DigitalKoans

The Open Archives Initiative has announced its Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) initiative:

Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) will develop specifications that allow distributed repositories to exchange information about their constituent digital objects. These specifications will include approaches for representing digital objects and repository services that facilitate access and ingest of these representations. The specifications will enable a new generation of cross-repository services that leverage the intrinsic value of digital objects beyond the borders of hosting repositories. . . . its real importance lies in the potential for these distributed repositories and their contained objects to act as the foundation of a new digitally-based scholarly communication framework. Such a framework would permit fluid reuse, refactoring, and aggregation of scholarly digital objects and their constituent parts—including text, images, data, and software. This framework would include new forms of citation, allow the creation of virtual collections of objects regardless of their location, and facilitate new workflows that add value to scholarly objects by distributed registration, certification, peer review, and preservation services. Although scholarly communication is the motivating application, we imagine that the specifications developed by ORE may extend to other domains.

OAI-ORE is being funded my the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a two-year period.

Presentations from the Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories meeting are a good source of further information about the thinking behind the initiative as is the "Pathways: Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories" preprint.

What was new and interesting during the week of 10/9/06?

• "10 Common Misunderstandings About the GPL"
• "Another Academic Library Joins Google Book Project"
• "Automated Policy Disclosure"
• "Bio-Funders Back the Open Access Publishing"
• "Could Online Poker Law Raise The Stakes on Free Linking?"
• "Creative Commons Launches 2nd Annual Fundraising Campaign"
• "Cuts.com: Mash Up a Hollywood Video"
• "Distributing the Catalog Discovery Experience"
• Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) Toolkit
• "Google to Subpoena Net Firms in Copyright Lawsuits"
• "GoogTube—Why YouTube Is Probably Safe"
• "Greenstone v2.71 Released"
• "iPRES 2006: Day 2 and conference report"
• "PBS Looks at Neutrality"
• "Panicked Chefs Propose Copyrighted Food "
• Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation
• "Podcast: ‘Open Source Strategies for Science’"
• "Put Another Copyright Act on the Barbie, Mate"
• "Warning over ‘Broken Up’ Internet"
• "Zotero Is Here"

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: "As We May Read," "CDSware (CERN Document Server Software)," "Delay between Online and Offline Issue of Journals: A Critical Analysis," Fedora and the Preservation of University Records, Final Project Report to Atlantic Philanthropies: Creating an Open Access Paradigm for Scholarly Publishing, "InCommon: Watch This Space!," "Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects on Libraries and Information Policy," "OA Wrap-up on the Last Congress," "Open Access and Quality," Research Communication Costs in Australia: Emerging Opportunities and Benefits, and UK Scholarly Journals: 2006 Baseline Report: An Evidence-Based Analysis of Data Concerning Scholarly Journal Publishing.

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.

What was new and interesting during the week of 10/2/06?

• "Analysts Don’t Like YouTube’s Chances"
• "The British Library Releases Intellectual Property Manifesto"
• "Calling All Academic Librarian Bloggers"
• "Celebrating a Web That’s Free—For Now"
• "E-Mail is for Old People"
• "Geekspeak Still Baffles Web Users"
• "Google and the Future of Print"
• "Google Crawls into Source Code Search"
• "Google Gadgets for All"
• "More Meta"
• "More on the Pricing Crisis"
• "Open Music Comes of Age"
• "Paper: Introducing unAPI"
• "Sony Reader: Nice, but No iPod"
• "Spending on Electronic Books by Academic Libraries has reached 11% of Their Spending on Print Books"
• "Still More Hybrid Journal Programs: T & F and RSC"
• "Toward the Next Gen Catalog"
• "Two Victories at WIPO!"
• "You Can Change a Contract"
• "Zotero—A First Glance"

The "Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia?" postprint is now available.

The abstract is below:

Three critical issues—dramatic expansion of the scope, duration, and punitive nature of copyright laws; the ability of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems to lock-down digital content in an unprecedented fashion; and the erosion of Net neutrality, which ensures that all Internet traffic is treated equally—are examined in detail and their potential impact on libraries is assessed. How legislatures, the courts, and the commercial marketplace treat these issues will strongly influence the future of digital information for good or ill.

If you would like a more detailed description, see my posting about the preprint.