DigitalKoans

Here’s a complete summary of the Digital Scholarship survey results. Thanks again to the respondents.

Thanks to the 179 respondents who filled out the Digital Scholarship survey.

Asked the question "The following free digital publications are important sources of information for me," respondents' favorable ratings (five-point Likert Scale, with "Agree" and "Strongly agree" responses added together) were:

1. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (established 10/96): 80.5%
2. Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (established 3/05): 73.2%
3. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (established 9/97): 70.4%
4. Open Access Webliography (established 8/05): 64.3%
5. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (established 6/01): 59.2%
6. DigitalKoans (established 4/05): 36.9%
7. FlashBack (established 6/05): 19.5%

High levels of "Neither agree or disagree" responses for DigitalKoans (54.2%) and FlashBack (64.8%), combined with reader comments, suggested that readers were not as familiar with these publications as with the others.

The top-ranked publications in terms of continuation were: (1) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, (2) Open Access Bibliography, and (3) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources.

Annual paperback editions were of interest to 33.5% of respondents (both "agree" categories) for the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography and the 30.1% of respondents for the Open Access Bibliography. The acceptable price range was most frequently between $30 and $50.

Based on this survey and on use data (which does not always correlate well with the survey), I'm making the following changes:

• Flashback has been discontinued. I'll cover a few of the most interesting items in regular DigitalKoans postings.
• The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog will be published monthly instead of biweekly.
• Version two of the Open Access Webliography will be written.
• A print-on-demand edition of the 2007 annual version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography will be published. (The HTML SEPB version and Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources will continue to be published quarterly and they will continue to be freely available).

I'll take the high level of interest in the Open Access Bibliography under advisement. Like SEPB, the OAB is a major undertaking. It took nine months of more than full-time effort to write a draft for submission and a considerable amount of follow-up time to finalize it for publication.

Finally, a clarification. Some readers apparently assume that the above digital publications have been the result of a team effort. With the exceptions of the Open Access Webliography (which has a co-author), the Open Access Bibliography PDF file, and prior use of UH search engines for SEPB/SEPW, this has never been true. In addition to content creation, I have done all of the related Web and other digital production work myself, including creating and maintaining the Digital Scholarship site.

If you are interested in the continuation of Digital Scholarship publications, such as DigitalKoans/Flashback, the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography/Weblog/Resources, and the Open Access Bibliography/Webliography, please take a short survey on this matter (six multiple-choice questions and two optional questions).

The survey will remain open through August 31, 2007.

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, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "The Changing Landscape of Serials: Open Access Journals in the Public Catalog"; "DRIVER: Seven Items on a European Agenda for Digital Repositories"; "EThOSnet: Building a UK e-Theses Community"; "Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics"; "Institutional Repositories and Their 'Other' Users: Usability Beyond Authors"; "Interoperability for the Discovery, Use, and Re-Use of Units of Scholarly Communication"; "Next-Generation Implications of Open Access"; "The PubMed Central Archive and the Back Issue Scanning Project"; and "The State of Scholarly Communications: An Environmental Scan of Emerging Issues, Pitfalls, and Possibilities."

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.

I've changed the format of the weekly Flashback posting in order to reduce the time it takes to produce it. Headlines are now grouped under a few major categories.

For those of you who late to the party, Flashback is a current awareness service that culls the most interesting news items from over 350 Weblogs, mailing lists, and other sources on topics such as copyright, DRM, and scholarly communication.

I started Flashback when I worked at the University of Houston Libraries as part of an effort to raise staff awareness about broader contextual trends in the above areas; however, like my other efforts in this area, it seemed to generate little interest there since it appeared to be perceived as being too far removed from day-to-day workplace concerns. Since scholarly communication information dissemination was part of my written job description, I continued to plug away at it, but I decided to share the results more broadly on DigitalKoans. Some DigitalKoans readers expressed considerable enthusiasm, so I put a bit more energy into it in spite of it being a workplace dud.

It’s been nine months since my resignation from the University of Houston Libraries. It’s time to decide how to focus my near-term publishing efforts and how to split them between unpaid and paid projects (including possibly shifting some energy into technical writing projects, such as computer books).

You can help by taking a short, multiple-choice survey (six required and two optional questions).

Thanks for your help.

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, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "Attitudes and Aspirations in a Diverse World: The Project StORe Perspective on Scientific Repositories," "Digital Archive Policies and Trusted Digital Repositories," "The Florida Digital Archive and DAITSS: A Working Preservation Repository Based on Format Migration," "Pathways: Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories," A Portal for Doctoral E-Theses in Europe: Lessons Learned from a Demonstrator Project, "Progress toward an OA Mandate at the NIH, One More Time," "Reinventing the Library—How Repositories Are Causing Librarians to Rethink Their Professional Roles," University Publishing in a Digital Age, and "The World Is All Grown Digital. . . . How Shall a Man Persuade Management What to Do in Such Times?"

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.

Ah, August. That’s when the hurricane season gets serious, and the Gulf waters this year are unusually hot.

So, a reminder about Digital Scholarship’s two hosts. The .com host is here in Houston. The .org host is in Dallas. Dallas is considerably more inland than Houston, which is only about 50 miles from the coast. Consequently, unless things are really bad, the Dallas host is likely to remain up should Houston be hit with a hurricane or tropical storm. Fingers crossed.

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, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "Actualized Preservation Threats: Practical Lessons from Chronicling America"; "Does Open Access Really Make Sense? A Closer Look at Chemistry, Economics, and Mathematics"; "Is Physics the New Biomedicine?"; "Libraries for the Blind as Accessible Content Publishers: Copyright and Related Issues"; "Open Access to Open Publish"; "Select for Success: Key Principles in Assessing Repository Models"; "Size Isn't Everything: Sustainable Repositories as Evidenced by Sustainable Deposit Profiles"; Using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, and "What Open Source Webpublishing Software Has the Scientific Community for E-Journals?"

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.

I’ve revised Open Access Update migrating the aggregate RSS feed for the OA-related weblogs to Yahoo Pipes, switching the source feed for the aggregate FeedBurner feed to the new Yahoo Pipes feed; adding more weblogs to the aggregate RSS feed; correcting the URLs for the OA-related mailing lists, e-journals, and wikis; and correcting the URLs in the Google Search Engines for those resources.