapters or sections of the HTML version of the OAB; 11,610 requests for the HTML version of "Key Open Access Concepts"; 3,183 requests for the author index; and 2,918 requests for the title index. I don’t have use statistics for the ARL PDF of the first few sections of the book. (The June 2005 through June 2006 statistics are from Urchin; when I analyze the log files in analog, they may vary slightly.)

Print runs for scholarly books are notoriously short, often in the hundreds. I suspect most scholarly publishers would be delighted to sell 500 copies of a specialized bibliography, many of which would end up on library shelves. However, by making the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals freely available in digital form, over 44,500 copies of the complete book, over 29,500 chapters (or other book sections), and over 6,100 author or title indexes have been distributed to users worldwide. Thanks to ARL, the OAB has had greater visibility and impact than it would have had under the conventional publishing model.

More on How Can Scholars Retain Copyright Rights?

Peter Suber has made the following comment on Open Access News about "How Can Scholars Retain Copyright Rights?":

This is a good introduction to the options. I’d only make two additions.

  1. Authors needn’t retain full copyright in order to provide OA to their own work. They only need to retain the right of OA archiving—which, BTW, about 70% of journals already give to authors in the copyright transfer agreement.
  2. Charles mentions the author addenda from SPARC and Science Commons, but there’s also one from MIT.

Peter is right on both points; however, my document has a broader rights retention focus than providing OA to scholars’ work, although that is an important aspect of it.

For example, there is a difference between simply making an article available on the Internet and making it available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. The former allows the user to freely read, download, and print the article for personal use. The latter allows user to make any noncommercial use of the article without permission as long as proper attribution is made, including creating derivative works. So professor X could print professor Y’s article and distribute in class without permission and without worrying about fair use considerations. (Peter, of course, understands these distinctions, and he is just trying to make sure that authors understand that they don’t have to do anything but sign agreements that grant them appropriate self-archiving rights in order to provide OA access to their articles.)

I considered the MIT addenda, but thought it might be too institution-specific. On closer reading, it could be used without alteration.

How Can Scholars Retain Copyright Rights?

Scholars are often exhorted to retain the copyright rights to their journal articles to ensure that they can freely use their own work and to permit others to freely read and use it as well. The question for scholars who are convinced to do so is: "How do I do that?"

The first thing to understand is that copyright is not one right. Rather, it is a bundle of rights that can be individually granted or withheld. The second thing to understand is that rights can either be granted exclusively to one party or nonexclusively to multiple parties.

What are these rights? Here’s what the U.S. Copyright Office says:

  • To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;

  • To prepare derivative works based upon the work;

  • To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;

  • To perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;

  • To display the copyrighted work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual
    images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work; and

  • In the case of sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.

A legal document, typically called a copyright transfer agreement, governs the copyright arrangements between you and the publisher and determines what rights you retain and what rights you transfer or grant to the publisher. The publisher may offer a single standard agreement or may have more than one agreement.

Whereas the publisher has had its agreement(s) written by copyright lawyers, you are not likely to be a copyright lawyer. This puts you at a disadvantage in terms or understanding, modifying, or replacing the publisher’s agreement. Therefore, it is very helpful to have documents written by copyright lawyers that you can use to modify or replace the publisher’s agreement with, even if the organization providing such documents does so under a disclaimer that it is not providing "legal advice."

Ordered by increasing level of difficulty in getting publisher acceptance, here are the basic strategies for dealing with copyright transfer agreements:

  • If the publisher has multiple agreements, choose the one that has the author assigning and/or granting specific rights to the publisher (e.g., ALA Copyright License Agreement). Don’t choose the agreement where the author assigns, conveys, grants, or transfers all rights, copyright interest, copyright ownership, and/or title exclusively to the publisher (e.g., ALA Copyright Assignment Agreement).
  • If the publisher has a single agreement that assigns, conveys, grants, or transfers all rights, copyright interest, copyright ownership, and/or title exclusively to the publisher:

Of course, other strategies are possible. For example, you could use another type of open content license instead of the Science Commons Publication Agreement and Copyright License. However, you might want to keep it simple to start.

For more information on copyright transfer agreements, see Copyright Resources for Authors and Scholars Have Lost Control of the Process.

For a directory of publisher copyright and self-archiving policies, see Publisher Copyright Policies & Self-Archiving.

By the way, DigitalKoans doesn’t provide legal advice and the author is not a lawyer.

Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects Available on 7/17/06

Neil Jacobs has announced on several mailing lists that Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, which he edited, will be available on July 17th. As you can see from book’s contents below, the book’s contributors include many key figures in the open access movement. I’ve seen an early draft, and I believe this will be a very important book.

The book itself is not OA, but contributors retained their copyrights and they can individually make their papers available on the Internet. My contribution ("What Is Open Access?") is available in both HTML and PDF formats, and it is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

So far, the US Amazon doesn’t list the book, but it is available from Amazon.co.uk in both paperback and hardback form.

The papers in the book are listed below.

  • "Overview of Scholarly Communication" by Alma Swan
  • "What Is Open Access?" by Charles W. Bailey, Jr.
  • "Open Access: A Symptom and a Promise" by Jean-Claude Guédon
  • "Economic Costs of Toll access" by Andrew Odlyzko
  • "The Impact Loss to Authors and Research" by Michael Kurtz and Tim Brody
  • "The Technology of Open Access" by Chris Awre
  • "The Culture of Open Access: Researchers’ Views and Responses" by Alma Swan
  • "Opening Access By Overcoming Zeno’s Paralysis" by Steven Harnad
  • "Researchers and Institutional Repositories" by Arthur Sale
  • "Open Access to the Research Literature: A Funder’s Perspective" by Robert Terry and Robert Kiley
  • "Business Models in Open Access Publishing" by Matthew Cockerill
  • "Learned Society Business Models and Open Access" by Mary Waltham
  • "Open All Hours? Institutional Models for Open Access" by Colin Steele
  • "DARE Also Means Dare: Institutional Repository Status in the Netherlands as of Early 2006" by Leo Waaijers
  • "Open Access in the USA" by Peter Suber
  • "Towards Open Access to UK Research" by Frederick J. Friend
  • "Open Access in Australia" by John Shipp
  • "Open Access in India" by D. K. Sahu and Ramesh C. Parmar
  • "Open Competition: Beyond Human Reader-Centric Views of Scholarly Literatures" by Clifford Lynch
  • "The Open Research Web" by Nigel Shadbolt, Tim Brody, Les Carr, and Steven Harnad

Postscript:

The book is now available from the US Amazon in paperback and hardcover form.

Top Five Technology Trends

As usual, the LITA top 10 technology trends session at ALA produced some thought-provoking results. And, as usual, I have a somewhat different take on this question.

I’ll whittle my list down to five.

  • Digital Copyright Wars: Big media and publishers are far from finished changing copyright laws to broaden, strengthen, and lengthen the rights of copyright holders. And they are not yet done protecting their digital turf with punitive lawsuits either. One big copyright impact on libraries is digitization: you can only safely digitize what’s in the public domain or what you have permission for (and the permission process can be difficult or impossible). There’s always fair use of course, if you have the deep pockets and institutional backing needed to defend yourself (like Google does) or if your efforts are tolerated (like e-reserves has been so far, except for a few sub rosa publisher objections). In opposition to this trend is a movement by the Creative Commons and others to persuade authors, musicians, and other copyright holders to license their works in ways that permit liberal use and reuse of them.
  • DRM: The Sony BMG rootkit fiasco was a blow, but think again if you believe that this will stop DRM from controlling your digital content in the future. The trick is to get DRM embedded in your operating system, and to have every piece of computer hardware and every consumer digital device that can access and/or manipulate content to support it (or to refuse access to material protected by unsupported DRM schemes). That’s a tall order, but incremental progress is likely to continue to be made towards this goal. Big media will continue to try to pass laws that mandate certain types of DRM and, like the DMCA, protect its use.
  • Internet Privacy: If you believe this still exists on the Internet, you are either using anonymous surfing services or you haven’t been paying attention. Net monitoring will become far more effective if ISPs can be persuaded or required to retain user-specific Internet activity logs. Would you be upset if every licensed e-document that your library users read could be traced back to them? Unless you still offer unauthenticated Internet access in your library, that may depend upon your retention of login records and whether you are legally compelled to reveal them.
  • Net Neutrality: If ISPs can create Internet speed lanes, you don’t want your library or digital content provider to be in the slow one. Hope you (or they) can pay for the fast one. But Net neutrality issues don’t end there: there are issues of content/service blockage and differential service based on fees as well.
  • Open Access: If there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon for the scholarly communication crisis, it’s open access. Efforts to produce alternative low-cost journals are important and deserve full support, but the open access movement’s impact is far greater, and it offers global access to scholars whose institutions may not be able to pay even modest subscription fees and to unaffiliated individuals.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (6/19/06)

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, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Certification in a Digital Era," "Digital Rights Management": Report of an Inquiry by the All Party Internet Group, "Fair Use in Theory and Practice: Reflections on Its History and the Google Case," "Investigating the ‘Public’ in the Public Library of Science: Gifting Economics in the Internet Community," Linking UK Pepositories: Technical and Organisational Models to Support User-Oriented Services across Institutional and Other Digital Repositories, "Managing Risk and Opportunity in Creative Commons Enterprises," "Reviving a Culture of Scientific Debate," and "Strategies for Developing Sustainable Open Access Scholarly Journals."

For weekly updates about news articles, Weblog postings, and other resources related to digital culture (e.g., copyright, digital privacy, digital rights management, and Net neutrality), digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing, see the latest DigitalKoans "Flashback" posting.

dLIST Information Sciences Digital Archive Announces New Editors

From the press release:

We are pleased to announce the dynamic new team of editors for dLIST, the Digital Library of Information Science & Technology. These Information/Library & Information Science faculty and librarians will be
responsible for specific subjects.

dLIST is a cross-institutional, subject-based, open access digital archive for the Information Sciences, including Archives and Records Management, Library and Information Science, Information Systems, Museum Informatics, and other critical information infrastructures. The dLIST vision is to serve as a trusted archive and source for scholarly communication in the Information Sciences, broadly understood. dLIST seeks to positively impact and shape scholarly communication in our closely related fields. Editors represent diverse sub-disciplinary communities and work closely with scholars in different fields such as Digital Humanities and Digital Libraries (Marija Dalbello), Government Information and Social Informatics (Kristin Eschenfelder), Information Behaviors (Soo Young Rieh), Museum Informatics (Paul Marty), Scholarly Communication (Charles Bailey), Science Technology Studies (Fernando Elichirigoity), and Classics (Michael May). More information about each of the dLIST editors is available at http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/editors.html.

The new team invites you to self-register, self-archive and explore the many unique features of dLIST.

Some dLIST features are:

  • DL-Harvest, an open access aggregator, which brings together materials from 14 global and open access archives in the Information Sciences for meta-searching and access to the full-text.
  • Detailed Usage Statistics, provide usage statistics of each item in dLIST .
  • RSS feeds and subscription alerts for items deposited in dLIST are available both by individual subjects (example: Academic Libraries) as well as the entire archive and anybody can be alerted automatically and quickly about new dLIST works.
  • A streamlined new web-based submission interface that lets authors upload and deposit their works easily.
  • Software patches and modifications (useful to Eprints archive maintainers) by Joseph Roback.
  • dLIST Classics is a new project that will be making fundamental and leading Library and Information Science texts openly accessible in dLIST.

For more information about dLIST and to self-register please visit http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/ or email dlist at u dot arizona dot edu.

dLIST, Digital Library of Information Science & Technology
Email: dlist at u dot arizona dot edu
Contact: Garry Forger, Learning Technologies at the University of Arizona

Anita Coleman

Netflix and the Long Tail

Netflix, the Internet company that rents DVDs, has an inventory that includes most of the 60,000 non-pornographic DVDs that are commercially available. What percent of these titles do you think rent each day? Five percent? Ten percent? Twenty percent at most?

No, about 66%. That’s 35,000 to 40,000 titles (and an unspecified number of actual DVDs) out the door and into customers’ mail boxes every day. (There are about five million Netflix accounts.)

The long tail at work.

Source: Leonhardt, David. "What Netflix Could Teach Hollywood." The New York Times, 7 June 2006, C1, C5.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (6/5/06)

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, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Business Models in Open Access Publishing"; "The Case for Scholars’ Management of Author Rights"; "Copyright: Finding a Balance"; "The Depth and Breadth of Google Scholar: An Empirical Study"; "Digital Library Federation (DLF) Aquifer Project"; "Finding a Balance 2: Signs of Imbalance"; "Follow-up on the Federal Research Public Access Act"; "Open Content and the Emerging Global Meta-University"; "Public Access to Federally Funded Research: The Cornyn-Lieberman and CURES Bills"; Scholarly Publishing Practice Academic Journal Publishers’ Policies and Practices in Online Publishing. Second Survey; and "Sustainable Digital Library Development for Scientific Communities in China."

For weekly updates about news articles, Weblog postings, and other resources related to digital culture (e.g., copyright, digital privacy, digital rights management, and Net neutrality), digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing, see the latest DigitalKoans "Flashback" posting.

Every Move That You Make: Internet Privacy at Risk

Privacy advocates have good reason to worry about a recent flurry of activity related to Internet data retention by ISPs. (In this context, data retention means keeping records about subscribers and their Internet activities beyond what is required for normal business purposes.)

In late April, Colorado Representative Diana DeGette, a Democrat, drafted legislation that would require ISPs to retain data about their subscribers until one year after their accounts were closed (see "Congress May Consider Mandatory ISP Snooping" and "Backer of ISP Snooping Slams Industry").

Then, in Mid-May, it was reported that Wisconsin Representative F. James Sensenbrenner, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was drafting legislation to mandate Internet data retention (see "Congress May Make ISPs Snoop on You"). The Judiciary Committee’s Communications Director backpedaled a few days after this revelation, issuing a statement that said: "Staff sometimes starts working on issues—throwing around ideas, doing oversight—and (they) get ahead of where the members are and what they want to tackle" (see "ISP Snooping Plans Take Backseat").

In late May, the Attorney General was reported to be privately asking major ISP’s to "retain subscriber information and network data for two years" (see "Gonzales Pressures ISPs on Data Retention").

What does data retention mean for reader privacy in an era where users are increasingly turning to Internet-based information resources instead of print resources? It depends on what data is retained, whether the user is authenticated (e.g., some libraries provide unauthenticated public Internet access), and under what circumstances it can be revealed. Let’s assume for the moment that there is fairly detailed data retention (e.g., user A went to URL B), but not total data retention (e.g., user A went to URL B, where the content of B is also retained).

Determining what the user saw at a particular URL may be dependent on how static the content is. Formally published material is presumably static. Access barriers may temporarily prevent the disclosure of licensed and other protected content until such barriers can be overcome by legal means, but nothing stops the immediate disclosure of freely available, formally published static material. Dynamic information, formally published or not, may have changed since the user accessed it, but how much? Information that is not formally published could have simply vanished, but the Internet Archive may permit reconstruction of what the user saw, and, for freely available material, it may also overcome the problem of changing content. In short, it may now be possible, for mandated retention periods, to determine every e-article, e-book, or other e-resource that a reader has used down to the level of specificity that a URL represents (e.g., page views within an HTML-based e-book).

Stepping back, you might ask: How is this different from the familiar library check-out record privacy problem? The difference is that libraries do not check out journal articles and a variety of other materials, such as reference books. Moreover, libraries are not required to retain circulation records, and readers always have the option for unrecorded in-library use. In the digital age, if it’s online, its use can be recorded.

Consequently, reader privacy may be going the way of the dinosaur. Stay tuned.

2006 Dr. Ilene F. Rockman Award

I was very surprised and deeply honored by receiving the first Dr. Ilene F. Rockman Award yesterday for my work on the "Reference Librarians and Institutional Repositories" issue of Reference Services Review. (Normally, this award, which is one of the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence, is given for the outstanding paper of the year, rather than an outstanding issue.)

My thanks to the RSR Editors and Editorial Board (who made this award without my knowledge), to Emerald, to the issue’s authors, and, of course, to Ilene.

The RSR issue in question includes the following IR articles (the links are to e-prints):

Forget RL, Try an Avatar Instead

Real life (RL) is so 20th century. Virtual worlds are where it’s at. At least, that’s what readers of BusinessWeek‘s recent "My Virtual Life" article by Robert D. Hof may quickly come to believe.

You may think that virtual worlds are just kids stuff. Tell that to Anshe Chung, who has made over $250,000 buying and renting virtual real estate in Linden Lab’s Second Life. Or, Chris Mead, whose Second Life couples avatars earn him a cool $90,000 per year. Or the roughly 170,000 Second Life users who spent about $5 million real dollars on virtual stuff in January 2006.

How about this? For all virtual worlds, IGE Ltd. estimates that users spend over $1 billion real dollars on virtual stuff last year.

While most users may be buying virtual clothes, land, and entertainment and other services, conventional companies are exploring how to use virtual worlds for training, meeting, and other purposes, plus trying to snag regular users’ interest with offerings such as Well’s Fargo’s Stagecoach Island.

For the library slant on Second Life, try the Second Life Library 2.0 blog and don’t miss the Alliance Second Life Library 2.0 introduction on 5/31/06 from 2:00 PM-3:30 PM. And don’t foget to browse the Second Life Library 2.0 image pool at Flickr.

Oh, brave new world that has such avatars in it!

Source: Hof, Robert D. "My Virtual Life." BusinessWeek, 1 May 2006, 72-82.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (5/9/06)

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, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Another OA Mandate: The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006," "Library Access to Scholarship," Podcasting Legal Guide: Rules for the Revolution, and "Preserving Electronic Scholarly Journals: Portico."

"Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia?" Preprint

A preprint of my "Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia?" paper is now available.

It will appear in Information Technology and Libraries 25, no. 3 (2006).

This quote from the paper’s conclusion sums it up:

What this paper has said is simply this: three issues—a dramatic expansion of the scope, duration, and punitive nature of copyright laws; the ability of DRM to lock-down content in an unprecedented fashion; and the erosion of Net neutrality—bear careful scrutiny by those who believe that the Internet has fostered (and will continue to foster) a digital revolution that has resulted in an extraordinary explosion of innovation, creativity, and information dissemination. These issues may well determine whether the much-touted "information superhighway" lives up to its promise or simply becomes the "information toll road" of the future, ironically resembling the pre-Internet online services of the past.

For those who want a longer preview of the paper, here’s the introduction:

Blogs. Digital photo and video sharing. Podcasts. Rip/Mix/Burn. Tagging. Vlogs. Wikis. These buzzwords point to a fundamental social change fueled by cheap PCs and servers, the Internet and its local wired/wireless feeder networks, and powerful, low-cost software: citizens have morphed from passive media consumers to digital media producers and publishers.

Libraries and scholars have their own set of buzz words: digital libraries, digital presses, e-prints, institutional repositories, and open access journals to name a few. They connote the same kind of change: a democratization of publishing and media production using digital technology.

It appears that we are on the brink of an exciting new era of Internet innovation: a kind of digital utopia. Dr. Gary Flake of Microsoft has provided one striking vision of what could be (with a commercial twist) in a presentation entitled "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imminent Internet Singularity," and there are many other visions of possible future Internet advances.

When did this metamorphosis begin? It depends on who you ask. Let’s say the late 1980’s, when the Internet began to get serious traction and an early flowering of noncommercial digital publishing occurred.

In the subsequent twenty-odd years, publishing and media production went from being highly centralized, capital-intensive analog activities with limited and well-defined distribution channels to being diffuse, relatively low-cost digital activities with the global Internet as their distribution medium. Not to say that print and conventional media are dead, of course, but it is clear that their era of dominance is waning. The future is digital.

Nor is it to say that entertainment companies (e.g., film, music, radio, and television companies) and information companies (e.g., book, database, and serial publishers) have ceded the digital content battlefield to the upstarts. Quite the contrary.

High-quality thousand-page-per-volume scientific journals and Hollywood blockbusters cannot be produced for pennies, even with digital wizardry. Information and entertainment companies still have an important role to play, and, even if they didn’t, they hold the copyrights to a significant chunk of our cultural heritage.

Entertainment and information companies have understood for some time that they must adopt to the digital environment or die, but this change has not always been easy, especially when it involves concocting and embracing new business models. Nonetheless, they intend to thrive and prosper—and to do whatever it takes to succeed. As they should, since they have an obligation to their shareholders to do so.

The thing about the future is that it is rooted in the past. Culture, even digital culture, builds on what has gone before. Unconstrained access to past works helps determine the richness of future works. Inversely, when past works are inaccessible except to a privileged minority, it impoverishes future works.

This brings us to a second trend that stands in opposition to the first. Put simply, it is the view that intellectual works are "property"; that this property should be protected with the full force of civil and criminal law; that creators have perpetual, transferable property rights; and that contracts, rather than copyright law, should govern the use of intellectual works.

A third trend is also at play: the growing use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. When intellectual works were in paper form (or other tangible forms), they could only be controlled at the object-ownership or object-access levels (a library controlling the circulation of a copy of a book is an example of the second case). Physical possession of a work, such as a book, meant that the user had full use of it (e.g., the user could read the entire book and photocopy pages from it). When works are in digital form and they are protected by some types of DRM, this may no longer true. For example, a user may only be able to view a single chapter from a DRM-protected e-book and may not be able to print it.

The fourth and final trend deals with how the Internet functions at its most fundamental level. The Internet was designed to be content, application, and hardware "neutral." As long as certain standards were met, the network did not discriminate. One type of content was not given preferential delivery speed over another. One type of content was not charged for delivery while another wasn’t. One type of content was not blocked (at least by the network) while another wasn’t. In recent years, "network neutrality" has come under attack.

The collision of these trends has begun in courts, legislatures, and the marketplace. It is far from over. As we shall see, it’s outcome will determine what the future of digital culture looks like.

Version 62, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 62 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over 2,680 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by the same author, provides much more in-depth coverage of the open access movement and related topics (e.g., disciplinary archives, e-prints, institutional repositories, open access journals, and the Open Archives Initiative) than SEPB does.

The "Open Access Webliography" (with Ho) complements the OAB, providing access to a number of Websites related to open access topics.

Changes in This Version

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are marked with an asterisk):

Table of Contents

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
5.3 Other Legal Issues
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

Further Information about SEPB

The HTML version of SEPB is designed for interactive use. Each major section is a separate file. There are links to sources that are freely available on the Internet. It can be can be searched using Boolean operators.

The HTML document includes three sections not found in the Acrobat file:

  1. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (biweekly list of new resources; also available by mailing list and RSS feed)
  2. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (directory of over 270 related Web sites)
  3. Archive (prior versions of the bibliography)

The Acrobat file is designed for printing. The printed bibliography is over 220 pages long. The Acrobat file is over 580 KB.

Related Article

An article about the bibliography has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (4/24/06)

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, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "The Impact of Mandatory Policies on ETD Acquisition," "Journals in the Time of Google," "Libraries and the Long Tail: Some Thoughts about Libraries in a Network Age," "Signing Away Our Freedom: The Implications of Electronic Resource Licences," Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe, Unintended Consequences: Seven Years under the DMCA, and The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

DigitalKoans Is One

DigitalKoans and the digital-scholarship.com domain (which is actually the same as escholarlypub.com) are one today.

Of course, my blogging career began on June 07, 2001, when the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog was established. However, SEPW was designed as a supplement to the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, whereas DigitalKoans was designed as a stand-alone publication, albeit one that is inevitably interwoven with my other publication efforts.

So, how did we do in year one? According to Urchin, the digital-scholarship.com domain, which includes DigitalKoans and my other digital works (excluding SEPB, SEPW, and SEPR), has had 251,033 visitor sessions, with an average of 686 sessions per day. There have been 540,054 page requests (pages typically being content-bearing HTML or PDF files), of which 377,640 were for DigitalKoans.

These requests came from 131 top-level Internet domains (e.g., .com). In terms of domains representing identifiable countries, the top ten were: Canada, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, France, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, and Belgium. (Interestingly, India and China came in at 11th and 12th place.) Of course, most U.S. users are in the .com, .edu, .net, and .org domains, which dominated the rankings as a whole.

As I’ve noted previously, I use Urchin for first-cut use statistics, and analog for final ones, so I consider these figures to be preliminary.

Free, Legal Digital Audio Downloads (Courtesy of the Creative Commons)

In Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation, J. D. Lasica tells the story of Tarnation, a documentary film that nominated for a Camera d’Or award (pg. 84). The film was made for $218.31 using a video camera and iMovie. One catch: Lasica says that getting permission to use brief commercial music and video segments in the movie cost around $400,000. Creating derivative works that use the entertainment industry’s copyrighted works is clearly not cheap, assuming that you can obtain permission to use them at all.

Imagine instead a world where you could download, play, and use digital media works for free without paying license fees. It may sound impossible, but that world is starting to be built using Creative Commons licenses.

The most liberal license of the six main Creative Commons licences is Attribution: "This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation."

The most restrictive license is Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives: "This license is often called the ‘free advertising’ license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially."

Here’s a brief guide to selected resources that will help you get started finding digital audio works licensed under Creative Commons licenses.

  • Creative Commons Audio Page: An excellent place to start. It has a search engine, featured audio Web sites, brief information about the Creative Commons Licenses, a list of sites where you can contribute audio works, and featured artists, tools, and works. See also: the Creative Commons Find page, where you can search for CC-licensed works using Google and Yahoo!.
  • ccMixter: "This is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons, where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want." Site tabs provide access to picks, remixes, samples, a cappellas, people, and extras.
  • Common Content: "Common Content is a catalog of works licensed in the Creative Commons, available to anyone for copying or creative re-use. The catalog includes over 3,848 records, many of which are collections which include hundreds or thousands of other works." Audio categories include ambient, music, samples, and speech.
  • The Freesound Project: "The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focuses only on sound, not songs." Sound clips are described, tagged (there’s a tag cloud for popular tags), geotagged, and rated (example: tibetan chant 4 colargol 2.aif). Site includes a "Remix! tree," sample packs, and user forum.
  • Indieish: Your Free Music Daily: Blog with CC-licensed music reviews.
  • jamendo: "On jamendo, the artists distribute their music under Creative Commons licenses. . . .jamendo users can discover and share albums, but also review them or start a discussion on the forums. Albums are democratically rated based on the visitors’ reviews. If they fancy an artist they can support him by making a donation." Site distributes albums using BitTorrent and the M3U playlist file format.
  • PodSafeAudio: "This site aims to provide a location where musicians can upload music under the Creative Commons License for use in Podcasts, Mashups, Shoutcasts, Webcasts and every other kind of ‘casting’ that exists on the ‘net." A complex site with many features, including track reviews,categorization of music by genre and rating, categorization of artists by genre and region, collaboration project listing, user forums, and a blog.

Hear Luminaries Interviewed at Recent CNI Task Force Meetings

Matt Pasiewicz and CNI have made available digital audio interviews with a number of prominent attendees at the CNI Fall (2005) and Spring (2006) Task Force meetings.

A Simple Search Hit Comparison for Google Scholar, OAIster, and Windows Live Academic Search

Given that Windows Live Academic Search’s content is limited to computer science, electrical engineering, and physics journals and conferences, a direct comparison of it with other search engines is somewhat difficult.

Although its limitations should be clearly recognized, the following simple experiment in comparing the number of hits for Google Scholar, OAIster (a search engine that indexes open access literature, such as e-prints), and Windows Live Academic Search may help to shed some light on their differences. (Note that OAIster does not typically include content directly provided by commercial publishers, although it does include e-prints for a large number articles published in academic journals.)

The search is for: "OAI-PMH" (entered without quotes).

"OAI-PMH" being, of course, the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. This is a highly specific search, where many, but not all, hits should fall within the subjects covered by Windows Live Academic Search. A major area that might not be covered is library and information science literature.

To get a better feel for the baseline published literature about OAI-PMH, let’s first do some searching for that term in specialized commercial databases.

  • ACM Digital Library (description): 51 hits.
  • Engineering Village 2 (description): 66 hits.
  • Information Science & Technology Abstracts (description): 36 hits.
  • Library Literature & Information Science Index/Full Text (description): 13 hits.

Now, the search engines in question (the links for the below search engine names are for the search, not the search engine):

So, what have we learned? Windows Live Academic Search has a somewhat higher number of hits than the selected commercial databases and, if adjusted downward for publisher versions only (see below), is on the high end. This suggests that it covers the toll-based published literature very well. However, it has a significantly lower number of hits than OAIster and Google Scholar, suggesting that its coverage of open access literature may be weaker than Google Scholar and it is quite likely weaker than OAIster.

Of the 74 hits for the "OAI-PMH" search in Windows Live Academic Search, 54 (73%) were "published versions" (i.e., publisher-supplied works); 20 (27%) were not (i.e., e-prints). Scanning the "Results by Institution" sidebar, it appears that 100% of OAIster’s 180 hits were from open access sources; I didn’t check them all. I didn’t try to break down the 542-hit Google Scholar search result, which has a mix of toll-based and open access materials, although it would be quite interesting to do so. It should be clear that a sample of one search term is a very crude measure (and that this posting won’t grace the pages of JASIST anytime soon).

Of course, this simple experiment tells us nothing about the presence of duplicate entries for the same work in search result sets, which could be important for a meaningful open access comparison. Consider, for example, this group of 11 hits for "A Scalable Architecture for Harvest-Based Digital Libraries—The ODU/Southampton Experiments" from the Google "OAI-PMH" search.

Nor does it tell us the number of items that are not journal articles (or e-prints for them) or conference papers.

An apples-to-apples comparison would adjust for useless duplicates and non-journal/conference literature. (But, of course, it would be quite useful if Windows Live Academic Search had non-journal/conference literature such as technical reports in it.)

However, given the small hit sets, it would not be impossible for someone else to do a deeper analysis on the duplicate entry question and some other tractable questions.