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The task of digitizing print books
Roger C. Schonfeld and Brian F. Lavoie, Books without Boundaries: A Brief Tour of the System-wide Print Book Collection, Journal of Electronic Publishing, Summer 2006.
Abstract: Print book collections are facing significant transformation in response to mass digitization, remote storage, and preservation. These issues should be considered within a system-wide context in which individual print book collections are viewed not as isolated units, but rather as parts of a larger whole. As libraries look beyond the boundaries of their local print book collections to consider system-wide implications, they will need to be equipped with data and analysis about the system-wide print book collection. This paper provides a brief overview of the system-wide print book collection, defined as the combined print book holdings of libraries everywhere, as reflected in the WorldCat bibliographic database. Issues addressed include the size of the collection; holdings patterns; distribution by publication date and language; and the relationship of the system-wide print book collection to overall book production. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of some implications of the analysis, and possible directions for future research. PS: This article is more relevant to OA than the abstract might suggest. Here are three bits, with my comments in parentheses and italics.
Serving OA content to every village
Richard Cave, One TOPAZ for Every Village, PLoS Blog, August 25, 2006. Excerpt:
Comment. This is a beautiful, attainable vision. It's true that access to OA content has to wait for bridges across the digital divide. And not every low-bandwidth bridge is good enough, since a slow or flaky connection for large files or many people can be equivalent to no connection at all. Taking advantage of the CM1's mesh network and P2P is a shortcut to serious, useful access. In principle, any kind of content could have its own node in that network, but we should make sure that OA content is first in line. Communities that can't afford stable broadband can't afford TA content either.
Chemical blogspace "collates posts from chemistry blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data."
For example, you can see which papers are currently being discussed by organic chemists, or which web pages are being linked to by chemoinformaticians It's sort of like a hot papers meeting with the entire chemistry blogging community. Sort of. (Thanks to Richard Akerman.)
PLoS ONE has had more submissions (70) in its first three weeks than any other PLoS journal in the same period.
PS: Congrats to PLoS and congrats to authors for seeing the value here and supporting something new. Google's access barriers are permanent
Jeff Ubois, In Perpetuity: UC�s Agreement with Google, Television Archiving, August 25, 2006. Excerpt:
Key provisions [of the UC-Google contract] are in Section 4, which restricts the University�s use of the digital copies, and Section 8, which says those prohibitions are forever (�survive expiration or termination of this agreement.�) UC is essentially barred from entering into pooling agreements with other universities, and other provisions ensure that no entity other than Google or UC may develop an alternative search engine or finding aid. PS: The same terms exist in the Michigan-Google contract, as I blogged back in June 2005. OA repository for Dutch archaeology
The Dutch DARE project has launched eDNA (e-depot Nederlandse Archeologie), an OA repository for Dutch archaeological research. For more details, see yesterday's announcement (in English).
Six more provosts endorse FRPAA
Since August 22, when SPARC posted its list of presidents and provosts endorsing FRPAA and OA, six provosts have added their names:
The total is now 54. (There will soon be a running tally on the page.) If you work at a U.S. institution, ask your president or provost to sign on to this call for open access to publicly-funded research. Also point out to them that university administrators who support FRPAA needn't wait for its adoption to foster OA on their own campuses.
Craig Silverman, Public Domain Books, Ready for Your iPod, New York Times, August 25, 2006. Excerpt:
LibriVox is the largest of several emerging collectives that offer free or inexpensive audiobooks of works whose copyrights have expired, from Plato to �The Wind in the Willows.� (In the United States, this generally means anything published or registered for copyright before 1923.) The results range from solo readings done by amateurs in makeshift home studios to high-quality recordings read by actors or professional voice talent.
Salvatore Salamone, The Uncommon Information Commons, Bio-IT World, July/August, 2006. Excerpt:
Like most life scientists, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh�s Graduate School of Public Health spent a great deal of time managing data. As is the case in many labs, data were stored in Excel spreadsheets that were e-mailed to colleagues. As such, much time was spent formatting and preparing data for analysis. And when data was shared, there were also difficulties tracking any changes to the data to ensure everyone was working with the same information. Indian academy converts three journals to OA
The National Academy of Sciences, India (NASI) has decided to provide immediate or unembargoed OA to the contents of three of its journals: Proceedings of the NASI (section A-Physical Sciences), Proceedings of the NASI (section B-Biological Sciences) and National Academy Science Letters. The journals will be accessible through the OA Digital Library of India. (Thanks to KnowledgeSpeak.)
Details on California's contract with Google Scott Carlson, U. of California Will Provide Up to 3,000 Books a Day to Google for Scanning, Contract States, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 25, 2006. Excerpt: A mere two months after the University of California begins its book-digitization project with Google, the university may provide the search company with a whopping 3,000 books a day for scanning. That nugget, and many others, can be found in a confidential contract that allowed California to join Harvard and Stanford Universities, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library, in the search-engine company's elaborate and controversial library-digitization effort. Patents pave the way for OA to avian flu data
John Lauerman, Poor countries may patent bird virus strains, Deseret News, August 25, 2006. Excerpt:
Poorer countries where bird flu is spreading may patent individual strains of the virus as a way to help them negotiate lower prices for vaccines and treatments. Comment. You don't see this very often: a movement to patent more stuff (esp. naturally occurring substances) integrated with a data-sharing initiative. There's a reason you don't see it very often, of course. Patent-holders usually want to confine information to themselves and licensees. But this deal does a remarkable job of bypassing that problem, even if you decide in the end that it's closer to a compromise than a win-win. Yes, the patent-holding countries can decide who may and who may not use their patents to develop medicines. But in exchange they are providing true OA to the data without limits or favoritism. Under the deal, they won't use their patents to impede research or restrict access to information, only to negotiate a royalty or discount on commercial products developed from them. From an anonymous post at Community Mobilization:
More OA journals in engineering Jay Bhatt is collecting the links to OA journals in engineering not already listed in the DOAJ. Roddy MacLeod has already submitted one:
OA archives for French research in the social sciences and humanities
Daniel Bourrion and three co-authors, Les chercheurs en Lettres et Sciences Humaines et les Archives Ouvertes, ENSSIB, June 2006. (Thanks to the INIST Libre Acc�s blog.) In French, but with this English-language abstract:
Based on an on-line inquiry and semi-directive interviews, the aim of this work is to find out how scholars in French universities in the field of humanities feel about the Open Archives phenomenon. The study tries to establish what keeps them from publishing their scientific production that way. It also indicates some directions librarians could follow to introduce and allow a better use of these Open Access repositories. Calling on libraries to drive harder bargains with Google Ben Vershbow, Librarians, hold google accountable, if:book, August 24, 2006. Excerpt:
Comment. I'm on the record preferring the OCA model to the Google model. So I certainly agree that participating libraries could exert pressure on Google to improve its model, for example by providing full open access to public-domain books with no barriers to printing, downloading, or redistribution. Nevertheless, Ben's conclusion here is marred by a number of false assumptions: (1) that librarians are "outsourcing their profession" to Google, (2) that Google is "taking over our library systems", (3) that Google's library project does "little more than enhance the world's elite libraries and give Google the competitive edge in the search wars", and (4) that Google "is in the process of annexing a major province of public knowledge". Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Digital University/Library Presses, Part 6: UTSePress, DigitalKoans, August 24, 2006. Another installment in Charles' useful series. Excerpt:
Google adds a library catalog search
Google Book Search now links to a library catalog search to help users find a brick-and-morter library that owns the book. Look at the bottom of Google's return page for the link.
Most of the examples I tried used WorldCat but not all do. In the Google blog post announcing the new feature, Google says "we have worked with more than 15 library union catalogs that have information about libraries from more than 30 countries, as well as with our colleagues working on Google Scholar (which includes a similar feature just for scholarly books)." Update. Run a number of Google book searches and you'll notice that some do and some don't provide a link to a library catalog search. Over at ResourceShelf, Gary Price has a handful of examples. His verdict so far: "Hard to find a pattern."
The Ask.com web search now looks for RSS feeds related to a search query. If it finds a relevant one, it links to its three most recent items. All this takes place at the top of the returns page, and below it the other returns are listed as usual. For example, search for open access (or open access news or peter suber) and the three most recent posts from OAN will appear at the top of the page. If a publisher, like the National Academies Press, has an RSS feed, then a search for it (national academies press or even nap) returns the three most recent items from its feed. (Thanks to Gary Price.)
For this feature, Ask defaults to the one most relevant feed on a topic. But if you want to see more than one feed for that topic, then simply click on the "Blogs & Feeds" tab at the top of the page, where three sub-tabs let you choose among "Posts", "Feeds", and "News". Click "Feeds" to see Ask's list of OA-related feeds. Comment. This is an elegant way to make use of something useful. All RSS feeds are OA, and there are valuable ones on a rapidly growing number of topics. While blogs are impossible to overlook these days, RSS feeds still rank high on the list of best-kept secrets about the free and easy exchange of information. There are some very good blog- and RSS-specific search engines, but users who don't know much about RSS feeds are not likely to seek them out. Ask is making them visible to new users and thereby increasing the visibility of the information they contain. A step towards the EU's i2010 Digital Library
Yesterday the European Commission adopted a Recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation. Excerpt:
The present Communication outlines the context of the Commission Recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation. The Recommendation aims at bringing out the full economic and cultural potential of Europe�s cultural and scientific heritage through the Internet. It is part of the Commission�s strategy for the digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation of Europe�s cultural and scientific heritage as set out in the Commission Communication �i2010: digital libraries� of 30 September 2005.... PS: By "online accessiblity" the recommendation seems to mean "online accessibility without charge", though it never mentions open access and never discusses the presence or absence of access charges.
Helen Pearson, Bird flu data liberated, Nature, August 24, 2006. Excerpt:
More news coverage of GISAID. Update. Also see the August 24 public letter from Peter Bogner, Ilaria Capua, Nancy J. Cox, David J. Lipman and others, A global initiative on sharing avian flu data, calling on scientists worldwide to share avian flu data and participate in the GISAID initiative. Excerpt: Several countries and international agencies have recently taken steps to improve sharing of influenza data, following the initiative of leading veterinary virologists in the field of avian influenza. The current level of collection and sharing of data is inadequate, however, given the magnitude of the threat. We propose to expand and complement existing efforts with the creation of a global consortium � the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID) � that would foster international sharing of avian influenza isolates and data.... This letter is also posted at the GISAID site along with the full list of signatories. Also see the press release accompanying the letter.
From the SHERPA blog this morning:
PS: BTW, the SHERPA Blog is new, only launched on Monday. This is a welcome extension of SHERPA's online presence and service to OA. More on the UK's Free Our Data campaign S.A. Mathieson, It's a struggle to get data out of councils, The Guardian, August 24, 2006. Excerpt:
Profile of Cornell's Internet-First University Press
Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Digital University/Library Presses, Part 5: Internet-First University Press, DigitalKoans, August 23, 2006. Another installment in Charles' useful series. Excerpt:
Another way that funders could help
Dorothea Salo, Second-order effects, Caveat Lector, August 23, 2006. Excerpt:
As more funders insist on open access, it seems not improbable that grant seekers will consider open publication venues and self-archiving a way to win brownie points on future grant applications. I expect this to have only a modest positive effect at best� but anything positive is good news. Comment. This is definitely another way that funders could help. But they tend to take the opposite course and give the most credit to publication in venerable high-prestige journals. This policy discriminates against OA journals (but only because they are new) and disregards OA archiving. It doesn't negate the good effects of an OA mandate on funded research, but it shows a commitment to OA only one front when funders could help on at least two.
BMC journals integrate with Connotea From the August 22 issue of BioMed Central Update:
Remember the Progressive Secretary letter in support of FRPAA? In the past month (the letter was posted July 16), more than 1,000 citizens have clicked to send it to their Congressional delegation.
PS: This is a testament to public support for FRPAA. (Not surprising in light of the Harris Poll of May 2006.) To send a copy of the letter yourself, visit the FRPAA letter page but also read the short description of how Progressive Secretary works. CERN's plan to convert particle physics journals to OA
Rüdiger Voss (ed.), Report of the Task Force on Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, CERN, June 22, 2006. Excerpt:
For more background on the CERN OA task force, see the press release announcing its launch on December 14, 2005. Comments.
How OA archiving helps publishers
Edgar Crook, For the Record: Assessing the Impact of Archiving on the Archived, RLG DigiNews, August 15, 2006. Excerpt:
PANDORA, Australia�s Web Archive at the National Library of Australia (NLA), has been archiving Web-based publications for 10 years, in conjunction with participants at the Australian State Libraries and other cultural organisations.... Here are some results read off the charts in the article: 37% of surveyed publishers said PANDORA archiving changed the public perception of their publication for the better, and less than 1% said for the worse. (Most said it caused no change.) 96% said that overall it has been positive for their publication. 92% said it increased the number of hits to their online publication. 29% said it increased their publication's citation rate. (Most said it caused no change.) 11% said it increased revenue from their web site, while only 1% said it decreased revenue.
The August issue of RLG DigiNews is now online. Here are the OA-related articles:
Stevan Harnad, US Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Report on Institutional Repositories, Open Access Archivangelism, August 22, 2006.
Muscular Dystrophy group supports FRPAA
Pat Furlong, Open access, Pat Furlong's Journal, August 21, 2006. Pat Furlong is the Founding President and CEO of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy. (Thanks to William Walsh.) Excerpt:
I�m in Washington today meeting with Sheila Walcoff, Counselor to the Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS). The discussion will concentrate on Senate Bill 2695, the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA).... Finding related articles in Google Scholar
Google Scholar has added a Related Articles link to each item in its return list. For details, see yesterday's post on the Google Blog.
KnowledgeSpeak interviews Matt Cockerill
KnowledgeSpeak has interviewed Matthew Cockerill, publisher of BioMed Central, August 23, 2006. Excerpt:
Empirical study of university-level OA mandates
Arthur Sale, The acquisition of open access research articles, a preprint, self-archived August 23, 2006.
Abstract: The behavior of researchers when self-archiving in an institutional repository has not been previously analyzed. This paper uses available information for three repositories analyzing when researchers (as authors) deposit their research articles. The three repositories have variants of a mandatory deposit policy. From the body of the paper: Conclusions: Comment. This is an important set of results. Sale's research shows that OA mandates work without coercion and supports the case for university-level mandates, the case for the dual deposit/release strategy, and the case against self-archiving embargoes. Update. The published edition is now online, in the October 2006 issue of First Monday. Calling on provosts and presidents to endorse FRPAA
SPARC has issued a call to action for university presidents and provosts to endorse FRPAA by adding their names to this public statement (August 22):
The web site includes a form allowing presidents and provosts to add their signatures and a list of those who have already endorsed FRPAA by signing the July 28 CIC letter or the July 31 GWLA letter. As new university leaders sign on, the list will grow. Comment. This is extremely helpful. The provosts and presidents who have already endorsed FRPAA show Congress that the bill has critical support from universities and researchers. There are undoubtedly other provosts and presidents who would have signed one of the first two letters but didn't know about them and others who will now be inspired to sign. This is an opening for all faculty (esp. in US institutions) to campaign locally and persuade their campus leaders to show their public support for open access to publicly-funded research.
How researchers can support OA
Francis Ouellette, Top 10 things you should do to support the Open Access of scientific publications, UBC Bioinformatics Centre, August 22, 2006. Excerpt:
10. Publish in OA journals Comment. We'd all make these lists differently, but I hope they'd all have some family resemblance. (See my list of what researchers should know about OA and my list of what resarchers can do to promote OA.) I like this one, especially #4, but can't resist making two suggestions. I'd revise Number 8: don't move, just work to get your university and the major public funding agencies in your country to sign the Berlin Declaration --and then to implement it. Number 10 is good advice but we can't yet assume that all scholars will be able to find high-quality OA journals in their research niche. Until then, scholars should understand that publishing in a conventional journal, and self-archiving the postprint, is a quick and easy way to provide bona fide OA to their research. I'd make providing OA to one's own work --through OA journals or OA repositories -- Number 1. More on the Bush administration's withdrawal of public info
Herb Kaufman, Bush closes door on open access, Hartford Courier News, August 22, 2006. Excerpt:
Another defense of Google Book Search
Richard Ekman, The Books Google Could Open, Washington Post, August 22, 2006. Ekman is the president of the Council of Independent Colleges and on the advisory boards of two university presses and a university library. Excerpt:
Launch of LibreDigital Warehouse
Steve Bryant, Publishers Fight Back Against Google with New Book Search Service, eWeek, August 22, 2006. Excerpt:
Comments.
I've heard this said about publishing poetry, not about publishing research. But it's a good line --limited to non-OA publishing-- and could use more exposure. From David Cohen in today's Guardian:
An organized OA search for prior art to block bogus patents
Nicholas Varchaver, Patent review goes Wiki, Fortune Magazine, August 16, 2006. (Thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog.) Excerpt:
Comment. Brilliant and much-needed, along with a simplified procedure to nullify patents awarded in error. I love the way this project moved from a blog posting to a trial run by the patent office and major corporations in about a year. More on OA Central and Chemistry Central
Kim Thomas, BioMed Central opens access to Chemistry articles, Information World Review, August 22, 2006. Excerpt:
Royal Society of Chemistry lashes out
Katharine Sanderson, Open access for chemistry, Chemistry World, August 22, 2006. Excerpt:
Comments. First note that the Royal Society of Chemistry is not connected with the Royal Society, which recently launched a hybrid OA journal program.
Free connectivity project wins prize from Gates Foundation
The Gates Foundation has given this year's Access to Learning Award, a $1 million prize, to Nepal�s Rural Education and Development (READ) program "for its pioneering approach to providing no-cost public access to computers and the Internet to residents, and its commitment to promoting information and literacy." For more details, see today's press release.
The Science Navigation Group, the group behind BioMed Central, has generalized the concept, launching Chemistry Central as its first project beyond biomedicine, and Open Access Central as the new umbrella organization to coordinate the growing family of disciplinary projects. From today's announcement of Open Access Central:
Also see today's announcement of Chemistry Central:
Comment. This is a significant development. BMC is the largest OA publisher and is taking its experience to chemistry, physics, and mathematics. These three fields will benefit by having BMC siblings publishing in their midst. Open Access Central will benefit from greater economies of scale, making its business model more robust. Note that PLoS has moved beyond biomedicine with PLoS ONE, a different way to generalize its experience. In both cases, researchers everywhere will benefit from the growing body of OA literature, the spread of experienced OA publishing to new fields, and the growing momentum for OA itself. Stevan Harnad donates prize to the ATA
From the Alliance for Taxpayer Access:
"Publish or Perish" author Stevan Harnad, winner of the English-language category prize in the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF2006) Poetry Competition sponsored by the Andrea von Braun Stiftung has donated his prize to support ATA's efforts for the Federal Research Public Access Act. In appreciation, we have made the poem available here. Thanks Stevan! PS: As a bystander whose only interest here is increasing support for the ATA and FRPAA, I also appreciate Stevan's gesture. Fields medal for Grigory Perelman
Grigory Perelman is one of four mathematicians to win the Fields Medal for 2006, honored for his progress in proving the Poincaré conjecture. However, he has refused the award. A notorious recluse, he has refused other mathematics prizes, refused job offers from Princeton and Stanford, and said he'd refuse the $1 million prize from the Clay Institute for a proof of the conjecture.
What's the OA connection? Here's how I put it Sunday on the PLoS Blog, where Chris Surridge had anticipated that Perelman would win this year's Fields Medal. There's another peculiarity in Perelman's way of sharing his results. As you note, he's posted his three papers to arXiv [one, two, three] and benefited from its form of open review. But to date he's refused to publish the same papers in peer-reviewed journals. The problem is not that a conventional journal would refuse them, at least now that consensus is building that his proof is sound. Steven Krantz, editor of The Journal of Geometric Analysis, has offered to publish Perelman's three papers or any new ones that he would like to submit, but Perelman has not accepted the offer. (See my blog postings on this here and here.) On second thought, it's just as likely that his refusal to publish in a peer-reviewed journal is of a piece with his refusal of prizes, money, and prestigious jobs. It may have more to do with temperament than principle; and if there's a principle here, it may have more to do with honors than peer review. In any case, his work on the Poincaré conjecture may be the most important work yet disseminated through preprints in an OA repository and never submitted for formal publication. For an earlier example of important mathematics taking place on an OA preprint server --also on the Poincaré conjecture-- see my short article in SOAN for April 2002. Congratulations to Perelman and his three co-winners, Andrei Okounkov of Princeton, Terence Tao of the University of California, and Wendelin Werner of the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay.
Survey of ARL member libraries on institutional repositories
The ARL has released its SPEC Kit on Institutional Repositories. From today's announcement:
Since 2002, when DSpace and other institutional repository (IR) software began to be available, an increasing number of research libraries and their parent institutions have established institutional repositories to collect and provide access to diverse locally produced digital materials. This emerging technology holds great promise to transform scholarly communication, but it is still in its infancy. This survey was intended to collect baseline data about ARL member institutions� institutional repository activities.... For more detail on the survey results, see (in order by increasing detail) Charles Bailey's summary, the executive summary of the report (OA), or the full report (not OA).
From an Alma Swan posting to the AmSci OA Forum, August 20, 2006:
[T]he numbers [of institutional repositories] are now increasing - at an average rate of one repository being established per day over the last twelve months. There is also some evidence that this rate has been increasing of late. The reasons given are various, but the two main ones are (i) the requirement for a vehicle for providing open access, and (ii) that a repository is the natural development for institutions wishing to take stewardship of their digital intellectual resources. Given those reasons, we can presumably expect the growth in the number of repositories to continue since neither reason is likely to decline in importance in the foreseeable period.... Scopus improves its handling of OA repository content
Scopus announced today that it has enhanced its organization of OA content from institutional repositories. Scopus is an Elsevier product. From today's announcement:
Comment. I'm glad to see that Scopus will index any institutional repository on request (the more tools indexing this content the better) and glad that it will let users pick the repositories they'd like to search (the more flexibility in searching this content the better). However, Scopus is expensive for users. Institutions that already have OA repositories don't need Scopus to make their research output accessible and searchable. The institutional repository and free search engines (OAI-specific search engines like OAIster and mainstream search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) already do that. But clearly institutions have nothing to lose and everything to gain by asking Scopus to include their content as well. For users who don't have access to Scopus, it's less important to demand local access to Scopus than to join the effort to persuade more institutions to provide OA to their research output. And for institutions that don't already have OA repositories and want to make their research output more accessible, it's less important to provide access to Scopus users than to provide open access to everyone, including Scopus. Update. Also see John Blossom's comments (August 22) on ContentBlogger: While the technology used to create the Selected Sources feature is hardly new, it's a very important breakthrough for scientific publishers to embrace the exposure of enterprise content to a more general audience. It helps to expose ideas and research under investigation in a way that is far more likely to result in powerful awareness and interactions surrounding the work of scientific professionals in highly useful contexts. The Selected Sources feature positions Elsevier as a provider of a far broader base of content than just journals that can help scientific professionals to solve key problems and that can help to position participating institutions as thought leaders in ways that will encourage collaboration. It's "low hanging fruit" from a product design perspective but as a first step it's an exciting hint of what scientific publishers can do to develop high-margin services that amplify the value of an enterprise's intellectual property significantly. Library policies to aid the transition to OA
Heather Morrison, From buying to producing (transitioning to open access), Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, August 20, 2006. Excerpt:
Google's CEO on fair use and the publisher lawsuits
Danny Sullivan interviewed Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, at the Search Engine Strategies Conference, August 9, 2006. Excerpt from the transcript (but also see the video):
Because of our scale and because of the amounts of money that we have, Google has to be more careful with respect to launching products that may violate other people's notion of their rights. But also, frankly, we find ourselves in litigation and the litigation was expensive, and diverts the management team, etcetera, from our mission. In the cases that you describe, most of the litigation in my judgment was really a business negotiation being done in a courtroom. And I hate to say that, but that is my personal opinion. And in most cases a change in our policy or a financial change would in fact address many of the issues. More on OA to European geodata
Public GeoData is drafting a third open letter to EC ministers opposing amendments to the INSPIRE directive that would block OA to geographic data. (Thanks to Jo Walsh.)
Turning public data into national security secrets
Kudos to William Burr, who has documented an attempt to censor US history by suppressing information previously and officially public. See his new report, How Many and Where Were the Nukes? What the U.S. Government No Longer Wants You to Know about Nuclear Weapons During the Cold War, The National Security Archive, August 18, 2006. (Thanks to Free Government Information.) Excerpt:
The Pentagon and the Energy Department have now stamped as national security secrets the long-public numbers of U.S. nuclear missiles during the Cold War, including data from the public reports of the Secretaries of Defense in 1967 and 1971, according to government documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive. More on the WIPO Development Agenda and A2K treaty
Karsten Gerloff, Access to Knowledge in a Network Society, a Master's thesis in the Department of Language & Communication Studies / Cultural Informatics at Lüneberg University, August 3, 2006. Excerpt:
Chapter 3 starts on p. 23 by explaining the nature of knowledge as a public good in the economic sense of the term. It then proceeds to outline two basic modes of the regulation of knowledge: intellectual monopoly powers and commons-based approaches. The former mode is based on exclusion, the latter on access. The description of the knowledge commons draws heavily on the concepts of the law scholars Yochai Benkler, Peter Drahos and James Boyle, all of which have contributed to a better understanding of immaterial commons and the way knowledge is produced in such an environment. A third section lays out some aspects of the relation between intellectual monopolies and economic development.... How OA archiving supports Australia's research quallity exercise
David Groenewegen, Practical Experiences with Research Quality Exercises. A slide presentation (at DAG ITWG, August 18, 2006) on OA archiving in support of Australia's research quality exercise.
Extending e-Science to the arts and humanities
JISC and two of the UK Research Councils --the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)-- are extending the UK's e-Science program to the arts and humanities. From today's call for grant proposals:
Grants will be awarded up to a total value of £2m, plus up to six 4-year postgraduate studentships. The other kind of science embargo In a discussion about open access, an "embargo" is the time after an article is published in a subscription-based journal when online access is limited to subscribers. Some non-OA journals never provide OA to their back issues, no matter how old, but others open up access after a "moving wall" of six months to three years. In a discussion about science journalism, however, an "embargo" is the time after a publisher or researcher issues a press release when journalists are expected to keep the news to themselves. In today's Inside Higher Ed, Vincent Kiernan has an extensive argument against embargoes in the second sense that occasionally touches on OA issues. Part of his argument is that new online forms of digital communication are undermining the embargo system. Excerpt:
OA and commons projects in Africa Frederick Noronha, 101 ideas on how to share knowledge... from Africa, DailyIndia, August 20, 2006. Excerpt:
Comment. This report deserves attention, but it's not new. It's dated 2005 and was released in January 2006. I blogged it on January 20.
Beth Ritter-Guth, Crazy Nerd, Proftitutes, August 19, 2006. Excerpt:
...Since I am doing my semester project on the rhetoric of Open Access and Open Source Scholarship, I decided to work completely in the open on a wiki [see the working notes]. In a sense, this is like taking a shower in public. All of my everything is out there. This is a completely new way to do research for me (a HUGE fan of colored notecards, snappy highlighters, and gaggles of paper products). So, I decided to blog about it, also. But, I went with a blog over at Easy Journal. I want to compare them to Blogger. PS: Good luck, Beth. Stevan Harnad, Open access jeremiads, archivangelism and self-archiving mandates, Open Access Archivangelism, August 20, 2006. Excerpt: Porter, George (2006) Let's Get it Started! Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship 47."...Stevan Harnad is into the second decade of his jeremiad on the subject of self-archiving. A number of platforms have been created to support institutional repositories [IRs]... If librarians and academicians agree on the desirability of institutional repositories, and software platforms and services are available to make repositories technically feasible, one is left to ponder a few questions. Why are there so few institutional repositories up and running? Why are the existing institutional repositories generally not well filled with the intellectual output of their respective institutions?..." Update. Stevan's comment has now been published as a letter to the editor in the Fall 2006 issue of Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship. |