Print: For Advice on Publishing in the Digital World, Scholars Turn to Campus Libraries - Chronicle.com

Print: For Advice on Publishing in the Digital World, Scholars Turn to Campus Libraries - Chronicle.com 

For Advice on Publishing in the Digital World, Scholars Turn to Campus Libraries

By JENNIFER HOWARD

"Rapidly changing" is the term most often used these days to describe the landscape of scholarly communication. Scholars have to clear new and higher hurdles as they bump up against copyright and fair-use issues, open-access mandates, and a baffling array of publication and dissemination models.

How much of his own published work can a scholar post on a personal Web site without raising his publisher's ire? How much of someone else's work can he use in his course pack without trampling on fair use and risking a fine or legal action? How does a researcher upload her work to her institution's repository, and are there consequences if she opts out? Those are just some of the questions that professors may find themselves tripping over.

Where can researchers find a guide to lead them through this 21st-century obstacle course?

The library, of course.

More institutions are creating or beefing up offices and programs in scholarly communication or hiring librarians with expertise in copyright and intellectual property.

Services vary wildly from place to place. But Karla Hahn, who directs the Office of Scholarly Communication for the Association of Research Libraries, has seen some major themes emerge. Faculty outreach — making sure that faculty members understand their rights and responsibilities and the options available to them — "is pretty universally a component," she says. Other common elements include helping academics figure out copyright issues and how to navigate institutional repositories. Offering publishing services outside of university presses is another large and growing area.

Over the past three years, Ms. Hahn says, many new programs have sprung up. Before that, research libraries held workshops or symposia on scholarly communication, but "we were not finding a lot of real established programs," she says. "The majority of our members now have some kind of programmatic emphasis."

She points to the interest generated by the association's Institute on Scholarly Communication, run jointly with the Association of College and Research Libraries. The institute holds periodic gatherings of library personnel assigned to scholarly-communication roles. For its first meeting, in 2005, "we had way more applications than we could accommodate in our 100 seats," Ms. Hahn told The Chronicle, and demand continues to be high.

The Chronicle talked with several people on the front lines about their enhanced roles. All of them are affiliated, loosely or closely, with research libraries, and their jobs reflect the wide array of services that now fall under the umbrella of scholarly communication programming.

The Copyright Czar

Kevin L. Smith, scholarly-communications officer at Duke University, has a staff of one: himself. Duke hired him two and a half years ago. He works out of the Duke University Libraries and maintains a blog, Scholarly Communications @ Duke, where he tracks and comments on major issues and developments. The blog is also designed to educate the university community about its rights and responsibilities.

"I'm supposed to be a resource for the whole university," he says. "I've been very, very busy from almost my first day." With a law degree as well as library expertise — a handy combination that is becoming more common among research librarians — Mr. Smith is particularly well equipped to handle questions about intellectual property and copyright as well as to help authors navigate the legal arcana of publishing contracts. He will even sometimes negotiate with a publisher on an author's behalf.

"Probably 65 to 70 percent of my time is dealing with the intellectual-property questions," he says. "Another 10 percent is spent trying to keep myself aware of national issues — legislation, litigation, things like the Google book settlement — and trying to figure out how they impact the university. Probably the remaining quarter of my time is spent dealing with publishing issues, author contracts, that kind of thing."

What he hears most often is a variation on the question "Can I use this particular piece of copyrighted material for whatever purpose I have in mind?" Maybe a graduate student wants to turn a journal article into a dissertation chapter. Perhaps a professor wants to post a chapter from her book on her Web site or pull a chapter of somebody else's for a course she's teaching.

Such concerns "take extraordinarily various forms, of course," Mr. Smith says. "Most often it's that they want to use somebody else's material."

He enjoys a good relationship with the university counsel's office, he says, but its work rarely overlaps with his. University lawyers "make the best decisions about how to reduce risk," he says. They're not there to answer copyright questions. For researchers, "I'm the person on whose door they can knock."

A High-Profile Mandate

Faculty outreach is also front and center in one of the most recent and most publicized experiments in scholarly communication. Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted in February to adopt an open-access requirement, requiring faculty members to deposit copies of journal articles in a new university repository.

To help scholars navigate the new requirement, the university established a dedicated Office for Scholarly Communication. It lives in the domain of Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, and is run by Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science and a prime mover behind the open-access decision.

The new repository, called Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard, or DASH, is now in beta testing. Mr. Shieber told The Chronicle in an e-mail interview that the university hopes it will be fully online early in the spring.

Mr. Shieber describes faculty interaction as "extremely important" to his office's mission. His staff has concentrated on getting the word out about the open-access policy, how to comply with it, and the mechanics of how to move work into DASH. The office is meeting with individual departments, and has staff members and student assistants who will help transfer articles and metadata into the repository.

Mr. Shieber told The Chronicle that just about all of Harvard's dozen or so faculties are considering open-access policies. "Each school has its own characteristics, and the policies need to be responsive to the differences among the schools," he says. "The process has to be faculty-based and consensual. But the office can help by advising and serving as a source for information."

Ambitions don't stop there. Mr. Shieber expects the office to evolve as "a laboratory for expanding and evolving scholarly communication practices." Perhaps its most important objective focuses on something of concern to librarians and scholars alike: figuring out a system to support authors who want to publish in open-access journals "by underwriting reasonable publication charges for those journals."

Paying to Publish

High publication costs are also much on the mind of David Stern, associate university librarian for scholarly resources at Brown University. Collection development is his primary charge. But that job now includes a portfolio of scholarly communication responsibilities, which he handles along with a team of other librarians. "It was recognized that the university needed to focus on accountability, return on investment, and compliance with new regulations," he told The Chronicle.

For Mr. Stern and his colleagues, that means raising "campus awareness" among faculty members and students. "That covers far more than just copyright," he says. "We talk about fair use and crediting and critical thinking and mashing, posting to the Web."

He and his colleagues contact every Brown researcher with a grant from the National Institutes of Health to make sure they know how to comply with the agency's public-access policy. It requires that research papers based on NIH-supported work be made freely available through the institutes' PubMed Central repository no later than 12 months after publication. That policy went into effect in April.

His job calls on him to sit down with authors to sort out their publishing choices, particularly with an eye to how much the different options cost. "At this point, what we're saying is 'Let's talk about the various business models, your roles in the process, and how your behaviors will influence the long-term solutions,'" Mr. Stern says.

Before he has that conversation with authors, Mr. Stern does the math. "We recommend that they select the highest-quality journal with the largest distribution, which is what they want," he says. But some journals charge higher authors' fees or have pricier subscription models than the university feels it can pay for. For instance, Mr. Stern ran the numbers and concluded that the library should not subsidize the Public Library of Science, an open-access science-publishing project that sustains its journals by charging authors (or their employers) $1,300 per article; it offers institutional memberships that reduce those fees. "We strongly support the idea of open access," Mr. Stern says. "We just have a problem with that particular business model."

"When we explain the financials" to authors, he says, "they understand it's not a matter of the money, it's a matter of the long-term viability. Many libraries don't do the analysis and just pay the bill. I'm here to do the analysis."

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Faculty
Volume 55, Issue 13, Page A8

Print: For Advice on Publishing in the Digital World, Scholars Turn to Campus Libraries - Chronicle.com

Print: For Advice on Publishing in the Digital World, Scholars Turn to Campus Libraries - Chronicle.com

Print: For Advice on Publishing in the Digital World, Scholars Turn to Campus Libraries - Chronicle.com 

For Advice on Publishing in the Digital World, Scholars Turn to Campus Libraries

By JENNIFER HOWARD

"Rapidly changing" is the term most often used these days to describe the landscape of scholarly communication. Scholars have to clear new and higher hurdles as they bump up against copyright and fair-use issues, open-access mandates, and a baffling array of publication and dissemination models.

How much of his own published work can a scholar post on a personal Web site without raising his publisher's ire? How much of someone else's work can he use in his course pack without trampling on fair use and risking a fine or legal action? How does a researcher upload her work to her institution's repository, and are there consequences if she opts out? Those are just some of the questions that professors may find themselves tripping over.

Where can researchers find a guide to lead them through this 21st-century obstacle course?

The library, of course.

More institutions are creating or beefing up offices and programs in scholarly communication or hiring librarians with expertise in copyright and intellectual property.

Services vary wildly from place to place. But Karla Hahn, who directs the Office of Scholarly Communication for the Association of Research Libraries, has seen some major themes emerge. Faculty outreach — making sure that faculty members understand their rights and responsibilities and the options available to them — "is pretty universally a component," she says. Other common elements include helping academics figure out copyright issues and how to navigate institutional repositories. Offering publishing services outside of university presses is another large and growing area.

Over the past three years, Ms. Hahn says, many new programs have sprung up. Before that, research libraries held workshops or symposia on scholarly communication, but "we were not finding a lot of real established programs," she says. "The majority of our members now have some kind of programmatic emphasis."

She points to the interest generated by the association's Institute on Scholarly Communication, run jointly with the Association of College and Research Libraries. The institute holds periodic gatherings of library personnel assigned to scholarly-communication roles. For its first meeting, in 2005, "we had way more applications than we could accommodate in our 100 seats," Ms. Hahn told The Chronicle, and demand continues to be high.

The Chronicle talked with several people on the front lines about their enhanced roles. All of them are affiliated, loosely or closely, with research libraries, and their jobs reflect the wide array of services that now fall under the umbrella of scholarly communication programming.

The Copyright Czar

Kevin L. Smith, scholarly-communications officer at Duke University, has a staff of one: himself. Duke hired him two and a half years ago. He works out of the Duke University Libraries and maintains a blog, Scholarly Communications @ Duke, where he tracks and comments on major issues and developments. The blog is also designed to educate the university community about its rights and responsibilities.

"I'm supposed to be a resource for the whole university," he says. "I've been very, very busy from almost my first day." With a law degree as well as library expertise — a handy combination that is becoming more common among research librarians — Mr. Smith is particularly well equipped to handle questions about intellectual property and copyright as well as to help authors navigate the legal arcana of publishing contracts. He will even sometimes negotiate with a publisher on an author's behalf.

"Probably 65 to 70 percent of my time is dealing with the intellectual-property questions," he says. "Another 10 percent is spent trying to keep myself aware of national issues — legislation, litigation, things like the Google book settlement — and trying to figure out how they impact the university. Probably the remaining quarter of my time is spent dealing with publishing issues, author contracts, that kind of thing."

What he hears most often is a variation on the question "Can I use this particular piece of copyrighted material for whatever purpose I have in mind?" Maybe a graduate student wants to turn a journal article into a dissertation chapter. Perhaps a professor wants to post a chapter from her book on her Web site or pull a chapter of somebody else's for a course she's teaching.

Such concerns "take extraordinarily various forms, of course," Mr. Smith says. "Most often it's that they want to use somebody else's material."

He enjoys a good relationship with the university counsel's office, he says, but its work rarely overlaps with his. University lawyers "make the best decisions about how to reduce risk," he says. They're not there to answer copyright questions. For researchers, "I'm the person on whose door they can knock."

A High-Profile Mandate

Faculty outreach is also front and center in one of the most recent and most publicized experiments in scholarly communication. Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted in February to adopt an open-access requirement, requiring faculty members to deposit copies of journal articles in a new university repository.

To help scholars navigate the new requirement, the university established a dedicated Office for Scholarly Communication. It lives in the domain of Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, and is run by Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science and a prime mover behind the open-access decision.

The new repository, called Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard, or DASH, is now in beta testing. Mr. Shieber told The Chronicle in an e-mail interview that the university hopes it will be fully online early in the spring.

Mr. Shieber describes faculty interaction as "extremely important" to his office's mission. His staff has concentrated on getting the word out about the open-access policy, how to comply with it, and the mechanics of how to move work into DASH. The office is meeting with individual departments, and has staff members and student assistants who will help transfer articles and metadata into the repository.

Mr. Shieber told The Chronicle that just about all of Harvard's dozen or so faculties are considering open-access policies. "Each school has its own characteristics, and the policies need to be responsive to the differences among the schools," he says. "The process has to be faculty-based and consensual. But the office can help by advising and serving as a source for information."

Ambitions don't stop there. Mr. Shieber expects the office to evolve as "a laboratory for expanding and evolving scholarly communication practices." Perhaps its most important objective focuses on something of concern to librarians and scholars alike: figuring out a system to support authors who want to publish in open-access journals "by underwriting reasonable publication charges for those journals."

Paying to Publish

High publication costs are also much on the mind of David Stern, associate university librarian for scholarly resources at Brown University. Collection development is his primary charge. But that job now includes a portfolio of scholarly communication responsibilities, which he handles along with a team of other librarians. "It was recognized that the university needed to focus on accountability, return on investment, and compliance with new regulations," he told The Chronicle.

For Mr. Stern and his colleagues, that means raising "campus awareness" among faculty members and students. "That covers far more than just copyright," he says. "We talk about fair use and crediting and critical thinking and mashing, posting to the Web."

He and his colleagues contact every Brown researcher with a grant from the National Institutes of Health to make sure they know how to comply with the agency's public-access policy. It requires that research papers based on NIH-supported work be made freely available through the institutes' PubMed Central repository no later than 12 months after publication. That policy went into effect in April.

His job calls on him to sit down with authors to sort out their publishing choices, particularly with an eye to how much the different options cost. "At this point, what we're saying is 'Let's talk about the various business models, your roles in the process, and how your behaviors will influence the long-term solutions,'" Mr. Stern says.

Before he has that conversation with authors, Mr. Stern does the math. "We recommend that they select the highest-quality journal with the largest distribution, which is what they want," he says. But some journals charge higher authors' fees or have pricier subscription models than the university feels it can pay for. For instance, Mr. Stern ran the numbers and concluded that the library should not subsidize the Public Library of Science, an open-access science-publishing project that sustains its journals by charging authors (or their employers) $1,300 per article; it offers institutional memberships that reduce those fees. "We strongly support the idea of open access," Mr. Stern says. "We just have a problem with that particular business model."

"When we explain the financials" to authors, he says, "they understand it's not a matter of the money, it's a matter of the long-term viability. Many libraries don't do the analysis and just pay the bill. I'm here to do the analysis."

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Faculty
Volume 55, Issue 13, Page A8

Print: For Advice on Publishing in the Digital World, Scholars Turn to Campus Libraries - Chronicle.com

AASLBlog » New Fair Use Guidelines for Digital Media

AASLBlog » New Fair Use Guidelines for Digital Media 

New Fair Use Guidelines for Digital Media November 14, 2008

Posted by jhurd in : Check this out! , trackback

Anyone working in libraries knows the confusion among faculty and students regarding the relationship between copyright, fair use and educational practice.  The Center for Social Media recently released their Code of Best Practices, a guideline “that helps educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use.”

From their website:

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education outlines five principles, each with limitations:
Educators can, under some circumstances:

1. Make copies of newspaper articles, TV shows, and other copyrighted works, and use them and keep them for educational use.
2. Create curriculum materials and scholarship with copyrighted materials embedded.
3. Share, sell and distribute curriculum materials with copyrighted materials embedded.
Learners can, under some circumstances:
4. Use copyrighted works in creating new material
5. Distribute their works digitally if they meet the transformativeness standard.

AASLBlog » New Fair Use Guidelines for Digital Media

OpenDOAR - Home Page - Directory of Open Access Repositories

OpenDOAR - Home Page - Directory of Open Access Repositories 

OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.

As well as providing a simple repository list, OpenDOAR lets you search for repositories or search repository contents. Additionally, we provide tools and support to both repository administrators and service providers in sharing best practice and improving the quality of the repository infrastructure. Further explanation of these features is given in a project document Beyond the list.

The current directory lists repositories and allows breakdown and selection by a variety of criteria - see the Find page - which can also be viewed as statistical charts. The underlying database has been designed from the ground up to include in-depth information on each repository that can be used for search, analysis, or underpinning services like text-mining. The OpenDOAR service is being developed incrementally, developing the current service as new features are introduced. A list of Upgrades and Additions is available.

OpenDOAR - Home Page - Directory of Open Access Repositories

Citizen Media Law Project

 Citizen Media Law Project

Citizen Media Law Project

Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Guide: The guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training, as well as others with an interest in these issues, and focuses on the wide range of legal issues online publishers are likely to face, including risks associated with publication, such as defamation and privacy torts; intellectual property; access to government information; newsgathering; and general legal issues involved in setting up a business. You can access the guide here.

Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Threats Database: The CMLP's interactive database of legal threats is now live. The database contains lawsuits, cease & desist letters, subpoenas, and other legal threats directed at those who engage in online speech. You can view, search, create, and comment on entries in the database from our database page.

Home | Citizen Media Law Project

Universal Digital Library: Results in Unicode

Universal Digital Library: Results in Unicode

The mission is to create a Universal Library which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. As a first step in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create the Universal Library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, available to everyone over the Internet. Within 10 years, it is our expectation that the collection will grow to 10 Million books. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world 24x7, without regard to nationality or socioeconomic background.

One of the goals of the Universal Library is to provide support for full text indexing and searching based on OCR (optical character recognition) technologies where available. The availability of online search allows users to locate relevant information quickly and reliably thus enhancing student's success in their research endeavors. This 24x7 resource would also provide an excellent test bed for language processing research in areas such as machine translation, summarization, intelligent indexing, and information retrieval.

It is our expectation that the Universal Library will be mirrored at several locations worldwide so as to protect the integrity and availability of the data. Several models for sustainability are being explored. Usability studies would also be conducted to ensure that the materials are easy to locate, navigate, and use. Appropriate metadata for navigation and management would also be created.

Universal Digital Library: Results in Unicode

World's biggest Open Access English Language Journals Portal - OPEN J-Gate

World's biggest Open Access English Language Journals Portal - OPEN J-Gate

What is Open J-Gate?

Open J-Gate is an electronic gateway to global journal literature in open access domain. Launched in 2006, Open J-Gate is the contribution of Informatics (India) Ltd to promote OAI. Open J-Gate provides seamless access to millions of journal articles available online. Open J-Gate is also a database of journal literature, indexed from 3000+ open access journals, with links to full text at Publisher sites.

World's biggest Open Access English Language Journals Portal - OPEN J-Gate

Colleges back students in piracy case - Politico.com Print View

 

Colleges back students in piracy case - Politico.com

Colleges back students in piracy case
By: Erika Lovley
August 19, 2008 04:17 PM EST

Hollywood-backed legislation to curtail copyright infringement by college students could make music and movie piracy even worse, the education lobby says.
The landmark provision, part of an expansive higher education bill signed into law last week by President Bush, requires colleges to curb students’ illegal file sharing. But the anti-piracy plan has rankled the American Council on Education and other education groups, which warn universities could be turned into copyright police — on their own dimes.
File-sharing experts also say the legislation would probably exacerbate the growing divide between the entertainment industry and the education community, where more schools are beginning to protect their students from the legal pursuits of the recording industry.
Backed by Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) and powerful recording and movie industry constituents, the provision also urges schools to consider deterrents such as legal file-sharing programs such as Ruckus and Napster. Music piracy alone costs the recording industry up to $12.5 billion annually, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
The recording industry and the Motion Picture Association of America have tried unsuccessfully for years to tackle illegal activities of college students, who use powerful campus networks to download and distribute entire movies within minutes.
“We don’t want people in college to go to higher education institutions where they’re receiving an education that it’s OK to perform illegal activities online,” said Copyright Alliance Executive Director Patrick Ross.
As chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, Berman has pushed the piracy issue in hearings and elsewhere. And his provision was barely disputed in either the House or the Senate, perhaps in part because it was buried in the 1,158-page higher education bill that was seven years in the making.
By clarifying the student loan process and expanding the Pell Grant financial aid program, the new law would help cut students’ college costs. But it has been widely criticized by education experts for doing just the opposite. Dozens of other provisions require schools to collect data about alumni success rates, fire safety and textbook prices, many of which the education groups fought vehemently because of the new costs involved.
But only Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a former U.S. education secretary, and a handful of Republicans opposed the bill because it contained too many regulations.
“This provision may lead to a Pandora’s box of impractical expectations. … Student privacy may be at great risk,” said Tony Pals, a spokesman for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. He complained that the unfunded mandate would also “add significantly to colleges’ administrative costs, which is ironic given the pressure Congress is putting on colleges to control their expenses.”

The University of Maryland and Pennsylvania State University are among hundreds of schools that have already installed Napster, Ruckus and other legal file-sharing programs to curb Internet piracy. Most universities, too, fine repeat offenders or cut off their Internet access.
But the legal file-sharing programs are also experiencing backlash from students, who say a technological barrier is preventing them from transferring the legal music and movies onto Apple iPods, the world’s most popular portable music players.
“These programs don’t deliver the music format the students want,” said Terry Hartle, vice president of the American Council on Education. “Our belief is that if music can’t be downloaded properly, the students won’t use it.”
More compatible technology is on the horizon but will not be ready for campus use soon.
While many schools have partnered with the recording and motion picture industries to fight online piracy, many education groups view Congress’s recent legislation as a threat to student privacy.
Tufts University recently refused to identify students sought by the recording industry in a file-sharing case.
“This is heading more toward polarization than a working relationship between schools and the copyright industry,” said Marty Lafferty, chief executive officer of the Distributed Computing Industry Association. “It’s a concern. It’s like the recording industry wants to do everything but the obvious — work with people.”
Entertainment executives argue that the bill would provide relief for colleges, where networks can be clogged with illegal downloading traffic and students are even being sued by the industry.
“Congress has sent a clear message that illegal file-sharing and downloading on college networks is a real problem that must be addressed by universities,” said Dan Glickman, chairman and chief executive officer of the Motion Picture Association.
Under the copyright provision, schools won’t face penalties if they can’t stop illegal activity. But the rules for implementation of the new law would have to be drawn by U.S. Education Department, where education lobbyists hope to find a sympathetic ear.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has criticized the many regulatory measures in the higher education bill, and experts expect the data collection process will be a huge burden for the department.
“The 110th Congress left a huge present for the next secretary of education,” said Hartle of the American Council on Education. “These regulations will put a huge burden on a thinly staffed agency. They will certainly need to hire new staff.”

© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC

Gartner Research Blog for the Media Industry

Gartner Research Blog for the Media Industry 

Judge Orders Copyright Holders to Think First, Subpoena Later

Posted By: Michael McGuire, Research VP

A federal judge ruled that copyright holders must consider whether pieces of content posted by individuals on sites such as YouTube are examples of "fair use" before demanding the content be pulled from the Web.
While the ruling isn't a sweeping endorsement of all forms of consumer creativity involving the use of copyrighted works, it's a substantial check on rights holders' carpet-bombing of sites with takedown notices. For that reason, the judge's ruling is significant.
Over the course of the past 10 years, copyright holders have deployed technology (DRM) and law (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Recording Industry Association of America's flood of lawsuits against alleged file traders) to protect their ability to control the flow of their content online. As YouTube and other UGC sites grew in popularity, rights holders were filing numerous takedown notices at any sign of copyrighted material.
There are a couple of important products of this decision. First, it underscores the imperative for rights holders to get a grip on reality and acknowledge the way the online media ecosystem is developing. The Lenz case for which the ruling was issued was a particularly egregious example of overreaching by the rights holders. The content involved a Prince song that was playing in the background - it wasn't really a video soundtrack - while a mother filmed her toddler dancing along to the song. How is that harmful to Universal's attempt to make money off the Prince song? (Besides getting a grip, I would also suggest that Universal Music, the plaintiff in the case, hire some different PR executives. I believe an astute PR pro would hear "mother" and "adorable child" and very likely caution against pursuing the case.) The video in question was ultimately reposted.
The second important product of the ruling is that it shows how little progress has been made recently in the deployment of technologies that can automate the process of checking for copyright violations, the filtering technologies that Google claimed would be developed to identify copyrighted material. While we might hail the judge's ruling, and we do, rights holders need to start serious collaboration with technology providers to create a set of licensing and content-tagging schemes that free consumers - who play by the rules - from concerns about being sued while also giving rights holders methods to track their content as it's flung around the Internet. Google and YouTube haven't really said whether the detection system they were going to have in place by the end of last year is actually in place.
At the moment, most sites such as YouTube claim to have some form of algorithmic filtering but also depend on humans to review content. Rights holders have to pay folks to scan these sites continuously looking for their material. (I guess that's a reasonable use of resources.) And the rush to do all this scanning for the usurpation of copyrighted material results in collateral damage, like this case.
This struggle between rights holders, online UGC providers and all other portals that enable consumers to upload their creations (and what they happen to collect online in the form of video and audio files) is never going to end. And it really shouldn't. However, what needs to happen is that an equilibrium needs to form that balances the needs and wants of consumers who want to create and put their stamp on the culture, no matter how silly it might seem to others, and the needs of rights holders and artists to be compensated or at least have some say in how their works are used by others.

Gartner Research Blog for the Media Industry

Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 73 - PlagiarismToday

 Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 73 - PlagiarismToday

Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 73

By Jonathan Bailey • Aug 25th, 2008 • Category: Podcast

It is Monday again and that means that it is time for another episode of the Copyright 2.0 Show.

It was a slam-packed show this week with stories from all over the world and updates to a lot of the ongoing copyright sagas.

All in all, there were eighteen stories this week including news from all over the copyright world including our “Weird Story of the Week”.

This week’s stories include:

• Fair Use Must Be Weighed When Filing a DMCA Notice
• The Pirate Bay Fights the Italian Blockade
• Comcast Gets Scolded for P2P Throttling
• Disney’s Copyright in Mickey May be in Trouble
• Pirate Video Game Toy Lands Seller in Jail
• And Many more…

You can download the MP3 file here (direct download). Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Copyright 2.0 Show - Episode 73 - PlagiarismToday

The Most Aggressive Copyright Holders | The Blog Herald

 

The Most Aggressive Copyright Holders

Filed as Features on August 25, 2008 9:21 am

by Jonathan Bailey

When it comes to matters of copyright, some companies have an earned reputation as being attack dogs. They are known for filing takedown notices at the drop of a hat, throwing lawsuits around at will and generally intimidating anyone that they feel gets too close to their intellectual property.

Though there is nothing wrong with being aggressive about your copyright, especially when you make your living from it. The problem comes when companies cross the line and sacrifice the rights of users and the public in their bid to protect their work.

These attack dogs are dangerous for many reasons. First, they are the ones most likely to file takedown notices, including against bloggers. Second, they often times trample free speech and run afoul of the law. Finally, they also end up writing both the copyright news we read and many of the copyright laws we follow.

So who are the most aggressive copyright holders? Though such a list is entirely subjective, here is my personal list of the most aggressive major copyright holders I have been tracking.

7. The Associated Press

Much of the AP’s current reputation when it comes to copyright stems from it recent controversy with the Drudge Retort. But while much of that incident was blown of proportion, as well as much of the AP’s stance on copyright, there is no doubt that they have been very aggressive protecting their work, including suing Verisign for their Moreover news service.

Though the AP is not as aggressive as many paint it to be, there is little doubt that they monitor, track and protect their content very thoroughly.

6. Disney

Among the copyright astute, Disney has a reputation that is almost beyond reproach. Despite a history of making blockbuster hits out of public domain stories, the house of mouse has been notoriously aggressive about protecting its rights.

Though Disney has been known to file more than a few copyright suits, its greatest success has always been in lobbying and legislation. Disney has far more to do with many of the current copyright laws than either the RIAA or the MPAA.

5. The International Olympic Committee

After the closing ceremonies, we tend not to hear much from the IOC, however, they remain one of the most aggressive copyright holders pretty much at any point.

This Olympics alone has seem them demand the removal of Olympic torrents from The Pirate Bay, thousands of takedowns on YouTube and even a controversy involving a likely mistaken takedown notice.

The IOC is notoriously protective of both its video and of its symbol, the five interlocking rings.

4. The National Football League

Though sports organizations are known for being protective of their copyrights, the NFL trumps pretty much everyone in this category. They famously demanded a takedown of a video only displaying the copyright notice from the Super Bowl.

In fact, they got it taken down twice.

When it comes to copyright, it seems that the NFL is in full blitz mode.

3. Viacom

When one things about aggressive copyright holders, Viacom is usually somewhere near the top of the list. Though they are famous for their 1.6 billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube, it is their hailstorm of takedown notices that really tells the story.

According to YouTomb, Viacm is the single largest sender of DMCA notices to the site, nearly doubling its nearest U.S.-based competitor, the WWE.

2. Warner Brothers

Though it would be easy to simply put the MPAA and the RIAA in the two and one slots, I decided to focus on companies, not trade groups. However, out of the “AA” crowd, Warner Brothers is a stand out in terms of aggressiveness.

Their protectiveness over The Dark Knight was both infamous and effective, on the music side, the sued the search engine Seeqpod and they launched a controversial campaign against The Pirate Bay.

They have been behind much of the copyright news over the past few years and are continuing to play a key role in the ongoing copyfight.

1. NBC Universal

Universal’s aggressiveness knows almost no limits. Not only have they been at the forefront of many RIAA lawsuits, but they have pulled their songs from Myspace, yanked their shows from iTunes (though they have since hinted at a return), blocked their shows from being recorded on DVRs, sued Redlasso and have been very aggressive about having their clips removed from YouTube.

However, their most controversial move was filing a DMCA notice against Stephanie Lenz, who posted a 30-second YouTube clip of her baby dancing with Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” barely audible in the background.

However, what makes Universal unique is that their aggressiveness is bound with progressiveness. They helped found the video site Hulu, which plays many NBC shows for free, and have been generally very forward-thinking with their copyright strategies.

Conclusions

As with any list, not everyone is going to agree with the order nor are they going to believe everyone of importance was included. So that brings me to my question. Who did I leave out and what would you change on this list?The Most Aggressive Copyright Holders | The Blog Herald

The Most Aggressive Copyright Holders | The Blog Herald

Techdirt: Turns Out Disney Might Not Own The Copyright On Early Mickey Mouse Cartoons

Techdirt: Turns Out Disney Might Not Own The Copyright On Early Mickey Mouse Cartoons 

"It's a Mickey Mouse world sometimes......" HSM

Turns Out Disney Might Not Own The Copyright On Early Mickey Mouse Cartoons

from the oops dept

Remember the recent story we had where some researchers noted that, despite the conventional wisdom (and claims from Time Warner), it appeared that Time Warner probably did not own the copyright on Happy Birthday? Of course, the company still collects millions for it, because people assume they do, but the historical evidence suggests that this is really incorrect. Now it turns out that the same thing may be true for Disney's copyright on Mickey Mouse. This is rather noteworthy considering both the history of Mickey Mouse, as well as how much effort Disney has always put towards copyright extension just as the supposed copyright on Mickey Mouse was about to expire.
Now, to be clear, Disney can continue to hold the trademark on Mickey Mouse for as long as it continues to use the mark in commerce, but the copyright should go into the public domain eventually -- meaning others can make use of the early works, as long as it's clear that they're not doing so as Disney. So what if all of these copyright extensions were for naught, and the copyright had already expired?
There seems to be rather compelling evidence that this is the case, and many legal scholars agree. Basically, Disney was a bit disorganized early on and appears to have screwed up the original copyright claims on some early Mickey Mouse shorts, which based on the law at the time would nullify the copyright altogether. Now, this would only count for those early clips, which had a slightly different version of Mickey.
Not surprisingly, Disney isn't particularly open to this argument. Not only does it dismiss the concept out of hand as "frivolous," it has also legally threatened a legal scholar who first published an analysis saying that the copyright was invalid. In a letter to the researcher, Disney warned him that publishing his research could be seen as "slander of title" suggesting that he was inviting a lawsuit. He still published and Disney did not sue, but it shows the level of hardball the company is willing to play.
Of course, the story can be different when Disney is on the other side of the coin. When it was discovered that someone else (other than Disney) probably held the copyright for Bambi, Disney went ballistic, throwing out arcane legal concept after arcane legal concept to come up with anything that would get the copyright out of the hands of this other potential owner. Disney basically threw every potential legal argument against the wall -- including claiming both that Bambi was in the public domain and that Disney owned the copyright to it.
Unfortunately, none of this is likely to amount to much. It's unlikely anyone will actually challenge Disney on the copyright of early Mickey Mouse (or that anyone will challenge Happy Birthday's copyright either). However, once again, we find that the supposed "ownership" of certain things isn't quite as clear cut as some would like you to believe.

Techdirt: Turns Out Disney Might Not Own The Copyright On Early Mickey Mouse Cartoons

BMI’s copyright revenue up 8% - Crain's New York Business

 BMI’s copyright revenue up 8% - Crain's New York Business

BMI’s copyright revenue up 8%

Broadcast Music Inc., which represents songwriters and composers, collected $901 million in revenues in its latest fiscal year.

 

Broadcast Music Inc. said Monday it earned more than $901 million in revenues for its fiscal year ended June 30, marking an historic high for the music copyright organization that distributes royalties to more than 375,000 songwriters and composers.
It’s the first time a copyright organization has topped the $900 million mark for music performance revenues. That figure also includes earnings from its subsidiary, Landmark Digital Services.
BMI will disperse more than $786 million to copyright holders, which represents an increase of 8% over the previous year.
International revenues, fueled by a weak dollar and a strong Euro, brought in $238 million and accounted for much of the boost. Growth in revenues was also helped by BMI’s aggressive approach in licensing music in less traditional forms of media such as digital and mobile businesses as well as cable television, satellite radio and satellite television.
Traditional broadcast radio and television still accounted for 38% of revenues, at $340 million, but satellite outlets brought in an additional $208 million, and new media revenues increased 50% to $15 million. BMI now licenses more than 6,500 digital media properties including mobile services and social networking sites.
"That's the story on digital overall," said Paul Resnikoff, publisher of Digial Music News. "It takes time to build up royalty streams on digital."
But BMI has also managed to cut costs, lowering overhead to 11.7%, by using online digital technology to track performances and collect with less paperwork and labor costs, notes Mr. Resnikoff.
"It's tough to chase down royalties from a smaller player, but they can be captured online all of a sudden, so it cuts both ways," he said.

BMI’s copyright revenue up 8% - Crain's New York Business

Podcast: Uncovering the social and economic benefits of open access : JISC

 Podcast: Uncovering the social and economic benefits of open access : JISC

Podcast: Uncovering the social and economic benefits of open access

Publication Date: 25 August 2008

Professor John Houghton's work to explore the social and economic impact of open access has had a significant impact on debates in his native Australia. Currently working for JISC to investigate the UK experience in this area, he talks to Philip Pothen about his work, the wider benefits of institutional repositories and why he thinks the open access argument is now won.

Podcast: Uncovering the social and economic benefits of open access : JISC

Out in the Open: Some MIT Scientists Sharing Results, Posting Unpublished Data - The Tech

Out in the Open: Some MIT Scientists Sharing Results, Posting Unpublished Data - The Tech 

Out in the Open: Some MIT Scientists Sharing Results, Posting Unpublished Data

By Carolyn Y. Johnson

THE BOSTON GLOBE

August 25, 2008

Barry J. Canton, a 28-year-old biological engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has posted raw scientific data, his thesis proposal, and original research ideas on an online Web site for all to see.

To young people primed for openness by the confessional existence they live online, that may not seem like a big deal.

But in the world of science — where promotions, tenure, and fortune rest on publishing papers in prestigious journals, securing competitive grants, and patenting discoveries — it’s a brazen, potentially self-destructive move. To many scientists, leaving unfinished work and ideas in the open seems as reckless as leaving your debit card and password at a busy ATM machine.

Canton is part of a peaceful insurgency in science that is beginning to pry open an endeavor that still communicates its cutting-edge discoveries in much the same way it has since Ben Franklin was experimenting with lightning. Papers are published in research journals after being reviewed by specialists to ensure that the methods and conclusions are sound, a process that can take many months.

“We’re a generation who expects all information is a Google search away,” Canton said. “Not only is it a Google search away, but it’s also released immediately. As soon as it happens, the video is up on YouTube and on all the blogs. The old model feels kind of crazy when you’re used to this instant information.”

Openness has always been an integral part of science, with scientists presenting findings in journals or at conferences. But the open-science movement, with many of its leaders in the Boston area, encourages scientists to share techniques and even their work long before they are ready to present results, when they are devising research questions, running experiments, and analyzing data. In such open forums, the wisdom of the crowd could offer the ultimate form of peer review. And scientific information, they say, should be available without the hefty subscription fees charged by most journals.

It is an attempt to bring the kind of revolutionary and disruptive change to the laboratory that the Internet has already wrought on the music and print media industries. The idea is that opening up science could speed discoveries, increase collaboration, and transform the field in unforeseen ways.

On the other side are people who see the benefits of the status quo. For centuries, scientific discoveries have occurred at a steady clip, without the help of wikis or Web tools. Journals publish papers that have been scrutinized by specialists, ensuring that bad research doesn’t mislead other scientists or the public.

Scientists who plunge into openness also risk giving a competing lab a leg up.

“Maybe somebody has discovered some interesting gene and doesn’t want to blab to the whole world about why it’s interesting,” said Michael T. Laub, an assistant professor of biology at MIT. He says his lab is not overly secretive, but does not post “all the gory details of what someone is working on, because I don’t want my grad students necessarily to be scooped by someone else.”

More broadly, the entire system of credit in science is based on being the first to publish a finding in a reputable journal; there’s no incentive to post on blogs or community Web sites. Scientists try to get their findings published in the top journals in their fields, and major scientific prizes are awarded to those who make breakthroughs.

Despite these concerns, the counterculture scientific movement is gathering steam, and not just among junior researchers.

For example, OpenWetWare.org started out in 2005 as Endipedia, a Web site that scientists in Thomas F. Knight ’79 and Andrew D. Endy’s labs at MIT used to share information. But today the Web site is backed by a National Science Foundation grant, and more than 4,000 biologists and bioengineers from across the world have signed up to share techniques, get practical tips, and even detail their day-to-day work if they choose.

Science Commons, a nonprofit group based at MIT, works to Web-enable the scientific enterprise by working on other aspects of openness: trying to find ways to make inaccessible journals broadly available and developing Internet tools to ease sharing of information.

“In the same way you couldn’t get to Facebook until you had the Web for 10 years — all sorts of stuff had to happen to the Web itself to support the emergence of something like Facebook,” said John T. Wilbanks, executive director of Science Commons. “I think the tipping point will come when scientists look at someone next to them using the open system and getting more discoveries, and saying ‘I want that.’”

Another local effort, Somerville’s Journal of Visualized Experiments, is an open-access video journal that seeks to increase transparency in the how-to part of science, since researchers often waste time trying to replicate another team’s experiment.

The Web site, with tutorials from top researchers on subjects from basic stem cell techniques to dissecting mosquitoes’ salivary glands, is informed by the experience of its cofounder, Moshe Pritsker. Pritsker recalls how he as a graduate student spent more than a month unsuccessfully trying to replicate a two-year-old stem cell technique; eventually he flew to Scotland to learn firsthand.

It’s hard to say which, if any, of these forms of openness will gain traction in the wider community. But the ethos of the Internet, where people are used to getting everything from television shows to news articles without paying, is already challenging the scientific publishing industry.

There are open-access journals, such as those published by the Public Library of Science, but scientific journals usually require a paid subscription to get access. But in February, Harvard’s largest division, the Faculty of Arts and Science, voted unanimously to make scholarly papers authored by faculty available free in an online repository, which will begin beta-testing this fall. The National Institutes of Health began an open-access policy this year requiring that NIH-funded research be posted online for free, within a year of publication.

Just as giving content away for free on the Internet has proved troublesome for newspapers as they try to adapt to a new business model, scientific publishers worry that open access could undermine the foundation on which scientific communication is built. Journals typically make money through a combination of subscription fees paid by individuals or by universities and advertising, which support its editorial and peer-review process.

“The bottom line is it’s a wonderful experiment, but it needs to be approached carefully, or you go out of business,” said Fred Dylla, executive director of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes 11 of its own journals.

Eventually, the success of open science hinges on utility: If research improves, scientists will have to adopt it or fall behind.

Canton, working in the relatively new field of synthetic biology, has seen the benefits firsthand. He and colleagues devised a bit of genetic material that could be inserted into a cell to let it communicate with other cells.

They posted their work online, but also submitted it to a journal over a year ago to be formally presented to the world’s scientific community. Meanwhile, their work was incorporated into 18 different projects by other labs. Canton was invited to workshops.

Last month, it came out in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Out in the Open: Some MIT Scientists Sharing Results, Posting Unpublished Data - The Tech

Does Amazon's Kindle give hope to open-access model?

Does Amazon's Kindle give hope to open-access model? 

Published on FierceBroadbandWireless (http://www.fiercebroadbandwireless.com)

Does Amazon's Kindle give hope to open-access model?

By lluna

Created Aug 25 2008 - 1:53am

How is one of the U.S. mobile wireless industry's first tests in open access fairing? Back in November, Amazon began distributing a new eBook device, called the Kindle, that makes use of Sprint's nationwide EV-DO network to enable wireless shopping and over-the-air content downloading. I noted then that the Kindle is the start of Sprint's whole concept around its WiMAX business--that a network can be accessed from several different types of consumer electronic devices that aren't subsidized or sold by the wireless operator.

While Amazon isn't saying how many devices have sold, Citigroup [1] recently said the Kindle appears to be selling much better than anticipated and could double a previous estimate for units sold this year. In fact, with few innovative gadgets on the market, the Kindle could become one of the top electronics gifts of the holiday season, along with the Apple iPhone, of course.

"Turns out the Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world," Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney wrote in a note to clients. He estimates that Amazon will sell up to 380,000 Kindle devices this year, up from his previous forecast of 190,000. Perhaps more impressive, Mahaney expects Kindle and related revenue of more than $1 billion by 2010.

Scott Devitt, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, forecasts Amazon will sell 500,000 to 750,000 Kindles in the next year.

Open access is off to a slow start as WiMAX deployments have been delayed and Verizon's open-access plans announced last year haven't really come to fruition. Is the Kindle in the position to give hope to the entire open-access model? Despite the fact that Amazon is in a unique position to continually market the device on its web site, the Kindle has to be a foreshadowing of the revenue-generating potential.--Lynnette [2]

---

Source URL:
http://www.fiercebroadbandwireless.com/story/apple/2008-08-25

Links:
[1] http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080811/wr_nm/amazon_research_citigroup_dc
[2] mailto: lluna@fiercemarkets.com

Does Amazon's Kindle give hope to open-access model?

Techdirt: Universities Realize That The RIAA Is Taking Advantage Of Them In Lawsuits On Students

Techdirt: Universities Realize That The RIAA Is Taking Advantage Of Them In Lawsuits On Students 

Universities Realize That The RIAA Is Taking Advantage Of Them In Lawsuits On Students

from the pushback-time dept

We never quite understood why various universities were cooperating with RIAA demands that they send "pre-litigation" letters to students accused of file sharing. These non-binding letters are often used to pressure students into paying fines, even if they're based on weak (at best) evidence of file sharing. It certainly wasn't in any university's best interests to basically help out a private organization in a business model dispute with its students. Yet, some university officials, falsely convinced by the RIAA that this was more than a business model dispute, decided to help out. And the response? The RIAA has increased the flood of notices, and then convinced Congress to move forward on legislation that would legally obligate universities to act as the RIAA's copyright cops.
It appears that more and more universities are realizing that they got shafted. The EFF points out that there's widespread anger among university officials who felt they were trying to find a middle ground by cooperating, but instead find themselves swamped with more and more notifications and this new legislation that increases their legal liability over a business model dispute. And, the worst part? Now that they're pushing back in court, the RIAA points out that dealing with these notices before wasn't a burden, so universities aren't being truthful that they're now a burden. How's that for a thank you for helping out originally?
If it hasn't become clear by now, the RIAA doesn't view universities as partners in all of this -- and any university that thinks of the RIAA as a partner is about to get steamrolled by the RIAA legal machine. It's time that more universities stood up not just for their own rights, but the rights of their students as well not to be targeted by questionable "pre-litigation" threat letters without more significant evidence. And, it wouldn't help for the RIAA to finally recognize that this entire battle has done nothing to deal with the real issue: its own inability to recognize that its business model needs to change.

Techdirt: Universities Realize That The RIAA Is Taking Advantage Of Them In Lawsuits On Students

New Copyright Term Tool : Chicago IP Litigation Blog

New Copyright Term Tool : Chicago IP Litigation Blog 

New Copyright Term Tool

Posted on August 5, 2008 by R. David Donoghue

 

Click here for the Copyright Digital Slider, a great new tool for calculating the status of a copyright from the American Library Association's Copyright Advisory Network.  You drag an arrow to the date of first publication, and the site tells you the status of the copyright (in force or in the public domain) and whether you need permission to use the work (yes, no or maybe).  Of course, it is not as good as consulting an attorney.  This is particularly true because for many dates of publication, the answer to whether you need permission to use the work is maybe.  Copyright terms are very complex and vary greatly depending on which version of the Copyright Act the work was published pursuant to and what actions the copyright holder has taken.  It is far more complex than the patent regime where, at most you have to determine whether the patent's term is 17 years from grant or 20 years from filing and then deal with any terminal disclaimers or added time listed on the face of the patent.

Hat tip to the Antitrust Review for pointing out this great tool.

New Copyright Term Tool : Chicago IP Litigation Blog

Federal court rules network DVR does not violate copyright - Related Stories - AAF SmartBrief

 

Federal court rules network DVR does not violate copyright

AAF SmartBrief | 08/05/2008

In a move that could potentially transform the way advanced video services are rolled out to viewers, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York ruled Monday that DVRs that operate via a central storage server rather than a set-top storage device do not violate copyright law. Analyst Craig E. Moffett said the decision "means a huge increase in the number of viewing hours per day potentially subject to ad-skipping." The use of networked technology paves the way for the delivery of interactive and dynamic advertising via recorded programs. Wall Street Journal, The (subscription required) (08/05) New York Times, The (08/05)

Federal court rules network DVR does not violate copyright - Related Stories - AAF SmartBrief

Mendeley Blog

Ran across this looking at Zotero stuff.. and it seemed to fit...HSM

Mendeley Blog

It describes how Chris Boulton’s thesis was repeatedly turned down for publication because its data contained copyrighted material (excerpts from fashion ads), the use of which should have fallen under the “fair use” doctrine.

For scholars who study media, the internet has broadened research horizons and expanded the reach of teaching and publications. But powerful gatekeepers remain. From academic journals seeking to control our intellectual property to lawyers crying foul when we quote from copyrighted material, we are bombarded with a myriad of confusing and dubious restrictions. In short, the implied threat of legal action creates a chilling effect that impacts us all. Some have pushed back, arguing that our educational activities are protected under the “fair use” statute. But this is a risky game to play. The rules aren’t always clear. And when it comes to fair use, we either use it, or lose it.

Via Open Students via A Blog Around the Clock.

Mendeley Blog

Mellon Foundation Assesses the State of Scholarly Publishing - Chronicle.com

 Mellon Foundation Assesses the State of Scholarly Publishing - Chronicle.com

Mellon Foundation Assesses the State of Scholarly Publishing

By JENNIFER HOWARD

Annual reports aren't exactly beach reading, but for anyone interested in the current condition of scholarly communication, the just-published 2007 report of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—particularly the essay on "Scholarly Publishing Initiatives" by Donald J. Waters and Joseph S. Meisel—is a page turner.

The foundation's deep pockets and commitment to humanistic research give Mellon a unique role in the university-press world. It's part fairy godmother, part life coach, and part enigmatic guru. When Mellon speaks, presses listen—and this year Mellon has spoken more frankly than usual, pushing its constituents to learn how to work better together, while reassuring them that what they do is vital and should endure.

Nearly a year has passed since the foundation made the first awards in two new series of publishing grants: one designed to get presses to collaborate on new series of monographs by junior scholars in underserved areas of the humanities, and the other to persuade presses to form partnerships with their home institutions on projects that further the scholarly agendas of both (The Chronicle, November 9, 2007).

The 2007 report offers a chance to take a first look at whether the new grant-making strategy is paying off. And it hints at where the foundation thinks scholarly publishing has gone wrong lately—and what may put it right again.

The Power of Positivity

Part of the trick to weathering a crisis, if that's the right word for what scholarly publishing faces, is not being told what to do but simply that you will pull through it. The Mellon report avoids the hot-tempered talk and hot-button issues (it offers no opinions about open access, for instance). It neither downplays nor overplays the gravity of the situation.

"There are difficult problems in scholarly publishing, and as we mentioned in our essay, the language of 'crisis' has a very long history," Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel told The Chronicle in an e-mail interview. "However, our view is that it is more useful to analyze problems constructively and systematically rather than to characterize the system generally as 'in crisis.'"

Mr. Waters leads the foundation's scholarly-communications program; Mr. Meisel helps oversee its agenda for bolstering research universities and humanistic scholarship. In their essay, the authors follow a simple strategy: Remind readers of the unique (and uniquely challenged) role that university presses have always played. Recap 30 years of crisis and opportunity. Review previous attempts at improving the situation. Reflect on what has worked and be candid about what hasn't.

University-press output, the authors remind readers, amounted to just 5 percent of the total number of books produced by American publishers in 2005. "However, the significance of university-press publishing is far greater than its niche position in the larger publishing industry would suggest," they write. "For example, following September 11, 2001, when the public searched for understanding and context in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the three best-selling books in the United States were all published by university presses."

That doesn't change, however, "the steady decline in average sales of scholarly titles"—a trend that has fueled an equally steady stream of crisis talk. Here Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel pick up another theme that has become popular lately: Take the long view. That's what the sociologist Andrew Abbott did in a plenary talk at the most recent gathering of the Association of American University Presses, held in Montreal in June.

As Mr. Abbott made clear in his talk, which drew on 80 years of data, university-press publishing has never been the easiest of businesses, and complaints about it have displayed "a stupefying, hilarious consistency" over the decades.

Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel leverage that history to set up a discussion of the biggest challenge/opportunity to confront university presses so far: the digital age. Their analysis confirms what many observers have already concluded. The transition to e-books has not been as smooth and as rapid as Mellon (and many others) thought it would be.

In the 1970s, "circumstances appeared so dire for university presses" that the foundation jumped in with title subsidies for individual monographs, only to discover that such help "did little to change the presses' underlying financial and productive capacities." The foundation then decided, in the late 1990s, "that books would quickly follow journals into online distribution and access," so it put money behind two e-monograph projects, Gutenberg-e and History E-Books. The results were mixed, to say the least (The Chronicle, March 7).

The Gutenberg-e monographs "proved far too expensive to sustain," the report notes, and journal editors resisted reviewing them. (Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel also note that review editors almost all wanted printed versions instead.) Gutenberg-e authors also failed to get as much professional bounce from the project as the foundation had hoped; so far, only 12 of the 22 whose books have been published in the series have landed on the tenure track.

The History E-Book project—now called Humanities E-Book—fared a bit better, but the report mentions that "after almost nine years, authors have produced only 55 of the promised 85 new e-books." At least that project has become self-sustaining—a goal that Mellon strongly encourages grant recipients to strive for—and its digitized backlist has proved unexpectedly popular with subscribers.

"Both projects have been extremely valuable in demonstrating the capabilities and requirements for publishing monographs authored specifically for electronic media," Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel write, "but neither of them succeeded in establishing the core hypothesis that such books would be cheaper to produce and distribute than those designed for print media."

Collaboration Over Coercion

Mellon has steered clear of attaching digital expectations to its most-recent university-press grants. In their interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel acknowledged that "these programs, in keeping with our understanding of the general needs, make no assumptions about the technologies of production and distribution." Instead, the foundation has opted to support interpress monograph-series collaborations and intra-university partnerships with a publishing angle—but it has imposed no digital requirements or expectations.

In the biggest grant made in the first category, five presses, led by New York University Press, will get $1.37-million over five years for a new series called the American Literatures Initiative (The Chronicle, January 18). In the second category, one finds entries such as "Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement," coordinated by the University of North Carolina Press; it also involves the Carolina Digital Library and Archives, the university law school's Center for Civil Rights, and the Southern Oral History Program. Mellon awarded a three-year, $937,000 grant to that undertaking (The Chronicle, February 8). Such experiments "reduce the cost and risk of exploring new areas of collaboration," Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel told The Chronicle.

But even a million-plus dollars of Mellon money can't change human nature. Put people from five different companies (or from different institutions on the same campus) in a room, and it will take some wrangling to get them to agree on anything.

"We knew the first year would be challenging because we have so many procedures and practices to set up," said Steve Maikowski, director of New York University Press, when asked how the American Literatures Initiative is shaping up. Mr. Maikowski's press heads the effort, which also includes the presses of Fordham, Rutgers, and Temple Universities, and the University of Virginia.

Almost every decision—hiring an outside managing editor to oversee the series, settling on an interior book-design template, agreeing on a copy-editing budget and standards—involved a debate. "I knew this was going to be the toughest part because you're asking presses to give up proprietary control and make compromises in some areas," the NYU Press director said.

But real work has begun on what Mr. Maikowski calls the "transformative elements" of the collaboration. For instance, the series' managing editor has begun to build "a very exciting Web-based production model where each of these manuscripts can be viewed by each managing editor" at each press. That may be operational by summer's end. And they're experimenting with how to tag content better, so that the presses can use it in a variety of ways later.

It took a while for the member presses to round up books for the series. About seven have been signed so far. (The goal is five a year for each press.) The partners are still working out a joint marketing plan.

"The collaborative learning curve is very steep in these first six or seven months," Mr. Maikowski said, "but it's flattened."

At the University of North Carolina, where the press leads a Mellon-financed, intra-university project on the "Long Civil Rights Movement," the collaborators have big dreams.

So far, enthusiasm has carried the day. "It's been a very open kind of conversation," said Sylvia K. Miller, the project's director. Ms. Miller came aboard in early June. The group's first goal is to inventory all the campus resources that could be included in the project. An interdisciplinary conference is in the works for next spring. There's talk of starting an online, multimedia journal.

"And on top of that—this is early days, so we're not sure what form this will take, but we all like the idea—some kind of publishing platform on which scholars in this field could do research, especially in some of the primary-source material that we would like to make available or at least discoverable through a search," Ms. Miller said. "This publishing platform would be an environment in which scholars could work together and converse about what they're doing and conduct formal and informal peer review."

As for how the press would benefit from all of this, Ms. Miller said that "we see all these ideas as feeding into developing ideas for the press. We're not necessarily going to leave print publication behind, but we have different directions in which we may move."

Hands On, Hands Off

Many who have worked with Mellon on the new grants describe the foundation as "hands on" during the application process. But after it accepts a proposal, the foundation does step back. "They made it clear that they were not micromanagers," Mr. Maikowski said. "Mellon is leaving it up to the presses to drive and direct and manage their projects and initiatives."

The Chronicle suggested to Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel that Mellon's current grant-making strategy could be viewed as a sort of social engineering, with university-press culture as its subject.

"The phrase 'social engineering' suggests that the Mellon Foundation decides what should happen and somehow guides grant recipients to do something they would not necessarily do (or want to do) on their own," the foundation officers told The Chronicle in response. "Mellon's grant-making programs sometimes encourage change but not without extensive consultation with potential grantees and only with institutions that decide they want to follow a certain course by responding to an invitation to apply for a grant."

Mellon appears determined to stay the collaborative course, with program staff members authorized to "seek high-quality proposals in each area" through next year. Another call for proposals went out in May, with winners to be announced at the end of the summer.

Asked how the foundation would decide whether the collaborative grants had been money well spent, Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel told The Chronicle that they would "be looking for evidence of improvements in the number and quality of monographs that are produced, as well as in the production and distribution of monographs." In the intra-university partnerships, they want to see "evidence of sustained capacity of the presses to support the academic priorities of their home universities."

Time, as they say, will tell. "It's been a learning process for a number of us," Mr. Maikowski said. "But in the end, the prospect of everything we can accomplish—that can create some sustainability—is what we're hoping for."

Mellon Foundation Assesses the State of Scholarly Publishing - Chronicle.com

SmartCopying - National Copyright

"Although its Australian -- the site does bring up some good information on the general issues of copyright"  -- HSM

Smartcopying

The "Smart Copying Website" is currently under development by the Copyright Advisory Group (CAG), a committee of the Schools Resourcing Taskforce (SRT) of the Australian Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA). The completed site, scheduled to be available in late 2008, will provide a comprehensive guide to copyright issues affecting Australian Schools. In the meantime, please refer to the National Copyright Guidelines on this site. The Guidelines have been designed to provide a quick reference guide to copyright issues affecting Australian schools. They are not intended to provide a detailed response to specific copyright questions or legal advice. For further information on specific copyright issues affecting your school, department or educational institution contact your Local Copyright Manager.

SmartCopying - National Copyright

First it was downloads. Now it's organic chemistry. - International Herald Tribune

 

First it was downloads. Now it's organic chemistry.

By Randall Stross

Published: July 27, 2008

After scanning his textbooks and making them available to anyone to download free, a contributor at the file-sharing site PirateBay.org composed a colorful message for "all publishers" of college textbooks, warning them that "myself and all other students are tired of getting" ripped off. (The contributor's message included many ripe expletives, but hey, this is a family newspaper.)

All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere.

Consider the cost of a legitimate copy of one of the textbooks listed at the Pirate Bay, John McMurry's "Organic Chemistry." A new copy has a list price of $209.95; discounted, it's about $150; used copies run $110 and up. To many students, those prices are outrageous, set by profit-engorged corporations (and assisted by callous professors, who choose which texts are required). Helping themselves to gratis pirated copies may seem natural, especially when hard drives are loaded with lots of other products picked up free.

But many people outside of the students' enclosed world would call that plain theft.

Compared with music publishers, textbook publishers have been relatively protected from piracy by the considerable trouble entailed in digitizing a printed textbook. Converting the roughly 1,300 pages of "Organic Chemistry" into a digital file requires much more time than ripping a CD.

The textbook publishers have abundantly good reasons to promote e-books. When Cengage sells an e-book version of "Organic Chemistry" directly to students, for $109.99, it not only cuts out the middleman but also reduces the supply of used books at the end of the semester.

THE e-book is wrapped with digital rights management, which, history indicates, will be broken sooner or later. But as long as it does work, digital publishing with a subscription model is a much fairer basis for the business. Such an arrangement spreads revenue across multiple semesters, so it isn't the unfortunate few students in the first semester with a new edition who shoulder the bulk of the burden.

A one-semester e-book subscription does require a change in expectations. Students cannot sell their texts at the end of a course, so buying one can't be viewed as a short-term investment to be cashed out. But as students show no attachment to textbooks in any case, the loss of access after semester's end seems likely to go unlamented.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

First it was downloads. Now it's organic chemistry. - International Herald Tribune

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship -- Evans 321 (5887): 395 -- Science

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship -- Evans 321 (5887): 395 -- Science 

Science 18 July 2008:
Vol. 321. no. 5887, pp. 395 - 399
DOI: 10.1126/science.1150473

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Reports

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship

James A. Evans

Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print—scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse—electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.

Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL60615, USA. E-mail: jevans@uchicago.edu

Scholarship about "digital libraries" and "information technology" has focused on the superiority of the electronic provision of research. A recent Panel Report from the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), "Digital Libraries: Universal Access to Human Knowledge," captures the tone: "All citizens anywhere anytime can use any Internet-connected digital device to search all of human knowledge.... In this vision, no classroom, group, or person is ever isolated from the world's greatest knowledge resources" (1, 2). This perspective overlooks the nature of the interface between the user and the information (3). There has been little discussion of browsing/searching technology or its potential effect on science and scholarship.

Recent research into the practice of library usage measures the use of print and electronic resources with surveys, database access logs, circulation records, and reshelving counts. Despite differences in methodology, researchers agree that print use is declining as electronic use increases (4), and that general users prefer online material to print (5). These studies are also in general agreement about the three most common practices used by scientists and scholars who publish. First, most experts browse or briefly scan a small number of core journals in print or online to build awareness of current research (6). After relevant articles are discovered online, these are often printed and perused in depth on paper (7). A second practice is to search by topic in an online article database. In recent years, the percentage of papers read as a result of browsing has dropped and been replaced by the results of online searches, especially for the most productive scientists and scholars (8). Finally, subject experts use hyperlinks in online articles to view referenced or related articles (6). Disciplinary differences exist. For example, biologists prefer to browse online, whereas medical professionals place a premium on purchasing and browsing in print. In sum, researchers peruse in print, browse in print or online (9), and search and follow citations online. These findings follow from the organization and accessibility of print and online papers. Print holdings reside either in a physical "stack" by journal and topic, arranged historically, or in a "recent publications" area. For print journals, the table of contents—its list of titles and authors—serves as the primary index. Online archives allow people to browse within journals, but they also facilitate searching the entire archive of available journals. In online interfaces where searching and browsing are both options (e.g., 3 ProQuest, Ovid, EBSCO, JSTOR, etc.), the searching option (e.g., button) is almost always placed first on the interface because logs demonstrate more frequent usage. When searched as an undifferentiated archive of papers, titles, abstracts, and sometimes the full text can be searched by relevance and by date. Because electronic indexing is richer, experts may still browse in print, but they search online (10).

What is the effect of online availability of journal issues? It is possible that by making more research more available, online searching could conceivably broaden the work cited and lead researchers, as a collective, away from the "core" journals of their fields and to dispersed but individually relevant work. I will show, however, that even as deeper journal back issues became available online, scientists and scholars cited more recent articles; even as more total journals became available online, fewer were cited.

Citation data were drawn from Thompson Scientific's Science, Social Science, and Arts and Humanities Citation Indexes, the most complete source of citation data available. Citation Index (CI) data currently include articles and associated citations from the 6000 most highly cited journals in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities going back as far as 1945, for a total of over 50 million articles. The CI flags more than 98% of its journals with from 1 to 3 of a possible 300 content codes, such as "condensed matter physics," "ornithology," and "inorganic and nuclear chemistry." Citation patterns were then linked with data tracking the online availability of journals from Information Today, Inc.'s Fulltext Sources Online (FSO).

FSO is the oldest and largest publication about electronic journal availability. Information Today began publishing FSO biannually in 1998, indicating which journals were available in which commercial electronic archives (e.g., Lexis-Nexis, EBSCO, Ovid, etc.) or if they were available freely on their own Web site, and for how many back issues. Merged together by ISSN (International Standard Serial Number), the CI and FSO data allowed me to capture how article online availability changes the use of published knowledge in subsequent research. FSO's source distinction further allows comparison of print access with the different electronic channels through which scientists and scholars obtained articles—whether a privately maintained commercial portal or the open Internet. The combined CI-FSO data set resulted in 26,002,796 articles whose journals came online by 2006 and a distinct 8,090,813 (in addition to the 26 million) that referenced them. Figure 1 shows the speed of the shift toward commercial and free electronic provision of articles, and how deepening backfiles have made more early science readily available in recent years.

Fig. 1. Distribution of online journal availability in ISI-FSO data through (A) commercial subscription and (B) free through journal Web site. "Hot" regions of the graph correspond to journal issues just a few years behind the years in which they are available online, e.g., in 2003, more journals were commercially and freely available from 1999—about 1000 and 500, respectively—than from any other year. The figure highlights how journal issues increasingly came online from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s in 2004 and 2005. [View Larger Version of this Image (36K GIF file)]

Panel regression models were used to explore the relation between online article availability and citation activity—average historical depth of citations, number of distinct articles and journals cited, and Herfindahl concentration of citations to particular articles and journals—over time (details on methods are in the Supporting Online Material). Because studies show substantial variation in reading and research patterns by area, I used fixed-effect specifications to compare journals and subfields only to themselves over time as their online availability shifted. In this way, the pattern of citations to a journal or subfield was compared when available only in print, in print and online through a commercial archive, and online for free.

The first question was whether depth of citation—years between articles and the work they reference—is predicted by the depth of journal issues online—how many years back issues were electronically available during the previous year when scientists presumably drafted them into their papers. For subfields, this was calculated as years from the first journal's availability. These data were collected in publication windows of 20 years, and so only data from 1965—20 years after the beginning of the data set—were used. For the entire data set, citations pointed to articles published an average of 5.6 years previously (table S1). The average number of years journal articles were available online is only 1.85 (the data go back to 1945), but with a standard deviation of 5 years and a maximum of more than 60 years. Analysis was performed by citation year and within journal or subfield. The standard ordinary least squares (OLS) method for linear regression was used in generating all the results to be described.

All regression models contained variables used to account and statistically control for alternative explanations of why citations might refer to more recent articles. A sequence of integers from 1 to 40, corresponding to citation years 1965 through 2005, was included to account for a general trend of increasing citations over time (the estimates for this variable were always positive and statistically significant, P < 0.001). Average number of pages and average number of references in citing articles were both included to account for the possibility that citations are more recent because articles are shorter with fewer references and the earliest ones have been disproportionately "censored" by publishers (estimates for pages were positive but not always significant; those for references were always positive and significant, P < 0.001: longer articles with more references referred to earlier work). A measure of the average age of title words was also included in the models to account for the possibility that in recent years, research has concerned more recent concepts or recently discovered (or invented) phenomena. This was calculated by taking the age of each title word within the relevant publication window for the analysis (e.g., prior 20 years) and then multiplying it by a weight for each word i in title j equivalent to where tf_ij equals the frequency of term i in title j and df_i equals the number of articles in a given year that contain term i out of the total number of annual articles N (11). This approach highly weights distinguishing title terms (e.g., buckey-balls, microRNA) and gives lesser weight to broad area terms (e.g., gene, ocean) and virtually no weight to universal words (e.g., and, the). Regression coefficients for the title age measures were always positive and significant (P < 0.0001), indicating that titles with older terms referenced earlier articles. Each model also contained a constant with a significant negative estimate.

The graphs in Fig. 2 trace the influence of online access, estimated from the entire sample of articles, and illustrated for journals and subfields with the mean number of citations. Figure 2A shows the simultaneous effect of commercial and free online availability on the average age of citations. Consider a journal whose articles reference prior work that is, on average, 5.6 years old—the sample mean. If that journal's issues become available online for an additional 15 years, both commercially and for free, the average age of references would decrease to less than 4.5 years, falling by 0.088 years for each new online year available. The within-subfield models followed the same pattern, although confidence intervals were wider (tables S2 to S4).

Fig. 2. Estimated influence of commercial and free online article availability (in years of journal issues available online) on (A) mean age of citations (based on OLS regression coefficients); (B) distinct number of articles and journals cited (based on exponentiated maximum likelihood negative binomial regression coefficients); and (C) Herfindahl concentration of citations within particular articles and journals (based on OLS regression coefficients). Each of these relations is illustrated relative to the sample mean of citation age, number, and concentration; each relation illustrated represents an underlying model that accounts for citation year, number of pages, and number of references in citing articles; the underlying citation age model also accounts for the mean weighted age of weighted title words in citing articles. Estimated percentage change, given one additional year of online availability, for (D) number of distinct articles and journals cited and (E) Herfindahl concentration within those citations, when enlarging the window in which citation measures are evaluated, from 1 to 30 years—1975 to 2005. [View Larger Version of this Image (45K GIF file)]

To determine the effect of online availability on the amount of distinct research cited, I explored the relation between the distinct number of articles and journals cited in a given citation year by depth of online availability. The number of distinct articles and journals was calculated over a 20-year window, as in the previous analysis. For the average journal, 632 articles were cited each year, but this ranges widely. Because citation values are discrete and because high values concentrate within a few core journals but vary widely among the others, I modeled its relation with online availability by means of negative binomial models (12). The negative binomial is a generalization of the Poisson model that allows for an additional source of variance above that due to pure sampling error. A fixed-effects specification of this model refers not to the coefficient estimates but to the "dispersion parameter," forcing the estimated variance of citations to be the same within journals or subfields, but allowing it to take on any value across them. These models were estimated with the maximum likelihood method and produced coefficient estimates that, when exponentiated, can be interpreted as the ratio of (i) the number of distinct articles cited after a 1-year increase in the electronic provision of journals over (ii) the number of articles cited without an online increase. One can subtract 1 from these ratios and multiply by 100 to obtain the percentage change of a 1-year increase in online availability on the number of distinct items cited. All models contained measures that statistically control for citation year, average number of pages, and references in citing articles.

In each subsequent year from 1965 to 2005, more distinct articles were cited from journals and subfields. The pool of published science is growing, and more of it is archived in the CI each year. Online availability, however, has not driven this trend. Figure 2B illustrates the simultaneous effect of free and online availability on the number of distinct articles cited in journals, and the number of distinct articles and journals cited in subfields. The panels portray these effects for a hypothetical journal and subfield receiving the sample mean of citations. With five additional years of free and commercial online availability, the number of distinct articles cited within journal would drop from 600 to 200; the number of articles cited within subfields would drop from 25,000 to 15,000; and the number of journals cited within subfields would drop from 19 to 16. This suggests that online availability may have reduced the number of distinct articles and journals cited below what it would have been had journals not gone online. Provision of one additional year of issues online for free associates with 14% fewer distinct articles cited.

Fewer distinct articles and journals were cited soon after they went online. Although this influenced the overall concentration of article citations in science, it did not fully determine it. Citations may be spread more evenly over fewer articles to more broadly disperse scientific attention. To assess the degree to which online provision influences the concentration of citations to just a few articles (and journals), I computed a Herfindahl index, where represents the percentage of citations s to each article j, squared and summed across journal or subfield i within the 20-year time window examined. A concentration of 1 indicates that every citation to journal i in a given year is to a single article; a concentration just less than 1 suggests a high proportion of citations pointing to just a few articles; and a concentration approaching zero implies that citations reach out evenly to a large number of articles. Herfindahl concentrations of articles cited in journals ranged from 0.0000933 to 1 in this sample, with an average of 0.088 and a wide standard deviation of 0.195. Where no articles were cited, no concentrations could be computed. Regression models were used to examine whether citation concentration to articles from the last 20 years could be attributed to depth of online availability. As in previous models, these were estimated for articles within journals and for articles and journals within subfields, by means of both commercial and free electronic provision. Citation concentrations are approximately normally distributed and the models were estimated with OLS.

Figure 2C illustrates the concurrent influence of commercial and free online provision on the concentration of citations to particular articles and journals. The left panel shows that the number of years of commercial availability appears to significantly increase concentration of citations to fewer articles within a journal. If an additional 10 years of journal issues were to go online via any commercial source, the model predicts that its citation concentration would rise from 0.088 to 0.105, an increase of nearly 20%. Free electronic availability had a slight negative effect on the concentration of articles cited within journals, but it had a marginally positive effect on the concentration of articles cited within subfields (middle panel) and appeared to substantially drive up the concentration of citations to central journals within subfields (right panel). Commercial provision had a consistent positive effect on citation concentration in both articles and journals. The collective similarity between commercial and free access for all models discussed suggests that online access—whatever its source—reshapes knowledge discovery and use in the same way. For all models, similar results were obtained when journals' presence in multiple (e.g., one, two, and three or more) commercial archives was accounted for and modeled simultaneously.

Although 20 years is not an unreasonable window of time within which to examine the effect of online availability on citations, it does not capture the trend of the effect. For example, one can imagine that online provision increases the distinct number of articles cited and decreases the citation concentration for recent articles, but hastens convergence to canonical classics in the more distant past. To explore this possibility, I performed the same analyses but calculated variables with expanding windows ranging from the last year to the last 30 years. To keep samples comparable, I estimated all models on data from 1975 (1945 plus a 30-year window) to 2005, and so the 20-year window coefficients do not correspond perfectly to the effects illustrated earlier. Estimated percentage changes in the number of articles and journals cited and the Herfindahl citation concentration within those citations were calculated as associated with a 1-year extension of online availability. These estimates and their corresponding 95% confidence intervals are graphed in Fig. 2, D and E. Increased online provision in the preceding year was associated with a decrease in the number of distinct articles cited within journals and articles and journals cited within subfields most in recent years (Fig. 2D). A 1-year change in online availability corresponded to a 9% drop in articles cited in the last year, but only a 7% drop in articles cited in the past 20 and 30 years. The pattern was the same for articles and journals within subfields (tables S2 to S4). The citation window's effect on citation concentration was not so consistent (Fig. 2E). Nevertheless, in the case of article concentrations within subfields, the Herfindahl concentration increase was highest—1.5% per year of online availability—when calculated for references to only the last year's articles.

The models presented are limited in a number of ways. For example, journals such as Science use Supporting Online Material for "Materials and Methods," which frequently include references not indexed by the CI. It is theoretically possible, though unlikely, that these references are to earlier or more diverse articles. Moreover, by studying only conventional journals, this study fails to capture newer scientific media like science blogs, wikis, and online outlets exploring alternative models of peer review. These new media almost undoubtedly link to extremely recent scientific developments—often through ephemeral Web links (13)—but they may also point to more diverse materials.

Collectively, the models presented illustrate that as journal archives came online, either through commercial vendors or freely, citation patterns shifted. As deeper backfiles became available, more recent articles were referenced; as more articles became available, fewer were cited and citations became more concentrated within fewer articles. These changes likely mean that the shift from browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature. Moreover, hyperlinking through an online archive puts experts in touch with consensus about what is the most important prior work—what work is broadly discussed and referenced. With both strategies, experts online bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers skim. If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. Research on the extreme inequality of Internet hyperlinks (14), scientific citations (15, 16), and other forms of "preferential attachment" (17, 18) suggests that near-random differences in quality amplify when agents become aware of each other's choices. Agents view others' choices as relevant information—a signal of quality—and factor them into their own reading and citation selections. By enabling scientists to quickly reach and converge with prevailing opinion, electronic journals hasten scientific consensus. But haste may cost more than the subscription to an online archive: Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly will be forgotten quickly.

This research ironically intimates that one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within core journals—likely had unintended consequences that assisted the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. Modern graduate education parallels this shift in publication—shorter in years, more specialized in scope, culminating less frequently in a true dissertation than an album of articles (19).

The move to online science appears to represent one more step on the path initiated by the much earlier shift from the contextualized monograph, like Newton's Principia (20) or Darwin's Origin of Species (21), to the modern research article. The Principia and Origin, each produced over the course of more than a decade, not only were engaged in current debates, but wove their propositions into conversation with astronomers, geometers, and naturalists from centuries past. As 21st-century scientists and scholars use online searching and hyperlinking to frame and publish their arguments more efficiently, they weave them into a more focused—and more narrow—past and present.

References and Notes

• 1. R. Reddy et al., "Digital Libraries: Universal Access to Human Knowledge" (President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, Panel on Digital Libraries, 2001); www.nitrd.gov/pubs/pitac/pitac-dl-9feb01.pdf.
• 2. The report (1) qualifies the vision of universal access, but only by admitting that "more `quality' digital contents" must be made available and better IT infrastructure must deliver them.
• 3. M. McLuhan, Understanding Media (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964), chap. 1.
• 4. S. Black, Libr. Resour. Tech. Serv. 49, 19 (2005). [ISI]
• 5. S. L. De Groote, J. L. Dorsch, J. Med. Libr. Assoc. 91, 231 (2003). [ISI] [Medline]
• 6. C. Tenopir, B. Hitchcock, S. A. Pillow, "Use and Users of Electronic Library Resources: An Overview and Analysis of Recent Research Studies" (Council on Library and Information Resources, Washington, DC, 2003).
• 7. A. Friedlander, "Dimensions and Use of the Scholarly Information Environment: Introduction to a Data Set Assembled by the Digital Library Federation and Outsell, Inc." (Council on Library and Information Resources, Washington, DC, 2002); www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub110/contents.html.
• 8. P. Boyce, D. W. King, C. Montgomery, C. Tenopir, Ser. Libr. 46, 121 (2004). [CrossRef]
• 9. C. Tenopir, D. W. King, A. Bush, J. Med. Libr. Assoc. 92, 233 (2004). [ISI] [Medline]
• 10. C. Shirky, "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links and Tags" (Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet: Economics & Culture, Media & Community, Open Source, 2005); www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html.
• 11. C. Manning, H. Schütz, Foundations of Natural Language Processing (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999).
• 12. J. Hausman, B. H. Hall, Z. Griliches, Econometrica 52, 909 (1984). [CrossRef] [ISI]
• 13. R. P. Dellavalle et al., Science 302, 787 (2003).[Abstract/Free Full Text]
• 14. A. L. Barabási, R. Albert, Science 286, 509 (1999).[Abstract/Free Full Text]
• 15. R. K. Merton, Science 159, 56 (1968).[Abstract/Free Full Text]
• 16. D. J. de Solla Price, Science 149, 510 (1965).[Free Full Text]
• 17. H. A. Simon, Biometrika 42, 425 (1955).[Free Full Text]
• 18. M. J. Salganik, P. S. Dodds, D. J. Watts, Science 311, 854 (2006).[Abstract/Free Full Text]
• 19. J. Berger, "Exploring ways to shorten the ascent to a Ph.D.," New York Times, 3 October 2007; www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/education/03education.html.
• 20. I. Newton, Principia (Macmillan, New York, ed. 4, 1883) (first published in 1687).
• 21. C. Darwin, The Origin of Species (D. Appleton, New York, 1867) (first published in 1859).
• 22. I gratefully acknowledge research support from NSF grant 0242971, Science Citation Index data from Thompson Scientific, Inc., and Fulltext Sources Online data from Information Today, Inc. I also thank J. Reimer for helpful discussion and insight.

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Supporting Online Material

www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/321/5887/395/DC1

Methods

Tables S1 to S4

References

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Received for publication 13 September 2007. Accepted for publication 9 June 2008.

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship -- Evans 321 (5887): 395 -- Science