DigitalKoans

Blackwell Publishing has released a new version of Blackwell Synergy, which utilizes Atypon’s Literatum software.

From the press release:

Blackwell Synergy enables its users to search 1 million articles from over 850 leading scholarly journals across the sciences, social sciences, humanities and medicine. The redesign provides easier navigation, faster loading times and improved access to tools for researchers, as well as meeting the latest accessibility standards (ADA section 508 and W3C’s WAI-AA).

Recently, the University of Chicago Press picked Atypon as a technology partner to provide an e-publishing platform for its online journals.

OCLC Openly Informatics has announced a free link checking plug-in for Firefox called Link Evaluator.

Here a brief description from the Link Evaluator page:

Link Evaluator is a Firefox extension designed to help users evaluate the availability of online resources linked to from a given Web page. When started, it automatically follows all links on the current page, and assesses the responses of each URL (link). . . .

After each link is checked, it is highlighted with a color based on the relative success of the result: green for fully successful, shades of yellow for partly successful, and red for unsuccessful.

It requires Mozilla Firefox version 1.5 (or later).

The University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, working together as the Michigan Digital Publishing Initiative, have established digitalculturebooks, which offers free access to digital versions of its published works (print works are fee-based). The imprint focuses on "the social, cultural, and political impact of new media."

The objectives of the imprint are to:

• develop an open and participatory publishing model that adheres to the highest scholarly standards of review and documentation;
• study the economics of Open Access publishing;
• collect data about how reading habits and preferences vary across communities and genres;
• build community around our content by fostering new modes of collaboration in which the traditional relationship between reader and writer breaks down in creative and productive ways.

Library Journal Academic Newswire notes in its article about digitalculturebooks:

While press officials use the term "open access," the venture is actually more "free access" than open at this stage. Open access typically does not require permission for reuse, only a proper attribution. UM director Phil Pochoda told the LJ Academic Newswire that, while no final decision has been made, the press’s "inclination is to ask authors to request the most restrictive Creative Commons license" for their projects. That license, he noted, requires attribution and would not permit commercial use, such as using it in a subsequent for-sale product, without permission. The Digital Culture Books web site currently reads that "permission must be received for any subsequent distribution."

The imprint’s first publication is The Best of Technology Writing 2006.

(Prior postings about digital presses.)

PC Magazine’s special double issue on Microsoft’s Vista operating system (26, no. 1/2 January 2007) is worth a look. Here are the key articles:

• The Insider’s Guide to Windows Vista
• Vista at Work

You might also be interested in their Top 20 Wired Colleges piece, which has some surprising results (e.g., Villanova University tops MIT).

In a posting on Google Blogoscoped, Philipp Lenssen has announced that he has put up 100 public domain books from Google Book Search on Authorama.

Regarding his action, Lenssen says:

In other words, Google imposes restrictions on these books which the public domain does not impose*. I’m no lawyer, and maybe Google can print whatever guidelines they want onto those books. . . and being no lawyer, most people won’t know if the guidelines are a polite request, or legally enforceable terms**. But as a proof of concept—the concept of the public domain—I’ve now ’set free’ 100 books I downloaded from Google Book Search by republishing them on my public domain books site, Authorama. I’m not doing this out of disrespect for the Google Books program (which I think is cool, and I’ll credit Google on Authorama) but out of respect for the public domain (which I think is even cooler).

Since Lenssen has retained Google’s usage guidelines in the e-books, it’s unclear how they have been "set free," in spite of the following statement on Authorama’s Books from Google Book Search page:

The following books were downloaded from Google Book Search and are made available here as public domain. You can download, republish, mix and mash these books, for private or public, commercial or non-commercial use.

Leaving aside the above statement, Lenssen’s action appears to violate the following Google usage guideline, where Google asks that users:

Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes.

However, in the above guideline, Google uses the word "request," which suggests voluntary, rather than mandatory, compliance. Google also requests attribution and watermark retention.

Maintain attribution The Google ‘watermark’ you see on each file is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.

Note the use of the word "please."

It’s not clear how to determine if Google’s watermark remains in the Authorama files, but, given the retention of the usage guidelines, it likely does.

So, do Google’s public domain books really need to be "set free"? In its usage guidelines, Google appears to make compliance requests, not compliance requirements. Are such requests binding or not? If so, the language could be clearer. For example, here’s a possible rewording:

Make non-commercial use of the files Google Book Search is for individual use only, and its files can only be used for personal, non-commercial purposes. All other use is prohibited.

OAI-PMH permits metadata harvesting from disciplinary archives, institutional repositories, and other digital archives. This allows the creation of specialized search services using this harvested metadata. OAI-PMH is a key technology for the open access movement, but does it require too much human intervention?

An interesting message on JISC-REPOSITORIES by Santy Chumbe, Technical Officer of the PerX project, suggests that it may. He says:

We have learned that in despite of its relative simplicity, an OAI-PMH service can be harder to implement and maintain than expected. We have spent a lot of effort harvesting, normalising and maintaining metadata obtained from OAI data providers. In particular the issue of metadata quality is an important factor here. A summary of our experiences dealing with OAI-PMH can be found at http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00006394. . . . A final report outlining the maintenance issues involved in the project is in progress but the experience gained suggests that successful ongoing maintenance of OAI targets would require a mixture of automated and manual approaches and that the level of ongoing maintenance is high.

A Companion to Digital Humanities is now freely available in digital form.

This important 2004 book was edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. It includes chapters by such notable experts as Howard Besser, Greg Crane, Susan Hockey, Willard McCarty, Allen H. Renear, Abby Smith, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, John Unsworth, and Perry Willett (to name just a few).

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: "Eliminating E-Reserves: One Library’s Experience," "Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s Critique of Google: Private Sector Book Digitization and Digital Library Policy," "Open Access in 2006," Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Final Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences, "The Research University and Scholarly Publishing: The View from a Provost’s Office," "Self-Archiving and the Copyright Transfer Agreements of ISI-ranked Library and Information Science Journals," "Using the Audit Checklist for the Certification of a Trusted Digital Repository as a Framework for Evaluating Repository Software Applications," and "Why Digital Asset Management? A Case Study."

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.

You may not know it, but your home computer could be under a serious attack from botnets populated by zombie computers, and that spells trouble for your personal data.

According to a New York Times article ("Attack of the Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat") ShadowServer is "now tracking more than 400,000 infected machines and about 1,450 separate I.R.C. control systems, which are called Command & Control servers." Moreover, it states that:

Computer security experts warn that botnet programs are evolving faster than security firms can respond and have now come to represent a fundamental threat to the viability of the commercial Internet. The problem is being compounded, they say, because many Internet service providers are either ignoring or minimizing the problem.

The New York Times piece offers some general advice about how to protect your computer. I’ll give you some quick specifics for PCs, using free programs.

First, let’s see how exposed your computer is to the Net. Go to Shields Up!, click on "Proceed" at the bottom of the page, click on "File Sharing," then click on "All Service Ports." If your computer, doesn’t pass these tests you’ll want to take remedial action.

Second, if you don’t have a software firewall, download and install the free version of Zone Alarm. Under "Firewall," set "Internet Zone Security" to "High."

Third, if you don’t have antivirus software, download and install AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition. Scan for viruses.

Fourth, if you don’t have antispyware software, download and install Ad-Aware SE Personal. Scan for spyware. Update and run it periodically.

Fifth (for DSL/cable users), if you really want to be safe and you don’t have a hardware firewall, buy one and disable the IRC ports: 194 and 6660-7000.

Wasn’t that fun? Now, run Shields Up! again. Hopefully, all is well. If not, tweak.

Keep in mind that free program versions lack features of paid ones. Also keep in mind that suite programs that you pay for often offer variable protection for various functions, and, while a single program may cover all functions, you may be better off mixing and matching single-function programs that are very highly rated by PC Magazine, PC World, and similar publications, keeping in mind that programs from different vendors can interfere with each other and experimentation m