Scholarly Communication News

Public Policy Connections: YouTube Sends Users To Copyright School: Should Content Owners Have to Go, Too?

2011-06-09T13:18:00.001-07:00

YouTube Sends Users To Copyright School: Should Content Owners Have to Go, Too?

Google has faced mounting criticism from lawmakers and the entertainment industry for not doing enough to combat online copyright infringement, and on April 14 released a set of stricter copyright policies for YouTube online video users. Copyright policy violators will be required to watch a "copyright tutorial" and pass a test before allowing them to continue using the service.

A posting by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) digs deeper into the issues, crediting YouTube for doing the right thing by jettisoning its one-size-fits-all three strikes termination policy, while also questioning requiring users who receive takedown notices to go to “copyright school," and that school has a pretty misleading curriculum. EFF makes the point that if YouTube is going to ask users to learn more about copyright when they receive a takedown notice, they should require the same of right-holders whose takedowns are disputed. As we have been reminded all too often, many content owners are badly in need of copyright education.

Read POLITICO Pro news story: Google unveils 'copyright school"
Read EFF news story: YouTube Sends Users To Copyright School: Will Content Owners Have to Go, Too?
Read LA Times news story: YouTube to require 'tutorials' for copyright offenders

Public Policy Connections: YouTube Sends Users To Copyright School: Should Content Owners Have to Go, Too?

SPARC introduces Open-access Journal Publishing Resource Index

2011-06-09T10:53:00.001-07:00

New resource helps streamline launch and operation of open-access journals.

Washington, D.C. -- SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition) today released a free online Open Access
Journal Publishing Resource Index with information and documents
to support the launch and operation of an open-access journal.
Materials in the index will help libraries, presses, and other
academic units on campuses as they work together to make the work
of their researchers more widely available.

This new resource is launched in conjunction with the SPARC
Campus-based Publishing Resource Center
(http://www.arl.org/sparc/partnering), which delivers a guide to
critical issues in campus-based publishing partnerships, case
studies, a bibliography and resource list, an index of
collaborative initiatives (operated in partnership with Columbia
University Libraries), and access to the LIBPRESS online
discussion forum (operated by the University of California). The
Center is overseen by an editorial board representing library and
university press staff who are actively engaged in creating and
managing publishing partnerships.

The new index complements the rich existing resource center by
pointing to relevant sections in existing open-access journal
publishing guides and to sample journal proposals, policies,
bylaws, and other documentation to help with planning,
development, and collaboration issues. Topics covered include:

* New Journal Planning
* Journal Publishing Program Policies
* Governance
* Editorial
* Marketing & Promotion
* Technical Platforms
* Sustainability Planning

Relevant sections of existing open-access publishing guides,
including those by David Solomon, Carol Sutton, Kevin Stranack,
Jan Velterop, Howard Goldstein and Raym Crow, and others are
indicated under each topic area.

By highlighting samples and best practices, the index will help
give campuses the tools they need to develop and maintain
long-term, successful open-access publishing ventures. "As
campus-based publishing gets more ambitious in scope, it's
important to build on the successes and challenges of earlier
initiatives and adopt best practices," said Raym Crow, senior
consultant at SPARC. "Ultimately, campus-based publishing can
offer universities greater control over the intellectual products
they help create. SPARC is pleased to provide another tool to
support libraries and publishers in sustainable, professional,
open-access publishing."

Lee C. Van Orsdel, Dean of University Libraries at Grand Valley
State University, says faculty are beginning to consult
librarians for advice on journal publishing options, including
open-access models, and the SPARC site is a welcome resource.
"We're deepening our knowledge as quickly as possible, but it's a
whole new area of expertise for most of us," she said. "It will
save us time and increase the probability that we can get to the
right solution when advising our faculty on their best options."

The editorial board invites contributions from other campuses to
help build this resource and expand the bibliography --
especially with primary research papers on collaboration issues.
"SPARC hopes this will seed an effort where people will give
documents to share, making it a community hub," said Crow.
Members of the board and how to contact the managing editor with
suggestions are detailed on the Center home page.

The Open Access Journal Publishing Resource Index is available
online at http://www.arl.org/sparc/partnering.

©ollectanea

2011-06-09T08:29:00.001-07:00

Excellent site to keep up date on copyright issues – I’ve added it to my reading list….HSM

©ollectanea

[kol-ek-tey-nee-uh]. Join the Center for Intellectual Property's Scholar, Peggy Hoon, in a discussion of current copyright issues.

©ollectanea

Is E-Book Milestone Worth Cheering? – Deadline.com

2010-07-20T07:08:00.001-07:00

Is E-Book Milestone Worth Cheering? – Deadline.com

Is E-Book Milestone Worth Cheering?

By MIKE FLEMING | Tuesday July 20, 2010 @ 9:21am EDT

Amazon.com is crowing that for the first time, its e-book sales volume has surpassed hardcovers. Am I the only one who sees this as an apocalyptic sign for the great pleasure of book reading? Amazon's basing its assertion on sales figures for the last three months, when buyers were lining their Amazon Kindles with summer beach reading. Amazon chief Jeffrey Bezos marvels that the milestone is more remarkable given that Amazon has only been selling e-books 33 months, as opposed to the 15 years it has been moving hardcovers. A report on the milestone in The New York Times indicates that within the next decade, less than 25% of books sold will be in print.

The lure of e-books is easy to understand: with no trees killed, books come cheaper to consumers, who no longer have to lug around hardcovers when an entire library can be loaded into a single lightweight device. On the cost front, I wonder what will happen when the makers of Kindle and other devices corner the publishing market and are no longer interested in selling its software at loss leader prices so that it can move hardware. That confrontation is inevitable, when more brick and mortar stores vanish.

My biggest problem--and the reason I'll always stick to print books--is that I think the entire experience of reading a books is cheapened by technology, same as it was in music. Young people don't become invested in musical artists the way I did when I bought vinyl albums, savored the cover art and gave every song a chance (my kids pay a buck to download hits only and don't care about an artist's progression). Future generations of readers won't value the ritual experience of buying a book, appreciating its distinctive smell and formative heft, earning the way to the end, page by page, and then displaying the best ones like trophies on a shelf.

Now, the whole business of publishing is changing. More and more authors like James Patterson are co-writing novels. That's made them more prolific and wealthy, but it doesn't mean their books are better. Tom Clancy is taking this a step further this fall with the fall publication of Dead or Alive, a Jack Ryan thriller. All of the big authors write their signature franchise character books solo--Patterson works alone on his Alex Cross mysteries--Clancy wrote the Jack Ryan book with frequent collaborator Grant Blackwood. While other authors continued Ian Fleming's James Bond series, Robert Ludlum's Bourne series and even Mario Puzo's The Godfather characters, it's only because those authors are dead. What's Clancy's excuse? I see it as another step in the wrong direction.

As for e-books, I'll give the last word to Elmore Leonard, who's still cranking out his customary 3 to 4 pages each day from 10-6, even as he prepares to turn 85. "To me, a book is a book, an electronic device is not, and love of books was the reason I started writing," Leonard told me recently. "I don’t have a word processor, e-mail, any of that stuff. I write in longhand mostly, then put it on my typewriter as I go along. I don’t have any interest in any of that electronic stuff, but I’m going on 85, and won’t have to worry about it too much longer.”

What about the rest of us, Elmore?

Is E-Book Milestone Worth Cheering? – Deadline.com

Center Releases New Guide to Navigating Copyright Law - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

2010-06-24T10:45:00.001-07:00

Center Releases New Guide to Navigating Copyright Law - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Center Releases New Guide to Navigating Copyright Law

By Sophia Li

Communications scholars often fret over the legal nuances of using copyrighted material in their research, says Pat Aufderheide, a professor of communication at American University and director of its Center for Social Media. Ms. Aufderheide and Peter A. Jaszi, a law professor at American, hope to help researchers rest easy with a new guide to using copyrighted work—like political cartoons or screenshots from online games—in their studies.

Because of the "fair use" provisions of copyright law, copyrighted work can be quoted if it is being used for a purpose different from its original intent, according to the report, which was vetted by a committee of lawyers.

The report, released today, gives communications scholars four types of research-related situations as examples: analyzing copyrighted material, quoting it to illustrate a point, using it to spark discussion, and storing it in a collection. The situations in the report were based on 387 responses to a survey of communications scholars conducted in collaboration with the International Communication Association.

The center's guides establish what's acceptable for a field and tell scholars how to apply the law to the cases they encounter, said Ms. Aufderheide.

The center plans to continue producing similar documents for other groups, like an association of research librarians, that want clearer guidelines on using copyrighted works, she added.

Center Releases New Guide to Navigating Copyright Law - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety

2010-01-22T12:26:00.001-08:00

Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety

ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety January 21, 2010
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Authors' Rights, Copyright in the Classroom, Open Access and Institutional Repositories , trackback
I attended parts of the ScienceOnline 2010 conference, held here in the Research Triangle this weekend. There was a fascinating array of topics discussed and an interesting crowd of 270+ that included many working scientists, librarians and even journalists. It was a great opportunity to listen to scientists talk about how they want to communicate with one another and with the general public.

There are some excellent discussions of what went on at this year’s conference, especially here and here on Dorothea Salo’s blog. Those with a real passion for more information can check out this growing list of blog posts about the conference. I won’t try to compete with these comprehensive recaps, especially because my selection of events to attend was rather idiosyncratic, and perhaps even ill-advised. But I do want to make three quick observations about what I personally learned from the conference.

First, I discovered one more argument for open science that had not occurred to me before, but has the potential to be very compelling for scientists on our faculties. One reason academic research should be online is that “junk” science is already there. If the general public — including the proportion thereof who vote or require health care — do not make good decisions in regard to matters involving scientific knowledge, we can only blame ourselves when the best research is not available to them, hidden behind pay walls.

Second, I was fascinated to discover that health science bloggers have developed a code of ethics to try and account for the many issues that arise when scientists put important and potentially life-altering information onto the open web. The benefits of this openness are indisputable, but so are some of the risks. This code of ethics represents an attempt to address some of those risks and minimize them (there is a somewhat different discussion of a similar issue from the conference here). The criteria applied to evaluate health care blogs (see the text of the code itself) — clear representation of perspective, confidentiality, commercial disclosure, reliability of information and courtesy — encapsulate standards that all of us who try to share information and opinion online need to be aware of.

Third, I was amazed at how important, and problematic, copyright issues were to this group. I attended seven sessions at the conference, and five of them dealt with copyright as a major (although often unannounced) topic of discussion. Even recognizing my tendency to gravitate toward such sessions, this is a high percentage. I asked a fellow attendee why so many sessions raised copyright and was told, albeit with tongue in cheek, that it is “ruining our lives.” More seriously, one scientist described trying to put his classroom lecture slides online and being told by his university’s counsel that all material that he did not create had to be removed first. Apparently there was no discussion of the applicability of fair use and how to decide what was and was not allowable; just a wholesale rule that would discourage most scientists interested in sharing. This suggested to me that it really is very important to improve the quality of copyright education on campus — for faculty, librarians (who are often the ones asked for advice) and even legal counsel. We cannot reasonably advocate more online open access unless we also give our scholars the resources to accomplish that goal. In many ways the technological infrastructure is becoming trivial and it is the policy and legal questions that must be addressed directly if we really want encourage openness.

Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety

Steinbeck and Guthrie Families Now Supports Google Book Plan - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com

2010-01-22T12:24:00.001-08:00

Steinbeck and Guthrie Families Now Supports Google Book Plan - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com

Steinbeck and Guthrie Families Now Supports Google Book Plan
By MOTOKO RICH
Associated Press John Steinbeck

The families of the author John Steinbeck and the musician Woody Guthrie, which previously opposed the proposed Google Book settlement that would create a vast digital library of books, say that they now support it.

In a statement released Thursday by the Authors Guild, one of the parties to the settlement, Gail Steinbeck, the wife of Thomas Steinbeck, the author’s son, said “the majority of the problems that we found to be troubling have been addressed.”

The settlement of a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google after the company began scanning books from university libraries, was originally announced in October 2008. Since then, a widespread group of authors, academics, librarians, public interest groups, as well as the Justice Department, have raised an array of objections based on antitrust, copyright and class-action issues.

Ms. Steinbeck, who had received notice of the settlement shortly before a May deadline for authors to opt out of it, sent a letter back then to several influential authors outlining her concerns. Responding to her urging to “stop it in its tracks right now,” a group of authors that included the musician Arlo Guthrie, Woody Guthrie’s son, asked the court for a four-month extension on the opt-out date. It was granted.

In September, the Justice Department laid out its concerns in a memorandum and in October, Google and its partners pledged to revise the settlement. The revised agreement was submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in November, making it easier for other companies to license Google’s digital collection of copyrighted but out-of-print books and established the position of an independent fiduciary, or trustee, who would be solely responsible for decisions regarding so-called orphan works, the millions of books whose rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.

In an e-mail message to fellow authors cited in Thursday’s statement from the Author’s Guild, Ms. Steinbeck wrote that the revision “meets our standards of control over the intellectual properties that would otherwise remain at risk were we to stay out of the settlement.” She added that neither the Steinbeck nor Guthrie families would “initiate a separate lawsuit against Google.”

Steinbeck and Guthrie Families Now Supports Google Book Plan - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com

DigitalKoans » Blog Archive » Cornell Establishes Collaborative Business Model for arXiv Repository

2010-01-22T10:25:00.001-08:00

DigitalKoans » Blog Archive » Cornell Establishes Collaborative Business Model for arXiv Repository

Cornell Establishes Collaborative Business Model for arXiv Repository

The Cornell University Library has established a collaborative business model for the arXiv repository.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

arXiv will remain free for readers and submitters, but the Library has established a voluntary, collaborative business model to engage institutions that benefit most from arXiv.

"Keeping an open-access resource like arXiv sustainable means not only covering its costs, but also continuing to enhance its value, and that kind of financial commitment is beyond a single institution's resources," said Oya Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. "If a case can be made for any repository being community-supported, arXiv has to be at the top of the list."

The 200 institutions that use arXiv most heavily account for more than 75 percent of institutional downloads. Cornell is asking these institutions for financial support in the form of annual contributions, and most of the top 25 have already committed to helping arXiv.

Institutions that have already pledged support include:

California Institute of Technology

University of California, Berkeley

University of Cambridge (UK)

CERN – European Organization for Nuclear Research (Switzerland)

CNRS – Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France)

Columbia University

DESY – Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (Germany)

Durham University (UK)

ETH Zurich – Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (Switzerland)

Fermilab

Harvard University

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Imperial College London (UK)

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Max Planck Society (Germany)

University of Michigan

University of Oxford (UK)

University of Pennsylvania

Princeton University

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Texas A&M University . . .

The proposed funding model is viewed as a short-term strategy, and the Library is actively seeking input on a long-term solution. Currently, Cornell University Library supports the operating costs of arXiv, which are comparable to the costs of the university's collection budget for physics and astronomy. As one of the most influential innovations in scholarly communications since the advent of the Internet, arXiv's original dissemination model represented the first significant means to provide expedited access to scientific research well ahead of formal publication.

DigitalKoans » Blog Archive » Cornell Establishes Collaborative Business Model for arXiv Repository

archy

2010-01-22T10:22:00.001-08:00

archy

Open access isn't the same as free access (#scio10)

There is one point from the discussion following our ScienceOnline2010 presentation that I want to elaborate on. This is the way in which credentialism excludes amateurs. This is a problem that I face.

The internet has made accessible vast amounts of literature for much wider audiences than ever before. Many of the original sources that I have been able to use in my research would not have been available to me just ten years ago. Many early journals existed for only a few years, in very small numbers. To read them, I would have had to travel to major libraries in Europe and the Eastern states, which would have been prohibitively expensive. Once at those libraries, I would have needed to get access to their rare book collections, which would have been very difficult since I lack an institutional affiliation. Because of Project Gutenberg, Google Books, and the efforts of many libraries I can now read these works online and, in may cases, view scans of the actual pages without traveling.

My point about lacking an institutional affiliation is very important. Most of the people at ScienceOnline2010 were associated with some kind of university or research institution. It was so taken for granted that they put it on the name tags, as if the affiliation was part of their name. I'm sure that it is standard practice at all professional conferences to assume the attendees are all in that profession. However, this was not a scientists' conference; it was a science communicators conference and communicators were defined as including bloggers who just happen to like science. Many attendees commented that it would have been useful to put peoples' blog aliases or online avatars on their tags along with their names. However, I didn't hear anyone suggest that these identities should have been put on the tags in place of their affiliations. Lacking an institutional affiliation, I put down Clever Wife's soap business, just to have something to fill in the blank.

The wonderful era of online access, which I mentioned above, is already facing counter-pressures to close it back up. The attendees were all familiar with the problems of modern scientific journals. They are ungodly expensive to purchase and many libraries don't have all of the relevant titles to their research. Many journals are beginning to address these problems by putting their content online, allowing institutions to purchase subscriptions that give access to the members of that institution wherever they are. That's great for them, but a barrier to everyone else. As an alumnus of the University of Washington, I'm supposed to have the same access privileges to library resources as do current students. The catch is that those privileges do not extend to internet access. To read journals, I have to go to the library. That's not a problem for people who work at the University, but, to someone who does not work there, it means making a special trip to read any given article. In those who do not work on or near a university library, the internet revolution has changed nothing.

Many of the journals who have put their content online do allow laypersons to access their articles, but we have to pay by the article. The prices range from ten to forty dollars per article with no consideration for length. Scientific research articles are usually quite short; one article I want is three pages long and will cost me forty dollars to view. For current research articles, I need to determine if it is relevant to my work without actually seeing it first.

The pay-per-view firewalls deprive an historical researcher of important context. The Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society are a perfect example of this. A few years ago they began posting online scanned images of the pages of their entire run. These were treasure to me. Whenever I went looking for an article, I browsed the entire issue to get an idea of the intellectual context of that one paper. This was not only useful, it was a lot of fun. In my presentation, I mentioned letters from landowners about natural oddities discovered on their land. As recently as the late 1700s, the Proceedings printed letters as trivial as someone finding a turnip in the shape of the Prime Minister's head. Priceless!

Last spring, with the scanning complete, the Society turned management of the digital archives over to JSTOR, a for-profit institution. Most of the attendees at our presentation were not even aware of the change. Because of their institutional affiliations, nothing had changed for them; they simply go online and read whatever they want. For me and people like me, it costs ten dollars for each article and letter unless we make a special trip to the University library.

As I mentioned in the presentation, the professionalization of the scientific world was a great thing in many ways, but, along with breaking down some barriers to the free exchange of ideas, it created new barriers. It divided the scientific world into two classes, active practitioners and passive spectators. Threats and barriers to the free and open access of ideas are not limited to censorship and social pressures; sometimes they are as simple as cost and distance.

archy

Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

2010-01-22T10:12:00.001-08:00

Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review

The time to send messages to the White House ended January 21

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 1/21/2010

Go back to the
Academic Newswire
for more stories

Have you told the White House what you think about open access to publicly funded research? The Office of Science and Technology Policy has been accepting comments for weeks now, but the window of opportunity to add your thoughts closes today.

You haven’t commented yet? Do it now. Don’t worry. I’ll wait for you.

Okay, now that you’re back, I want to confess that there’s a lot involved that I don’t personally understand: the technical requirements, the need for uniformity, the way the deposits should work—I don’t have opinions on the fine points. What I do believe, though, is that the research funded by our tax dollars is important because it’s a public good. We wouldn’t be funding it with public dollars otherwise. It’s good for academic science, but it’s good for industry, too. (See also what ALA/ACRL and ARL have to say.)

Sharing science
My son is a physics postdoc at the Argonne National Laboratory. He does things with our tax dollars that I couldn’t begin to explain, but I do get that what he does may end up improving batteries that will be sold in products that we’ll be using—laptops, cars, you name it. It’s good for consumers. It’s good for business. And it’s especially good for pushing forward the frontiers of what we know about materials at a very fundamental level. (I mean, he fires photons at stuff to see what happens. That’s pretty basic.)

What if students or faculty at my college need to read up on the latest research published by the people whose synchrotron is funded by our taxes? Well, they’re probably in luck. Physicists are big on sharing. They’ve been doing it for years, through arXiv and by making their own society publications open access friendly. Not everything is available, of course, but quite a lot is. They still publish massive amounts of research, but somehow they feel their interest in supporting a quality publishing operation is not incompatible with fast and free dissemination of results.

Not on the same page
Other science disciplines taught at my campus aren’t quite as open. In biology, there are myriad worthy societies that rely on earnings from library subscriptions, and there are even more commercially-published journals that rank high in importance. Neuroscience is an exciting concentration that is attracting a lot of students but, oy, it’s expensive. Like physics, chemistry has a major society that represents many branches of the field, but its journals are pricey and the logic of open access is not wired into the discipline as it is in physics.

We also pay a lot just to find out what we don’t have. Our most expensive specialized databases are those covering chemistry and mathematics literature. The vast majority of what these tools index is published in journals we can’t afford, but, if we expect our faculty to be active scholars (and we do), there’s really no alternative. We have to hope that the land grant university up the road whose library we depend on will have enough tax-supported funding to provide access to the fair-use articles we can obtain, and that we’ll be able to afford copyright fees for the rest. For this to work, somebody, somewhere, has to buy a subscription.

Many small colleges like mine are going straight to paying commercial publishers for articles at point of need, and they’re saving a lot of money on subscriptions. But this means that, by design, there is no public asset to explore, even on a licensed, temporary basis. Scientific research is thus a disposable unit purchased for individuals, a solution that still costs libraries thousands of dollars per year. That’s a savings that comes at a steep cost.

Whose crisis?
This situation, of course, is often mistakenly called “the serials crisis.” It might be more accurate to call it the humanities crisis, because both my library and the research university we count on have less money for books, which are the lifeblood of many humanities disciplines. We know we have to pay fees for journal articles, because the only way we share them is by copying. Thanks to the first sale doctrine, we can share a book until it falls apart—and it’s politically a lot easier to not buy a book than it is to cancel a journal or database subscription.

Here’s another thing: it has always seemed peculiar to me that the “5/5 rule” CONTU guideline for the interlibrary loan (ILL) of articles is a flat rate of five articles, published within the most recent five years, regardless of the size of a journal. We can get five articles from a science journal that publishes 1000 short articles a year—and five articles from a humanities journal that publishes 20 long articles a year. That doesn’t seem right, but such are the peculiar metrics of copyright compromises. It’s considered fair use to request by ILL some 20 percent of the humanities journal before paying copyright fees (which tend to be very affordable, anyway) but only one half of one percent of the big science journal, for which copyright fees typically cost the price of a scholarly trade paperback in the humanities. No wonder we’re buying fewer books.

Science in the public interest
We have a long way to go before we sort out the economics of publishing in a digital world. Book publishers are sweating over when to release ebooks, and the newspaper of record is poised to start charging frequent flyers.

But this one is a no-brainer. We believe science is valuable enough that we pour public funding into it. We need to make sure that the results of that funding helps advance our knowledge of the physical and natural world, and that won’t happen if libraries can no longer afford it. Let’s make sure our investment pays off—for the public good.

The White House wants to hear from us. Add your comments to the open forum today.

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books this year.

Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

2010-01-22T10:10:00.001-08:00

At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 1/21/2010

Academic Newswire
for more stories

Unprecedented dissemination opportunities, but difficulty for business models

"Average" OA humanities monograph runs at a deficit

Experiments under way to see what works

Open access (OA) publishing models, pricing concerns, and the cannibalization of print sales were the headline topics at the SPARC-ACRL forum session on Saturday at the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting in Boston, titled "The Ebook Transition: Collaboration and Innovations Behind Open Access Monographs."
The conclusion? Open access monographs are an unprecedented boon to the scholarly mission of dissemination, yet challenge the financial sustainability of an academic press.

Introducing the panelists, David Carlson, incoming chair of the SPARC steering committee and dean of library affairs at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, said that the scholarly market demands ebooks, regardless of the difficulties they pose for publishers and libraries. The three panelists then described their attempts to meet that demand.

Bearish outlook for OA monographs
Michael Jensen, director of strategic web communications for the National Academies Press (NAP), was the first to suggest the bad news/good news proposition: the press’s sales have actually declined, but NAP has fulfilled more of its mission of achieving maximal dissemination.

"There's an awful lot of reading going on," Jensen said of NAP's open content, which draws on average ten page views for each distinct visitor. However, only 0.3% of visitors purchase anything. The press has experimented with making the best non-optimal version (HTML page access) free, while offering the optimal version (PDF download) for a fee. The content is openly available, he said, but you can't easily read the free version on an airplane, for example, since pages must be requested individually online. This encourages users to buy the text as an ebook.

Aside from not worrying about royalties for the content it publishes on behalf of the National Academies, Jensen said NAP faces slightly less pressure since its support is guaranteed by the Academies. Similarly, the press functions under the umbrella of scientific funding rather than under a humanities mindset, where requests as small as staff computers can pose budget anxiety.

"I've never been more bearish on the future," Jensen concluded, adding that the near-term holds serious risks for monograph publishers, and that specialty markets for OA monographs likely won't function without explicit institutional support.

Taking stock of the "average" OA monograph
Patrick Alexander, director of the Penn State University Press, similarly cited tension between OA and “the practical goal of sustainability," then analyzed the press's open access Romance [language] Studies collection.

A 256 page "average monograph" has a list price of $57.88 for a cloth edition and $30.50 for paper (though many sales are at a significant discount). Meanwhile, it’s also made available at no cost to the end user in PDF sections. This press sells an average of just 95 copies in cloth and 279 copies in paper.
Thus, the "visible" first copy costs total about $5223, including editing and materials, as well as Cataloging in Publication filing and copyright registration. Beyond that are “invisible costs” for processes like validating metadata and software training for staff. Other overhead costs such as university support, facilities, personnel, and equipment add up to another $5,188, he said, bringing the total cost for the first digital and print copy to about $10,411.

In the end, each title runs a deficit of $9,898, Alexander said, with the obvious conclusion that the current model doesn't demonstrate financial sustainability. Still, the press has reached most of its dissemination goals, with some titles still getting significant traffic online two years after publication, an unusual sign of interest for this specialized field.

Value of experimentation
Finally, Maria Bonn, newly appointed associate university librarian for publishing at the University of Michigan, described her institution's similar experiments with "calculated risk-taking" in the service of scholarly access.

She described three open access efforts, including an imprint called digitalculturebooks, the inclusion of retrospective press titles in the HathiTrust, and a partnership with the Open Humanities Press. As with the other OA efforts described at the panel, Bonn said that making the digitalculturebooks materials available online represented purely additive costs on top of regular cost of producing a print title.

The response to the imprint—which covers topics particularly suited to an online audience—has been generally good in terms of both sales and online visibility, but Bonn said it’s unclear whether this and other efforts would be viable over the long term.

Weak sales or not, "we think it's the right thing to do," she said. "It's the purpose of the press to support scholarly access."
For now, it seems, publishers support such experiments to generate valuable data about open publishing models, but it is also clear they can't continue forever.

At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

UBC This Week « UBC Public Affairs

2010-01-15T09:59:00.001-08:00

UBC This Week « UBC Public Affairs

"interesting idea -- will it be sustainable?" HSM

UBC Library gives inaugural award for communicating research The UBC Library will be inaugurating the UBC Library Innovative Dissemination of Research Award, which will honour students, faculty and staff whose creative use of new tools and technologies are expanding the boundaries of research and enhancing the impact of research findings. Faculty, staff and students are eligible to apply to win the certificate of recognition and a $2,000 cash prize. The first winner will be selected by the University Librarian and members of the Librarys Scholarly Communications Committee, and announced during Celebrate Research Week in early March. Deadline for applications is Feb. 1, 2010. For information on submission criteria and procedures, visit http://scholcomm.ubc.ca/award or contact Joy Kirchner at 604-827-3644 or joy.kirchner@ubc.ca.

UBC This Week « UBC Public Affairs

White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers -- Kaiser 327 (5963): 259 -- Science

2010-01-15T09:54:00.001-08:00

White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers -- Kaiser 327 (5963): 259 -- Science

White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers Jocelyn Kaiser Should all papers that result from U.S. taxpayerfunded research be made freely available? The White House science office likes the idea and has asked for input on whether many federal agencies should formally adopt it. So-called open access advocates are enthusiastic in comments submitted to a White House forum, but some scientific societies remain wary, fearing that a too-broad public-access policy could kill journal subscriptions. Both sides agree that the White House appears to be moving toward a plan. "They're focusing not on should we do this but how would we do this," says Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a librarian group and open-access proponent. The push for mandatory release of research papers started 2 years ago at the National Institutes of Health, which required that grantees send copies of their peer-reviewed, accepted papers to the agency. NIH posts the final manuscripts or published papers in its free PubMedCentral archive; release can be delayed on request up to 12 months after publication. The objective has been to give patients and the public broader access to research results. Despite grumbling from publishers, NIH says the policy is working smoothly. Last month, as part of President Barack Obama's "open government" activities, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched an online discussion about whether the NIH model should be expanded to other agencies. The OSTP forum asks nine questions, including how to ensure that authors comply. About 400 comments have been submitted so far from scores of individual scientists, librarians, publishers, and others. The majority support broadening public access, says OSTP Assistant Director of Life Sciences Diane DiEuliis, a neuroscientist on detail from NIH. "There was a fair consensus on the general issue," she told Science by e-mail, as well as on other questions, such as "embargo times": how long an author and journal can keep a paper under private control. Many suggested using the current NIH embargo12 monthsand preferred central repositories like PubMedCentral rather than university archives. But even a 12-month delay worries some nonprofit scientific publishers. For example, mineralogists and anthropologists argued that their papersunlike those in biomedical researchmay have a very long "half life" and that releasing the full text on the Internet could cause journals to lose subscribers. Katherine McCarter of the Ecological Society of America, which has not yet submitted comments, says that for ecology journals, "even a 1-year delay could be a real disincentive to buy a subscription." The cost of producing a single paper can run significantly higher in social sciences because papers need more space and require a "more robust peer-review process," argues William E. Davis III, executive director of the American Anthropological Association. His letter warns that mandatory release of such papers "could well result in the demise of the very journals that ... advocates seek to make more freely available." Despite such concerns, OSTP seems to be moving inexorably toward a general open-access policy. DiEuliis says OSTP will sort through all comments (the deadline has been extended until 21 January) and send suggestions to an interagency working group. This panel will also consider a report due this week from a group of publishers and other stakeholders that OSTP and the House Science Committee convened last June. One possibility, DiEuliis says, is that OSTP could draft an executive order or memo that would set out "minimum standards" but "give agencies flexibility to create custom plans.

White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers -- Kaiser 327 (5963): 259 -- Science

Polymers - MDPI

2010-01-08T09:45:00.001-08:00

Polymers - MDPI

New Open access journal -- HSM

Polymers Polymers (ISSN 2073-4360), an Open Access journal of polymer science, is published by Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) online quarterly. The first issue will be released in 2010.

Polymers - MDPI

Universities UK on Open Access, Metrics, Mandates and the Research Excellence Framework - Open Access Archivangelism

2010-01-08T09:41:00.001-08:00

Universities UK on Open Access, Metrics, Mandates and the Research Excellence Framework - Open Access Archivangelism

Universities UK on Open Access, Metrics, Mandates and the Research Excellence Framework Universities UK recommends making all the research outputs submitted to the UK's new Research Excellence Framework (REF) Open Access (OA). The UUK's recommendation is of course very welcome and timely. All research funded by the RCUK research councils is already covered by the fact that all the UK councils already mandate OA. It is this policy, already adopted by the UK, that the US is now also contemplating adopting, in the form of the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), as well as the discussion in President Obama's ongoing OSTP Public Access Policy Forum. But if HEFCE were to follow the UUK's recommendation, it would help to ensure Open Access to UK research funded by the EU (for which OA is only partially mandated thus far) and other funders, as well as to unfunded research -- for which OA is mandated by a still small but growing number of universities in the UK and worldwide. (The same UUK proposal could of course be taken up by UK's universities, for once they mandate OA for all their research output, all UK research, funded and unfunded, becomes OA!) There is an arbitrary constraint on REF submissions, however, which would greatly limit the scope of an OA requirement (as well as the scope of REF itself): Only four research outputs per researcher may be submitted, for a span covering at least four years, rather than all research output in that span. This limitation arises because the REF retains the costly and time-consuming process of re-reviewing, by the REF peer panels, of all the already peer-reviewed research outputssubmitted. This was precisely what it had earlier been proposed to replace by metrics, if they prove sufficiently correlated with -- and hence predictive of -- the peer panel ranklings. Now it will only be partially supplemented by a few metrics. This is a pity, and an opportunity lost, both for OA and for testing and validating a rich and diverse new battery of metrics and initializing their respective weights, discipline by discipline. Instead, UUK has endorsed a simplistic (and likewise untested and arbitrary) a-priori weighting ("60/20/20 for outputs, impact and environment"). Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1) Also in Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds. (2007)

Universities UK on Open Access, Metrics, Mandates and the Research Excellence Framework - Open Access Archivangelism

Impact of Open Access on Citation - Digital & Scholarly

2010-01-08T09:40:00.001-08:00

Impact of Open Access on Citation - Digital & Scholarly

Impact of Open Access on Citation By Adrian K. Ho on January 6, 2010 8:50 PM |

Yassine Gargouri, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Tim Brody, and Stevan Harnad have archived their article, Self-selected or mandated, open access increases citation impact for higher quality research, in arXiv.

Here is the abstract: Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articles accessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this "OA Advantage" may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in 1,984 journals. The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and greatest for the most highly cited articles.

The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations). The advantage is greater for the more citeable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. BTW, the Open Citation Project has created a bibliography of studies on the effect of open access and downloads on citation impact.

Impact of Open Access on Citation - Digital & Scholarly

Journalist, freelance and sci-fi authors groups take aim at Google book settlement | Technology | Los Angeles Times

2010-01-08T09:38:00.001-08:00

Journalist, freelance and sci-fi authors groups take aim at Google book settlement | Technology | Los Angeles Times

Journalist, freelance and sci-fi authors groups take aim at Google book settlement January 6, 2010 | 6:03 pm

Three national authors groups comprising more than 4,000 writers and journalists today decried the controversial agreement between Google and author-publisher groups that would allow the tech giant to sell access to millions of books online. In a letter to Congress, the three groups -- the National Writers Union, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America -- pointed to what they saw as the overly confusing and ultimately unfair rules that would govern what Google could do with the books if the settlement were to be approved in federal court. In language by turns wry and outraged, the writer groups accuse Google of inadequately explaining the terms of the agreement to the many authors it could affect, and the Authors Guild and publishing industry of fashioning a deal that favors current authors, while leaving less lucrative out-of-print authors behind. The deal does not cover books currently in print. "Think about it," the letter reads. "The existing competitive marketplace is best for the books that publishers care about. It's just the rest of us they want shoved into the straight jacket of the Book Rights Registry which they and the Authors Guild are proposing." If the settlement were approved, it would include the creation of a "Book Rights Registry" to oversee licensing and revenue claims for all books covered by the agreement -- many of which are out of print but remain copyrighted. Under its current terms, authors are automatically included in the settlement, and must "opt out" if they prefer that their books not appear in Google's search results. By the nature of older books, many authors are dead or difficult to find. Still, many authors have objected to being automatically included in the settlement process. "Are you opting in or opting out of the Google Books Settlement? If you dont know what that means or dont know what it means for you and your book youre in good company," read the letter. "No attempt was made to locate the vast majority of authors, and the rest were sent emails. Of those, how many thought they were email spam and deleted them unread?" Google declined to directly address the concerns expressed in the letter, noting instead that if it is approved, "the settlement will open access to millions of books while giving authors and publishers new ways to distribute their work online." The Authors Guild did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Find the full text of the letter embedded below.

Journalist, freelance and sci-fi authors groups take aim at Google book settlement | Technology | Los Angeles Times

Copyright Tips for Review Sites | PlagiarismToday

2010-01-08T09:28:00.001-08:00

Copyright Tips for Review Sites By Jonathan Bailey " Jan 6th, 2010 "

Whether you are looking to start a review site or have been running one for years, copyright is an issue you are almost certainly going to bump into. This is especially true if you're going to be reviewing copyrighted works, such as books, games or movies, but is true for just about any review you do. Even those who review electronics, for example, have to look at the packaging, manuals and promotional material as copyrighted works. Fortunately, copyright law gives a great deal of leeway when creating reviews, as it should, but knowing where the boundaries are and how to keep your site legal is important. Perhaps even more importantly though, it is crucial to be aware of ways in which your content could accidentally become a target for copyright enforcement, often by automated systems. However, with some common sense, some simple precautions and some common courtesy, you should be able to avoid any and all issues pretty easily. With that in mind, here is what you need to be aware of. For the rest of the ....

Copyright Tips for Review Sites | PlagiarismToday

In the end though, if youre looking to set up a review site or are running one now, you probably have no reason to fear so long as you are acting in good faith. Reviews, commentary and criticism are highly protected under copyright law and, generally, the bar for infringement is higher than mere distribution. If youre aware of the potential issues and work to avoid them, you most likely have very little to fear.

Blade Runner author's family takes aim at Google - Gadgets - NZ Herald News

2010-01-08T09:13:00.001-08:00

Blade Runner author's family takes aim at Google - Gadgets - NZ Herald News

Blade Runner author's family takes aim at Google By Kevin Rawlinson 12:53

The family of Blade Runner's author claim Google nicked names for its Nexus One smartphone.

The family of Blade Runner's author claim Google nicked names for its Nexus One smartphone. The family of author Philip K Dick is threatening to sue Google for infringement of intellectual property rights over its new Nexus One mobile. Isa Dick Hackett, daughter of the American writer, says that many of the names of the phone's features are lifted directly from her father's book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the 1982 film Blade Runner based upon it. The Nexus One's operating system is called Android and the rogue cyborgs in the book are called Nexus 6s. Ms Dick Hackett sent a letter to Google yesterday, the day after the phone's launch, demanding that the corporation change the name. "Google takes first and then deals with the fallout later. In my mind, there is a very obvious connection to my father's novel. People don't get it. It's the principle of it. It would be nice to have a dialogue. We are open to it. That's a way to start," she said. Google's new product is based on its Android technology, launched two years ago. The company hopes that the phone - a direct competitor to the Apple iPhone - will gain it a share in the mobile phone market.

Google claimed at the phone's launch on Tuesday that the Nexus name is used in the word's original sense - as a place where things converge. In Dick's book, set in a future San Francisco, the main protagonist, Rick Deckard -n played by the actor Harrison Ford in Blade Runner - is a bounty hunter, searching for renegade androids who have escaped their human masters and are trying to lead lives as humans. After some people left Earth to escape the fallout from a nuclear war which had ravaged the planet, the cyborgs were supposed to act as slaves.

In the past, the Dick family, along with the relatives of the writer John Steinbeck and musician Arlo Guthrie, son of US musician Woody Guthrie, has also attacked Google's Book section, on which users can search the text of books the company has scanned and uploaded. Google uses optical character recognition technology to convert the books into searchable text and stores them on its digital database. They said that the system was overly complicated and that copyright holders were being asked to make binding decisions. In 2008, Google agreed to pay around £78m (NZ$169m) to copyright holders after the American Author's Guild sued. The company also agreed to set up Book Rights Registry to distribute revenue to copyright holders. Another mobile phone company, Motorola, agreed to pay the director of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, George Lucas, for the use of the name Droid in their Android OS-powered smartphone. However, the Nexus One character is not trademarked by the Dick family. - THE INDEPENDENT By Kevin Rawlinson

Blade Runner author's family takes aim at Google - Gadgets - NZ Herald News

French solution to illegal download and copyright infringement - tax Google and Yahoo | ZDNet Government | ZDNet.com

2010-01-08T09:09:00.001-08:00

French solution to illegal download and copyright infringement - tax Google and Yahoo

Posted by Doug Hanchard @ January 7, 2010 @ 11:24 AM

The French government commissioned a study to determine solutions to the problems of downloading copyright protected movies and music. The panels recommendation is to tax search engine companies, funding new portals that would make available legal ways for consumers to access copyright materials. In a Globe and Mail post, the governments Minister of Culture, Frederic Mitterrand; The plan seemed inevitable to us, if we want to maintain a certain pluralism in the culture world and prevent the endless enrichment of two or three world players who will impose their cultural formatting on us, Patrick Zelnik, a record producer who helped lead the mission, was quoted as telling Liberation newspaper. This idea is similar to how blank VCR and music tapes were taxed in some countries to distribute to the music industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Googles response in the article was polite but clearly concerned; Google appears cool to the idea, but sought a conciliatory tone. Google Frances public affairs director said the company told the mission it wanted co-operation between Internet players and the cultural fields to develop new models. Olivier Esper said there were opportunities to promote innovative solutions instead of continuing on a path that opposes the Internet and the cultural worlds, for example the path of taxation. Its unknown what the RIAA or MPAA think of this approach. The complexity of creating the taxation method and how it is applied certainly would cause significant challenges and how tax revenues would be distributed. Such a program would likely face stiff resistance if a similar proposal was suggested in the United States and Canada.

French solution to illegal download and copyright infringement - tax Google and Yahoo | ZDNet Government | ZDNet.com

Association of Research Libraries :: ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication Webinar Series

2010-01-08T09:07:00.001-08:00

Association of Research Libraries :: ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication Webinar Series

ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication Webinar Series Strengthening Programs Through Collaboration This 8-part webinar series will assist libraries in taking their scholarly communication programs to the next level. Featured guest speakers will provide practical perspectives on emerging areas in scholarly communication. Throughout the series, participants will have opportunities to build and develop a network of colleagues and to review how local successes and activities can build towards a comprehensive program plan.

Audience: The series is designed to cover a broad range of topics geared toward graduates of the popular ARL/ACRL Scholarly Communication Institute, as well as others with responsibilities in the area of scholarly communication. Specific webinars may also appeal to a broader audience of librarians who feel they need to be better informed of scholarly communication issues. Organizations are welcome to participate as a group, or librarians can participate individually.

Format: Each webinar will be one hour in length, followed by an optional half-hour online breakout discussion session. Sessions will take place in an interactive, online classroom environment. They will be recorded and made available to registrants as an archive, so if you sign up for the full series but cannot attend a particular session, there will be an opportunity to catch up later. Optional pre-work assignments will be available in advance to enrich the experience or to provide the necessary background to bring participants up to speed in advance of the sessions.

Libraries may wish to collaborate on pre-work assignments with neighboring libraries (or more distant libraries virtually). A list of registrants will be available in advance to facilitate coordination of such collaboration.

Timing: The series will begin in March 2010 and conclude in November with one webinar per month, except for August.

Registration: Participants can choose to register for the whole series at a fee of $325.00 (paid in two installments), or for individual sessions at of fee of $50.00 each.

Believing that it is crucial for libraries to sustain commitment to building scholarly communication programs, the sponsors of the institute are underwriting the costs to bring this webinar series to you at a greatly reduced price. We are pleased to offer this opportunity to engage virtually as we know that your professional development dollars are limited. Webinars take place in an interactive, online classroom environment with one user/one login per group. If you wish to participate as a group, one person must register, login, and keyboard during the event. Your institution could project the webcast to participants in the same location. Class size is limited to X logins. Full refunds will be granted up to X days prior to the start of the seminar.

Association of Research Libraries :: ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication Webinar Series

Open Access - 148 Resources | EDUCAUSE

2010-01-08T09:04:00.001-08:00

Open Access - 148 Resources | EDUCAUSE

Open Access - 148 Resources * Overview * Publications (93) * Presentations (15) * Podcasts (18) * Blogs (22) Overview * Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 * Initiatives from the NSF's DataNet Program: DataONE and the Data Conservancy * The "Other" Sustainability Problem * Throwing Open the Doors: Strategies and Implications for Open Access * Where Is the Open Education Movement Going? Refers to access to databases, online learning environments, publications and other information systems that often are password-protected.

Open Access - 148 Resources | EDUCAUSE

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Strong open access growth reported by Hindawi

2010-01-08T08:56:00.001-08:00

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Strong open access growth reported by Hindawi

Strong open access growth reported by Hindawi Hindawi Publishing reports strong growth for 2009. Submissions more than doubled, from 7,600 in 2008 to more than 16,500 in 2009. The number of accepted manuscripts grew from 2,500 in 2008 to 4,400 in 2009. Note that the growth in accepted manuscripts is smaller than the growth in submitted manuscripts, indicating an increased rejection rate. This data and indication of strong growth at PLoS One is important in indicating that not only is growth rate of open access journals very strong (two per day based on DOAJ rates), the growth of articles published in open access journals is strong as well. Thanks and congratulations to Hindawi's Paul Peters and Ahmed Hindawi.

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Strong open access growth reported by Hindawi

Google And The New Digital Future

2009-12-02T17:49:00.001-08:00

Google And The New Digital Future

"Pretty much the way most thought it would go.....Sigh!" HSM

Google And The New Digital Future

The New York Review of Books November 9 is one of those strange dates haunted by history. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, signaling the collapse of the Soviet empire. The Nazis organized Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, beginning their all-out campaign against Jews. On November 9, 1923, Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch was crushed in Munich, and on November 9, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and Germany was declared a republic. The date especially hovers over the history of Germany, but it marks great events in other countries as well: the Meiji Restoration in Japan, November 9, 1867; Bonaparte's coup effectively ending the French Revolution, November 9, 1799; and the first sighting of land by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, November 9, 1620. On November 9, 2009, in the district court for the Southern District of New York, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers were scheduled to file a settlement to resolve their suit against Google for alleged breach of copyright in its program to digitize millions of books from research libraries and to make them available, for a fee, online. Not comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall, you might say. True, but for several months, all eyes in the world of books--authors, publishers, librarians, and a great many readers--were trained on the court and its judge, Denny Chin, because this seemingly small-scale squabble over copyright looked likely to determine the digital future for all of us. Google has by now digitized some ten million books. On what terms will it make those texts available to readers? That is the question before Judge Chin. If he construes the case narrowly, according to precedents in class-action suits, he could conclude that none of the parties had been slighted. That decision would remove all obstacles to Google's attempt to transform its digitizing of texts into the largest library and book-selling business the world has ever known. If Judge Chin were to take a broad view of the case, the settlement could be modified in ways that would protect the public against potential abuses of Google's monopolistic power. That Google's enterprise (Google Book Search, or GBS) threatened to become an overweening monopoly became clear when the Department of Justice filed a memorandum with the court warning about the likelihood of a violation of antitrust legislation. More than four hundred other memorandums and amicus briefs also provided warnings about mounting opposition to GBS. In the face of this opposition, Google and the plaintiffs petitioned the court to delay a hearing that was scheduled for October 17 so that they could rework the settlement. Judge Chin set November 9 as the deadline when the new version of the settlement would be unveiled. The great event turned out to be a dud, however. At the last minute, Google and the plaintiffs asked Judge Chin to grant another extension. He gave them four more days, so the witching hour finally took place not on November 9 but on a less auspicious date, Friday the 13th. Why did the deadline look so monumental? The terms of the settlement will have a profound effect on the book industry for the foreseeable future. On the positive side, Google will make it possible for consumers to purchase access to millions of copyrighted books currently in print, and to read them on hand-held devices or computer screens, with payment going to authors and publishers as well as Google. Many millions more--books covered by copyright but out of print, at least seven million in all, including untold millions of "orphans" whose rightsholders have not been identified--will be available through subscriptions paid for by institutions such as universities. The database, along with books in the public domain that Google has already digitized, will constitute a gigantic digital library, and it will grow over time so that someday it could be larger than the Library of Congress (which now contains over 21 million catalogued books). By paying a moderate subscription fee, libraries, colleges, and educational institutions of all kinds could have instant access to a whole world of learning and literature. But will the price be moderate? The negative arguments stress the danger that monopolies tend to charge monopoly prices. Equally important, they warn that Google's dominance of access to books will reinforce its power over access to other kinds of information, raising concerns about privacy (Google may be able to aggregate data about your reading, e-mail, consumption, housing, travel, employment, and many other activities). The same dominance also raises questions about both competition (the class-action character of the suit could make it impossible for another entrepreneur to digitize orphan works, because only Google will be protected from litigation by rightsholders) and commitment to the public good. As a commercial enterprise, Google's first duty is to provide a profit for its shareholders, and the settlement leaves no room for representation of libraries, readers, or the public in general. Story continues below An extensive argument about the pros and cons could turn Judge Chin's courtroom into a forum where the full range of literary questions would be dramatized by debate. No courtroom drama took place on November 13, because nothing happened other than the filing of the revised settlement (call it GBS 2.0 to distinguish it from the original version of the settlement, GBS 1.0). But the filing was important in itself, because it marked the denouement of years of hard bargaining over who would control a large stretch of the digital landscape that is just now coming into view. To be sure, GBS 2.0 will certainly be challenged by groups and individuals who claim they were not fairly represented in the classes of authors and publishers. The case may take years to work its way through the courts. Meanwhile, Google will go on digitizing; and as the legal situation evolves, it may devise further revisions of the settlement (GBS 3.0, GBS 4.0, etc.). The public will have to study all the new versions of the settlement in order to stay informed about the rules of the game while the game is being played. Who ultimately wins is not simply a matter of competition among potential entrepreneurs but an issue of enormous importance to everyone who cares about books, even though the public is reduced to the role of spectator. As the first step toward a resolution, the filing on November 13 suggested just how far Google is willing to go in modifying the original settlement. Google's spokesman hailed the revised version as providing all the benefits and none of the defects that one could expect. According to Dan Clancy, Google Books engineering director, Google is still very excited about this agreement.... We look forward to continuing to work with rightsholders from around the world to fulfill our longstanding mission of increasing access to all the world's books. But the arguments in favor of the reworked settlement came from Google and the plaintiffs who will become its collaborators if their deal is approved. To get a sense of the counterarguments, one can survey the memorandums and amicus briefs that were filed with the court before November 9.[*] The protests that came from Europe are the most revealing. Although they concentrate on issues of special importance to foreigners--above all, the incompatibility of American class-action suits with protection for copyright holders who are not Americans--they show how the settlement was seen from a distant perspective. The governments of France and Germany sent memorandums urging the court to reject the settlement "in its entirety" or at least insofar as it applied to their own citizens. Far from seeing any potential public good in it, they condemned it for creating an "unchecked, concentrated power" over the digitization of a vast amount of literature (this according to the French memorandum) and for doing so (according to the Germans) by a "commercially driven" agreement negotiated "in secrecy...behind closed doors by three interested parties, the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and Google, Inc." In contrast to the commercial character of Google's enterprise, both governments stressed the higher values represented by their national literatures. The French began their memorandum by invoking Pascal, Descartes, Molière, Racine, and other writers through Camus and Sartre, while the Germans summoned up the line that led from Goethe and Schiller to Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. Each country cited the number of its Nobel Prize winners in literature (France sixteen, Germany twelve), and each buttressed its case by other evidence of high-mindedness. The Germans insisted on Gutenberg and his contribution to "the spread of science and culture." The French cited the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1789 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 in order to uphold the principle of "free access to information" threatened by Google's "de facto monopoly." It is an odd spectacle: foreign governments defending a European notion of culture against the capitalistic inroads of an American company, and submitting their case to Judge Denny Chin of the Southern District Court of New York. What Judge Chin, who grew up in Hell's Kitchen in a family of poor Chinese immigrants (and won a scholarship to Princeton University) made of it all is difficult to say. He did not tip his hand on November 13, nor did he say when a hearing would take place. In playing the cultural card, the French emphasized the unique character of the book, "a product unlike other products"--its power to capture creativity, to enrich civilization, and to promote diversity, which, they claimed, would be compromised by Google's commitment to commercialization. The Germans spoke in the name of "the land of poets and thinkers," but they laid most stress on the right of privacy, which, they argued, Google could threaten by keeping data on who reads what. Both governments then listed a series of subsidiary arguments, which were nearly the same, word for word--unsurprisingly, as they engaged the same legal counsel: 1. The settlement gives Google a virtual monopoly over orphan works, even though it has no claim to their copyrights. 2. Its opt-out provision, which means that authors will be deemed to have accepted the settlement unless they notify Google to the contrary, violates the rights inherent in authorship. 3. It contains a most-favored- nation clause--i.e., a provision that prevents a potential competitor from obtaining better terms than Google in any new commercial uses of the digitized books. The terms of such future enterprises will be determined by a Books Rights Registry composed exclusively of representatives of the authors and publishers. The Registry will keep track of copyrights and cooperate with Google in setting prices. 4. It gives Google the power to censor its database by excluding up to 15 percent of the digitized works. 5. Its guidelines for pricing will promote Google's commercial interests, not the good of the public, through the use of algorithms created by Google according to Google's secret methods. 6. It favors secrecy in general, hiding audit procedures, preventing the public from attending meetings in which Google and the Registry will discuss library matters, and even requiring Google, the authors, and publishers to destroy all documents relevant to their agreement on the settlement. Above all, the French and Germans condemned the settlement for sanctioning the "uncontrolled, autocratic concentration of power in a single corporate entity," which threatened the "free exchange of ideas through literature." To drive the point home, they both noted that Google has taken in more revenue than many countries--$22 billion in 2008. The same points were made in a hearing before the European Commission on September 7 by the three most important international library associations: the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), the European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associates (EBLIDA), and the Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (LIBER). In nearly identical testimony, all three stressed the danger that "a large proportion of the world's heritage of books in digital format will be under the control of a single corporate entity." It was Google's sheer power that gave them pause. They summoned up the prospect of a digital library of 30 million books that would cost $750 million, and they concluded that Google would exercise something close to hegemony in the book world. Therefore, they appealed to the European Commission to defend the interests of the public by preventing Google from abusing its power. Some of these associations submitted similar statements to the New York court. So did hundreds of other groups and individuals. After reading through them, one has the impression of a sense of alarm gathering force and rising to the surface of a collective consciousness. As November 9 approached, it did indeed promise to be a day of destiny, when we would begin to see into our digital future and to face the forces that might determine it. Where was the Department of Justice in the pre-November debate? It, too, submitted a memorandum for the court's consideration. After months of investigating potential violations of antitrust law, the DOJ pointed to two serious difficulties: the possibility of horizontal agreements among authors and publishers to restrict price competition and the further restriction of competition by Google's de facto exclusive rights to the digital distribution of orphan works. Competitors would be denied access to millions of orphans, the memorandum argued, because they would not enjoy the immunity from suits for copyright infringement that the settlement reserves to Google. Moreover, the settlement's equivalent of a most-favored-nation clause would prevent all competitors from obtaining better terms than Google's even if they could put together an attractive database. Instead of expatiating in the European manner on the danger to the world's literary heritage, the DOJ warned about something concrete: the "risk of market foreclosure." What to do? Far from sounding hostile to Google Book Search, the DOJ acknowledged its potential to promote the public good and announced, "The United States does not want the opportunity or momentum to be lost." The memorandum could therefore be read as a prescription for a way to save the settlement. It concentrated on the most hotly debated provisions--those concerning the approximately seven million out-of-print but in-copyright books, especially orphans--and it suggested the following changes: 1. Require rightsholders of out-of-print books to participate in the settlement by opting in instead of operating from the assumption that they had agreed to participate unless they opted out. The shift to an opt-out default would remove Google's control of books whose rightsholders cannot be identified or do not come forward. 2. Do not distribute the profits from the sale of orphan books to the parties of the settlement (Google and the authors and publishers) but rather use the money to fund a thorough search for the unknown rightsholders, and extend the search for a long period of time. 3. Appoint guardians to protect the interests of orphan rightsholders by serving on the registry. 4. Find some mechanism by which potential competitors to Google could gain access to orphan works without exposure to suits for infringement of copyright. Presumably this would require legislation by Congress. 5. Prevent Google from using out-of-print works in new commercial products without the owner's permission. The DOJ said it would continue to investigate the potential violation of antitrust laws, and it concluded with an unambiguous imperative: "This Court should reject the Proposed Settlement in its current form...." But its recommendations for an improved settlement did not go far--not nearly as far as those suggested by the governments of France and Germany and many other critics. The DOJ said nothing about the need for monitoring prices, protecting privacy, preventing censorship, providing representation of the public on the registry, and requiring full disclosure of Google's secret data. If the DOJ encouraged Judge Chin to take a broad view of the settlement, it did not open the door wide. The revised settlement, or GBS 2.0, released on November 13, reads as if Google and the plaintiffs took most of their cues from the DOJ's memorandum. In a clear concession to the DOJ's criticisms, GBS 2.0 provides that the Registry will include a court-appointed guardian to represent the rightsholders of unclaimed books. But it does not switch to an opt-out provision for such rightsholders--that is, according to GBS 2.0, any owner of a copyright of an out-of-print book would be deemed to accept the settlement unless he or she rejected it. Because millions of books, primarily orphans, fall into this category where the rightsholders are difficult to identify, Google alone would enjoy immunity from prosecution by any rightsholders who might turn up--and the exposure to litigation, which could easily reach $150,000 per title, would be enough to prevent any competitor from entering the field. Instead of providing a solution to the problem of orphan works, GBS 2.0 leaves Google in command of their commercialization, pending eventual legislation by Congress. As to revenue from the sale of orphan books, GBS 2.0 complies with the DOJ's insistence that the money not go to Google and the plaintiffs. Instead it will be spent in efforts to search for the unidentified rightsholders; and after being held for ten years, the funds will be distributed to charities determined by court order. GBS 2.0 also follows the DOJ's recommendation to abandon the most-favored-nation clause. Google's competitors would be able to license out-of-print books in retail enterprises --that is, in selling individual works to consumers--although Google would maintain exclusive control of the institutional subscriptions to its gigantic database. How the price of those subscriptions will be set remains unclear. GBS 2.0 has some language explaining the way its pricing algorithm will work, but it contains no effective mechanism to prevent price gouging, no provision for an antitrust consent decree that would empower a public authority to monitor prices, and no way to protect the public from excessive pricing should Google be taken over in the future by rapacious speculators. GBS 2.0 does not therefore differ in essentials from GBS 1.0. It largely ignores the objections of foreign governments, except in one crucial respect: it partly meets the objections by narrowing the scope of GBS to books published in the United States and to countries with similar legal systems--that is, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Google will not display books published in countries like France and Germany, and it will give them representation on the Registry to protect their interests. Just what proportion of unclaimed works will now be excluded from the settlement by this concession remains to be clarified. Will these concessions be enough to mollify Google's critics outside the Department of Justice who are not parties to the settlement? Probably not, judging from a statement issued on November 13 by the Open Book Alliance, whose members include Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo: By performing surgical nip and tuck, Google, the AAP [Association of American Publishers], and the AG [Authors Guild] are attempting to distract people from their continued efforts to establish a monopoly over digital content access and distribution; usurp Congress's role in setting copyright policy; lock writers into their unsought registry, stripping them of their individual contract rights; put library budgets and patron privacy at risk; and establish a dangerous precedent by abusing the class action process. What then is the outlook for the future? No one can predict the fate of the settlement as it bounces from court to court; but if the public good should be taken into consideration, one can imagine two general solutions to the problems posed by GBS, one maximal, one minimal. The most ambitious solution would transform Google's digital database into a truly public library. That, of course, would require an act of Congress, one that would make a decisive break with the American habit of determining public issues by private lawsuit. The legislation would have to settle ancillary problems--how to adjust copyright, deal with orphan books, and compensate Google for its investment in digitizing--but it would have the advantage of clearing up a messy legal landscape and of giving the American people what they deserve: a national digital library equal to the needs of the twenty-first century. But it is not clear how Google would react to such a buyout. If state intervention is deemed to go too far against the American grain, a minimal solution could be devised for the private sector. Congress would have to intervene with legislation to protect the digitization of orphan works from lawsuits, but it would not need to appropriate funds. Instead, funding could come from a coalition of foundations. The digitizing, open-access distribution, and preservation of orphan works could be done by a nonprofit organization such as the Internet Archive, a nonprofit group that was built as a digital library of texts, images, and archived Web pages. In order to avoid conflict with interests in the current commercial market, the database would include only books in the public domain and orphan works. Its time span would increase as copyrights expired, and it could include an opt-in provision for rightsholders of books that are in copyright but out of print. The work need not be done in haste. At the rate of a million books a year, we would have a great library, free and accessible to everyone, within a decade. And the job would be done right, with none of the missing pages, botched images, faulty editions, omitted artwork, censoring, and misconceived cataloging that mar Google's enterprise. Bibliographers--who appear to play little or no part in Google's enterprise--would direct operations along with computer engineers. Librarians would cooperate with both in order to assure the preservation of the books, another weak point in GBS, because Google is not committed to maintaining its corpus, and digitized texts easily degrade or become inaccessible. This digitizing process could be subsidized as part of the Obama administration's economic stimulus, and the overall cost, spread out over ten to twenty years, would be manageable, perhaps $750 million in all. Meanwhile, Google and anyone else would be free to exploit the commercial sector. The national digital library could be composed from the holdings of the Library of Congress alone or, failing that, from research libraries that have not opened all their collections to Google. Perhaps other solutions could be devised. If the court did not resolve the Google Book Search problem on November 13, at least it had the potential to concentrate minds and stimulate public debate. We are agreed that something must be done to improve the nation's health. Why not do something to enrich its culture? --November 18, 2009

[*]The texts of the documents can be consulted at dockets.justia.com/docket/court-nysdce/case_no-1:2005cv08136/case_id-273913.

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard. "The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future" was published in October and "The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon" will be published in December. (December 2009)

Google And The New Digital Future

New Blog - Citation Help for ISU and Beyond

2009-11-03T12:26:00.001-08:00

http://citehelp.blogspot.com/

I have started a new Blog to keep primarily ISU faculty, staff, and students up-to-date with the latest tools related to bibliographic management applications, primarily EndNote, EndNote Web, and Zotero. Anyone using these tools may benefit from the information shared. I will try to tag those items that exclusivly related to Iowa State University such as upcoming workshops.

The address is http://citehelp.blogspot.com/

Thanks -- Stephen

Highlights from International Open Access Week 2009 « ResourceShelf

2009-10-30T07:53:00.001-07:00

Highlights from International Open Access Week 2009 « ResourceShelf

Highlights from International Open Access Week 2009 From the Announcement: The first International Open Access Week (October 19 23) may have just come to a close, but the broad spectrum of initiatives that it showcased ensures that Open Access to research will play a central role in advancing the conduct of research and scholarship for years to come. Events took place on more than 300 higher education, research, and other sites worldwide, illustrating the dramatic growth of the global network that has emerged in support of Open Access. The post goes on to highlight five key events from International Open Access Week. Youll read about and find related links to: + The establishment of new access policies at agencies and research institutes. + The adoption of campus-based open-access policies. + The release of extensive research on the economic and social impact of Open Access. + The commitment of significant new funds to support open-access publication. + A groundswell of support by college and university students. Source: SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)

Highlights from International Open Access Week 2009 « ResourceShelf

The Accessibility Paradox | Peer to Peer Review - 10/29/2009 - Library Journal

2009-10-30T07:52:00.001-07:00

The Accessibility Paradox | Peer to Peer Review - 10/29/2009 - Library Journal

"Interesting article in Library Journal ... 1st paragraph here for more wander over to LJ" -- HSM

The Accessibility Paradox -- Library Journal, 10/29/2009

The book world has been harrumphing about a battle among big box stores to sell the season's biggest books at the cheapest price. In order to draw customer into their stores, Target and Wal-Mart are making ten bestselling author's books available for under ten bucks. (Wisconsin is missing all the excitementthey have a law against dumping goods below wholesale prices but Amazon has joined in the fray, so Wisconsinites can still go online and pre-order bestsellers at low-low prices.) The American Booksellers Association has even asked the Department of Justice to intervene. I'm somewhat bemused to see a Barbara Kingsolver book among the discounted booksattention shoppers! Critique of corporate greed and US imperialism on sale in aisle three! But I'm also taken aback by the horrified response of the book industry. I thought the big crisis was that nobody reads. Now it turns out the problem is that books are so popular with the masses they're being used as bait to draw in shoppers. Come on, guys, get your story straight! Which is it?

The Accessibility Paradox | Peer to Peer Review - 10/29/2009 - Library Journal

Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers - Ars Technica

2009-10-30T07:45:00.001-07:00

Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers - Ars Technica

Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers A study provides evidence that file sharing takes place with some very specialized media: the research papers published in scientific journals. By John Timmer | Last updated October 29, 2009 6:15 AM CT

The ease with which information can be spread through the Internet has exacerbated tensions among those who pay for, conduct, and publish scientific research. Many journals still require subscription or per-article payments for access to the research they publish, which often leaves the public, who funds a significant percentage of the research, on the wrong side of a pay wall. So far, however, there's been little evidence that the public has been interested enough in research to engage in the sort of widespread file-sharing that plague other content industries. But a new study suggests that may just be because nobody's looked very carefully.

The study, which was spotted by TechDirt, appears in an open-access journal, so anyone can read its entire contents. It describes the sharing of over 5,000 research papers on a site frequented by medical professionals, and the formal community rules that governed the exchange.

During the six months in 2008 that the author tracked the activity on the site, which was a discussion board focused on medical fields, it had over 125,000 registered users. Anyone could start an account, but many of the fora were focused on specific issues, such as those faced by nurses and residents. In addition to those, however, there was a section called the Electronic Library that contained a forum called "Databases & Journals—Requests and Enquiries."

Up to three times a day, users were allowed to submit a request for a published research article, accompanied by a link to the free abstract hosted at the journal's website. Other users would then download the full article and host it somewhere, providing a link in the discussion. If everything was set up properly, the site would track the number of downloads.

Over the course of six months, over 6,500 articles were requested, and over 80 percent of those requests were successfully filled. The articles received a mean of 4.47 views, with one attracting 177 downloads. The author found that the requests roughly paralleled the journal's impact factors, with Nature and Science coming out on top, followed by more specialized medical journals. Figuring an average cost of $30 a download (the price requested by many journals), the publishing industry was potentially losing $1.4 million a year due to the site, although it's unlikely that many of the downloaders would have actually exercised their option to buy an article.

According to the author, the site (which is never named) went inactive in early 2009, although its contents were indexed via Google prior to that point.

The author considers this behavior in the context of the Open Access debate, which has played out in Congress and research institutions. He also terms the file sharing behavior among people involved in the medical profession "ethically dubious," given it involves the distribution of copyrighted material.

There is, however, an alternate way of viewing this that the author doesn't discuss: at least some medical professionals are apparently unable to obtain the publications they feel are needed for their training or practice; given their job responsibilities, it seems unethical to withhold these materials.

In addition, it's worth noting that, although this sort of informal sharing would be obviated if all research was open access, it has a very different history from the formal open access movement. For many years, it was traditional for anyone publishing a paper to order a stack of what were termed "reprints"—essentially the journal article without the rest of the journal's contents—from the publisher, in order to share with colleagues or anyone who was interested, but did not have access to the journal. With the advent of digital publishing, this sort of service shifted to the emailing of PDFs—in a lot of ways, the file sharing seen here could be viewed as the next logical step in this publication sharing process.

In any case, the amount of sharing that goes on is undoubtedly much larger than the file exchanges observed in the study. Many authors are now choosing to simply place articles where anyone can find them, either ahead of print at places like the arXiv, or after, on their university's servers. Offers to share paywalled articles also occur in public forums that aren't dedicated to this exchange, at least based on some of the comments attached to Ars' science articles.

Many publishers are readily adapting to and, in some cases, embracing the increased demands for public access to research results. But there remain a number who are resisting the trend. The study suggests that publishers might do well to adopt some sort of formalized access system, or they may end up facing a growth in the sites that encourage the same sort of sharing that has caused the movie and film industries so much indigestion.

The Internet Journal of Medical Informatics, 2009. DOI unavailable.

Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers - Ars Technica

SPIE Digital Library - Subscription Information and Support for Librarians

2009-10-23T11:40:00.001-07:00

SPIE Digital Library - Subscription Information and Support for Librarians

Open-access SPIE Reviews journal to launch in mid-2009 with focus on emerging topics in optics and photonics

December 12, 2008 -- SPIE announced today the launch in mid-2009 of the new open-access journal SPIE Reviews under the editorship of William T. Rhodes. The new journal will publish original, in-depth review articles on emerging and evolving fields in applied optics and photonics of use to researchers as well as industry innovators.

"Articles will serve both as valuable overviews of significant new technologies and as portals to the primary literature in those areas for practitioners, researchers, and students." Dr. Rhodes said. "The optics community has long needed a good journal of review articles. I am extremely pleased that SPIE is launching this new publication, and doubly pleased because it comes at no cost to readers or authors." Rhodes is a professor of electrical engineering and Associate Director of the Imaging Technology Center at Florida Atlantic University, and Emeritus Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology.

As editor, Rhodes will be assisted by a broadly interdisciplinary editorial board that will provide the expertise needed to ensure that SPIE Reviews covers the full range of topics important to SPIE constituents.

SPIE Reviews will be available as an open-access publication in the SPIE Digital Library, the world's largest collection of optics literature. Articles in the SPIE Digital Library incorporate features such as extensive CrossRef-linked bibliographies, multimedia, bookmarking tools, and RSS feeds. In addition to these features, SPIE Reviews will feature links to related resources such as book chapters. SPIE Reviews joins the open-access SPIE Letters virtual journal as an additional open-access offering in the SPIE Digital Library, which also includes articles available by subscription or pay-per-view from SPIE's other six journals and the Proceedings of SPIE.

"SPIE Reviews will offer timely insights on emerging technologies of benefit to researchers and students, while also providing industry managers with overviews of developing fields and a front-view perspective on technology trends," said CEO Eugene Arthurs.

SPIE Reviews' open-access status will ensure its availability to researchers in developing countries and in schools with limited access to primary research journals, Arthurs noted. "This supports SPIE's mission to advance devierse new technologies throughout the world."

Articles will be invited by members of the editorial board and the editor. Proposals from prospective authors also will be considered by the editor. Proposals and inquiries may be sent to journals@spie.org. Additional information on SPIE Reviews is available at www.spie.org/reviews.

SPIE Digital Library - Subscription Information and Support for Librarians

Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)

2009-10-23T11:15:00.001-07:00

Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)

Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) becomes a founding member of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)

October 21, 2009

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) became a founding member of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). COAR is an international association of organizations and individuals that have a common strategic interest in open access to scholarly communication. COAR was formed out of a need to work together at the international level to promote greater visibility and application of research outputs through global networks of open access digital repositories.

Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)

Hardin News» Blog Archive » Open Access Publishing in the Health Sciences- The University of Iowa Libraries

2009-10-23T11:12:00.001-07:00

Hardin News» Blog Archive » Open Access Publishing in the Health Sciences- The University of Iowa Libraries

Editor’s Note: Throughout Open Access Week (Oct 19-23), the UI Libraries will be sharing the views of our UI colleagues on the topic of open access.

by Dr. William Sivitz, Professor of Internal Medicine

I recently published an article in PlosOne (Mitochondrial Targeted Coenzyme Q, Superoxide, and Fuel Selectivity in Endothelial Cells by Brian D. Fink, Yunxia O’Malley, Brian L. Dake, Nicolette C. Ross, Thomas E. Prisinzano, and William I. Sivitz). I found the process straightforward and faster than most other journals. The peer review was thorough but fair. I hope to see this used more frequently.

by Dr. Michael Knudson, Association Professor of Pathology

We published in Plos One and found it a very satisfying experience. Quick, insightful reviews, no charge for color figures and no copyright forms to sign.

The journal allows readers to provide feedback and ratings of each article. I would recommend Open Access to all.

Hardin News» Blog Archive » Open Access Publishing in the Health Sciences- The University of Iowa Libraries

Sorry -- Been Away !

2009-10-23T11:10:00.001-07:00

Sorry -- had numerous work related issues which were so unforeseen that I had to drop everything to get done.

None related to open access -- but I am back.... So....

Thanks for understanding.....Stephen

About OA week — Open Access Week - October 19-23, 2009

2009-10-23T11:07:00.001-07:00

About OA week — Open Access Week - October 19-23, 2009

About OA week

October 19-23 will mark the first international Open Access Week.

Open Access Week is an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public. The now-annual event has been expanded from a single day to accommodate widespread global interest in the movement toward open, public access to scholarly research results.

Open Access Week builds on the momentum started by the student-led national day of action in 2007 and carried by the 120 campuses in 27 countries that celebrated Open Access Day in 2008. 2008 organizers SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), the PLoS (The Public Library of Science), and Students for FreeCulture welcome new key contributors for 2009: OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook); Open Access Directory (OAD); and eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries), which will again spearhead events in developing and transitional countries.

There are also partner organizations that are engaging their communities in every corner of the globe and these are listed on the main page of this site (SPARC Europe, SPARC Japan, DOAJ and BIREME). If you want join them and help get the word out please contact dokubo@plos.org.

This year, the organizers will highlight a growing suite of educational resources that local hosts can use to design their own programs on Open Access, for their respective audiences and time zones. The OASIS project features the resources for researchers, administrators, librarians, students, and the public — as well as different OA awareness levels — that will be the centerpiece of the 2009 Open Access Week program.

These audience-specific resource lists will be supplemented by the growing clearinghouse of educational materials available through the Open Access Directory, which will again serve as the key index for participating campuses and organizations on five continents. Through the collaborative functionality of the two initiatives, videos, briefing papers, podcasts, slideshows, posters and other educational tools will be drawn from all over the Web to be featured during Open Access Week 2009.

The organizers will also work with registered participants to develop a variety of sample program tracks, such as “Administrators’ introduction to campus open-access policies and funds,” “OA 101,” and “Complying with the NIH public access policy” that take full advantage of available tools. Scholars, students, libraries, publishers, individuals, and campuses everywhere are invited to adapt these resources as needed and to mark Open Access Week by hosting an event, distributing literature, blogging, or wearing an Open Access t-shirt.

“After the success of last year’s Open Access Day, we’re delighted to be co-organizing the first ever Open Access Week with our fellow collaborators, again in conjunction with the anniversary of one of our flagship journals,” said Peter Jerram, CEO for the Public Library of Science. “We would ask our supporters to celebrate the fifth anniversary of PLoS Medicine by spreading the word about Open Access and getting involved in the week.”

“There’s no more certain sign of the momentum behind Open Access to research than an annual, global celebration of this scale,” added Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. “Occasions like this are the best possible way to attract attention from busy faculty members and administrators. It’s SPARC’s pleasure to be working with our partners to realize the event once again this year.”

Read a Press Release about Open Access Week 2009.

About OA week — Open Access Week - October 19-23, 2009

URGENT! Intellectual Property Lawyer Marc Toberoff Goes After Disney/Marvel Deal & Other Studios For Jack Kirby Estate – Deadline.com

2009-09-21T07:26:00.001-07:00

"sorry for not posting lately -- been busy with 3 other major projects, but this was too good...." Stephen

URGENT! Intellectual Property Lawyer Marc Toberoff Goes After Disney/Marvel Deal & Other Studios For Jack Kirby Estate

By Nikki Finke |

Specifically, the estate of Jack Kirby, co-creator of Captain America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, The Avengers, Iron Man, Hulk, The Silver Surfer and Thor, has sent notices terminating copyright to publishers Marvel and Disney, as well as film studios that have made movies and TV shows based on characters he created or co-created, including Sony, Universal, 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures. That's the news from the website bleedingcool.com, which covers all things comic book. Normally these kinds of lawsuits are run of the mill for Hollywood. But not when they're litigated by Marc Toberoff, who is the bane of Big Media. He's had so many victories they're hard to count, especially in he comic book arena on behalf of Superman creator Jerry Seigel against DC Comics and Warner Bros. Like that case, Kirby’s estate is looking to regain his share of copyright in the characters and their use in comics and other media. "Such claims, if found valid, would begin from 2014 and, as always, it's worth noting that Marvel/Disney will still own the trademarks of the characters in comics, and the studios in movies. The likelihood is that, if successful, the Kirby estate would enter into negotiation over terms to continue publishing comics based on his work," the website wrote. Other recent cases which Toberoff has won or settled lawsuits on Lassie, Get Smart, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Wild Wild West, and Smallville. On the Superman case, Warner Bros could have been draped in black mourning the loss of a shitload of Superman dollars because of U.S. District Court Judge Stephen G. Larson's ruling: "After 70 years, Jerome Siegel’s heirs regain what he granted so long ago — the copyright in the Superman material that was published in Action Comics, Vol. 1. What remains is an apportionment of profits, guided in some measure by the rulings contained in this Order, and a trial on whether to include the profits generated by DC Comics’ corporate sibling’s exploitation of the Superman." Think about it: Siegel sold the rights to the action hero he created with Joseph Shuster to Detective Comics for $130, and his heirs got back ownership of the character in 1999 and could possibly lay claim to $50+ million of Warner Bros' and/or its DC Comics' cash. Can that happen in the Kirby case? The iron is that Disney CEO Bob Iger's ties to Marvel go back two generations to Kirby himself. That's because Iger's late great-uncle (his grandfather's brother) was illustrator/cartoonist Jerry Iger, who partnered with illustrator/cartoonist Will Eisner back in the 1930s to create the comic book packager Eisner & Iger Studios. And their first hire was Jack Kirby, who as you know later became the co-creator of many of Marvel's best known characters with then Marvel editor-in-chief Stan Lee. Lee, meanwhile, has been supportive of the Disney/Marvel deal (though he is fighting lawsuits of his own on other fronts.)

URGENT! Intellectual Property Lawyer Marc Toberoff Goes After Disney/Marvel Deal & Other Studios For Jack Kirby Estate – Deadline.com

How do I make my research papers openly available without leaving out peer-review? « eResources at the University of Bradford

2009-07-01T14:43:00.001-07:00

How do I make my research papers openly available without leaving out peer-review? « eResources at the University of Bradford

How do I make my research papers openly available without leaving out peer-review?

A range of Open Access journals are now available in most subject areas. These titles number in their thousands and are usually peer-reviewed. Some of the more well-known titles include those of BioMed Central (199 peer-reviewed titles) and the Public Library of Science (seven peer-reviewed science and medicine titles). A number of directories exist to list Open Access journals. One of more extensive lists is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) which also facilitates searches across the journals. The multi-disciplinary and multi-lingual DOAJ covers over 4250 free, full-text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.

In addition to Open Access journals the commercial publishers may offer paid open access options. this would allow authors to deposit their articles immediately in their institutional open access repositories upon payment of a fee. The same publishers may also permit authors to deposit after an embargo period without the payment of a fee. Where a publisher’s standard policy does not allow an author to comply with their funding agency’s open access mandate, paid open access options may enable an author to comply. Information about publishers’ paid options for open access are available at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/PaidOA.html. Guidance is also available from the Research Information Network (RIN) who have produced a briefing document called “Paying for open access publication charges”. This PDF is available from RIN web pages.

Authors are urged to consider the requirements set by their funding bodies (information about funder mandates are available directly from the funding organisation or e.g. the JULIET database) regarding open access to reseach outputs. In many cases researchers are expected to make research results available open on the web. This could be an Open Access journal or paid open access article in a commercial journal. Institutional repositories are a third option for releasing research materials to the free web.

Authors concerned about their rights to publish in traditional commercial journals need not worry. Making research available openly on the World Wide Web does not exclude the publication of articles in the author’s choice of journal. However, it worth noting that on occasion the publisher’s policy on self-archiving and placing published articles on the free web may clash with the funder’s mandate on open access. Bearing this in mind it is worth checking the prospective publisher’s copyright policy and the funder mandate prior to getting published.

More information on publisher policies are available via the RoMEO database or the Bradford Scholars web page at the University of Bradford. Alternatively, you may choose to contact the repository team at Bradford for advise and assistance. Contact details are available at the Bradford Scholars homepage.

How do I make my research papers openly available without leaving out peer-review? « eResources at the University of Bradford

Automated Copyright Settlement Letters Apparently A Lucrative Business | Techdirt

2009-07-01T14:32:00.001-07:00

Automated Copyright Settlement Letters Apparently A Lucrative Business | Techdirt

Automated Copyright Settlement Letters Apparently A Lucrative Business

from the pay-up-or-we'll-sue dept

We've covered a few different stories of companies that have been involved in what certainly has a lot of similarities to extortion: sending automated letters insisting that you're violating the law, and demanding payment to prevent a lawsuit. DirecTV was one of the first companies to put a big push behind such a revenue stream, but it was eventually shot down by the courts. The RIAA, of course, has used such a program for a while. More recently, we've seen some companies in Europe experiment with similar programs. The latest is Nexicon, a former cigarette retailer that's now rebuilt itself as an automated legal threat sender, scanning BitTorrent for what it believes is infringing content, and dashing off automated legal notices, demanding payment within 10 days, and suggesting that simply paying up is a lot cheaper than even contacting a lawyer. At what point do politicians realize just how badly the system is being abused? Or do they just let this sort of activity continue?
In the meantime, it looks like ACS:Law, which is one of the organizations that's been involved in a similar settle-or-we'll-sue letter sending campaign has been outed as sending bogus letters to people who had nothing to do with the content they're alleged to have infringed upon. The most amazing thing? The companies involved seem to admit it. In a letter used by multiple firms, they note that "We do not claim that your computer was used to commit the infringing act (although we do not exclude this possibility), nor do we claim that you downloaded our client's work. Our claim is that your Internet connection was used to make our client's work available via one or more P2P networks. The file may not, therefore, be on your computer." But they still want you to pay up, of course. It's guilty until proven innocent, because that's a lot more lucrative.

Automated Copyright Settlement Letters Apparently A Lucrative Business | Techdirt

The Associated Press: High court won't block remote storage DVR systems

2009-07-01T14:31:00.001-07:00

The Associated Press: High court won't block remote storage DVR systems

High court won't block remote storage DVR systems

2 days ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Hollywood studios and television networks lost their bid Monday for the Supreme Court to block the use of a new digital video recorder system that could make it cheaper and easier for viewers to record shows and watch them when they want, without commercials.

The justices decline to hear arguments on whether Cablevision Systems Corp.'s remote-storage DVR violates copyright laws.

For consumers, the action means that Cablevision and perhaps other cable system operators soon will be able to offer DVR service without need for a box in their homes. The remote storage unit exists on computer servers maintained by a cable provider.

Industry experts say the new technology could put digital recording service in nearly half of all American homes, about twice the current number. That's what has movie studios, TV networks and cable channels worried. DVRs allow viewers easily to skip past commercials.

The studios and networks contend that the service is more akin to video-on-demand, for which they negotiate licensing fees with cable providers.

The Obama administration, which urged the court not to hear the case, said the ruling by the federal appeals court in New York in favor of Cablevision was correct.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a judge's ruling that Cablevision, rather than its customers, would be making copies of programs, thereby violating copyright laws.

The Screen Actors Guild, songwriters, music companies, Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the NCAA all sided with the networks and studios in asking for high court review.

The case is Cable News Network v. CSC Holdings Inc., 08-448.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The Associated Press: High court won't block remote storage DVR systems

OASIS

2009-07-01T14:23:00.001-07:00

OASIS

OASIS aims to provide an authoritative ‘sourcebook’ on Open Access, covering the concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving it. The site highlights developments and initiatives from around the world, with links to diverse additional resources and case studies. As such, it is a community-building as much as a resource-building exercise. Users are encouraged to share and download the resources provided, and to modify and customize them for local use. Open Access is evolving, and we invite the growing world-wide community to take part in this exciting global movement

OASIS

Media Life Magazine - Supremes open way for remote DVRs

2009-07-01T14:18:00.001-07:00

Media Life Magazine - Supremes open way for remote DVRs

Supremes open way for remote DVRs High court ruling frees Cablevision to offer service

By Louisa Ada Seltzer
Jun 30, 2009

It would seem like a splitting of hairs, but then so much of copyright and trademark law is just that.
Cablevision came up with a system allowing its customers to record TV shows, as they might with a DVR, but store them remotely on a Cablevision server.

TV networks, which are generally opposed to all things DVR, objected and filed a lawsuit, arguing that Cablevision's remote DVR storage system violated their copyright protection of the shows they produce--and in a way that a TiVo device or similar home DVR device does not.
The networks, including CNN, CBS and Fox Networks Group, along with the Motion Picture Association of America, won the first round in federal court but then lost on appeal, when last August the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned the lower court's decision.
Yesterday the networks lost again when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
The effect is to enable Cablevision and other cable systems to broaden their offerings to consumers, allowing them to record and store programs without having to buy a home DVR device.
The networks worry that thus enabled, more and more viewers will use the service with the intent of zipping though ads on the recorded shows as they might with a TiVo device. About a third of homes now have some sort of DVR device.
Cablevision halted the rollout of its remote DVR service three years ago but now plans to introduce a version of it this summer, and presumably other cable systems will follow.
The network's beef with the remote system is that in effect it empowers a third party, the cable operator, to become a distributor of content that belongs to the networks. By contrast, the home DVR-recorded show is clearly for personal use and as such is not for distribution.
In any case, as copyright holders, the networks must be diligent in bringing legal challenges whenever they believe their copyright protection is being challenged, lest they open a floodgate of similar incursions.
And it becomes all the more critical as more and more content goes online or is offered on demand.
But they have a practical aim as well. Their long-term intent is to reach terms with cable systems such as Cablevision to restrict the ease with which users are enabled to skip ads.
What effect all this will have on ad-skipping is hard to say.
Numerous studies have been done on DVR usage and ad-skipping, and a number have concluded it occurs far less often than one might expect.
More to the point though, to skip an ad using a DVR device requires watching the ad as it’s speeded through to know when the program resumes. The effect is that the skipped ad gets more attention than if the viewer simply left the room.

Media Life Magazine - Supremes open way for remote DVRs

Has the Pirate Bay given up piracy? – SciTechBlog - CNN.com Blogs

2009-07-01T14:17:00.001-07:00

Has the Pirate Bay given up piracy? – SciTechBlog - CNN.com Blogs

Has the Pirate Bay given up piracy?

The Pirate Bay, a Swedish file-sharing Web site used by millions to exchange movies and music, is reportedly being sold to the Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X AB for nearly $8 million.

A blog posted on thepiratebay.org Tuesday morning says rumors of the sale are true:

We’ve been working on this project for many years. It’s time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody… The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets.

The Pirate Bay and its founders have been under legal attack from copyright owners for years. While the Web site does not host copyrighted content, it does host millions of torrent files which enable peer-to-peer file-trading. Many of these torrent files point to copyrighted material.

In April four of the Website’s co-founders were convicted of collaborating to violate copyright law and sentenced to one year in jail as well as ordered to pay $3.6 million in damages to several major media companies.

A press release from Global Gaming Factory suggests, following the sale, the Pirate Bay is done with piracy:

Following the completion of the acquisitions, GGF intends to launch new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners. The responsibility for, and operation of the site will be taken over by GGF in connection with closing of the transaction, which is scheduled for August 2009.

There are hundreds of competing Websites that offer copyright infringing torrents, but it appears the Pirate Bay, which once claimed a spot on the Web’s top 100, will no longer be among them. The site claims more than 3.5 million registered users.

The news made Pirate Bay one of the top trending topics on Twitter Tuesday morning, with many tweets mourning the sale. “The Pirate Bay walks the plank for new biz model,” said one Twitterer.

Will the sale of the Pirate Bay mean an end to free copyrighted material for all? And can Global Gaming Factory monetize a site that is based on piracy?

Has the Pirate Bay given up piracy? – SciTechBlog - CNN.com Blogs

Music Firm Sues Microsoft, Yahoo, and Real Networks Over Copyright Infringement | paidContent

2009-07-01T14:13:00.001-07:00

Music Firm Sues Microsoft, Yahoo, and Real Networks Over Copyright Infringement | paidContent

Music Firm Sues Microsoft, Yahoo, and Real Networks Over Copyright Infringement

Not your typical targets for a music copyright infringement lawsuit: The big companies that run paid online music subscription services. But MCS Music America, which says it administers almost 45,000 tracks, is suing Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), and RealNetworks (NSDQ: RNWK), basically saying that they left some seemingly big Ts uncrossed when they obtained the rights to offer some songs to their members. From the lawsuit: “In order to transmit, perform, reproduce and deliver any sound recording of any musical work via ‘on-demand streams’ or ‘limited downloads’ defendants must first obtain not only the rights for the sound recording itself but also the rights for the underlying musical composition which is embodied on said sound recording.”

MCS Music America wants the tracks taken down and is also asking for damages—either “actual damages and profits derived by the defendants” or $150,000 for each act of copyright infringement (That could add up since it takes 90 pages for MCS Music America to simply list all the songs that it says have been misappropriated—and MCS Music America says that a separate act of copyright infringement took place each time one of those songs was downloaded or streamed).

TechDirt, which first reported the lawsuit, says it’s an indication of “just how incredibly confusing and impossible copyright law has become” since the three companies obviously did take the time to obtain some rights to the songs. Representatives from Yahoo, Microsoft and RealNetworks had no comment.

Music Firm Sues Microsoft, Yahoo, and Real Networks Over Copyright Infringement | paidContent

RIAA triumphs in Usenet copyright case | Digital Media - CNET News

2009-07-01T14:11:00.001-07:00

RIAA triumphs in Usenet copyright case | Digital Media - CNET News

RIAA triumphs in Usenet copyright case

by Greg Sandoval

Note: See Usenet.com's reaction at "Usenet.com says RIAA 'whittling down' Betamax case."

The Recording Industry Association of America has prevailed in its copyright fight against Usenet.com, according to court documents.

In a decision that hands the RIAA an overwhelming victory, U.S. District Judge Harold Baer of the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of the music industry on all its main theories: that Usenet.com is guilty of direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement. In addition, and perhaps most important for future cases, Baer said that Usenet.com can't claim protection under the Sony Betamax decision. That ruling says companies can't be held liable for contributory infringement if the device they create is "capable of significant non-infringing uses."

Baer noted that in citing the Betamax case, Usenet.com failed to see one important difference between it and Sony. Once Sony sold a Betamax, an early videotape recorder, the company's relationship with the buyer ended. Sony held no sway over what the buyer did with the device after that. Usenet.com, however, maintains an ongoing relationship with the customer and does has some say in how the customer uses the service.

Usenet.com's lawyers could not be reached Tuesday evening.

The two-decade-old Usenet network was one of the early ways to distribute conversations and binary files, long before the Web or peer-to-peer networks existed. Usenet.com is a company that enabled users to access the Usenet network.The RIAA filed suit against Usenet.com in October 2007, accusing the company of encouraging customers to pay up to $19 a month by enticing them with copyrighted music.

The case is highly unusual because of Baer's many findings of discovery misconduct by the Usenet.com side. The rules of discovery in a civil case requires both sides to exchange information. The RIAA produced evidence, however, that Usenet.com destroyed evidence or failed to produce witnesses on multiple occasions.

The RIAA accused Usenet.com of intentionally destroying the contents on seven hard drives that contained employee-generated data; providing false information; and attempting to prevent employees from giving depositions by sending them to Europe.

The judge found the evidence credible but denied the RIAA's motion to hand it a victory based solely on the misconduct. Instead, the judge sanctioned Usenet.com "from asserting (the company's) affirmative defense of protection under the DMCA's safe harbor provision."

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor provides refuge to Internet service providers from being held responsible for criminal acts committed by users. Without that and without the Betamax decision, Usenet.com was a sitting duck.

In a brief note posted Tuesday to RIAA.com, the trade group for the music industry said: "We're pleased that the court recognized not just that Usenet.com directly infringed the record companies' copyrights but also took action against the defendants for their egregious litigation misconduct."

RIAA triumphs in Usenet copyright case | Digital Media - CNET News

The Ridiculous Copyright Situation Faced By Academics Who Want To Promote Their Own Research | Techdirt

2009-07-01T14:06:00.001-07:00

The Ridiculous Copyright Situation Faced By Academics Who Want To Promote Their Own Research | Techdirt

The Ridiculous Copyright Situation Faced By Academics Who Want To Promote Their Own Research

from the don't-ask,-don't-tell dept

Ed Kohler points us to a long, but fascinating blog post, by Stuart Shieber, a CS professor at Harvard, discussing the somewhat ridiculous copyright situation that many academics deal with in trying to promote their own works. I've heard similar stories from other professors I know, but this one is worth reading. Shieber points out the importance of academics getting their research published in journals, but how annoying it is that most journals require those academics to give up all sorts of rights -- including the right to distribute their own research on their websites. However, he notes that most published academics simply ignore this rule, and you end up with a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Even though they're legally prevented from putting up a PDF of their work on their website, they do so anyway, and journals just look the other way.
Shieber, however, finds this situation to be a bad thing, and instead adds an amendment that at least grants him the right to publish his own research on his own website. It seems pretty ridiculous that this should even be an issue at all. He notes that most journals haven't had a problem with this -- which is surprising, but good to hear. He did run into one publisher, however, who fought him on it, and after lots of back and forth, his paper was pulled. The reasoning that the journal gave didn't make much sense, and Shieber shows how wrong they are (for example, they claim that if professors published the works on their website, demand for journal subscriptions would go down -- but Shieber did a quick look, and found that about 80% of those who published in the same journal had posted the content anyway, and it hadn't killed off the journal, so arguing against him seemed pointless). Eventually, he was able to convince the journal to change its policies and got his paper published, but it delayed publication for a while.
It's really unfortunate that journals still think that locking up such content makes sense. The idea that researchers shouldn't be allowed to share their own research with the world because some journal needs artificial scarcity for its business model is something that needs to be put to rest.

The Ridiculous Copyright Situation Faced By Academics Who Want To Promote Their Own Research | Techdirt

Kurtz on Measuring Effectiveness in the New Scholarly Communications : Christina's LIS Rant

2009-07-01T13:59:00.001-07:00

Kurtz on Measuring Effectiveness in the New Scholarly Communications : Christina's LIS Rant

Kurtz on Measuring Effectiveness in the New Scholarly Communications

Category: Information Science • information retrieval • open access
Posted on: June 27, 2009 5:43 PM, by Christina Pikas

Michael J. Kurtz of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics came to speak at MPOW at a gathering of librarians from across the larger institution (MPOW is a research lab affiliated with a large private institution). He's an astronomer but more recently he's been publishing in bibliometrics quite a bit using data from the ADS. You can review his publications using this search.

As an aside, folks outside of astro and planetary sciences might not be familiar with ADS, but it's an excellent and incredibly powerful research database. Sometimes librarians turn their nose up at it because it's all about being functional and not at all about being pretty, but it essentially rocks (I'm definitely going to have to do a post on freely available research databases besides PubMed).

Kurtz' talk was basically at the speed of light and broken down into two parts: bibliometrics using usage data as compared to citations in astro with ads data and then more on scholarly communication.

I only have hand-written notes so let me just try to capture some of his points in bullets:

like Amazon, successful recommender systems use usage data

not new, Derek J deSolla Price graphed the obsolescence curve for articles (not cited, then get the most citations, then trails off, eventually flat with few citations after some period of time that depends on the subject)

in an article he mapped the usage vs. age. He showed us graphs of 110 years, a few years (?), and then 90 days. (maybe doi: 10.1002/asi.20096 ). This can be modeled using exponentials with 4 different time scales.

he showed the different usage - age graphs for traffic coming directly to ADS (presumably mostly professional scientists - this looked just like Price's model and the citation model), for people coming from Google Scholar(they take to be students), and from people coming from google (flat across all years, taken to be random members of the public).

astronomers read and cite the same things so you can use usage instead of citations to look at individuals, institutions, countries

the MESUR project - gathering usage data from a pile of places. Problem is the quality of the data available - doesn't follow a user through what looked at, what linked to.

ADS has a popular items algorithm: put in a search - it matches, people who have read also read, ranks those by # of usages

should use citedness for tenure decisions - very unstable at about 7-10 years where as usage data is pretty stable

usage is better at measuring journals than citedness. example: medicine - clinicians read a lot more articles but don't write so much (if at all).

page rank gets it right, IF gets it wrong (I think this was mapping various things like usage, citation, impact factor... on some big graph...)

So that's the notes I have from the first section - here's the second.

ADS has semantic links between scholarly papers, the observations they' are based on, and other sources of data for that astronomical object (this is actually wicked cool)

ADS also links to ArXiv and has openurl linking so you can find a copy your institution subscribes to (I had them list our parent institution, but you have to set up your own preferences to turn it on, they don't register IPs with institutions)

it's a hodge podge now, but they're working on a virtual observatory that will make this more seamless

elsewhere - he mentioned provenance (briefly - I saw more at the IEEE eScience conference) and the value of sharing workflows (like myExperiment) - and VisTrails

he ended with an exhortation to support Open Access (this crowd already does - well at least the STEM folks)

I needed about 5 more minutes with each slide, but it was still a great talk. I'll have to go back and read/re-read his articles after this comps thing is over. BTW- if you're reading Michael - I'm waving and thanks for coming!

Kurtz on Measuring Effectiveness in the New Scholarly Communications : Christina's LIS Rant

Open Access: What are the economic benefits? « Jurn blog

2009-07-01T13:53:00.001-07:00

Open Access: What are the economic benefits? « Jurn blog

Open Access: What are the economic benefits?

Yet another new report for your holiday deckchair reading. Open Access: What are the economic benefits? A comparison of the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Denmark is by John Houghton of the Australian Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, and is published by the Danish Knowledge Exchange….

“Open access or ‘author-pays’ publishing for journal articles (i.e. ‘Gold OA’) might bring net system savings of around [...] EUR 480 million in the UK (at 2007 prices and levels of publishing activity) [...] a repositories and overlay-services model may well produce similar cost savings to open access publishing.”

Open Access: What are the economic benefits? « Jurn blog

Majors Welcome P2P Win, But $1.92M Award Could Make For Bad PR

2009-06-23T07:08:00.001-07:00

Majors Welcome P2P Win, But $1.92M Award Could Make For Bad PR

Majors Welcome P2P Win, But $1.92M Award Could Make For Bad PR
June 18, 2009 - Legal and Management
By Ben Sheffner
The recording industry secured a resounding victory when a Minnesota jury awarded the four major labels $1.92 million in damages after unanimously finding that Jammie Thomas-Rasset had willfully infringed on their copyrights by downloading and sharing 24 songs on the Kazaa peer-to-peer network.
The mammoth size of the verdict, representing $80,000 per track, may help dissuade more P2P users from illegally downloading music, and for that the labels are happy. "We appreciate the jury's service and that they take this as seriously as we do," RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said in a statement.
"We are pleased that the jury agreed with the evidence and found the defendant liable."
But a question arose after the verdict about whether the sheer size of the damages could lead to a backlash against an industry that is already portrayed in some quarters as overreaching.
No one expects that the four major labels, all plaintiffs in the case, will collect the entire amount from Thomas-Rasset, a 32-year-old Brainerd, Minn., mother of four who testified during the retrial that her ex-boyfriend or sons, then 8 and 10, were most likely responsible for downloading and distributing the songs. Thomas-Rasset lost her previous trial in 2007 and was ordered to pay $222,000, only to achieve a now-pyrrhic victory when the court tossed the verdict because of a faulty jury instruction.
The RIAA's Duckworth indicated after the verdict that the recording industry doesn't intend to collect $1.92 million from Thomas-Rasset. "Since day one, we have been willing to settle this case and we remain willing to do so," she said.
This could help the labels avoid potential political and legal headaches stemming from the large verdict. Even for law-abiding citizens who believe that labels have every right to protect their copyrights, a verdict of almost $2 million could be hard to swallow.
The Copyright Act provides for awards of statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, in the case of willful infringement. A number of copyright scholars on the "copyleft," led by Harvard Law School's Charles Nesson, have argued that such damages awards for personal use of file-sharing networks are excessive. Though no court has yet adopted that theory, the Thomas-Rasset verdict provides a very human face to the argument, which she will likely pursue on appeal if the case isn't settled.
While the recording industry maintains strong support in Congress, with powerful champions including House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and his Senate counterpart Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the Minneapolis verdict could well lead to a legislative move to reduce the damages awards available against individual infringers like Thomas-Rasset.
Thomas-Rasset's attorney, Kiwi Camara, said he was "very surprised" by the size of the verdict and signaled a willingness to talk about a possible settlement with the labels. But Camara also listed a number of potential issues to appeal should the parties be unable to resolve the case, including a challenge to the labels' ownership of the copyrights at issue based on the argument that they were improperly classified as "works made for hire" in contravention of the Copyright Act of 1976.
Ben Sheffner is a copyright attorney who blogs at copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com. Previously, while employed at 20th Century Fox, he worked on an amicus curiae brief in this case for the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

Majors Welcome P2P Win, But $1.92M Award Could Make For Bad PR

Royalties measure rocks Congress - Jeanne Cummings - POLITICO.com

2009-06-16T09:13:00.001-07:00

Royalties measure rocks Congress - Jeanne Cummings - POLITICO.com

Royalties measure rocks Congress

By JEANNE CUMMINGS | 6/16/09 4:12 AM EDT

It seems like a chicken-or-egg sort of argument.

Do musicians make more money because radio stations play their songs, or do radio stations make more money because they play the artists’ songs?

That’s part of the conundrum facing lawmakers as they consider the Performance Rights Act, a proposed piece of legislation that would require local radio stations to pay royalties to musicians whose songs are played on their airwaves.

Picking a side in this dispute carries some political risks, given the powerful adversaries.

On the one hand, you have the artists, whose star power and photo op possibilities can instantly bring tears of joy to the eyes of even the most grizzled veterans of the House and Senate.

Artists will.i.am, Sheryl Crow, Dionne Warwick and even Martha Reeves and the Vandellas have attended town hall meetings and appeared on Capitol Hill to pose with politicians and promote the legislation.

On the other hand, you have the radio station owners and talk show giants, whose control over the airwaves can have a knee-rattling, nail-biting effect on even the longest-serving incumbents.

Among them is Eduardo Sotelo, better known as Piolin, a syndicated Latino talk radio host who reaches millions of listeners in 52 markets. Piolin has had two sit-downs with President Barack Obama and is largely credited with driving Hispanic votes to the Democratic ticket last fall. He opposes the proposed royalty payments.

Making matters even harder for lawmakers is that the two sides are starting to play rough.

The coalition representing the artists, including MusicFIRST and the Recording Industry Association of America, filed a complaint last week with the Federal Communications Commission accusing the broadcasting industry of intimidating artists who support the act by threatening to silence their recordings.

In addition, the performers’ advocates assert that radio stations are refusing to air ads that present their view even as the stations run their own commercials misrepresenting it.

The group is urging the FCC to launch an investigation that “should also serve as an appropriate foundation for license renewal determinations.”

Meanwhile, the National Association of Broadcasters and its allies are accusing House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), the House bill’s chief sponsor and a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, of promoting legislation that would run small, minority-owned stations out of business.

The stations are using their inherent grass-roots advantage by urging listeners to press their local House or Senate members to oppose the legislation. When Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) voted against the proposal in the Judiciary Committee, she said it was because of heavy lobbying from Los Angeles station owners.

And the royalty opponents warn that aspiring artists would suffer if the legislation were passed, because radio stations would be less willing to pay untested talents without established fan bases.

“If this comes about, you won’t see very many new artists except on ‘American Idol,’” said Tom Joyner, a nationally syndicated African-American talk radio host. “That’s going to be the only place you can break in new artists. It won’t be the radio.”

Joyner tried to make that case when he met with Conyers on Capitol Hill this spring, but the congressman wasn’t moved.

Royalties measure rocks Congress - Jeanne Cummings - POLITICO.com

Creative Commons Recognition « Open Education News

2009-06-12T14:39:00.001-07:00

Creative Commons Recognition « Open Education News

Creative Commons Recognition

June 9, 2009 · 2 Comments

Glyn Moody points to a survey conducted by UK’s Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) regarding copyright terminology and presentation on government websites. The results found that 75% of the public did not recognize the Creative Commons license logos, nor what they means. The survey had 1350 respondents. From the survey results:

Only those likely to be more familiar with copyright (inferred from their route to the survey) are likely to have a previous understanding of Creative Commons terminology and imagery. One might argue that if these are used moving forward, more people will become more familiar with these, however, the benefits at this stage of shared / added meaning would only really apply to a minority…

Creative Commons Recognition « Open Education News

U.S. Steps Up Inquiry of Google Book Settlement - NYTimes.com

2009-06-12T14:38:00.001-07:00

U.S. Steps Up Inquiry of Google Book Settlement - NYTimes.com

U.S. Presses Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Book Settlement

By MIGUEL HELFT

Published: June 9, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — In a sign that the government has stepped up its antitrust investigation of a class-action settlement between Google and groups representing authors and publishers, the Justice Department has issued formal requests for information to several of the parties involved.

The Justice Department has sent the requests, called civil investigative demands, to various parties, including Google, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild and individual publishers, said Michael J. Boni, a partner at Boni & Zack, who represented the Authors Guild in negotiations with Google.

“They are asking for a lot of information,” Mr. Boni said. “It signals that they are serious about the antitrust implications of the settlement.”

The Justice Department began its inquiry into the sweeping $125 million settlement this year after various parties complained that it would give Google exclusive rights to profit from millions of orphan books. Orphans are books still protected by copyrights, but that are out of print and whose authors or rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.

Attorneys general in several states are also investigating the settlement.

The complex settlement agreement, which is subject to review by a federal court, was aimed at resolving a class action filed in 2005 by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google. The suit claimed that Google’s practice of scanning copyrighted books from major academic and research libraries for use in its Book Search service violated copyrights.

Under the settlement, announced in October, Google would have the right to display the books online and to profit from them by selling access to individual titles and by selling subscriptions to its entire collection to libraries and other institutions. Revenue would be shared among Google, authors and publishers.

Critics said that the settlement would unfairly grant Google a monopoly over the commercialization of millions of books.

The Justice Department’s requests do not necessarily mean that the government will oppose the settlement. But the department’s investigation could delay any approval of the settlement, antitrust specialists said.

“The government must be a lot further along with this than people thought,” said Gary Reback, a lawyer who wrote a book on antitrust. “Now, there is a big boulder sitting on the judge’s desk. It is hard to see the judge approving this if a government investigation is pending.”

Judge Denny Chin of Federal District Court in Manhattan, who is overseeing the settlement, is to hold a hearing in September.

The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site Tuesday that some publishers had received civil investigative demands.

U.S. Steps Up Inquiry of Google Book Settlement - NYTimes.com

Suffolk bar may have to back down over copyright suit | HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com

2009-06-12T14:35:00.001-07:00

Suffolk bar may have to back down over copyright suit | HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com

Suffolk bar may have to back down over copyright suit

Randy White, owner of Randzz Restaurant & Pub in Suffolk, refused to get a license to play copyrighted music in his bar. He was sued for infringement and lost the case. Now, he owes almost $14,000. (Genevieve Ross | The Virginian-Pilot)

Suffolk bar may have to back down over copyright suit | HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com

Hoax academic articles, media meddling, and problems with 'open access' as it exists. | libcom.org

2009-06-12T07:31:00.001-07:00

Hoax academic articles, media meddling, and problems with 'open access' as it exists. | libcom.org

Hoax academic articles, media meddling, and problems with 'open access' as it exists.

Submitted by Choccy on Jun 11 2009

Some recent hoax articles are demonstrating the flaws in the control of information and particularly academic publishing. A recent hoax demonstrates that, so long as you are willing to pay, you can get anything published, even computer generated mumbo-jumbo. And if you can't pay, you either don't publish, or the company owns the product of your labour. Open access isn't as open as it seems.

Not quite as lol-worthy as the 'Sokal hoax' but certainly a nice effort is the story of a recent hoax paper submitted to, and accepted, by an open-access information science journal. A graduate student at Cornell University submitted a computer-generated nonsensical article to The Open Information Science Journal after getting unsolicited email for the publisher, Bentham Science Publishers. The paper was called 'Deconstructing Access Points'.

New Scientist covers the story and the paper's author, Philip Davis, details it at his blog. What's apparent from the abstract onwards, is that it's incomprehensible tripe, and the author's institutional affiliation, Center for Research in Applied Phrenology, or CRAP, should have been a dead giveaway - not only because of the acronym, but a discredited 19th century practice of examining head-bumps has nothing to do with anything alluded to in the paper or the academic field in which the journal is situated.

The paper was accepted, and Davis was asked to pay $800 for it's publication, which he declined - having made his point, he withdrew the paper. The thing is, an earlier attempt at a bogus paper, by the same author and to another Bentham-owned journal, had been rejected, so the acceptance of the paper in question can't merely be attributed to a scam publication simply taking money to publish crap, given they do actually reject some papers.

There's actually a serious point to be made about how profit motives in research, and in particular, charging for authors to publish academic research means that any old crap will be accepted, as long as people can pay the often hefty author fees. Though many scientists and academics see open-access as a positive development, meaning they can communicate their research with a wider audience, for free, via the internet (rather than through expensive subscription journals), most open-access publication charge hefty fees for authors. The problems with the open-access platform as it exists under a profit-driven model, are apparent when you consider that some of the best known open-access journals, such as PLoS One, charge high author fees ($1250) and do 'light peer-review' (which means examining methodological flaws but not the relevance or importance of papers. Such bulk-publishing, at a price, and with a high-acceptance rate, keeps the businesses afloat (Nature).

PLoS One was the journal at the centre of the recent media frenzy over the 47mil-year-old 'Ida' fossil primate, found in Messel, Germany.
While the fossil was universally described as an incredible and remarkably complete find, the methods in which its find was unveiled to the world set a new precedent in the corporate media courting of scientific research. Before the paper had even been published, several TV channels (inc. BBC, and History Channel) had their documentaries lined-up, a book was available pre-order, and science journalists had been forced to sign 'secrecy' contracts just to get a look at the fossil and interview the researchers involved.

In the original paper, the authors declared 'no competing interests', despite knowing TV companies and book publishers were involved in almost every step of the find. When a skeptical science writer, Carl Zimmer, queried this, the journal was forced to include an addendum with regard to the relative 'interests':
“The authors wish to declare, for the avoidance of any misunderstanding concerning competing interests, that a production company (Atlantic Productions), several television channels (History Channel, BBC1, ZDF, NRK) and a book publisher (Little Brown and co) were involved in discussions regarding this paper in advance of publication. However, to clarify, none of the authors received any financial benefit from any of these associations and these organizations had no influence over the publication of this paper or the science contained within it. The Natural History museum in Oslo will receive some royalty from sales of the book, but no revenue accrues to any of the scientists. In addition, the Natural History Museum of Oslo purchased the fossil that is examined in this paper, however, this purchase in no way influenced the publication of this paper or the science contained within it, and in no way benefited the individual authors.”

This of course had no bearing on the quality of the fossil, by all accounts of people who work in the field of paleontology it's an astonishing find, and the unique nature of the Messel Pit means it will provide many more incredibly well-preserved fossils. What did piss scientists off though, was the sheer hype around the find, and the cynical timing of the TV and book industries involvement. The choice of the PLoS One journal, which is certainly a highly regarded and reputable journal, was also deliberately chosen because of its comparatively 'light' review process, as opposed to other high-impact subscription journals, such as Science or Nature. The fossil itself hadn't actually been 'found' by the researchers, it had been sitting in a private collection since the 1980s.

Another issue some scientists and writers pointed out, that the hype surrounding the 'missing link' Ida was proposed to be, misrepresented the nature of the fossil record, and of evolutionary relationships - it gives the impression of evolution as a linear process, a 'great chain of being', just waiting for that 'missing link' to be filled. Other reports hailed the find as 'teh f1Nal Ev1d3ncE of Ev0Lut1on!1!!!1!', as if it was on shaky ground prior to the find. Carl Zimmer writes again, "If the world goes crazy for a lovely fossil, that’s fine with me. But if that fossil releases some kind of mysterious brain ray that makes people say crazy things and write lazy articles, a serious swarm of flies ends up in my ointment."

Media hype aside, charging for authorship is common in open-access. If you want your work open and accessible for free to the public, you have to pay for it. You can avoid these fees, by signing away your copyright, and thus control over what you have laboured to produce. I've just had my first foray into the academic publishing game, and it was an eye-opener. Going in wide-eyed, with a first article accepted, and thinking 'yes, this article is interesting and people will want to read it, it should be free and accessible to all, no fancy journal subscriptions!1!!!'. But no, to have this 'open-access' and freely available I would have to pay $3000, which I don't have. So, unable to pay for that, and unlikely to get my department to do so, I signed away control to the publishing company, Springer. Of course, having copyright doesn't interest me, I don't want to 'own' this research, but it raises problems over where authors, the creators of this work, can share and distribute their own work. Authors are not allowed to host a pdf file on their own website, or say, a blog, until 12mths after the date of publication.

Challenging the 'pay-to-play' ethos of much of the academic publishing world, particularly those that spam potential contributors for their pay-to-publish articles, drove some genius authors to write this piece of work: 'Get me off your fucking mailing list'.

Outside of open-access, and in the traditional subscription-based journal world, it recently emerged that Elsevier, a big-name academic publisher, has SIX industry-sponsored medical journals, on its roster, all essentially long adverts, in the form of positive journal articles, for drugs owned by the companies that run the journals. Essentially, these are 'fake' journals, claiming to be objective and interested only in the evidence-base of the research contained, but in actuality, controlled directly by pharmaceutical companies.

Under capitalism we'll never really have a truly open and accessible information and research community. Even the moves toward opening-up access to research findings are as fraught with problems of control and ownership as the traditional subscription-based research publications. Open access isn't as open as I thought.

Hoax academic articles, media meddling, and problems with 'open access' as it exists. | libcom.org

Pubget: the search engine for life-science PDFs

2009-06-12T07:27:00.001-07:00

Pubget: the search engine for life-science PDFs

Pubget solves the problem of full-text document access in life science research. Instead of search results linking to papers, with Pubget's proprietary technology, the search results ARE the papers. Once you find the papers you want, you can save, manage and share them — all online.

Each year, scientists spend at least a quarter billion minutes searching for biomedical literature online. This is time they could better spend curing disease and building the future. Pubget's mission is to give them (you!) that time back.

Pubget: the search engine for life-science PDFs

The Delaware Curmudgeon

2009-06-12T07:19:00.001-07:00

The Delaware Curmudgeon

"Not really sure if it belogs here but freedom of information and privacy are isues I love to debate -- so ....." HSM

Enzyte May Not Make Your Penis Bigger, But the Promoter is Shaking His Dick at the Government

Remember Smiling Bob and the Enzyte commercials? I really miss them, and am disappointed that the claims were apparently not true. Ah, well. The commercials really cracked me up.
But the promoter of this impotent product, Stephen Warshak, is in the middle of fighting against a violation of his Fourth Amendment right in Washak v. United States. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed an amicus brief.
From EFF:

During its criminal investigation, the Department of Justice illegally ordered defendant Stephen Warshak's email provider to prospectively "preserve" copies of his future emails, which the government later obtained using a subpoena and a non-probable cause court order. The government accomplished this "back door wiretap" by misusing the Stored Communications Act (SCA), which is only supposed to be used for obtaining emails already in storage with a provider.
In Wednesday's filing, EFF argues that the government's seizure violated federal privacy laws and Warshak's Fourth Amendment expectation of privacy in his email. As a result, the illegally seized emails should have been suppressed by the district court where Warshak was tried. All told, the government acquired over 27,000 emails spanning over six months from Warshak's email provider, all without probable cause.
"The Justice Department not only violated the Fourth Amendment and federal privacy statutes but its own surveillance manual when it conducted this 'back door wiretap' to intercept six months worth of emails without a warrant," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "Thankfully, this abuse has given the appeals court yet another opportunity to clarify that the Fourth Amendment protects the privacy of email against secret government snooping, even when it's in the hands of an email provider."

The EFF article cited also has a link to the brief (PDF) which is worth reading. It is also a bit scary. It states that not only did the government not obtain probable cause before seizing Mr. Warshak’s e-mails, it also violated the very provisions of the Stored Communications Act (known as the “wiretap act”).
You may or may not think that Mr. Warshak is a reputable fellow (unless you tried Enzyte and it worked), but this case is important in defending our expectations or privacy when sending or receiving e-mail, as well as demanding that the government adhere to its own regulations.

The Delaware Curmudgeon

Open and Shut?: The world’s first Open Access Mandate?

2009-06-12T07:13:00.001-07:00

Open and Shut?: The world’s first Open Access Mandate?

The world’s first Open Access Mandate?

In the process of writing something about the current state of Open Access (OA) mandates I became intrigued by the mandate introduced at Geneva-based particle physics laboratory CERN.

Officially, CERN introduced a self-archiving mandate in November 2003. Amongst other things, this requires CERN researchers to “deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository”.

This suggests that CERN’s mandate came some ten months after the world’s first mandate – introduced in the department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the UK’s University of Southampton in January 2003.

When I began enquiring about the genesis of the CERN mandate, however, the picture began to seem less clear. I found it hard, for instance, to establish why CERN had introduced its mandate, and who had been responsible for pushing it through.

Amongst those I contacted for enlightenment was scholarly publishing consultant Alma Swan, who said her understanding was that there had always been a mandate at CERN. Originally this was an analogue mandate, with researchers expected to provide the library at CERN with print copies of all the papers they published, but that this was subsequently upgraded to a digital mandate (in November 2003).

Alma kindly emailed the head of the Scientific Information Service at CERN Jens Vigen for clarification. Vigen also found the question intriguing and began digging around in CERN's archives; and today he emailed me a copy of the original memo from CERN's Director General – officially known as CERN/DG/Memo/5, and dated 17th March 1955.

Vigen commented, “Times have obviously changed since then and I must admit I was smiling quite a lot while reading it. However, the mandate for deposit was, as you see, in place from the very first days of the organisation's life.”

Images of the two-page memo are attached below, and can be accessed as a PDF file here.

This still leaves me with a number of questions however:

1. Is it fair to call the CERN memo an OA mandate given, for instance, that the term OA was only coined in 2001, at the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)?

2. Similarly what do we make of the fact that the policy was combined with one on press statements? Could it be that this was not intended to refer to scholarly papers?

3. If it can be classifed as an OA mandate, is it truly the world's first, or is there another dusty memo out there somewhere predating 17th March 1955?

4. If it is an OA mandate, why was it introduced at CERN at such an early date?

5. What was the process by which CERN’s analogue mandate was upgraded to a digital mandate. Specifically, who was responsible, and why was it upgraded?

All comments and further information gratefully received.

Open and Shut?: The world’s first Open Access Mandate?

Reports: DOJ Turns up the Heat on Google's Book Deal - Business Center - PC World

2009-06-12T07:06:00.001-07:00

Reports: DOJ Turns up the Heat on Google's Book Deal - Business Center - PC World

Reports: DOJ Turns up the Heat on Google's Book Deal

Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

Wednesday, June 10, 2009 8:30 AM PDT

The U.S. Department of Justice has stepped up its review of a deal that would settle a lawsuit publishers and authors filed against Google over the latter's book search engine, according to published reports.

The DOJ started looking into the proposed deal in April via preliminary and informal inquiries, but has now turned it up a notch by sending civil investigative demands (CIDs) to parties involved.

Critics have objected to the proposed deal, announced in October, citing antitrust concerns. Google and the plaintiffs -- the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) -- say those concerns are unwarranted.

However, it appears that after its initial review of the deal, the DOJ is leaning toward challenging the proposed settlement.

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported late Tuesday that the DOJ is now sending CIDs to organizations involved in the deals, a more formal approach than its initial information-gathering efforts.

"The Justice Department is clearly focused on Google. It's a wide-ranging request for documentation," a New York publishing executive told the Journal.

A DOJ spokeswoman declined to comment.

"The Department of Justice and several state attorneys general have contacted us to learn more about the impact of the settlement, and we are happy to answer their questions. It's important to note that this agreement is non-exclusive and if approved by the court, stands to expand access to millions of books in the U.S.," Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker said via e-mail.

Google has maintained that the proposed settlement, which has to be approved by the court, will be beneficial to authors, publishers and readers by making it easier to find, distribute and purchase books, especially those that are out of print.

Critics have raised several objections, including what they perceive as excessive control by Google over prices and over so-called "orphan works," books that are under copyright but whose owners can't be found, such as when the author has died or the publishing house disappeared.

For example, Consumer Watchdog has charged that the proposed settlement gives Google special protections against lawsuits over orphan works.

"The danger of using such works is that a rights holder will emerge after the book has been exploited and demand substantial infringement penalties. The proposed settlement protects Google from such potentially damaging exposure, but provides no protection for others. This effectively is a barrier for competitors to enter the digital book business," Consumer Watchdog said in a statement.

In the fall of 2005, the Authors Guild and the AAP separately sued Google alleging that Google's wholesale scanning and indexing of in-copyright books without permission amounted to massive copyright violations. Book authors and the Authors Guild filed a class-action lawsuit, while five large publishers filed a separate lawsuit as representatives of the AAP's membership.

The lawsuits were brought after Google launched a program to scan and index books from the libraries of major universities without always getting permission from the copyright owners of the books.

Google then made the text of the books searchable on its book search engine, although it argued it was protected by the fair use principle because it only showed snippets of text for in-copyright books it had scanned without permission.

Last October, the Authors Guild and the AAP hammered out a wide-ranging settlement agreement that calls for Google to pay US$125 million and in exchange gives the search giant rights to display chunks of these in-copyright books, not just snippets.

In addition, Google will make it possible for people to buy online access to these books. The agreement will also allow institutions to buy subscriptions to books and make them available to their constituents.

A royalty system will also be set up to compensate authors and publishers for access to their works via the creation of the Registry. Revenue will come from institutional subscriptions, book sales and ad-revenue sharing.

This Registry, whose board of directors will be made up of an equal number of author and publisher representatives, will also locate and register copyright owners, who in turn have the option to request to be included in or excluded from the project.

A big portion of Google's $125 million payment will go towards funding the Registry, while the rest will be used to settle existing claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees.

Consumer Watchdog also slammed what it calls a "most favored nation" provision in the settlement towards Google, by preventing the Registry from offering better deals to Google competitors interested in offering access to books online.

Meanwhile, University of California at Berkeley law professor Pamela Samuelson has argued against the settlement, saying it will endanger competition because of its orphan work provisions.

"The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry's future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is," Samuelson wrote.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which will decide whether to approve the settlement, has extended from June to September the period for members of the plaintiff class -- authors, publishers and rights holders in general -- to be notified of the agreement and mull whether to opt out of it.

Reports: DOJ Turns up the Heat on Google's Book Deal - Business Center - PC World

Christian Copyright Solutions Releases VIDEOready License for Christian Camps and Youth Ministries

2009-06-12T07:05:00.001-07:00

Christian Copyright Solutions Releases VIDEOready License for Christian Camps and Youth Ministries

Christian Copyright Solutions Releases VIDEOready License for Christian Camps and Youth Ministries

FAIRHOPE, Ala., June 10 /PRNewswire/ -- It's the perfect gift for youth groups and campers -- visual images capturing the colors, sights, sounds and images of their life-changing trips and events. User-friendly technology makes it easy for student and camp leaders to film and produce highlight videos, and mixing the hottest Christian music with images just sweetens the memories. But is it LEGAL?

Many Christian leaders are unaware it is illegal to "lift" songs from their favorite artists (whether from a CD or MP3 download) to score highlight scenes without prior permission and licensing from owners of the songs and recordings.

To provide an easy and legal solution for church and camp leaders, Christian Copyright Solutions (CCS) announces the launch of VIDEOready License (http://copyrightsolver.com/VideoReadyLicense.aspx), an internet on-demand license, providing immediate online authorization for hundreds of today's most popular Christian songs.

In collaboration with major Christian music publishers and record labels, the VIDEOready License features pre-approved licensing for a selection of song tracks (including both song and sound recording) by top Christian artists--like Chris Tomlin, David Crowder, Kari Jobe, Lincoln Brewster, Hillsong and Third Day.

I know Christian camp staffs and leaders want to do the right thing," explains Susan Fontaine Godwin, CCS CVO/Founder. "They want to model a good example for youths regarding upholding the laws of the land (1 Tim. 5:18). They often don't, however, due to lack of knowledge, confusion or the complexities in getting copyright clearances."

According to the U.S. Copyright Law, prior permission to reproduce music must be obtained from the owner of the song and the sound recording, which are two separate copyrights and often controlled by at least two different parties. The VIDEOready License now makes legal authorization simple, easy and immediate.

"Music Services applauds Christian Copyright Solutions for their new program, VIDEOready License," states Don Cason, Music Services Vice President. "This program provides legitimate permission for the use of many popular Christian recordings for uses on camp and event video projects. It's a wonderful turn-key solution to secure the proper licenses for some of the top songs used in these projects. Congratulations, CCS."

"We try so hard to do the right thing, but it's been so difficult to do that with our videos," says Sarah Augustston of Covenant Harbor Bible Camp. "I am so grateful that God placed this idea in the minds of others, so that all camps may be able to honor the copyright issues."

CCS (www.copyrightsolver.com) offers online administration, consultation and education services to a client base which includes Saddleback Church, Pine Cove Christian Camps, Willow Creek Church, Bellevue Baptist Church. In addition to the VIDEOready License, CCS features the following services and licenses:

PermissionsPlus - online copyright administration digitally manages every detail of permissions/licensing from start to finish.

WorshipCast License - legally webcast more than 16 million songs

PerformMusic License - one-stop church performance license from ASCAP, BMI & SESAC

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SOURCE Christian Copyright Solutions

Christian Copyright Solutions Releases VIDEOready License for Christian Camps and Youth Ministries

LEAHY Remarks At World Copyright Summit

2009-06-12T07:00:00.001-07:00

LEAHY Remarks At World Copyright Summit

LEAHY Remarks At World Copyright Summit

Jun 10, 2009 (Congressional Documents and Publications/ContentWorks via COMTEX) -- Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) delivered the following remarks at the World Copyright Summit on Wednesday morning in Washington, D.C.

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Remarks Of Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee, At The World Copyright Summit "New Frontiers For Creators In The Marketplace" June 10, 2009 As Prepared Thank you. I always appreciate the opportunity to be in such talented company.
I would like to thank the President of CISAC, Robin Gibb, and the Chairman of the Board, Brett Cottle, for inviting me here today.

I am an avid fan. I see intellectual property rights as an important way to ensure that inventors and creators have the incentives to produce their work. In my role as a United States Senator, I am also interested in the value of that work in our economy, and the importance of bringing those creations to the public.
This Conference brings together those who create the movies, music, art, and literature we enjoy, with those who are able to connect creators and consumers. The design of this Conference represents an important recognition that a symbiotic relationship exists among all participants in the copyright system.
This relationship is also reflected in copyright policy. The art of creating copyright law is in understanding the need to provide strong and sufficient protections for creators, while making sure that their creations can be used, enjoyed, and appreciated.
Too often, different factions within the copyright community view themselves only as having competing interests. They fail to work together to see what can be achieved through cooperation. I encourage you to use the dialogue you are creating here this week to bridge policy differences. We should work together on copyright legislation that ensures a fair and functioning system in the Information Age.
Intellectual property is a major driver of the United States economy. I was able to be on a movie set recently and it gave me a firsthand view of the talent and effort that goes into creating such an incredible work. It also demonstrated how many jobs are related to the industry. That last Batman movie included over 65 days of filming in Chicago, and $36 million was poured into the local economy as a result. Seventeen million dollars went to nearly 800 local vendors - that is real money that creates real jobs. Congress must do its part to protect intellectual property, and to foster its growth. That is why legislation to reform our patent system, protect the rights of creators, and enforce our copyright laws must be enacted and supported.
Preventing the theft of intellectual property - your work - therefore remains a high priority of mine. A few weeks ago, President Obama announced a new cybersecurity initiative. In doing so, the President noted some estimates that online intellectual property theft reached $1 trillion worldwide last year. That is unacceptable.
As we work to reinvigorate the American and global economies, we simply cannot afford to tolerate theft on this level. You are all creators and legitimate users of intellectual property. The theft of intellectual property hurts all of us, it costs jobs, and it impedes economic growth.
More than ever, we need a comprehensive and coordinated IP strategy.
Last year, Congress enacted an intellectual property rights enforcement bill that I was pleased to sponsor. We intend that law to provide the resources and coordination our law enforcement agencies need to combat intellectual property theft here in the Unites States.
But your businesses and your audiences are increasingly global, and so our governments must also work together on an international approach to protecting intellectual property rights that fosters creativity and facilitates the legitimate distribution of your work to consumers.
I am working on bipartisan legislation this year, on which all aspects of the recording industry agree, that will harmonize U.S. copyright law in important respects with the rest of the developed world. It will ensure performing artists are compensated when their work is broadcast over the radio.
Copyright issues are global in large part because we are moving at full speed into the digital world. Consumers are increasingly accessing news and entertainment content online. From watching user generated videos, to episodes of the evening news, there is no question that consumers are taking advantage of the fast-growing digital environment.
Consumers watch videos over the web on their television sets, on their computers and on personal digital devices. The online world is adaptable, and it does not recognize international boundaries.
This week, television stations in the United States will cease analog broadcasting and complete the digital transition. Radio stations are also providing high definition digital services today.
The digital world brings with it the perils of piracy for content owners, but it also opens new business models and new opportunities for creators to reach consumers.
I have been working on intellectual property policy for many years now. It was 15 years ago that I last addressed the CISAC World Congress about copyright issues.
A little more than a decade ago, we enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to address emerging issues related to copyright and the Internet. The DMCA was intended to provide a framework for protecting content, while allowing Internet access and online service providers to flourish.
The legislative process is deliberate, and so the DMCA had to be sufficiently flexible to address issues that would arise in a rapidly innovating world.
Business models, technology, and Internet usage change faster than Congress can act. Consider that in the time since the DMCA was enacted, the number of homes in the U.S. with Internet access has roughly tripled. When Congress passed the DMCA, Google had yet to be incorporated.
The relationship between Internet service providers and content owners continues to evolve. New issues that were barely contemplated when we wrote the DMCA a decade ago will surely emerge.
Your innovation has changed, and will continue to change the digital environment. As the digital world evolves, and the issues you confront as both creators and distributors of content change, I look forward to continuing to hear from you on how the current law is working and how it can be improved.
I again commend you for bringing together interests on all sides of copyright issues. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be a part of it.
# # # # #

LEAHY Remarks At World Copyright Summit

Film, TV music composers urge copyright law change - Yahoo! News

2009-06-12T06:58:00.001-07:00

Film, TV music composers urge copyright law change - Yahoo! News

Film, TV music composers urge copyright law change

By Sue Zeidler Sue Zeidler – Wed Jun 10, 5:29 pm ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Nathan Barr has scored horror films like "Hostel" and the HBO vampire series "True Blood," but what really keeps the composer up at night is fear he will not get paid for music distributed online.

"'True Blood' is my first big show for TV and it's definitely going to see a lot of play on the Internet. It's a big issue for me," Barr, 36, told Reuters in an interview. "I don't understand why composers don't get paid if someone downloads it."

The issue is the latest digital copyright debate pitting creators in the entertainment industry on one side and studios, broadcasters, cable operators and technology companies on the other. Barr underscores how a growing number of artists -- writers, actors and, yes, composers -- feel they are not fairly compensated for content distributed on the Internet.

Actors and writers have aired their grievances and demanded Hollywood studios pay up. Now, composers, along with publishers, are urging Congress to change copyright law so that when music airs in an audio-visual download, it is considered a public performance that earns them royalties.

The stakes are high: Industry experts believe composers could potentially earn nearly $100 million in additional royalty payments annually as Internet viewing grows -- if the law was changed to deem downloads of music in audio-visual works as public performances.

"We see audio visual as a vigorous growth area for composers, whether it's on Hulu, Netflix or iTunes, and a big issue is clarifying public performance rights as they apply to digital downloads," said Richard Conlon of Broadcast Music Inc (BMI), a performing rights group that collects royalties on behalf of artists.

The copyright issue, apart from being proposed legislation, is also expected to be the subject of a House Judiciary committee hearing in July, industry experts say.

At the center of the debate is a federal court ruling in April 2007, considered a victory for companies like AOL, RealNetworks and Yahoo! Inc YHOO.O> that found that downloading a music file was not considered a "performance."

AU REVOIR

Composers are arguably one of most overlooked among the so-called frontline entertainers behind a movie or TV series.

"Most composers don't get pensions like other people ... and we're now realizing we're not covered for much of the way entertainment is viewed online," Barr protested.

Performing rights group American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) is appealing the 2007 ruling.

And ASCAP, BMI, and various other publishing and songwriting groups sent a letter in March 2009 to Congress urging a change in the U.S. Copyright Law.

"It's important these markets get locked down as composers really rely on public performance royalties," Conlon said.

Meanwhile, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), a trade group for Hollywood studios such as General Electric Co's Universal Pictures, Viacom Inc's Paramount and Walt Disney Co, strongly opposes these efforts, arguing that a download is not a performance.

"The MPAA is opposed to amending the copyright law to require a double payment for music in movies and TV shows downloaded from the Internet," Angela Martinez, a spokeswoman for the MPAA said. "We do not need to amend the Copyright Act to compensate these composers twice for the same activity."

Veteran entertainment lawyer Jay Cooper said composers collect performance royalties when their music airs on cable, TV, radio and is streamed over the Web.

"But if a film along with the music in it is incorporated in a DVD, the typical contract between a composer and studio does not grant the composer a royalty or payment for sales of the DVD or for any downloads of the DVD," Cooper said.

"Composers believe the performance right of a download is not a contractual right but a legal right to which there is great opposition," he said.

Martinez and others like Jonathan Potter, executive director of the Digital Media Association, which represents online services like Apple Inc iTunes and Yahoo, believe composers are being disingenuous.

"This legislative request is the latest effort by these groups to blur the lines between making a copy and making a public performance in order to get royalties where none are obligated or should be obligated," said Potter.

(Reporting by Sue Zeidler; Editing by Edwin Chan, Richard Chang)

Film, TV music composers urge copyright law change - Yahoo! News

Authorlink.com: News Item Publishers Issue Statement-on Open Access

2009-06-12T06:50:00.001-07:00

Authorlink.com: News Item Publishers Issue Statement-on Open Access

Publishers Issue Statement on Open Access

Washington, DC (AUTHORLINK NEWS, June 9, 2009)-- The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP/PSP) today expressed its support and endorsement of a joint statement on the open access debate issued by two prestigious international organizations representing publishers and librarians. Designed to bring more light and less heat to the often contentious debate surrounding open access, the statement, entitled “Enhancing the Debate on Open Access,” was issued on May 20 by the International Publishers Association (IPA) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). They were joined in releasing the statement by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers.

Although the debate over open access presents a unique and important opportunity for the international publishing and library communities to explore the use of technology and new business models to meet the challenges of growing scholarly publishing output, the debate has too often been hobbled “by unnecessary polarisations and sweeping generalized statements.” The IPA/IFLA statement attempts to lay out common ground for both communities so that future debate is conducted “in an open-minded way, encouraging experimentation and arguments based on empirical facts...”

Michael Hays (McGraw-Hill Education), chairman of the AAP/PSP Executive Council, said: “By acknowledging common ground and shared values and agreeing, among other things, that ‘all assumptions surrounding open access and scholarly communications should be open to scientific scrutiny and academic debate,’ this statement represents an important step forward in bringing a civility and rationality to this debate which has too often been absent. We applaud the efforts of IFLA and the IPA, and join in the spirit of open inquiry and mutual respect embodied by the statement.”

The complete text of the statement can be found at:

http://www.internationalpublishers.org/images/pdf/IndustryPolicy/IFLAIPA/JointStatements/ifla%20ipa%20statement%20on%20open%20access%20final%2020090505.doc

About AAP/PSP:

Members of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers, Inc.(AAP) publish the vast majority of materials used in the U.S. by scholars and professionals in science, medicine, technology, business, law, reference, social science and the humanities and are worldwide disseminators, archivists, and shapers of scientific research via print and electronic means. The Division's 100 plus professional societies, commercial publishers and university presses produce books, journals, computer software, databases and electronic products.

Authorlink.com: News Item Publishers Issue Statement-on Open Access

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog

2009-06-12T06:48:00.001-07:00

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog

June 10, 2009

Next Weblog update on 7/15/09.

American Archivist 72, no. 1 (2009): Includes "A Brave New World: Archivists and Shareable Descriptive Metadata," "Digital Preservation through Archival Collaboration: The Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences," and other articles.

Ariadne, no. 59 (2009): Includes "EThOS: From Project to Service," "Publish and Cherish with Non-Proprietary Peer Review Systems," "The REMAP Project: Steps towards a Repository-Enabled Information Environment," "Three Perspectives on the Evolving Infrastructure of Institutional Research Repositories in Europe," and other articles.

Bailey, Charles W., Jr. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008 Annual Edition. Houston: Digital Scholarship, 2009.

D-Lib Magazine 15, no. 5/6 (2009): Includes "Evaluation of Digital Repository Software at the National Library of Medicine"; "Towards a Repository-Enabled Scholar's Workbench: RepoMMan, REMAP and Hydra"; and other articles.

The International Information & Library Review 41, no. 1 (2009): Includes "E-Theses and Indian Academia: A Case Study of Nine ETD Digital Libraries and Formulation of Policies for a National Service," "Managing Digital Information Resources in Africa: Preserving the Integrity of Scholarship," and other articles.

Journal of Archival Organization 7, no. 1/2 (2009): Includes "Choosing a Digital Asset Management System That's Right for You"; "Planting Seeds for a Successful Institutional Repository: Role of the Archivist as Manager, Designer, and Policymaker"; "Why Archivists Should Be Leaders in Scholarly Communication"; and other articles.

Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries 6, no. 2 (2009): Includes "Better Control of User Web Access of Electronic Resources," "Core Competencies for Electronic Resource Access Services," "Database Coverage and Impact Factor of Open Access Journals in Pharmacy," "A Licensing Survival Guide for Librarians," and other articles.

Journal of Library Administration 49, no. 4 (2009): Includes "The Future of Academic Publishing: A View From the Top" and other articles.

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60, no. 1 (2009): Includes "Author-Choice Open-Access Publishing in the Biological and Medical Literature: A Citation Analysis" and other articles.

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60, no. 3 (2009): Includes "Do Open-Access Journals in Library and Information Science Have Any Scholarly Impact? A Bibliometric Study of Selected Open-Access Journals Using Google Scholar" and other articles.

LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of European Research Libraries 19, no. 1. (2009): Includes "The Jigsaw Puzzle of Digital Preservation—An Overview," "The KB e-Depot: Building and Managing a Safe Place for e-Journals," "Taking Care of Digital Collections and Data: 'Curation' and Organisational Choices for Research Libraries," and other articles.

Library Review 58, no. 24(2009): Includes "Choosing Between Print or Digital Collection Building in Times of Financial Constraint" and other articles.

Morris, Sally. Journal Authors' Rights: Perception and Reality. London: Publishing Research Consortium, 2009.

New Library World 110, no. 5/6 (2009): Includes "Customized Mapping and Metadata Transfer from DSpace to OCLC to Improve ETD Work Flow," "Putting the Public in the Public Domain: The Public Library's Role in the Re-Conceptualization of the Public Domain," and other articles.

OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives 25, no. 1 (2009): Includes "Bioline International: A Case Study in Open Access and Its Usage for Enhancement of Research Distribution for Scientific Research from Developing Countries," "An Interactive Reading Environment for Online Scholarly Journals: The Open Journal Systems Reading Tools," "Open Access Dissemination Challenges: a Case Study," "Open Access Indicators and Information Society: the Latin American Case," "The Open Access Movement and the Library World Seen from the Experience of the E-LIS Project," "Promoting Open Access in Germany as Illustrated by a Recent Project at the Library of the University of Konstanz," and other articles.

Research Information (June/July 2009): Includes "Partners in Open Access," "Publishers Relax Author Rights Agreements," and other articles.

Research Information Network. E-Journals: Their Use, Value and Impact. London: Research Information Network, 2009.

Research Library Issues, no. 263 (2009): Includes "Achieving the Full Potential of Repository Deposit Policies," "Author-Rights Language in Library Content Licenses," "Digital Scholarly Communication: A Snapshot of Current Trends," "Strategies for Supporting New Genres of Scholarship," and other articles.

ScieCom Info 5, no. 2 (2009): Includes "A Digitizing Project and Open Access Publishing of an Established National Journal"; "Open Access to Scientific Publications: The Situation in Lithuania"; "Open Minds—An Interview with Rune Nilsen Professor of International Health, The University of Bergen"; and other articles.

Technical Services Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2009): Includes "The Crisis in Scholarly Communication, Part I: Understanding the Issues and Engaging Your Faculty" and other articles.

Technical Services Quarterly 26, no. 3 (2009): Includes "The Crisis in Scholarly Communication, Part II: Internal Impacts on the Library, with a Focus on Technical Services" and other articles.

Webology 6, no. 1, (2009): Includes "Citation Analysis of Library Trends," "Moving from Script to Science 2.0 for Scholarly Communication," and other articles.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog

Open-Access Publisher Appears to Have Accepted Fake Paper From Bogus Center - Chronicle.com

2009-06-12T06:46:00.001-07:00

Open-Access Publisher Appears to Have Accepted Fake Paper From Bogus Center - Chronicle.com

Open-Access Publisher Appears to Have Accepted Fake Paper From Bogus Center

The medical-research industry is under growing pressure to improve its ethical standards. Similar pressure has extended to peer-reviewed medical journals, after Elsevier, a publishing leader, admitted to publishing at least nine fake journals from 2000 to 2005.

In other words, it’s an especially bad time for a medical journal to be duped by an author who, say, submits a fake computer-generated research paper from a fake institution he named the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology — or CRAP.

And yet that’s exactly what appears to have happened.

The deception was the work of Philip M. Davis, a doctoral student in communication at Cornell University who serves as executive editor of the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s Scholarly Kitchen blog.

Mr. Davis said he had concocted the plan after receiving numerous “aggressive” unsolicited e-mail messages from Bentham Publishing, which finances its line of 200 open-access scientific journals by charging authors a publication fee.

Mr. Davis and the blog’s editor in chief, Kent R. Anderson, submitted two research papers that were created by a computer program at MIT called SCIgen that describes itself as generating random text intended to “maximize amusement, rather than coherence.”

One of the papers was rejected by Bentham, and the other — a nonsensical five-page report with footnotes and graphical charts that purported to describe an Internet process called the “Trifling Thamyn” — was accepted after the publisher said it had been peer-reviewed. Mr. Davis reported that an invoice for $800 had been issued by Bentham, without any evidence that the article was actually peer-reviewed.

The publications director at Bentham, Mahmood Alam, told The Chronicle by e-mail that, “to the best of our knowledge, we have not published any article from the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology in any of our journals.” Mr. Davis said he had written to Bentham to withdraw the paper after its publication was approved.

Bentham’s subscription manager, Pradeep Menon, reached by telephone at the company’s headquarters in the United Arab Emirates, said he was aware of the accusation but had no further details and could not offer any other company official to comment.

“It’s the first of its kind because we never had such an insinuation charged against us,” Mr. Menon said. “All of our journals are peer-reviewed — that is 100 percent sure.”

Similar scammers have had success in the past, most notably the hoax published in the journal Social Text in 1996 by Alan D. Sokal, a physicist at New York University.

The “popular conception” that open-access publishers rely on publication fees, meanwhile, may not even be true, according to Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard University. Mr. Shieber, in his blog, The Occasional Pamphlet, said he had devised a program to pull data out of computerized medical-journal listings and concluded that only about 23 percent of open-access journals charge publication fees. —Paul Basken

Open-Access Publisher Appears to Have Accepted Fake Paper From Bogus Center - Chronicle.com

The Associated Press: First Freedom of Information ombudsman appointed

2009-06-12T06:45:00.001-07:00

The Associated Press: First Freedom of Information ombudsman appointed

First Freedom of Information ombudsman appointed

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN – 1 day ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Archives appointed a veteran open government advocate Wednesday to be the first Freedom of Information Act ombudsman, empowered to mediate disputes between people who request data and the agencies that have it.

Miriam Nisbet, who now heads the information society division of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris, was chosen to direct the Archives' new Office of Government Information Services, acting Archivist Adrienne Thomas announced.

"While the federal FOIA mediator's office is still a long way from mediating its first FOIA dispute, it took a big step forward today," said Rick Blum, coordinator of the Sunshine in Government Initiative, a coalition of nine media groups, including The Associated Press. Blum said Nisbet "is a longtime advocate for open government, and this is a promising start for those who want the FOIA to work better."

Thomas said Nisbet "has dedicated her entire professional life to working for open access to government records."

Nisbet, who is still in Paris wrapping up her UNESCO duties, said she was excited to be part of "a new approach to make the Freedom of Information Act work better." She is expected to open the new Archives office in September.

Nisbet's U.N. office supports libraries and archives in developing countries and promotes new communication technologies for education, science and culture. Before joining the U.N. in 2007, she was legislative counsel of the American Library Association. In the mid-1990s, she was special counsel for information policy at the National Archives. And from 1982 to 1994, she was deputy director of the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy, which decided which department documents could be released under FOIA and the Privacy Act and provided guidance to the entire federal government on how to implement FOIA.

The FOIA ombudsman's office was created by the OPEN Government Act of 2007. Besides mediating disputes, it is authorized to review how well agency's comply with the act and recommend policy changes to the president and Congress.

On the Net:

National Archives: http://www.archives.gov/

The Associated Press: First Freedom of Information ombudsman appointed

French Court Kills Part of Controversial Copyright Law

2009-06-12T06:37:00.001-07:00

French Court Kills Part of Controversial Copyright Law

French Court Kills Part of Controversial Copyright Law

A French court struck down yesterday part of a recently passed anti-piracy law that would have shut off Internet access to those accused of repeated copyright infringement. The Constitutional Council said, in effect, that given the importance of the Internet, a court approval was needed before denying someone web access.

The court’s decision is a blow to copyright holders, who loved the law and saw its strict measures as a model for cracking down on file sharing. The three strikes law, which passed last month, would have created a new government agency called HADOPI (the Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Oeuvres et la Protection des droits sur Internet) that would issue notices (at a copyright holder’s behest) to illegal file sharers. Upon receipt of a third notice, the accused would have been disconnected from Internet access for anywhere from two months to a year and blacklisted from signing up with another ISP. The law would also allow ISPs to be ordered to block certain sites, such as The Pirate Bay.

But the Council put the kibosh on that plan. The New York Times writes:

The council said the proposal was contrary to French constitutional principles, like the presumption of innocence and freedom of speech. The latter right “implies today, considering the development of the Internet, and its importance for the participation in democratic life and the expression of ideas and opinions, the online public’s freedom to access these communication services.”

France’s culture minister said that, based on the court’s decision, the law could be taken back to the French Prime Minister for re-tooling.

French Court Kills Part of Controversial Copyright Law

Justice Dept. Seeks Details On Google Deal - washingtonpost.com

2009-06-12T06:36:00.001-07:00

Justice Dept. Seeks Details On Google Deal - washingtonpost.com

Justice Dept. Seeks Details On Google Deal

By Brian Womack and James Rowley

Bloomberg News
Thursday, June 11, 2009

The Justice Department has asked Google and publishers for information about the settlement of a book-scanning dispute, signaling that a federal probe is underway.

Google has received a formal inquiry from the Justice Department, said Adam Kovacevich, a company spokesman. The Authors Guild received a civil investigative demand last week, said Paul Aiken, executive director of the New York-based group, which was part of the settlement.

Google, which is creating an online book database by scanning millions of titles, reached a $125 million deal with publishers last year to settle copyright issues. The agreement could make Google the main online source for millions of out-of-print books, raising antitrust concerns.

Hachette Book Group, a publishing company in New York, also received a formal request for information from the Justice Department, said spokeswoman Sophie Cottrell. Gina Talamona, a spokeswoman for DOJ, declined to comment.

The settlement was designed to end years of hostility between Google and publishers.

Google, which began scanning books in 2004, uses volumes from Harvard University, the New York Public Library and other sources. The project lets users search books, bringing up pages or excerpts that contain sought-for terms.

The company was sued in 2005 by the Authors Guild, Pearson's Penguin unit, McGraw-Hill, John Wiley & Sons and Simon & Schuster. They claimed the digitizing process infringed their copyrights.

Justice Dept. Seeks Details On Google Deal - washingtonpost.com

Can Scraping Non-Infringing Content Become Copyright Infringement... Because Of How Scrapers Work? | Techdirt

2009-06-12T06:34:00.001-07:00

Can Scraping Non-Infringing Content Become Copyright Infringement... Because Of How Scrapers Work? | Techdirt

Can Scraping Non-Infringing Content Become Copyright Infringement... Because Of How Scrapers Work?

Earlier this year, we couldn't figure out how Facebook's lawsuit against Power.com made any sense. Power.com tried to aggregate various social networking accounts in a single place, so you could manage them all at once through a single interface. Yet Facebook charged the company with all sorts of complaints, including copyright and trademark infringement, unlawful competition and violation of the computer fraud and abuse act. Power.com asked for the case to be dismissed, but last month the judge sided with Facebook, but did so in a troubling way, by basically suggesting that since Facebook's terms of service prohibited these uses, it made it copyright infringement. Michael Scott points us to lawyer Jeff Neuberger's take on the ruling, and separately Tom O'Toole has a good analysis of the ruling. Neuberger states the following:

Judge Fogel concluded that the allegations of the complaint made out a sufficient claim of copyright infringement because Power Ventures "need only access and copy one page to commit copyright infringement." The court also found that the ToU prohibited downloading, scraping or distributing content from the Facebook Web site content except that belonging to the user, and that in any event, using automated methods, i.e., "data mining, robots, scraping, or similar data gathering or extraction methods" to access any content were also prohibited by the ToU. Thus, the court found that the allegation that Power Ventures accessed Facebook via automated means constituted made out a claim of direct copyright infringement, while the allegation that Facebook users utilized the Power.com interface to access their own profile pages made out claim of secondary copyright infringement.
Thus, because the terms of service said you can't do any automated scraping of the site, it's suddenly infringing? Even worse, the court found that even though the data being used by Power.com isn't owned by Facebook (it's the users') the scraping was still copyright infringement, because in order to scrape the non-infringing content, Power.com had to first "scrape" the whole page. O'Toole explains:
OK, so far the court has found that Power.com made unauthorized copies of the Facebook Web site. What about the fact that Facebook does not own the copyright in its users' profile data? Facebook surmounted this hurdle by arguing that the content of the Facebook page that surrounded the user's data is copyrightable and is owned by Facebook. According to Facebook, the Power.com scraper operated in a manner that required it to copy the entire Web page in order to extract the user's profile data....
Note that the court is conditioning its ruling on the assertion that the Power Ventures scraper necessarily copied the entire Web page before it processed the page and extracted the profile data. That comports with my (limited) understanding of how a Web scraper works. But is it true? If it were true, couldn't an argument be made that this is a fair use of the page? I'll leave that for better lawyers.
All of this seems a bit troubling, as it would effectively rule out scraping even non-infringing content, just because the scraper had to first read through copyrighted content to get to the non-infringing stuff. But, that seems to go against the entire purpose of copyright law. The fact that the scraper reads copyrighted content shouldn't mean that it's infringement. It's not doing anything with that content other than using it to find the content it can make use of. Anyway, this ruling probably doesn't mean all that much, since it was just to reject the dismissal request, but it does seem odd that the judge gave so much weight to Facebook's terms of service, and seems to indicate the mere act of scraping can be copyright infringement.

Can Scraping Non-Infringing Content Become Copyright Infringement... Because Of How Scrapers Work? | Techdirt

Stolen Picture at Extraordinary Mommy

2009-06-12T06:33:00.001-07:00

Stolen Picture at Extraordinary Mommy

Stolen Picture

May 28th, 2009

So, this is the price we pay for indulging in social media, I guess.

I am thrilled to have reconnected with so many friends on Facebook. One of them sent me this message yesterday:

Alright, so how’s this for random: I’m in the car, taking my wife for a check up, pass by a new grocery store and notice that they have a picture of you, your husband and two kids on the store front window. Life size. I kid you not. Will take a photo of it later today and send….

What you don’t know from this message: this college friend lives in the CZECH REPUBLIC.

Clearly, my family did NOT take a picture for any advertisements - either here or abroad. And, clearly, whoever hijacked the picture assumed no one would recognize us so far away. Hmmmm…wrong.

I’ll admit, there is an element of flattery (I think) to the whole thing. But still, there is something creepy about knowing our family picture was stolen from one of my sites. This picture has been on my blog, used as a Christmas card and put on a few Ning Networking sites. It is also on my Facebook page (which is one of the reasons Justin recognized us) but my FB page is open only to friends.

Perplexing.

According to my friend, Justin, the translation reads: “We will prepare and deliver your requests in two business days.”

Thanks, Justin for letting me know!

Interesting. Bizarre. Flattering, I suppose. But quite creepy.

This picture was taken by a friend of mine, Gina Kelly. She does give me the rights to the pictures she has taken - and has authorized me to use them on my site, etc.

Your thoughts?

Updated, Saturday, June 6th. Based on the comments I’m seeing, I feel compelled to clarify a few things. 1) I am the author of this site - Danielle. Not my husband. Quite a few comments have been directed to him. 2) I take FULL responsibillity for posting this picture with the incorrect resolution (read: too high). Clearly, I am not a professional photographer and should have made the resolution smaller and/or watermarked the picture. 3) I used the incorrect term in one of my comments - the photographer did sign a release for me to use the pictures, and certainly, this does not mean I ‘own’ them. 4) While the photographer certainly may sell some of her pictures as stock, she ALWAYS has the subjects sign a model release. I didn’t sign one for this picture, but would have if she had asked. 5) I posted this story because I think it is INTERESTING - what are the chances a friend who see this ad thousands of miles away? AND because I was SURPRISED it happend. Like many of you commenting, I wasn’t aware pictures could be taken. If this makes me naive, so be it. Now I know. And, for the record, I will not stop using pictures of my family on my site - I will however, change the format. 6) I am grateful to the greatest percentage of people who have commented with very interesting thoughts. However, if you are part of the smaller percentage who are commenting only to say that a member of my family (or all of us) are ugly, I won’t be approving the comment. I won’t allow it on my site. I imagine you understand. Thanks for stopping by!

Filed under Are you kidding me?, I'm just sayin' |

Stolen Picture at Extraordinary Mommy

Open Repositories 2009 trip report « ptsefton

2009-06-12T06:28:00.001-07:00

Open Repositories 2009 trip report « ptsefton

Open Repositories 2009 trip report

Overall impressions

Repository sustainability

Papers and posters

Microsoft workshop

Judging the competition

Conclusion

Here’s my summary of my experience of OR09 it Atlanta Georgia USA. Tim McCallum and I came over from USQ and arrived on Friday night after 30 plus hours of traveling, for a Monday start. Tim discovered that if you lose the posters due to severe fatigue then getting them printed out on the Georgia Tech library’s plotter is easy and cheap.

There were only a few Australians this time. I was surprised that there was nobody to represent/promote Fez or Mudadora, two antipodean repository solutions based on Fedora Commons but I did meet a Muradora user, Juan Rodriguez from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who knows the Muradora team – sounds like it’s alive and well.

I’ll go through some general impressions of the conference then summarize my direct contribution; moderating a session, giving a couple of papers, presenting a poster, serving as a judge on the Developer Challenge and attending workshops and meetings with Microsoft Research. This is, of course, a personal view. As with any conference I missed stuff while I was working on presentations, plotting, having a jetlag-management nap, looking out the window, or judging the competition etc.

Overall impressions

Lots of people I have talked to have remarked on the movement towards modularity, where repositories are not monolithic systems but sets of services. I can’t remember who it was who reminded me of Clifford Lynch’s 2003 definition of a repository as a ’set of services’:

In my view, a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution. While operational responsibility for these services may reasonably be situated in different organizational units at different universities, an effective institutional repository of necessity represents a collaboration among librarians, information technologists, archives and records mangers, faculty, and university administrators and policymakers. At any given point in time, an institutional repository will be supported by a set of information technologies, but a key part of the services that comprise an institutional repository is the management of technological changes, and the migration of digital content from one set of technologies to the next as part of the organizational commitment to providing repository services. An institutional repository is not simply a fixed set of software and hardware.

http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/br226ir.shtml

I agree. It’s not a computer program, it’s a lifestyle; what Lynch is calling organizational commitment.

I think the title of a presentation from John Kunze, Stephen Abrams and Patricia Cruse of the California Digital Library (CDL), Permanent Objects, Disposable Systems summed this up really nicely. I liked the stuff from the CDL and Library of Congress looking at simple ways to describe and move data; the ‘non-repository’ movement. We’ll be looking into BagIt, Pairtree, Dflat, etc, particularly for our work on The Fascinator Desktop where we need tested, safe, documented ways to organize data in way that is as lightweight as possible.

I had a little moment in the spotlight when keynote speaker John Willbanks referenced my ‘Scholarly HTML‘ idea. This was reported in Twitter thus:

akosavic Wilbanks at #or09: rename “semantic web” as “scholarly HTML”

So there you have it, meet the saviour of the semantic web. Move over Sir Tim.

Actually I wouldn’t go that far – what I am trying to get at with this Scholarly HTML is that the research article – our unit of academic currency should be a web page, not a bit of pretend paper, a PDF. Journals need to be reinvented. Articles should be web pages (yes we need ways to time-stamp and version them). Peer review and editing are both important, but I can think of better ways to get those done than we typically use now. Then there’s the idea of embedding machine readable semantics in the form of statements of fact, links to data etc, not to mention machine readable metadata. More on this soon here on the blog – I think I’ll write a series of papers on this, with appropriate collaborators, in the open then we’ll see if we can get them to count as scholarly literature via peer review. A couple of people told me they’re watching the Scholarly HTML posts so I think I’m onto something with this one.

Repository sustainability

I was asked by email before the conference to moderate a session, Strategies for Innovation and Sustainability: Insights from Leaders of Open Source Repository Organizations. Chairing sessions is my least favourite part of conferences, but I said yes. What they didn’t explain was that this was not just paper session, it was a panel session, where the moderator had to do more than just introduce the speakers. On stage with me were the leaders of the three major repository platforms. Michele Kimpton of the DSpace Foundation, Sandy Payette from Fedora Commons, Les Carr of ePrints fame from the University of Southampton and Lee Dirks of Microsoft Research.

The big news this conference was the recent merger between the DSpace and Fedora Commons organizations to form DuraSpace. That meant that I got to introduce Lee from Microsoft as the new player in the open source world battling a creeping DuraSpace monopoly (Microsoft’s new repository Zentity is likely to be released as OSS). Before I left for the US my partner advised me not to call Microsoft the ‘underdog’ – so I didn’t.

The three organizations on the panel each had ten minutes or so to talk about how they are set up to sustain their open source software. I don’t think there was much definite there. The DuraSpace crew are still working out a sustainability model, while ePrints remains driven very much by Southampton, but with some cash coming in from selling services. The Zentity repository is too young too need a sustainability model – it needs an adoptability model.

My question to the panel was basically to ask them to play devil’s advocate and ask them ‘what’s the worst thing that could happen’.

In the case of the new MS Repository, Zentity Lee was upfront – if there’s no uptake then the product will not be supported. That’s basically the same as with any repository, but this one will be a bit different if it takes off, as it’s what Sandy called ‘open at the edges’ in that it runs only on the Microsoft software stack – what this might mean long term I don’t know, but if your organization decides to move platforms then the repository won’t be going with you.

The answer from the other two organizations as to what could go horribly wrong, was ‘not too much’ – at least that was my reading of the answer. My summary is that with ePrints, Dspace and Fedora commons there are enough users that if the central organizations crumbled or gave up then someone would invent a new one.

But I reckon the best thing that repository managers can do is get familiar with the ways you can import and export data while intoning to themselves Permanent Objects, Disposable Systems.

Papers and posters

At OR07 the reviewers didn’t think that my proposed presentation about dragging repositories onto Web 2.0 was worth scheduling but we kept working on dragging repositories from Web 0.5 collections of PDF into the twentieth century (stay tuned for the twenty-first). This time, I was able to put all the stuff I did for the conference straight into ePrints. Each item was authored in ICE, in OpenOffice.org, (although I could have used Microsoft Word) with an embedded slide-show. Even my poster had an embedded sideshow, a straight HTML view and PDF.

First up Jim Downing from Cambridge and I showed off the work we did with our teams on the ICE-TheOREM project. Not only were we able to show a thesis going onto the web in HTML as well as the dreaded PDF, it had granular chapter-level embargo, and we were fully buzzword compliant, with ORE and SWORD built in. And for the first time we made our work available as a ready-to run virtual machine, a few copies of which I handed out. We’ll definitely do more of that, and keep updating our machine with all the software we work with – at the moment it runs ICE, ePrints and The Fascinator, but I’d love to see DSpace and OJS and Moodle on there as well all integrated.

I gave a presentation on The Fascinator in the Fedora user group stream (great rooms with power at every seat) which was gratifyingly well attended.

And there was the poster, which I supplemented with a metaphor – a collection of 40mm & 50mm PVC waste pipe and various connectors. David Flanders used it to build a data grid which included a pipe going straight to repository hell a place he has apparently spent a fair bit of time drinking microbrew with too much malt. The idea was to drive the point that we want to make research data plumbing as easy as PCV pipe network engineering. Here I am spruiking the poster with a fistful of PVC.

At time of writing there are a couple of minor usability issues with the HTML-in-ePrints approach which I’m sure will be fixed soon.

Open Repositories 2009 trip report « ptsefton

U Texas System Expands Copyright Clearance License -- Campus Technology

2009-06-12T06:26:00.001-07:00

U Texas System Expands Copyright Clearance License -- Campus Technology

U Texas System Expands Copyright Clearance License

By Dian Schaffhauser

06/11/09

The University of Texas (UT) System has expanded its adoption of Copyright Clearance Center's annual copyright license from its Austin campus, which it announced in September 2008, to the entire UT System. The nine academic campuses and six health institutions that the UT System comprises make it one of the largest higher education systems in the United States.

The annual copyright license makes it easy for faculty and staff to license published materials for use in coursepacks, e-reserves, course management systems, and research collaboration. For a single annual fee, the license provides librarians, faculty, copy shop staff, and others with pre-approved permission to use and share content from millions of books, scholarly journals, newspapers, magazine, and e-books.

"An annual comprehensive license from the Copyright Clearance Center will allow all 15 campuses of the UT System to improve operational efficiency in this area and will position the UT System at the forefront of copyright use and compliance management," said Barry Burgdorf, vice chancellor and general counsel of the UT System. "We are pleased to deliver the campuses of one of the largest public university systems in the nation into this cost efficient arrangement, which will benefit our faculty, students and staff by providing easy, compliant access to a large and expanding library of academic works,"

"At UT Austin, we strive to make course materials available to students and faculty with minimal difficulties, and CCC's annual copyright license helps us do just that," added Georgia Harper, scholarly communications advisor with the UT at Austin Libraries. "With the annual copyright license, faculty and staff can focus on the business of teaching, while demonstrating the importance of respecting the intellectual and creative property of others."

The list of institutions that have adopted CCC's annual license includes the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Middlebury College in Vermont, and Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, WI.

U Texas System Expands Copyright Clearance License -- Campus Technology

Law Librarian Blog

2009-06-09T10:20:00.001-07:00

Law Librarian Blog

Open Access Marches On

Signatories to Open Access Statement

The statement is signed by the directors of the University Press of Florida, University of Akron Press, University Press of New England, Athabasca University Press, Wayne State University Press, University of Calgary Press, University of Michigan Press, Rockefeller University Press, Penn State University Press, and University of Massachusetts Press.

Mike Rossner of Rockefeller University Press said that the press directors issued the statement as they wanted "to align ourselves with the stances taken by many universities -- by faculties and administrators -- on scholarly communication." Quoted in Inside Higher Ed.

Open Access News blog reported on June 4th that ten university press directors signed a position statement in support of free access to scientific, technical, and medical journal articles no later than twelve months after publication. The statement is further discussed on the Chronicle of Higher Education news blog. This announcement should remind you of the November 7, 2008 Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship that was signed by many law library directors and called for elimination of printed law journals and adoption of a stable, open access model for law journals.

The Press Directors’ position statement is somewhat contrary to the position of the American Association of University Presses, their 112-member national organization. Executive Director Charles Lowery’s nine page PDF explains the AAUP position which is argued with the assumption that the reason academic law libraries support open access is to help meet shrinking budget lines. I do not think this is the only reason why academic library directors support open access, but the essay is worth reading to review different approaches to journal deselection choices such as combining a cost-per-page with a cost-per-use strategy.

AAUP filed a letter of support for the Fair Copyright in Research Works bill (H.R. 6845) which was reintroduced into Congress this past September (and seems to have died in the Judiciary Committee) prohibiting federal agencies from requiring fund recipients to give up their copyright in order to receive federal monies.

The American Association of Publishers also supports bills like H.R. 6845. At the site of their affiliate, Professional Scholarly Publishing, you can find key talking points surrounding the Fair Copyright in Research Works bill, and reposted statements from other organizations concerning retention of copyright in funded scientific works. The AAP also lobbied President Obama on the same. You can find their letter to him and Vice President Biden at this site.

At least one of the signatories to the position statement, Rockefeller University Press Director Mike Rossner, already makes Rockefeller journals available six months after publication. He has not found this practice of delayed free posting contrary to their business model. This position diffuses much of the discussion levied against open access. Hopefully, we will see more concrete support of an open access model that will result in more collections such as the Directory of Open Access Journals and BioMed Central , or direct access to journals via their own web sites.

To inform yourselves more fully on the benefits of open access, I highly recommend the
SPARC pages on this issue. (VS)

Law Librarian Blog

Library Intelligencer » Introducing Copyright: A Plain Language Guide to Copyright in the 21st Century

2009-05-27T13:52:00.001-07:00

Library Intelligencer » Introducing Copyright: A Plain Language Guide to Copyright in the 21st Century

Introducing Copyright: A Plain Language Guide to Copyright in the 21st Century

http://www.col.org/SiteCollectionDocuments/Introducing_Copyright_online_edition.pdf

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to
encourage the development and sharing of open learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies.
© Julien Hofman and Commonwealth of Learning, 2009

Library Intelligencer » Introducing Copyright: A Plain Language Guide to Copyright in the 21st Century

MDPI.com: peer-reviewed, fully open access scholarly journals since 1996 « Life Sciences Info @ Imperial College London Library

2009-05-27T13:40:00.001-07:00

MDPI.com: peer-reviewed, fully open access scholarly journals since 1996 « Life Sciences Info @ Imperial College London Library

MDPI.com: peer-reviewed, fully open access scholarly journals since 1996

MDPI.com is a platform providing open access to peer-reviewed journals published by Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI). Access is available to material published from 1996 onwards and includes:

International Journal of Environmental Research & Public Health

International Journal of Molecular Sciences

Marine Drugs

Molecules

Nutrients

Remote Sensing (New as of March 2009)

Sustainability (New as of March 2009)

Toxins

Viruses

Visit www.mdpi.com to access these journals and more, and hook up to an RSS feed from the site too.

MDPI.com: peer-reviewed, fully open access scholarly journals since 1996 « Life Sciences Info @ Imperial College London Library

Librarians = Open Access and New Media Advocates : Greg Laden's Blog

2009-05-27T13:38:00.001-07:00

Video -- HSM -- Thanks to Librarians = Open Access and New Media Advocates : Greg Laden's Blog

Librarians = Open Access and New Media Advocates

hat tip Bora, where you can find more.

Librarians = Open Access and New Media Advocates : Greg Laden's Blog

Major research institute moves publications to open-access system | News | Breaking News | Feedstuffs

2009-05-27T13:15:00.001-07:00

Major research institute moves publications to open-access system | News | Breaking News | Feedstuffs

Major research institute moves publications to open-access system

(5/27/2009)

The spiraling cost of subscriptions to scientific journals is fueling a movement toward web-based open access for papers detailing new scientific findings. The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) formally launched an open-access (OA) system for its scientific publications on May 27.

"ICRISAT has declared the Green OA Mandate in the Institute, thereby making available a digital, web-accessible repository of pre-prints of the scientific and scholarly publications emerging from ICRISAT's research," according to a statement from the institute.

"According to the registry on global OA initiatives maintained by the University of Southampton in the U.K., ICRISAT is among the earliest agricultural research institutes to declare the green mandate," the statement noted. The University of Southampton maintains the database, which is called Roarmap.

ICRISAT noted that critical research information to researchers across the globe has been affected by the costs of the journals, and "even institutions in developed countries find it difficult to meet increasing journal subscription costs."

In recent years, the OA movement has sprung up in many developed countries, ICRISAT reported. "Champions of the OA movement believe that in spite of publisher-mandated copyright restrictions, authors of scientific and scholarly papers have the fullest freedom to share their findings with their peer community," the statement said.

ICRISAT, based in India, has research stations throughout the world in semi-arid tropical regions. It is one of the institutions of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

The OA repository of ICRISAT can be accessed at http://openaccess.icrisat.org. Most of the institute's print publications can be accessed at http://books.icrisat.org.

Major research institute moves publications to open-access system | News | Breaking News | Feedstuffs

Teaching About Copyright and Fair Use for Media Literacy Education - Creative Commons

2009-05-27T13:12:00.001-07:00

Teaching About Copyright and Fair Use for Media Literacy Education - Creative Commons

Teaching About Copyright and Fair Use for Media Literacy Education

Jane Park, May 26th, 2009

Last November, the Center for Social Media at AU released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, which followed on the heels of a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. These guides were aimed at clearing up many of the urban myths surrounding copyright, especially when it came to classroom use of copyrighted materials.

Now, the Media Education Lab at Temple University has produced excellent resources based on the original guide to help teachers teach about copyright and fair use in their classrooms. Resources include lesson plans, Powerpoint slides, videos, case studies, podcasts, and FAQs. The lesson plans iterate on topics from the code such as “Understanding Copyright”, “The Cost of Copyright Confusion”, and “Defining and Applying Fair Use”.

What tickles me: that in order to find out just what you can do with these resources, you get to view and use them first—Learning fair use via fair using! To use these resources in your classroom or study group (or for simply personal edification), check them all out here.

Teaching About Copyright and Fair Use for Media Literacy Education - Creative Commons

National Journal Online -- Tech Daily Dose -- Judge Sotomayor Has IP Background

2009-05-27T13:11:00.003-07:00

National Journal Online -- Tech Daily Dose -- Judge Sotomayor Has IP Background

Judge Sotomayor Has IP Background

U.S. Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whom President Obama named as his nominee for the Supreme Court on Tuesday morning, has a background in intellectual property litigation -- as an associate and partner at the Manhattan law firm Pavia & Harcourt and as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. As a district court judge in 1997, Sotomayor heard a case brought by a group of freelance journalists who claimed various news outlets including the New York Times and Time Inc. violated copyright laws by reproducing their work on electronic databases and archives such as Lexis-Nexis without first obtaining their permission. Sotomayor ruled against the freelancers, arguing that the publishers were within their rights under the Copyright Act.

The appeals court reversed Sotomayor's decision, siding with the freelancers, and the Supreme Court upheld the appellate ruling 7-2. Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer dissented, siding with Sotomayor's position. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority's opinion, saying: "If there is demand for a freelance article standing alone or in a new collection, the Copyright Act allows the freelancer to benefit from that demand; after authorizing initial publication, the freelancer may also sell the article to others. It would scarcely "preserve the author's copyright in a contribution" as contemplated by Congress... if a newspaper or magazine publisher were permitted to reproduce or distribute copies of the author's contribution in isolation or within new collective works."

National Journal Online -- Tech Daily Dose -- Judge Sotomayor Has IP Background

Conference Board report on copyright draws criticism

2009-05-27T13:11:00.001-07:00

Conference Board report on copyright draws criticism

Conference Board report on copyright draws criticism

Last Updated: Tuesday, May 26, 2009 | 12:48 PM ET Comments58 Recommend65

CBC News

University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist has attacked the form and content of a Conference Board of Canada report advocating tighter copyright rules.

Copyright is a contentious issue in the digital universe, and the Conservative government has had a hard time finding a way to update Canada's law without drawing stiff opposition from digital advocates, including Geist.

The last version of the bill, which could have imposed serious penalties for illegal downloading, died when the government dissolved Parliament before the Oct. 14, 2008, election. During the campaign, the Conservatives said they would reintroduce copyright reform.

The Conference Board report, published last week, came out ahead of a board conference on copyright set for Friday.

Land of illegal downloading

The board promoted the report with a news release saying "Canada's failure to strengthen intellectual property rights in the face of digital technology has given it an unwelcome reputation as the file-swapping capital of the world."

Because of "lax regulation and enforcement," internet piracy is rising in Canada, the board said. "The estimated number of illicit downloads (1.3 billion) is 65 times higher than the number legal downloads (20 million), mirroring the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's conclusion that Canada has the highest per capita incidence of unauthorized file-swapping in the world," the board said.

But in a posting on his blog Monday, Geist — a professor who writes frequently about internet copyright issues — said the downloads claim is based on extrapolated data from a 2006 survey, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development study "did not reach" the conclusion the board said it did.

Moreover, Geist said the board based its information on material previously published by the International Intellectual Property Alliance, "the primary movie, music, and software lobby in the U.S."

He said the board report was funded by pro-copyright groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network and Copyright Collective of Canada.

He also said the board had copied parts of its report from a property alliance report.

The board responded with a posting on its website Tuesday, saying it "stands behind its findings" and acknowledging a failure to attribute material in one instance. "We have corrected the missing citation in the report and we apologize for the oversight," the board said.

The report was a piece of contract research, and the board "does not disclose the terms of its contracts without permission of the client."

It also acknowledged "that some of the cited paragraphs closely approximate the wording of a source document."

The report's recommendations closely mirrored those advocated by the property alliance.

Both suggested:

Protecting measures aimed at preventing unauthorized copying.

Outlawing devices that enable such copying.

Providing strong civil and criminal penalties for violations.

Carefully defining exceptions to the rules.

Tougher rules and more enforcement are needed "to protect new knowledge and shore up Canada's poor innovation record," the board said.

Its report "reviewed the full spectrum of arguments surrounding the issue of intellectual property rights in Canada. The final report includes those arguments considered most relevant to the policy under review."

Conference Board report on copyright draws criticism

Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton vs. The Internet | Sony Insider

2009-05-27T13:08:00.001-07:00

Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton vs. The Internet | Sony Insider

Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton vs. The Internet

Posted by Christopher MacManus on May 26th, 2009 Comments Printer-Friendly

The CEO of Sony Pictures, Michael Lynton, has really been the target of some intense Internet discussion lately. It all started when he attended a panel regarding the future of film making and oddly stated that he “doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.” He complained the Internet has “created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.” These comments circulated quickly amongst blogs and news websites, and even Sony Insider was left wondering what the real deal is. How could someone from Sony say that?

I won’t be ignorant here and say that he’s wrong; Lynton is right in a certain sense. There is immense value in the Internet, but he speaks the truth about being able to steal content. I can use a file sharing program such as uTorrent and download any modern software I want, crack it, and use it very quickly. Using the same program, I can also download just about any song, album, or movie released in the last ten to twenty years with relative ease. Some older, more obscure content is a little harder to come by but just about everything is out there. However, Lynton stating that there isn’t “anything good having come from the Internet” is simply inescapable and will probably haunt him till the end of his career. People have attacked him incessantly regarding this statement since it was revealed last week, and with such intense scrutiny he offered further explanation at the Internet-only publication Huffington News.

While Lynton’s 10+ paragraph rebuttal is too long for us to repost, we seriously recommend you read it to understand the mindset of a person who runs one of the largest movie companies in the entire world. While there are several great points, I got this notion halfway through that Lynton is standing up for the way things used to be, before the Internet, before file sharing, before everything was nearly free. However, you can’t send society back in a time machine and forget what we have now. Lynton implies the Internet needs guardrails. There have been plenty of guardrails that have tried to curb illegal piracy - services, such as the first version of Napster, Morpheus, Kazaa have been shut down only to be replaced by the more efficient BitTorrent. Until the Internet is somehow turned off, people will find new ways to distribute content and the system to do so will become stronger and more efficient than before.

I would guess that all of the people who already are singing, writing, and filming creative content with little or nothing in the way of monetary compensation will keep on doing it. Small-budget films that were never about making a living in the first place will keep popping up - and keep being clever, creative, and redefine their genre. What may become untenable is the multi-million dollar special effects blockbuster, which makes up a huge chunk of film as an industry but often falls flat in terms of the creativity that the Lynton’s point would defend. That also applies to fiction, poetry, and music.

The pricing of the product was mostly due to the delivery medium, which is becoming irrelevant. People are stealing because its too expensive for most people to enjoy new content. I gained this perspective very quickly while on vacation visiting my father near Tallahassee (Wakulla County, Florida USA). The second edition of Wakulla News 2009 deliquent tax list is printed in a font size that is probably about 9, and is 24 pages long. These economic woes are probably a common situation in many counties in the United States. It will take time for the industry to realize that the pay scales in the entertainment business is going to be corrected by the Internet. Those millions to the actors will reduce invariably, and the profits will have to come down to accommodate customers.

The internet will not be changed by copyright, although certain countries may blast their legal minds out before they learn the lesson, copyright will change for the technology. The rational for the imposition of monopoly copyright was capital intensive industrial copy technology. With the internet, the rational has fallen, and simply asserting, as Lynton’s post does in a round about way, that copyright is a natural right or that it is responsible itself for artistic expression or that artistic expression is stymied if “other owners of copyrights” lose their monopolies, is exactly like saying the audience won’t like talkies.

It would be a great mistake to believe that the death of an industry necessarily heralds the death of an art. Will piracy mean there’s going to be less? Certainly, to some extent, but it’s not going to kill jam poets, writers’ circles, or local bands - it’s going to mean less Rambo and Britney Spears to go around, and that’s honestly kind of okay with us.

Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton vs. The Internet | Sony Insider

Independent study fuels debate on copyright report

2009-05-27T13:03:00.001-07:00

Independent study fuels debate on copyright report

Independent study fuels debate on copyright report

By Vito Pilieci, Ottawa CitizenMay 26, 2009Comments (5)

OTTAWA — An independent study, first commissioned and then ignored by the Conference Board of Canada, is fuelling further debate over the research organization's most recent report on copyright in Canada.

University of Ottawa law professor, Jeremy de Beer, was commissioned by the Conference Board last spring to conduct independent research on copyright legislation.

De Beer delivered a working paper to the board in the fall. The working paper was reviewed by researchers at the board while they were compiling data to complete their copyright report.

De Beer's findings ran counter to many of the board's conclusions and was not mentioned in the board's final report called Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Economy, which was released Friday.

In a statement Tuesday, the Conference Board said:

"In the course of the research, the authors reviewed the full spectrum of arguments surrounding the issue of intellectual property rights in Canada, including Prof. de Beer's study. The final report includes those arguments considered most relevant to the policy under review."

The Conference Board report calls Canada "the file-swapping capital of the world" and calls for strict new copyright legislation as well as new power for border guards to deal with counterfeit and pirated goods.

The report is largely based on the findings of the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) 2008 Special 301 Report.

De Beer's research debunks the 301 Report by stating, "such sources have been exposed as lacking creditability," in the working paper provided to the board called Copyright and Innovation in the Networked Information Economy.

"For example, a Canadian Government official has debunked the 'Special 301 Reports' . . . as driven entirely by U.S. Industry and lacking reliable and objective analysis," the report adds.

De Beer called the omission of his research in the board's final report "strange."

"I would have thought that they would have more carefully weighed the various perspectives that they solicited," said de Beer. "I'm not interested in picking a fight with them. If they want to commission research from me and then ignore it, that's their prerogative."

On Monday, University of Ottawa professor and Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-commerce law Michael Geist accused the board of plagiarism and questioned the sponsors behind the Conference Board's report.

The board has admitted the copyright report was produced as "contract research," adding: "The Conference Board regularly produces custom research. Our guidelines for financed research require the design and method of research, as well as the content of the report, to be determined solely by the Conference Board."

According to the Conference Board, the report was funded by the Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, the Canadian Intellectual Property Council, the Copyright Collective of Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation as well as other lobby groups who are pushing for stronger Canadian copyright legislation.

The board would not detail financial commitments from the report's backers, citing client confidentiality, but it did say that the financial backers have no say over the report's editorial content.

The board's reassurance was of little comfort to Geist, who said the revelation that the organization ignored independent research "raises even further troubling questions about the objectivity of the survey."

He is calling for the research organization to recall the report.

"The right thing to do is to say, 'this report does not meet the standards of the Conference Board of Canada," he said. "The right thing to do is to pull it. They seem to be operating on completely the opposite tack."

Geist believes the controversy surrounding the board's report has damaged its reputation. The board describes itself as "the foremost, independent, not-for-profit applied research organization in Canada. Objective and non-partisan. We do not lobby for specific interests."

"It calls into question a lot of their research and significantly damages their claims that they are somehow independent," he said.

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

Independent study fuels debate on copyright report

If This Is The Sort Of Writing That Strong Copyright Creates... I'll Pass | Techdirt

2009-05-18T06:32:00.001-07:00

If This Is The Sort Of Writing That Strong Copyright Creates... I'll Pass | Techdirt

If This Is The Sort Of Writing That Strong Copyright Creates... I'll Pass

from the let-it-go... dept

Two years ago, we were among those who piled on in response to author Mark Helprin's NY Times op-ed piece in which he argued that copyright should last forever. We explained why this showed a fundamental ignorance of the very purpose of copyright law. Of course, rather than inform himself, it appears Helprin spent the past two years fuming against those who tried to educate him. He's written an entire book bashing the "digital barbarians" who are trying to destroy society by picking away at copyright. I'm about halfway through the book, and I'd finish it faster if I didn't have to keep whacking my head against the wall wondering how someone could fail so spectacularly at basic fundamental logic and comprehension. I'm planning to write up something of a review (along with reviews of some other, much more worthwhile books) at some point soon.
In the meantime, however, the Wall Street Journal saw fit to give Helprin space to embarrass himself royally earlier this week. The piece attacks consumer rights advocates as being advocates for "thieves" (don't get me started...) and implies that those fighting against copyright extension are all part of a plot of some big tech companies to get all information for free (and destroy society at the same time). It goes on to suggest (despite the fact that copyright law has been changed in one direction and one direction only over the years) that those of us concerned about the massive expansion of copyright have been winning battle after battle with almost no opposition:

So here we have a city -- the hypothetical city and New York itself -- deeply dependent upon what copyright protects but unaware of the threat it faces, even as, sector by sector, it begins to fall. Are you -- were you -- in publishing? Are you, or were you, a journalist? A screenwriter, composer, architect, designer, photographer, writer, or in a business that brings the work of these people to the public? What have you done to protect your life's blood and to guarantee the continued independence of your voice? As distressed as you may be now or not long from now, should copyright go the way of all flesh, some of you may soon be unable even to recognize your own profession, if indeed it continues to exist.
As ridiculous as his book is, at least his argument there is laid out with a bit more effort. This piece is just pure tripe, backed up with nothing even resembling fact. It's odd that a publication like the Wall Street Journal would allow blatant falsehoods to be published in its pages, but if that's what it takes these days to defend copyright... I guess it shows how desperate the defenders of Big Copyright have become.
K Matthew Dames from Copycense has taken an initial stab at correcting many of Helprin's errors in great detail, citing numerous sources to show just how incredibly wrong Helprin is over and over again.
Still, the thing that struck me is that Helprin's argument does what many other "defenses" of the elitist (and purely imaginary) notion that there's some war between "professional content creators" and those weak-minded "amateurs" who are trying to destroy them seem to do: it disproves its own point. For all the talk about how copyright and other tools of "protection" against the riff raff guarantees higher quality output, all we get is totally indefensible material like Helprin's. The defense of copyright produces misleading, poorly thought out, poorly defended and flat out wrong content such as Helprin's. Meanwhile, the thoughtful, reasonable, useful analysis comes from sites like Copycense. In the end, that may be the best response to Helprin's work. His own words disprove his own thesis.

If This Is The Sort Of Writing That Strong Copyright Creates... I'll Pass | Techdirt

Share a File, Lose Your Laptop? - PC World

2009-05-15T07:30:00.001-07:00

Share a File, Lose Your Laptop? - PC World

Share a File, Lose Your Laptop?

Antipiracy remedies are working, but Hollywood and the software industry are sponsoring a global agreement to crack down on consumers.

Bill Snyder, InfoWorld.com

You're returning to the U.S. from a quick trip to Canada. A customs official says he wants to examine your laptop. You boot it for him and he finds (gasp!) a bootlegged copy of Allen Toussaint's new CD. "Sorry, sir, we'll have to hold on to that."

Just like that, your MacBook is the property of the U.S. government and you're out $1,600. Or maybe it becomes known that you've shared music or an old version of WordPerfect online. Good-bye Internet account.

That couldn't happen today. But Hollywood and the software industry are in a lather about piracy, so they're pushing a draconian, international agreement that could make those ugly scenarios an everyday occurrence.

[ InfoWorld's Robert X. Cringely has choice words on current antipiracy measures in his blog post, "The wrong arm of the law" | Keep up on the day's tech news headlines with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: First Look newsletter and InfoWorld Daily podcast. ]

Called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the new plan would see the United States, Canada, members of the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, and Switzerland form an international coalition against copyright infringement. What's making groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation especially nervous is the veil of secrecy around the negotiations. In fact, it took some well-placed leaks and a Freedom of Information Act request to find out the most basic details of the plan. (Anything to do with regulation by the EU makes me nervous as well. Remember the crackdown on ugly vegetables?)

A year ago, Wikileaks obtained and posted a copy of an internal discussion paper that laid out some of the avenues the international bureaucrats were pursing. Check it out -- and be sure to note the section about border controls and the seizure and destruction of property.

Software piracy is a legitimate concern
Before going further, I'll stipulate that piracy and counterfeiting software are real problems. I write for a living, many of the people I write about create code for a living, and some of my friends are professional musicians. So I'm not at all opposed to the protection of content. We deserve to profit from our labor and so do our employers.

Just this week, the Business Software Association, in conjunction with IDC (a research company owned by InfoWorld's parent) released a study about software piracy. It claims that losses to world economy attributed to software piracy increased by 5 percent (excluding currency fluctuations) last year to $50.2 billion.

I'm always skeptical of studies funded by organizations looking to make a point. But IDC is a reputable outfit, and even if the study's findings are somewhat inflated, a lot of money is obviously being taken off the table. Walk around a marketplace in Asia, as I did last year, or do a little shopping on Craigslist or eBay and you'll find astonishing collections of obviously pirated software applications, not to mention videos and music CDs.

Interestingly, though, the study found that in 2008 the rate of PC software piracy dropped in about half (48) of the 110 countries studied, remained the same in about a third (36), and rose in just 16. Even in China, the poster child for software piracy, the rip-off rate has dropped some 10 percentage points since 2004, 6 points in India and Brazil, and 15 points in Russia.

Clearly then, antipiracy measures are working. And working pretty well. But the BSA, which represents the software industry, still favors ACTA. And some of the worst offenders -- countries like Georgia and Zimbabwe where they say 90 percent of the software deployed is pirated (not to mention parts of Eastern Europe) -- aren't part of the trade negotiations. So why crack down so hard on people in countries where piracy is declining?

You could lose your Internet connection -- without a trial
Last September, a coalition of more than 20 organizations, including the American Library Association, the Consumer Electronics Association, Intel, and Yahoo, submitted comments to the U.S. trade representative about ACTA. The comments expressed concern that elements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) could be included in ACTA without any of the safeguards available under the DMCA.

For example, while the language in the DMCA gives Internet service providers some latitude in deciding whether to terminate Internet access to online copyright infringers, ACTA could result in laws requiring ISPs to automatically disconnect infringers without any discretion, the note warned. While the DMCA leaves the decision to install traffic- and user-monitoring systems largely up to ISPs, ACTA could make such systems mandatory, they said. Seem far-fetched? It's already happening: France this week approved a law cutting off Internet accounts for people found to have made illegal downloads three times.

Great -- one more layer of intrusive, heavy-handed regulation sponsored by the geniuses of the music and movie industries, and the folks that want to protect Europeans from misshapen bananas.

I welcome your comments, tips, and suggestions. Reach me at bill.snyder@sbcglobal.net.

Share a File, Lose Your Laptop? - PC World

Copyrights & Campaigns: No settlement in Jammie Thomas case; retrial set for June 15 in peer-to-peer case

2009-05-15T07:18:00.001-07:00

Copyrights & Campaigns: No settlement in Jammie Thomas case; retrial set for June 15 in peer-to-peer case

No settlement in Jammie Thomas case; retrial set for June 15 in peer-to-peer case

Back to Duluth!
The eyes of the copyright world will once again be focused on that northern Minnesota burg after a court-ordered settlement conference failed to resolve the Jammie Thomas peer-to-peer infringement case -- the only one of the approximately 30,000 cases filed by the labels against individual p2p users that has actually gone to trial so far.
Reports Wired:

Thomas’ lawyer, Brian Toder, and RIAA lawyers met privately in a Minnesota federal court for two hours haggling over the case. No conclusion was reached (.pdf). Thomas has maintained she would never settle. A retrial is set for June 15.

“What they wanted to do, my client did not want to do,” Toder said in a telephone interview. He declined to disclose the RIAA’s financial demands.

The first Thomas trial ended in late 2007 with a verdict for the plaintiffs and a $222,000 statutory damages award against Thomas for infringing 24 songs. Thomas claimed that a mysterious lurker had used her wireless network to download the songs, but, as Wired deadpanned at the time:

Expert testimony from an RIAA witness...showed that a wireless router was not used, casting doubt on her defense that a hacker lurking outside her apartment window with a laptop might have framed her, he said.
One juror called Thomas a "liar" in a post-verdict press interview, and 2 wanted to impose maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work before the jury settled on the figure of $9,250. However, the court threw out the entire verdict after determining that his jury instruction on the so-called "making available" theory of liability was foreclosed by Eighth Circuit precedent.
June could be an awfully busy month for the labels' litigators; Judge Nancy Gertner in the Joel Tenenbaum case has told the parties to expect trial date as early as late June, though I suspect that delays produced by the webcast imbroglio will necessitate pushing that out.

Copyrights & Campaigns: No settlement in Jammie Thomas case; retrial set for June 15 in peer-to-peer case

How much did piracy hurt 'Wolverine' boxoffice?--THR, Esq. Entertainment & Media Law Blog

2009-05-15T07:12:00.001-07:00

How much did piracy hurt 'Wolverine' boxoffice?--THR, Esq. Entertainment & Media Law Blog

How much did piracy hurt 'Wolverine' boxoffice?

By Matthew Belloni

The opening weekend numbers are in, and the hottest question in the anti-piracy community has been answered...sort of..OK, not really.

As THR's Carl DiOrio reports, Fox's "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" pulled in an estimated $87 million domestically this weekend, making it a solid hit. Now the query that was first raised when the unfinished workprint of the film leaked on March 30th is center stage: what could have been?

The answer is unknowable, of course, and the file-sharing community will no doubt point to the big total as proof that piracy doesn't really hurt the studios, at least not when it comes to theatrical boxoffice. But a close look at the numbers suggest the leak indeed might have cost Fox. How much? Tons of variables are at work here; everything from mixed reviews to swine flu. But here are a couple purely speculative piracy loss scenarios:

$7.18 milllion -- Reports following the leak suggested that about 1 million people viewed at least part of the workprint. That number seemed low to us, given the publicity, the Web savvy of the film's core audience and how easy it is now to access torrent sites via Google. But accepting that number and multiplying it by $7.18, which is the average North American movie ticket price, the early availability might have shaved about $7.18 million off the opening weekend numbers. Caveats: Sure, many of those who cared enough to look at the leaked version no doubt donned their muttonchops and plastic claws to see the finished film on opening night. And plenty of lookie-loos never would have seen the film anyways. (Plus, the 1 million presumably refers to views worldwide, not just North America.) But the leak also contributed to some negative buzz about the film, which--like with Universal's leaked "Hulk" in 2003--reverberated beyond the pirate community ("Wolverine's" RottenTomato rating ended up at a splattering 38%).

$15.75 million -- That's the difference between the opening weekend domestic gross of "Wolverine" and "X-Men: The Last Stand." Brett Ratner's 2006 contribution to the series opened to a more impressive $102.75. Granted, that benchmark seems unfair because "X-3" opened over the Memorial Day weekend (its 4-day total was $122.9 million) and was riding high on fan support of Bryan Singer's well-received "X-2: X-Men United." But an argument could be made that a prequel about the series' most popular character, released as the summer kickoff in a year of recession-supercharged boxoffice, would have reached $100 million without piracy.

$14.1 million -- A better comparison for "Wolverine" might be the $102.1 that "Iron Man" pulled in over the same weekend last year. That comic book adaptation launched without the built-in franchise power that "Wolverine" has and without the recession boost but still managed to outgross it by an estimated 14.1 million. (Good reviews helped the Jon Favreau pic, but these movies are review-proof, aren't they?)

$00 -- What if the copyleft is right and piracy doesn't really impact opening weekends at all? Maybe the unfinished print acted as a massive tease for the final cut, something that primed the core audience and served as free publicity for everyone else. Or maybe audiences separate the experience of watching pirated movies online from the fun of seeing a big summer movie in the theater. We doubt it (and we never believed those rumors that Fox actually leaked the film itself to stoke buzz or create an excuse if the film fizzled). But look for the pirates to point to "Wolverine" and say the studios are crying, um, wolf, when they beat their drums about leaks hurting the bottom line.

As we said, this is all just speculation. That's the frustrating part about rampant piracy: there's no way to know how sharp "Wolverine's" boxoffice claws might have been.

RELATED: THR's Steven Zeitchik looks at the "mutating force" of piracy over at the Risky Business blog.

POST UPDATED WITH LINKS

How much did piracy hurt 'Wolverine' boxoffice?--THR, Esq. Entertainment & Media Law Blog

RealNetworks Files Antitrust Claims Against Hollywood -- Hollywood Studios -- InformationWeek

2009-05-15T06:47:00.001-07:00

RealNetworks Files Antitrust Claims Against Hollywood -- Hollywood Studios -- InformationWeek

RealNetworks Files Antitrust Claims Against Hollywood

The media player software maker's lawsuit reads like a conspiracy plot as it's impossible for any organizations other than the studios to sell DVD-copying software.

By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek
May 14, 2009 06:07 PM

RealNetworks, which is waging a court battle against several Hollywood studios over its DVD-copying software, has filed antitrust claims against the movie studios, accusing them of trying to prevent other companies from building products that let consumers legally copy DVDs for personal use.

RealNetworks filed the accusations Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, where it's battling an attempt by the studios to extend a court order barring the company from selling its DVD-copying RealDVD until after the legality of software is settled. The Motion Picture Association of America has sued RealNetworks accusing it of copyright violations. In addition, the DVD Copy Control Association, which licenses copyright-right protection technology for the MPAA, has joined the suit, accusing RealNetworks of violating its license with RealDVD.

RealNetworks filed its latest allegations in preparation for closing arguments in the current court battle over the temporary restraining order against RealNetworks. Closing arguments are scheduled for May 21.

Within the 36-page court document, RealNetworks claims the studios and the DVD CCA have conspired to make it impossible for any organizations other than the studios to sell DVD-copying software. "Without this illegal cartel, Real and others would be able to compete to provide consumers with products to enable them to gain more value from their DVDs, without having to pay again to make a fair-use copy of the DVDs they have already purchased," a RealNetworks spokesman said in an e-mail.

Under the fair-use segment of the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act, people can legally copy movies and music for personal use. RealDVD, which costs $30, makes it possible to copy a DVD onto the hard drive of a laptop, but does not strip the copyright-protection technology on the DVD, according to RealNetworks. In addition, RealDVD adds another layer of protection that prevents the movie file from being opened on any device other than the one it was originally copied to.

As part of its latest filing, RealNetworks is asking the court to bar the movie studios and the DVD CCA from anti-competitive activity and for monetary damages that would be determined later.

RealNetworks Files Antitrust Claims Against Hollywood -- Hollywood Studios -- InformationWeek

Not Enough Time in the Library - Chronicle.com

2009-05-14T06:39:00.001-07:00

"Research Literate -- so much better than information literacy -- IMHO -- HSM"

FIRST PERSON

Not Enough Time in the Library

Just because your students are computer-literate doesn't mean they are research-literate

By TODD GILMAN

As an academic librarian, I hear an awful lot of hype about using technology to enhance instruction in colleges and universities. While the very word "technology" — not to mention the jargon that crops up around it, like "interactive whiteboards" and "smart classrooms" — sounds exciting and impressive, what it boils down to is really just a set of tools. They're useful tools, but they don't offer content beyond what the users put into them.

Today we have hardware and software that facilitate communication, resource-sharing, and organization. We have computers attached to projection systems for lectures and demonstrations; social-networking and messaging sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter; virtual spaces like blogs and wikis in which to collaborate; course-management software like Blackboard/WebCT, Sakai, and Angel to supplement or even take the place of the physical classroom; and programs such as RefWorks, Endnote, and Zotero to keep track of and format bibliographies.

Oldsters tend to associate those tools with youngsters. Many faculty members, especially senior ones, believe they are less adept at using those tools than their students are. While that much may be true, the assumption that follows — that when it comes to technology, today's students need no faculty guidance — most certainly is not.

While college students may be computer-literate, they are not, as a rule, research-literate. And there's a huge difference between the two.

The fact that some professors do not recognize the distinction means they effectively assume that their students find themselves as much at home in the complex and daunting world of information as when they upload 25 photos from their iPhone to Facebook and text their friends to announce the latest "pics."

Academic librarians are eager to offer sessions for students on what we call "research education." But the mistaken assumption that students don't need it means that many professors don't ask us to meet with their students, or even respond to our enthusiastic offers to lead such sessions. Students don't need to be taught anything about working online, because they were practically born digital, right?

Research education is not tools education. Research education involves getting students to understand how information is organized physically in libraries, as well as electronically in library catalogs and in powerful, sometimes highly specialized commercial databases. It means teaching students to search effectively online to identify the most relevant and highest-quality books, articles, microform sets, databases, even free Web resources.

Students do not come to college armed with those skills, nor are they likely to be acquired without guidance. Yet students desperately need such skills if they hope to function effectively in our information-driven economy. As Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams opine in The Craft of Research: The "vast majority of students will have careers in which, if they do not do their own research, they will have to evaluate and depend on the research of others. We know of no way to prepare for that responsibility better than to do research of one's own."

Professors may need to be reminded that online searching requires a set of skills that are the strong suit of academic librarians — and that we are eager to impart those skills to students. Faculty members may also need to be reminded that developing those skills takes practice. Would professors assume that students possess the critical-thinking skills necessary to make sense of an early-17th-century document related to the Plymouth Bay Colony just because they grew up in Massachusetts?

Here, then, are some tips for faculty members on how to augment students' research skills.

Spend a class period on search strategies. Show students how to find their way around the library's electronic catalog (for books) and a few general databases such as Academic Search Premier, those in the WilsonWeb platform, and LexisNexis Academic (for articles). A librarian can conduct a session with your students on those sources and, more important, demonstrate effective search strategies to avoid frustration and wasted time. Make the session mandatory, hold it during class, and be sure to attend it, to show you mean business. Even better, teach the session with the librarian, or at least chime in to stress key points.

Take a tour. Introduce students to the physical spaces of the library, especially the reference desk, the reference collection and its contents, the periodical reading room, and the stacks — including how to read a call number. Believe it or not, many students' familiarity with their college or university library stops at the study spaces.

Reinforce the lesson with an assignment. Devise a for-credit assignment that echoes what you and the librarian have shown the students. It should emphasize key distinctions that they often forget, such as the need to search the online catalog for books but library databases for articles. You might also incorporate a component that challenges students to evaluate the quality of information they find, such as comparing the top results returned by a keyword search in Google with those returned in Academic Search Premier with the peer-reviewed box checked. Which results are more authoritative, and how can students tell?

Take it a step further. Perhaps you want to do more than require a single assignment, such as encouraging students to use library materials in support of arguments in their term papers. It would be good to assign them Chapter 3 (pp. 40 to 55) of the second edition of The Craft of Research (available for library purchase as an e-book, so students don't have to shell out extra). The chapter covers how to turn interest in a topic into a research question that's worth trying to answer. It should reduce the likelihood that students will set out to write a paper on "the history of rowing on U.S. college campuses" and move them instead toward an argument supported by convincing data about, say, "the role that athletics plays in U.S. college admissions."

In an ideal world, students should have multiple encounters with librarians, not just the standard 60-to-90-minute session that is most common now.

Faculty members in Yale's English department clearly recognize the growing importance of research education: They have just agreed to increase fivefold the number of undergraduates who will attend library sessions as an integral part of their introductory writing and literature courses (from 350 to roughly 1,900). Add to that our new "personal librarian" program, which pairs every Yale freshman with a Yale librarian, and you see the students themselves begin to be repositioned to value learning the craft of research. Let's hope this example encourages others to follow suit.

The more time students spend with us, the further they can go beyond the basics into larger conceptual issues. Once they have determined what makes a good research question in the first place, they can move on to ask themselves (and the librarian) what is needed to answer specific questions they want to explore, developing the confidence that comes from knowing they are looking in all the right places for answers, and actually finding what they seek.

Todd Gilman is the librarian for literature in English at Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library.

Not Enough Time in the Library - Chronicle.com

Scholarly Communication News

Public Policy Connections: YouTube Sends Users To Copyright School: Should Content Owners Have to Go, Too?

YouTube Sends Users To Copyright School: Should Content Owners Have to Go, Too?

SPARC introduces Open-access Journal Publishing Resource Index

©ollectanea

[kol-ek-tey-nee-uh]. Join the Center for Intellectual Property's Scholar, Peggy Hoon, in a discussion of current copyright issues.

Is E-Book Milestone Worth Cheering? – Deadline.com

Center Releases New Guide to Navigating Copyright Law - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Center Releases New Guide to Navigating Copyright Law

Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety

ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety January 21, 2010

Steinbeck and Guthrie Families Now Supports Google Book Plan - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com

Steinbeck and Guthrie Families Now Supports Google Book Plan

DigitalKoans » Blog Archive » Cornell Establishes Collaborative Business Model for arXiv Repository

archy

Open access isn't the same as free access (#scio10)

Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review

The time to send messages to the White House ended January 21

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 1/21/2010

At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 1/21/2010

UBC This Week « UBC Public Affairs

White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers -- Kaiser 327 (5963): 259 -- Science

Polymers - MDPI

Universities UK on Open Access, Metrics, Mandates and the Research Excellence Framework - Open Access Archivangelism

Impact of Open Access on Citation - Digital & Scholarly

Journalist, freelance and sci-fi authors groups take aim at Google book settlement | Technology | Los Angeles Times

Copyright Tips for Review Sites | PlagiarismToday

Blade Runner author's family takes aim at Google - Gadgets - NZ Herald News

French solution to illegal download and copyright infringement - tax Google and Yahoo | ZDNet Government | ZDNet.com

Association of Research Libraries :: ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication Webinar Series

Open Access - 148 Resources | EDUCAUSE

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Strong open access growth reported by Hindawi

Google And The New Digital Future

New Blog - Citation Help for ISU and Beyond

Highlights from International Open Access Week 2009 « ResourceShelf

The Accessibility Paradox | Peer to Peer Review - 10/29/2009 - Library Journal

Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers - Ars Technica

SPIE Digital Library - Subscription Information and Support for Librarians

Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)

Hardin News» Blog Archive » Open Access Publishing in the Health Sciences- The University of Iowa Libraries

Sorry -- Been Away !

Sorry -- had numerous work related issues which were so unforeseen that I had to drop everything to get done.

About OA week — Open Access Week - October 19-23, 2009

About OA week

URGENT! Intellectual Property Lawyer Marc Toberoff Goes After Disney/Marvel Deal & Other Studios For Jack Kirby Estate – Deadline.com

How do I make my research papers openly available without leaving out peer-review? « eResources at the University of Bradford

How do I make my research papers openly available without leaving out peer-review?

Automated Copyright Settlement Letters Apparently A Lucrative Business | Techdirt

Automated Copyright Settlement Letters Apparently A Lucrative Business

from the pay-up-or-we'll-sue dept

The Associated Press: High court won't block remote storage DVR systems

OASIS

Media Life Magazine - Supremes open way for remote DVRs

Has the Pirate Bay given up piracy? – SciTechBlog - CNN.com Blogs

Music Firm Sues Microsoft, Yahoo, and Real Networks Over Copyright Infringement | paidContent

Music Firm Sues Microsoft, Yahoo, and Real Networks Over Copyright Infringement

RIAA triumphs in Usenet copyright case | Digital Media - CNET News

RIAA triumphs in Usenet copyright case

The Ridiculous Copyright Situation Faced By Academics Who Want To Promote Their Own Research | Techdirt

The Ridiculous Copyright Situation Faced By Academics Who Want To Promote Their Own Research

from the don't-ask,-don't-tell dept

Kurtz on Measuring Effectiveness in the New Scholarly Communications : Christina's LIS Rant

Open Access: What are the economic benefits? « Jurn blog

Open Access: What are the economic benefits?

Majors Welcome P2P Win, But $1.92M Award Could Make For Bad PR

Royalties measure rocks Congress - Jeanne Cummings - POLITICO.com

Royalties measure rocks Congress

By JEANNE CUMMINGS | 6/16/09 4:12 AM EDT

It seems like a chicken-or-egg sort of argument.

Creative Commons Recognition « Open Education News

Creative Commons Recognition

June 9, 2009 · 2 Comments

U.S. Steps Up Inquiry of Google Book Settlement - NYTimes.com

U.S. Presses Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Book Settlement

Suffolk bar may have to back down over copyright suit | HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com

Suffolk bar may have to back down over copyright suit

Hoax academic articles, media meddling, and problems with 'open access' as it exists. | libcom.org

Last Updated: Tuesday, May 26, 2009 | 12:48 PM ET Comments58 Recommend65