DigitalKoans

According to CrossRef, the official DOI registration agency, over a half-million DOIs have been assigned to books or book chapters, and twenty of its members are using DOIs in this fashion.

What’s a DOI? Here’s a short description from CrossRef

The DOI, or digital object identifier, serves as a persistent, actionable identifier for intellectual property online. DOIs can be assigned at any level of granularity, and therefore provide publishers with an extensible platform for a variety of applications. And DOI links don’t break. Even if a publisher needs to migrate publications from one system to another, or if the content moves from one publisher to another, the DOI never changes.

While the use of DOIs for book chapters is especially interesting, DOIs can be utilized for smaller book sections as this example of an entry for Ian Fleming in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography illustrates. (Notice the DOI, "Ian Lancaster Fleming (1908–1964): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/33168," at the bottom of the entry.)

The Digital Curation Centre has launched the International Journal of Digital Curation, which will be published twice a year in digital form (articles are PDF files). It is edited by Richard Waller, who also edits Ariadne. It is published by UKOLN at the University of Bath, using Open Journal Systems.

The journal is freely available. Although individual articles in the first volume do not have copyright statements, the Submissions page on the journal Web site has the following copyright statement:

Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the University of Bath. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings.

The first issue includes "Digital Curation, Copyright, and Academic Research"; "Digital Curation for Science, Digital Libraries, and Individuals"; "Scientific Publication Packages—A Selective Approach to the Communication and Archival of Scientific Output"; and other articles.

What was new and interesting during the week of 11/20/06? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Another Directory of OAI-Compliant Repositories"
  

  Openarchives.eu is the European guide to OAI-PMH compliant digital repositories in the world.

• "Are We Really Smarter Than Me?"
  

  Under the tagline "we are smarter than me," an online collaborative book project has opened itself to public participation. The draw involves asking people to collaboratively write a book with "authors from MIT, Wharton, and thousands of professionals from around the world." Visitors are invited to become authors in the Creative Commons-licensed project.

• "College Presidents, the Latest Bloggers"
  

  A growing number of college presidents are setting up blogs, not only to express political opinions but also to criticize some people on the campus and congratulate others, reports The New York Times.

• "Calif. Court Ruling Seeks to Protect Bloggers, Web Publishers"
  

  In a victory for bloggers, newsgroup participants and other Web publishers, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday that individual Internet users cannot be held liable for republishing defamatory statements written by others.

• "Data Curation"
  

  Chris Rusbridge is the Director of the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Edinburgh. . . . Chris came through OCLC recently, and gave a thoughtful presentation which nicely framed some of the issues that data curation poses: "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow:" the players on the curation stage [ppt: 6.2MB/63 slides].

• "Down with DRM?"
  

  Now, an increasingly vocal grassroots resistance to DRM is cropping up. An anti-DRM campaign called "Defective by Design," which is organized by the Free Software Foundation, has 15,000 registered members; the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that DRM places limits on "your ability to make lawful use of the music you purchase." Web sites like stopdrmnow.org and digitalfreedom.org have been launched "to protect individuals’ right to use new digital technologies" and urge boycotts on DRM-tagged content.

• "The End User: Copyright Levies Are Debated on Digital Hardware"
  

  In Europe, the existing system of copyright levies—which were first collected on the sale of cassette tape recorders in 1961—is on the verge of radical change. In the United States, it is being introduced, although indirectly. In Japan, it was recently considered and discarded.

• "Future of Copyright Roundtable at Birkbeck"
  

  On the 19th and 20th of last month I attended a roundtable organised by the AHRC Copyright Research Network and the Public Programmes Department of Tate Modern under the grand title "Future of Copyright and the Regulation of Creative Practice." Of the approximately 20 participants there was a fairly even mix of artists, academics and activitists.

• "The Future of Scientific Publishing: an Open Discussion in the Journal of Neuroscience"
  

  For the past several months, the Journal of Neuroscience has been hosting a series of articles concerning Open Access and the future of scholarly publishing—OA’s merits, who pays for it and the role of the scholarly society.

• "How GPL Fits in with the Future of Antitrust Regulation"
  

  The "GPL and open-source have nothing to fear from the antitrust laws," declared the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently. That was in response to a federal complaint charging IBM, Red Hat and Novell with conspiring to thwart competition in the operating-system market by providing Linux free of charge under the GNU General Public License.

• "The Internet as a Resource for News and Information about Science"
  

  Fully 87% of online users have at one time used the internet to carry out research on a scientific topic or concept and 40 million adults use the internet as their primary source of news and information about science.

• "A Model OA Policy for Developing Countries"
  

  The participants in the Workshop on electronic publishing and open access (Bangalore, November 2-3, 2006) have issued a Bangalore Policy Statement on OA.

• "New DMCA Exemptions Granted"
  

  The Copyright Office/Library of Congress today issued its determination in the latest triennial DMCA exemption rule-making. Six exemptions were granted, the largest number so far.

• "A New Way to Browse Books"
  

  I’ve always had an interest in cutting-edge web applications—existing Google products such as Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets make heavy use of JavaScript and DHTML to create full-featured applications in a web browser that you can use without having to download and install anything. In an effort to make online book reading easier, we’ve [Google’s] given our product the same treatment. I’m tremendously excited to announce the first fruits of these efforts.

• "Open Source Databases Cheaper Than Proprietary Ones"
  

  Forrester Research have a new report out saying that open source databases such as MySQL, Ingres and Enterprise DB are cheaper than their proprietary rivals by approximately 60% for databases less than 300GB.

• "Publishers Question Professors’ Grasp of Copyright Law"
  

  The publishing industry says professors who post extensive excerpts of protected books online must have flunked basic copyright law.

• "Purdue Streams a Movie at 7.5Gb/sec"
  

  My friend just got back from the Supercomputing conference in Tampa, FL where she and the rest of the Purdue Envision Center rocked the High Performance Computing Bandwidth Challenge by streaming a 2-minute-long, 125-GB movie over a 10-Gb link at 7.5 Gb/sec.

• "Record Industry Association Declares DRM Dead"
  

  DRM as we know it is over. There may be Son of DRM but that’s another matter. Right now its dead, the majors are moving towards the new model.

• "Universal Sues MySpace for Copyright Infringement"
  

  Popular social-networking Web site MySpace was slapped with its first copyright-infringement lawsuit, by Universal Music Group, alleging that the site enables “rampant” unauthorized copying and distribution of its artists’ songs and videos.

• "Web Censorship Law May Come Out of Hibernation"
  

  On Monday, U.S. District Judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr. in Philadelphia will hear closing arguments in the Child Online Protection Act case, and a ruling is expected by early 2007.

• "Webcast Lectures in Course on OS and OA"
  

  Pamela Samuelson and Mitchell Kapor are teaching a course at Berkeley on Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information. The lectures are all online as OA webcasts, and of course the syllabus is a wiki.

• "Will Industry Consolidation Bring Better OPACs"
  

  Francisco Partners, owners of ExLibris, announced that they purchased Endeavor Information Systems from Elsevier. Francisco will merge Endeavor with ExLibris to create one of the industry’s leading ILS vendors.

• "Will It Copy?"
  

  Second Life users are reportedly fighting back by building anti-CopyBot technologies, but this is ultimately futile. As long as shape and coloration are visible, it will be possible to observe and copy them. . . . Eventually, this will happen in real life too.

• "‘Worm’ Attacks Second Life World"
  

  The self-replicating worm planted spinning gold rings around the virtual world, which is inhabited by more than a million users.

In a two-year (2005-2007) joint project with Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands, Koninklijke Bibliotheek is developing an emulation system that will allow digital objects in outmoded formats to be utilized in their original form. Regarding the emulation approach, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek says:

Emulation is difficult, the main reason why it is not applied on a large scale. Developing an emulator is complex and time-consuming, especially because the emulated environment must appear authentic en must function accurately as well. When future users are interested in the contents of a file, migration remains the better option. When it is the authentic look and feel and functionality of a file they are after, emulation is worth the effort. This can be the case for PDF documents or websites. For multimedia applications, emulation is in fact the only suitable permanent access strategy.

J. R. van der en Wijngaarden Hoeven’s paper "Modular Emulation as a Long-Term Preservation Strategy for Digital Objects" provides a overview of the emulation approach.

In a related development, a message to padiforum-l on 11/17/06 by Remco Verdegem of the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands reported on a recent Emulation Expert Meeting, which issued a statement noting the following advantages of emulation for digital preservation purposes:

• It preserves and permits access to each digital artifact in its original form and format; it may be the only viable approach to preserving digital artifacts that have significant executable and/or interactive behavior.
• It can preserve digital artifacts of any form or format by saving the original software environments that were used to render those artifacts. A single emulator can preserve artifacts in a vast range of arbitrary formats without the need to understand those formats, and it can preserve huge corpuses without ever requiring conversion or any other processing of individual artifacts.
• It enables the future generation of surrogate versions of digital artifacts directly from their original forms, thereby avoiding the cumulative corruption that would result from generating each such future surrogate from the previous one.
• If all emulators are written to run on a stable, thoroughly-specified "emulation virtual machine" (EVM) platform and that virtual machine can be implemented on any future computer, then all emulators can be run indefinitely.

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: "Author Addenda: An Examination of Five Alternatives"; "Building Preservation Environments with Data Grid Technology"; "Improving Access to Research Results: Six Points"; "Improving Access to Research Results: What’s in It for the Institution? Can We Make the Case?"; "Is There a Viable Business Model for Commercial Open Access Publishing?"; "Library Access to Scholarship"; "The Open Access Movement in China"; and "Standards-Based Interfaces for Harvesting and Obtaining Assets from Digital Repositories."

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 11/13/06? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Broadcast Rights and the Public Domain"
  

  Imagine an old Charlie Chaplin movie in the public domain. . . . Under the proposed WIPO broadcast treaty, a TV network that took this public domain movie and played it over the air would have the right to sue anyone who taped the movie off of that broadcast and redistributed it.

• "The Broadcast Treaty and Open Access"
  

  Ben Ivins of the National Association of Broadcasters argues that because other countries give broadcasters a distinct right in their signal, it is opponents of the treaty who must show that the treaty would be harmful. This argument is exactly backward. In the United States, a proponent of a law that restricts speech has the burden to show that the restriction will advance an important governmental interest.

• "Cataloging v. Metadata"
  

  The joke goes: Metadata is cataloging done by men.

• "CC as a Global Movement"
  

  In my last letter, I described some of the ways CC technologies get integrated into Web 2.0 applications. Many of you wrote that you were surprised by the examples, and were especially excited that the applications reached so broadly internationally. . . . So, this week, consider just three examples drawn from a pool of many more. In each, our tools for encouraging sharing are encouraging a much wider range of creativity

• "Copyright Ruling against Biggest and Most Popular Russian E-Library"
  

  A Moscow court has found Maxim Moshkov, owner of the biggest and most popular Russian on-line library, lib.ru, guilty of breaching copyright law.

• "Deal or No Deal—Licensing & Acquiring Digital Resources"
  

  In this article, I will apply the techniques and theories described in a classic book on negotiation, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, by Roger Fisher and William Ury, to the licensing context.

• Digital Document Archiving: Tools and Resources
  

  The three-part manual describes the creation of digital archive of full text documents with Winisis, GenisisWeb and GenisisCD software, which work even in windows95.

• "Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Agree to Standard Sitemaps Protocol"
  

  Now based at Sitemaps.org, the system instructs web masters on how to install an XML file on their servers that all three engines can use to track updates to pages.

• "Huh? YouTube Sends TechCrunch a Cease & Desist"
  

  The offense we committed was creating a small tool that lets people download YouTube videos to their hard drives. We referenced the tool in a recent post that walked people through the process of moving YouTube Videos to their iPod.

• "Is Painting Still Like Photography?"
  

  This is the question being asked by painter Daniel A. Moore, because he is being sued by the University of Alabama which claims that his paintings of Alabama football game scenes violate the University’s trademark "crimson and white color scheme."

• "Merge Historical Maps with Current World In Google Earth"
  

  Google Earth in 4D from Googling Google is a very nice catch about how Google Earth now allows you to view historical maps within the software. Want to see how people thought the world used to look, before all those satellites were taking pictures?

• "One Billionth Article Downloaded on ScienceDirect!"
  

  Elsevier (LSE: REL), the largest global scientific, technical and medical publisher, today counted the one-billionth full-text article download on its electronic journal and book platform, ScienceDirect(R). ScienceDirect started counting the use of full-text articles in April 1999, when it was launched.

• "RIAA President Decries Fair Use"
  

  Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, has an editorial on CNet responding to the Consumer Electronics Association’s support of the Digital Freedom campaign for fair use.

• "RIAA Pulling Out All The Stops To Pass Audio Flag"
  

  Two big appropriations bills—Agriculture and Military Construction, are possible vehicles for the flag. While it won’t be easy—the former has already been passed in the House and the latter has been passed by both houses, all kinds of mischief can happen if there is a conference on either bill.

• "‘Second Life’ Faces Threat to Its Virtual Economy"
  

  The controversy gathered steam Monday when Linden Lab, which publishes Second Life, posted a blog alerting residents of the virtual world to the existence of a program or bot called CopyBot, which allows someone to copy any object in Second Life.

• "Skypecasts Academic Potential"
  

  Skype has a great Skypecasts FAQ page. They define Skypecasts as "large, hosted calls on Skype." . . . Basically you can create or join a large online conference call with UP TO 100 people. Skypecasts are scheduled to begin and end at a certain time and usually have a certain topic of discussion. The users must download and use Skype in order to join the Skypecast.

• "The "Social" in Social Tagging"
  

  However, I’m not sure that simplicity is the distinction which people are seeking to capture through the inclusion of the "social" adjective. I think the intent is not to indicate the simplicity of the "tagging" operation, or the level of expertise required, but rather to emphasise that the operation takes place in the context of a communal or collaborative system.

• "Sun Picks GPL License for Java Code"
  

  After years of requests and debates, Sun Microsystems is ready to release Java source code under a Linux-friendly license.

• "U. of Virginia Joins Google’s Book-Scanning Project"
  

  Google will scan selections from Virginia’s collection of books on American history, literature, and humanities, according to campus officials.

• "Unchecked Copyright Infringement and the Collapse of Virtual Economies"
  

  Yet to some extent, all scarcity within virtual worlds is artificial. With digital goods, once an object is created, it can be cloned at little to no marginal cost. It’s the same reason why piracy of digital files is easier than of analog media. But, in order to make the game worth playing and keep the virtual economies from collapsing, the game universe needs to enforce the principles of scarcity.

• "Universal Music CEO: iPod Owners Are Thieves "
  

  In explaining that Universal required Microsoft to pay it vig on the sale of each Zune, Doug Morris said, "These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it."

• "Vista and More: Piecing Together Microsoft’s DRM Puzzle"
  

  Vista’s DRM technologies fall into several distinct categories, all of which are either completely new to the operating system or represent a significant change from the technology found in previous versions of Windows.

• "The Web Turns 16"
  

  According to the timeline on W3.org, the web turns 16 today.

The Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) has issued new documentation dealing with digital image issues:

• "Challenges of Describing Images"
• "Controlling Your Language—Links to Metadata Vocabularies"
• "Getting Practical with Metadata"
• "Metadata Overview"
• "Metadata Standards and Interoperability"
• "Putting Things in Order: Links to Metadata Schemas and Related Standards"

TASI has also created new guides to assist users in identifying appropriate materials:

• Overview of TASI Materials for Digitisation Project Staff
• Overview of TASI Materials for Those Using Digital Images in Teaching and Research

PLoS is building its innovative PLoS ONE e-journal, which will incorporate both traditional and open peer review, using the open source TOPAZ software. (For a detailed description of the PLoS ONE peer review process, check out "ONE for All: The Next Step for PLoS.")

What is TOPAZ? It’s Web site doesn’t provide specifics, but "PLoS ONE—Technical Background" by Richard Cave does:

The core of TOPAZ is a digital information repository called Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture). Fedora is an Open Source content management application that supports the creation and management of digital objects. The digital objects contain metadata to express internal and external relationships in the repository, like articles in a journal or the text, images and video of an article. This relationship metadata can also be search using a semantic web query languages. Fedora is jointly developed by Cornell University’s computer science department and the University of Virginia Libraries.

The metastore Kowari will be used with Fedora to support Resource Description Framework (RDF) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework metadata within the repository.

The PLoS ONE web interface will be built with AJAX. Client-side APIs will create the community features (e.g. annotations, discussion threads, ratings, etc.) for the website. As more new features are available on the TOPAZ architecture, we will launch them on PLoS ONE.

There was a TOPAZ Wiki at PLoS. It’s gone, but it’s pages are still cached by Google. The Wiki suggests that TOPAZ is likely to support Atom/RSS feeds, full-text search, and OAI-PMH among other possible features.

For information about other open source e-journal publishing systems, see "Open Source Software for Publishing E-Journals."