DigitalKoans

In a digital video from the Google Tech Talks series, Moshe Pritsker, Editor-in-Chief of JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments), discusses that video-based journal.

Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

Contrasting the rapid advancement of scientific research itself, scientific communication still heavily relies on traditional print journals. Print journals however, lack the necessary characteristics to allow enable an effective transfer of knowledge, which is significantly impeding scientific progress. Addressing this problem, the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE, www.jove.com) implemented a novel, video-based approach to scientific publishing, based on visualization of experimental studies. Created with the participation of scientists from leading research institutions (e.g. Harvard, MIT, and Princeton), JoVE provides solutions to the "bottleneck" of the contemporary biological research: transparency and reproducibility of biological experiments. JoVE has so far released 9 monthly issues that include over 150 video-protocols on experimental approaches in developmental biology, neuroscience, microbiology and other fields.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded grants to four groups of university presses to support the cooperative publication of scholarly books and digital works in the fields of American Literatures, Ethnomusicology, Slavic Studies, and South Asian Studies. The Ethnomusicology project will develop a plan for publishing printed and digital works, and the American Literatures project will utilize a "a shared, centralized, external editorial service dedicated solely to managing the production of books in the initiative."

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The four projects and participating presses are:

• Slavic Studies: University of Wisconsin Press, Northwestern University Press, and the University of Pittsburgh Press;
• American Literatures: New York University Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press;
• South Asian Studies: Columbia University Press, the University of California Press, and the University of Chicago Press;
• Ethnomusicology: Indiana University Press, Kent State University Press, and Temple University Press. . . .

Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Pittsburgh will use the Mellon funds to support the publication and promotion of first monographs in Russian, East European, and Central Asian studies. Although all three presses have strong publication lists in this field, this initiative will enable them to accept more first books by junior scholars, to work closely with those scholars to develop their authorial skills, and in some cases to underwrite the publication of works in paperback or the incorporation of expensive elements (such as color images). . . .

The American Literatures Initiative, led by NYU in collaboration with Fordham, Rutgers, Temple and Virginia, also seeks to publish promising scholars’ first books in their focus field of English-language literatures of Central and North America and the Caribbean. The most innovative aspect of the program will be the establishment of a shared, centralized, external editorial service dedicated solely to managing the production of books in the initiative. This service will handle all copyediting, design, layout, and typesetting costs, and manage each title through to the point where it is ready for printing. Mellon funds will also be used to pay authors modest royalty advances and develop robust, collaborative marketing efforts among the five presses—which will reduce costs for advertising and electronic marketing, publicity, academic conference exhibits, and other efforts. . . .

Major editorial goals of the Columbia-led South Asian Studies series will be to open up new archival material to scholars, to explore new theories and methods, and to develop scholarship that is both deep in expertise and broad in appeal across disciplines. . . .

The ethnomusicology project received a one-year planning grant, the first phase in establishing a cooperative publishing program that will include the digital publication of related field materials. Through their cooperative series Indiana, Kent State, and Temple will seek to broaden publishing opportunities for emerging scholars in ethnomusicology, and to offer scholars in ethnomusicology and related fields enhanced means of accessing these materials via the Web. In so doing the presses’ goal is to assist in disseminating scholarship and developing new methodologies in both research and publication. The project will be eligible to apply for continued funding at the completion of the planning stage.

Chris Heaton-Harris, a British Member of European Parliament (MEP), has proposed an amendment to the draft Cultural industries in the Context of the Lisbon Strategy report that asks the EP to filter infringing content from the Internet, to remove or block infringing content, and to terminate the connectivity of infringers.

Urges the Commission to oblige all those active in the sector to join forces and seek solutions equitable to all with the aim to develop the offer of legitimate online content and to make sure that all the involved stakeholders act responsibly. In the event that adequate solutions have not been found within a reasonable period of time that should not exceed 1 year, calls on the Commission and the Member States to adopt legislative measures obliging Internet service providers to cooperate in the fight against online piracy. This cooperation of Internet service providers should include the use of filtering technologies to prevent their networks being used to infringe intellectual property, the removal from the networks or the blocking of content that infringes intellectual property, and the enforcement of their contractual terms and conditions, which permit them to suspend or terminate their contracts with those subscribers who repeatedly or on a wide scale infringe intellectual property; draws Member States’ attention on this point to the fact that legislative measures which oblige Internet services providers to cooperate in the fight against online piracy would be more effective than the legal pursuit of users who infringe intellectual property;

Read more about it at "Copyright Extensions and ISP Filtering: Breaking EU Culture, One Amendment at a Time" and "MEP Says Providers Should Cut the Line If Copyright Is Infringed."

There has been another denial-of-service attack on digital-scholarship.org and its version of DigitalKoans. If you have access problems, use the .com site instead. A second feed is also available.

• .Com Site: http://www.digital-scholarship.com/
• .Com DigitalKoans: http://www.digital-scholarship.com/digitalkoans/
• Second Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DigitalKoans2

The number two ISP in the U.S., Time Warner Cable, will test charging Beaumont, Texas users based on the level of their downloading activity.

Read more about it at "Time Warner: Download Too Much and You Might Pay $30 a Movie," "Time Warner Links Web Prices with Usage," "Time Warner Metered Pricing: Not the Solution," and "Time Warner to Test Metered Web Use."

The New York Times Bits blog running run an interesting debate this week between Tim Wu, Professor of Law at the Columbia Law School, and Rick Cotton, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, NBC Universal, about copyright issues.

Postings so far include:

• "Is Copy Protection Needed or Futile?"
• "Should Internet Providers Block Copyrighted Works?"
• "Mixing It Up Over Remixes and Fair Use"
• "Responding to Readers on Filtering"

Applications for Advancing Knowledge: The IMLS/NEH Digital Partnership grant program are due on March 18, 2008.

Here's an excerpt from the guidelines:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) invite proposals for innovative, collaborative humanities projects using the latest digital technologies for the benefit of the American public, humanities scholarship, and the nation's cultural institutions. These grants require substantive collaborations among libraries, museums, archives, universities, and other cultural organizations. Grants support projects that explore new ways to share, examine, and interpret humanities collections in a digital environment; that develop new uses and audiences for existing digital resources; or that result in extensible and transferable methodologies or tools.

Eligible projects might:

• advance the role of cultural repositories in online teaching, learning, and research for public audiences, teachers, students, and scholars;
• develop collaborative approaches involving the scholarly community and cultural repositories for the creation, preservation, use, and presentation of reusable digital collections and products;
• use innovative approaches in digital technology to provide new perspectives on humanities resources or offer new interpretive contexts for scholars, students, and public audiences; or
• examine and coordinate community-based approaches and standards for making resources available online and allowing them to be widely shared.

Podcasts of sessions at APSR's Clever Collections: A National Showcase of Technical Innovations for Digital Collections conference are now available.

Here are the titles of some repository-oriented presentations:

• "Enhancing Research Collections by Harvesting Community Annotations"
• "Integrating Repositories with Researcher Environments"
• "Object Re-Use and Exchange (ORE): Practice and Experience in the Open Language Archives Community"
• "The Repository Interoperability Framework"
• "Taking Aim and (Mostly) Hitting Our Targets: from DART to ARCHER"