DigitalKoans

The Association of Research Libraries and Peggy Hoon, Scholarly Communication Librarian at the North Carolina State University Libraries, have established the Know Your Copy Rights initiative "for librarians who are developing positive educational programs for academic users of copyrighted materials in US not-for-profit institutions."

A variety of useful documents are available (and more are being developed): "Assessing Campus Copyright Education Needs & Opportunities," "Know Your Copy Rights—What You Can Do" (faculty brochure), and "Using Copyrighted Works in Your Teaching—FAQ: Questions Faculty and Teaching Assistants Need to Ask Themselves Frequently."

If you are tired of negotiating a license for every commercial information product that you purchase, there may be hope on the horizon.

The NISO Shared E-Resource Understanding Working Group (SERU), co-chaired by Karla Hahn, Association of Research Libraries, and Judy Luther, Informed Strategies, is addressing this issue.

Here is the group’s charge:

The working group is charged with developing Recommended Practices to be used to support a new mechanism for publishers to sell e-resources without licenses if they feel their perception of risk has been adequately addressed by current law and developing norms of behavior.

The document will be an expression of a set of shared understandings of publisher and library expectations regarding the sale of an electronic resource subscription. Negotiation between publisher perspectives and library perspectives will be needed to develop a useful set of practices.

The working group will build on considerable work to identify key elements of a best practices document already begun during a one-day meeting sponsored by ARL, ALPSP, SSP, and SPARC. All of the participants in that scoping meeting expressed a strong desire to continue to work on this project and form the proposed working group to develop best practices.

A recent article provides more details about SERU as does its FAQ.

There is also a mailing list. Send a message to SERUinfo-subscribe@list.niso.org to subscribe.

Ted C. Bergstrom and Rosemarie Lavaty have deposited an eprint in eScholarship that studies the self-archiving behavior of economists ("How Often Do Economists Self-Archive?").

They summarize their findings in the paper’s abstract:

To answer the question of the paper’s title, we looked at the tables of contents from two recent issues of 33 economics journals and attempted to find a freely available online version of each article. We found that about 90 percent of articles in the most-cited economics journals and about 50 percent of articles in less-cited journals are available. We conduct a similar exercise for political science and find that only about 30 percent of the articles are freely available. The paper reports a regression analysis of the effects of author and article characteristics on likelihood of posing and it discusses the implications of self-archiving for the pricing of subscription-based academic journals.

Their conclusion suggests that significant changes in journal pricing could result from self-archiving:

As more content becomes available in open access archives, publishers are faced with greater availability of close substitutes for their products and library demand for journals is likely to become more price-elastic. The increased price-responsiveness means that profit-maximizing prices will fall. As a result, it can be hoped that commercial publishers will no longer be able to charge subscription prices greatly in excess of average cost. Thus the benefits of self-archiving to the academic community are twofold. There is the direct effect of making a greater portion of the body of research available to scholars everywhere and the secondary effect of reducing the prices charged by publishers who exploit their monopoly power.

The Disruptive Library Technology Jester and Free Range Librarian blogs have sounded a warning that $47 million of unobligated current-year funding for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program is in serious danger of being rescinded.

House Joint Resolution 20 has been passed in the House and is now being considered by the Senate.

The NDIIPP 2005 Annual Review provides a detailed look at the work of this important Library of Congress program.

See Murray’s Jester posting for the cutback details and check out his protest letter to Ohio’s Senators.

What was new and interesting during the week of 2/5/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Apple’s Jobs Calls for DRM-Free Music"
  

  In a rare open letter from CEO Steve Jobs on Tuesday, Apple urged record companies to abandon digital rights management technologies.

• "Big Win for Innocent RIAA Defendant"
  

  Good news today from the great state of Oklahoma. Debbie Foster, a single mom who was improperly sued by the RIAA back in 2004 for file sharing, has won back her attorneys’ fees. The decision today is one of the first in the country to award attorneys fees to a defendant in an RIAA case over music sharing on the Internet.

• "A Closer Look at the National Archives-Footnote Agreement"
  

  Surprisingly, everyone I [Dan Cohen] spoke to at both NARA and Footnote emphasized that despite the seemingly set-in-stone language of the legal agreement, there is a great deal of latitude in how it is executed, and they asked me to spread the word about how historians and the general public can weigh in.

• "Commons Touch on Rights"
  

  With digital rights management technology fuelling the impassioned debate on copyright, Creative Commons licences are attracting more interest by the day.

• "Custom Search Engine for DOAJ"
  

  Try out the DOAJ search engine for english journal content!

• "Day of the RFIDs"
  

  The California State Senate, in August of 2006 passed the Information Protection Act in August of last year, went to the Governor for signature, and languished till the end of the year. It has been reintroduced by State Senator Simitian as The Identity Information Protection Act of 2007, (SB 30) and is currently under the consideration of the committee of the Judiciary. This Act is attempting to protect our privacy from covert scanning.

• "EDUCAUSE2006 Podcast: The Real At-Risk E-Content"
  

  They [Joanne Kaczmarek and Taylor Surface] will share how the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed open-source software to efficiently manage the process of archiving Web documents, Web pages, and entire Web sites in support of an institution’s work to record its history as represented on the Web.

• "ELI2007 Podcast: Connexions"
  

  In this 52-minute recording from the 2007 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting, we’ll hear from Richard Baraniuk in a session entitled Connexions: Building Communities and Sharing Knowledge.

• "Emerald Signs Agreement with Council of Australian University Librarians"
  

  This five-year consortial agreement provides CAUL’s 1.1 million users with access to Emerald’s collection of online digital journals and databases

• "Google’s Schmidt Pitches ‘Self-Governing’ Net"
  

  Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s nightmare scenario for a future Internet looks like this: As billions more people go online, those in power are so "freaked out" about the misuse of personal information that they suffocate the Web with stifling regulations.

• "Groups: Deff Report"
  

  This is by way of introduction to a very interesting report from DEFF, Denmark’s ‘electronic research library’. DEFF provides services to Denmark’s academic libraries. . . . I found it a fascinating read as it explores what it is best to do at the group or network level to serve the shared interests of a group of academic libraries. Where is the appropriate division of labor between institutional efforts and collective action by an organization such as DEFF?

• "Harvard Business School Studies Wikipedia"
  

  In the true spirit of their subject Wikipedia, Harvard Business School Professors Karim Lakhani and Andrew McAfee, have published their latest case study online under a GNU Free Documentation License. The study documents not just the history of Wikipedia, but encyclopedias themselves and presents the information in a format that is intended to foster debate and discussion on the subject.

• "Mellon Gives MONK a Million"
  

  The University of Maryland is part of an international and multi-institutional research team recently awarded a two-year $1,000,000 grant by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a humanities text-mining project called "Metadata Offer New Knowledge" (MONK). The project, directed by John Unsworth at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, also includes faculty, staff, and students from Northwestern University, McMaster University, the University of Nebraska, and the University of Alberta, as well as the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

• "Minimum Necessary Sysadmin"
  

  "Out of the box" is a relative term here. DSpace doesn’t have a box, really. Getting it running is assuredly not as simple as sticking a CD in a CD drive, clicking some horrible EULA, and waiting while the CPU whirs. It’s free as in kittens, as Karen Schneider aptly puts it.

• "More on the MLA report"
  

  Some of the most important work about and in digitalized scholarship is appearing from university presses, an invaluable resource that the task force correctly praises and for which it seeks more institutional resources. Yet many departments are clueless, all thumbs in the old-fashioned sense of the phrase, in doing evaluations of digital scholarship that respect peer review.

• "NY Times Publisher: Our Goal Is to Manage the Transition from Print to Internet"
  

  "I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either," he says.

• "Project Builder: Building Rich, Contextualized Web Presentations from a Digital Archive"
  

  The Project Builder CMS helps faculty members and cultural institutions create rich, multimedia digital archives and Web sites that are easily maintained and augmented. The system encourages best practices in metadata and allows for the development of complex, multimedia learning objects. Digital objects in the repository can be easily repurposed for other projects.

• "Music Industry Group Fires Back at Apple"
  

  A recording industry group fired back Wednesday at Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs, suggesting his company should open up its anti-piracy technology to its rivals instead of urging major record labels to strip copying restrictions from music sold online.

• "Public Comment for Revision of DCMI Abstract Model"
  

  The DCMI Abstract Model, which attained the status of DCMI Recommendation in March 2005, has been revised in light of discussion and feedback from the DCMI Architecture Working Group, the DCMI Usage Board, and the broader community. This revised version of the Abstract Model has been posted for a four-week public comment period.

• "Senator to Propose Surveillance of Illegal Images"
  

  A forthcoming bill in the U.S. Senate lays the groundwork for a national database of illegal images that Internet service providers would use to automatically flag and report suspicious content to police.

• "Vista, Ingenta Merge to Form Publishing Technologies"
  

  Vista International, a specialist in comprehensive back-office software for publishers, and Ingenta, focused on online publishing technology, are merging to create Publishing Technologies PLC, an international firm offering a wide range of publishing-specific software products to the industry.

• "Wal-Mart to Launch Video Downloads"
  

  Hollywood’s love affair with DVDs will face its biggest test beginning Tuesday as Wal-Mart unveils a movie and TV-show download service with participation by all major studios.

• "Web 2.0 Explained in a Short, Moving Video"
  

  This incredible video called "Web 2.0. . . the Machine is Us/ing Us," is deeply moving and incredibly smart.

• "WorldCat Improvements"
  

  Some nice additions to OCLC’s WorldCat.org service were announced yesterday.

• "The World’s First Wiki Novel?"
  

  Nevertheless, a group of students at De Montfort University, in Leicester, England, are going to give the Wiki novel a shot, according to The Guardian.

• "YouTube and Viacom"
  

  On February 2nd, Viacom used the DMCA to make YouTube shut off about 100,000 videos. Many of those videos, however, weren’t Viacom’s to claim.

The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) has issued an open access position paper ("ASCB Position on Public Access to Scientific Literature").

Here is an excerpt:

The ASCB believes strongly that barriers to scientific communication slow scientific progress. The more widely scientific results are disseminated, the more readily they can be understood, applied, and built upon. The sooner findings are shared, the faster they will lead to new scientific insights and breakthroughs. This conviction has motivated the ASCB to provide free access to all of the research articles in Molecular Biology of the Cell two months after publication, which it has done since 2001. . . .

Some publishers argue that providing free access to their journal’s content will catastrophically erode their revenue base. The experience of many successful research journals demonstrates otherwise; these journals make their online content freely available after a short embargo period that protects subscription revenue. For example, as noted above, the content of Molecular Biology of the Cell is free to all after only two months, yet the journal remains not only financially sound, but profitable. The data clearly show that free access and profitability are not mutually exclusive.

Our goal should be to make research articles freely available as soon as feasible so that science and the public benefit from their expanded use and application. At the same time, it is important that nonprofit societies and other publishers generate sufficient revenues to sustain the costs of reviewing and publishing articles. We believe that a six-month embargo period represents a reasonable compromise between the financial requirements of supporting a journal and the need for access to current research.

The Princeton University Library has announced that it has joined the Google Book Search Library Project.

From the press release:

A new partnership between the Princeton University Library and Google soon will make approximately 1 million books in Princeton’s collection available online in a searchable format.

In a move designed to open Princeton’s vast resources to a broad international audience, the library will work with Google over the next six years to digitize books that are in the public domain and no longer under copyright. . . .

"We will be working with Google in the next several months to choose the subject areas to be digitized and the timetable for the work," [Karin] Trainer said. "Library staff, faculty and students will be invited to suggest which parts of our distinctive collections should be digitized."

Princeton is the 12th institution to join the Google Books Library Project. Books available in the Google Book Search also include those from collections at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of California, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas-Austin, the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the New York Public Library, the University Complutense of Madrid and the National Library of Catalonia.

Google also announced the new partnership in its Inside Google Book Search blog.

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: Community Created Content: Law, Business and Policy, "A Comparison of OpenURL Link Resolvers: The Results of a University of Connecticut Libraries Environmental Scan," "Continuing Use of Print-Only Information by Researchers," "A Dublin Core Application Profile for Scholarly Works," "Mandate Momentum in 2007," and "U.S. Institutional Repositories: A Census."

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 1/29/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "28% of Online Americans Have Used the Internet to Tag Content"
  

  Just as the internet allows users to create and share their own media, it is also enabling them to organize digital material their own way, rather than relying on pre-existing formats of classifying information. A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.

• "About Digitising Five Centuries of UK Life: Massive £12m Boost for Digitisation of National Scholarly Resources"
  

  JISC today announced the successful bids in a further £12m investment in the digitisation of major resources of national importance.

• "Books: Mapped"
  

  So why not visualize places mentioned in books on a map? Now you can. Our team has begun to animate the static information found in books by organizing a sample of locations from them on an interactive Google Map, with snippets of text from the book, and links to the actual pages where the locations are mentioned.

• "Copyright Industries Worth $1.3T to U. S Economy"
  

  According to a new study commissioner by U.S. copyright industries, copyright industries in the U.S. accounted for $1.38 trillion in 2005, or 11.12% of the gross domestic product.

• "Copyright Policy: Orphan Works Reform"
  

  The alternative I [Lawrence Lessig] propose is a kind of copyright maintenance procedure (like patent maintenance). I

• "Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively"
  

  When a court-appointed special master last year rejected the claim of an Alabama couple that their daughter had suffered seizures after a vaccination, she explained her decision in part by referring to material from articles in Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia.

• "Dancing with Them What Brung Ya"
  

  So if the green road to OA wants to dance with academic libraries—and green-OA does want us on its dance card, because it would not exist and cannot at present survive without us—it will have to accept the other digital baggage we bring with us. Student papers. Digitized collections. Webcasts. Learning objects. Et cetera.

• "Demeanor and Community"
  

  I’d bet my entire net worth and a bit over that DSpace adopters contain many, many more non-techies and accidental techies than Fedora adopters.

• "Emerald OA Experiment Pays in Kind"
  

  In exchange for open publication on Emerald Asset authors will be asked to submit a summary of their research findings highlighting their practical application.

• "Free Nation Foundation Trying to Found Copyright-Free Nation"
  

  They’re really trying to make their own society with the long term goal of buying an island and inhabiting it.

• "ISO PDF?"
  

  Adobe reportedly will be submitting PDF for adoption as an ISO standard.

• "More ORE"
  

  This is just a very brief follow-up to my earlier post to note that the report of the OAI ORE TC meeting held in New York City a couple of weeks ago is now available.

• "NAPC Digitizing ERIC’s Document Backfile"
  

  More large-scale digitization projects continue to emerge as aggregators move to extend their digital archives. The National Archive Publishing Co. (NAPC; www.napubco.com) has announced a 2-year project by which they will digitize a backfile of microfiche reports in ERIC (Education Resources Information Center; www.eric.ed.gov). All documents date from 1966 to 1992—about 340,000 documents or 40 million pages.

• "Net Neutrality, Broadband Taxes Top House Tech Agenda"
  

  A key House Democrat on Wednesday said his 2007 goals are to enact legislation related to Net neutrality, patents, and broadband regulation and taxation, including authorizing local governments to offer their own Internet service.

• "Net Pioneer Predicts Overwhelming Botnet Surge"
  

  Internet pioneer Vint Cerf has warned high-powered attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the Internet is at serious risk from botnets.

• "Newsmaker: Fighting to Protect Copyright ‘Orphans’"
  

  Recently, Kahle visited CNET’s Second Life auditorum for a discussion in front of an eager audience about the case, as well as about the Internet Archive, Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop project and other issues.

• "‘Publish’ Videos of Experimental Protocols"
  

  The Journal of Visualized Experiments (2006-) is truly living up to the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words.

• "Report on Library Future Roles Webcast"
  

  I liked the EDUCAUSE Webcast Architectures for Collaboration—Roles and Expectations for Digital Libraries. Peter Brantley (currently of CDL, soon to be Director of the Digital Library Federa