Welcome to the Free Online Scholarship (FOS)
Newsletter
November 16, 2001
The two longest issues of the newsletter came out in the last three
weeks. I wanted to give us both a break this week, but then I started
writing about cross-border censorship again. I can't promise that the next
issue will be shorter, but it will appear after a longer interval than the one
week which has been the recent average. I plan to take some time off to
enjoy Thanksgiving visitors.
With this issue, the newsletter subscriber tally breaks 800. My
deepest thanks, once more, to all of you who have forwarded copies to colleagues
or announced it in your own publications.
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More thoughts on cross-border censorship
In last week's issue I reported on the November 7 decision of a federal
district court in California giving Yahoo the protection of the First Amendment
in deciding what to put on its web site, even if its pages are served in a
country banning content of that kind. This is only the latest controversy
raising the question of cross-border censorship. The question arose
sharply last summer when the latest drafting conference ended for the Hague
Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments (see
FOSN for 7/3/01,
7/10/01). Here are some further thoughts.
French hate speech law prohibits the selling of Nazi artifacts. Yahoo
wants the right to sell more or less whatever its users want to sell, regardless
of who is offended. But since in fact Yahoo has decided not to sell Nazi
artifacts any more, let's focus on the conflict of principle embodied in this
case, not on the Nazi connection. Instead of selling of Nazi memorabilia
at a Yahoo auction, think about defending evolution against creationism in an
online science journal or documenting the Tienemann Square massacre in an online
history journal.
On November 20, 2000, a French court ruled that Yahoo had access to
technology enabling it to serve its Nazi artifact pages to all visitors except
those in France. There is technology for this purpose, called IP-tracking
software, but a panel of three experts (including Vinton Cerf) advised the
French court that it could not achieve better than 60% success at blocking
surfers from a given country. Some reports of the panel's recommendation
put the figure at 80%.
Let me focus for a moment on the seemingly minor point of the effectiveness
of IP-tracking software. The future of cross-border censorship may depend
on it. IP-tracking software identifies the geographical location of web
visitors. Web sites might use it to show different weather forecasts, news
headlines, advertisements, discounts, or insurance offers to surfers from
different locations. Yahoo could use it to block French users from seeing
its Nazi artifact pages. A history journal could use it to block Chinese
readers from its articles on the Tienemann Square massacre.
If it's true that IP-tracking software can't deliver better than 60-80%
success at identifying the country of a web visitor, then it's not accurate
enough to protect all French visitors from offense and to protect all non-French
visitors from loss of their free access rights. If so, then it doesn't
solve the problem.
In the absence of IP-tracking software, we face a stark choice with only
two options. First, countries like France lose to countries like the
U.S. Web authors and publishers in free countries can publish what they
like, and serve their pages worldwide. Countries that ban this content
would have to lump it and adapt. Freedom of reading and access would rise
to the level of the most-free nations. Second, countries like the U.S.
lose to countries like France. Countries that prohibit certain content can
enforce their prohibition against authors and publishers in other
countries. Countries that would like to protect the freedom of speech
would have to lump it and adapt. Freedom of speech would sink to the level
of the least-free nations. (Each of these options has variations that we
needn't consider here.)
The choice is a painful one because it means that, no matter what, some
nations will not be able to live by their own rules. To me this is only a
problem when the nation's rules have widespread public consent, as the French
hate speech rules probably do. But if this is the choice, then the
California court was absolutely right to decide in favor of freedom.
However, as IP-tracking software improves, this will be a false
dichotomy. There will be a third option, namely, publishing freely for
free countries and blocking certain content for less free countries at the
request of those countries.
On the one hand, IP-tracking software is an elegant solution to problems
like the Yahoo-France conflict. But on the other hand, this elegance
really amounts to making censorship technically and politically easy to
implement. If French censorship could only be implemented at the cost of
U.S. censorship, then the price is too high, and no one should be surprised to
hear a U.S. court say so. But if French censorship could be confined to
France, then France might persuade other nations to let it.
The latest generation of IP-tracking software is much better than the
French court and its panel of experts believed in November of 2000. One
company, Quova (maker of RealMapping and GeoNet) claims 98% accuracy in
identifying the country of origin of a web visitor or download request and 85%
accuracy for the city of origin. But it doesn't matter much whether these
claims are exaggerated. Eventually IP-tracking software will be very
accurate and courts will know it. The question is whether when that time
comes nations will agree to use it to allow censorship to exist in some
countries while free speech and a border-crossing internet continue to flourish
elsewhere.
I'm afraid we must conclude that freedom would be more secure if
IP-tracking software didn't exist. Then we'd always face the stark choice
between the most-free nations and the least-free. When those are the only
options, then we have a fighting chance at persuading a critical mass of
countries to join the most-free nations and realize the liberating promising of
the internet. IP-tracking software will allow islands of repression in a
sea of freedom. By mitigating the starkness of the stark choice, and
allowing deference to repressive nations, it will create a path of least
resistance that many nations will find irresistible.
Note, however, that on November 7 the California court tried to close the
gate to this middle path. It did not rely on the reported 60-80%
success-rate, and hence it is not liable to reversal when the true rate is known
or when the technology improves. The court ruled that because it is
unconstitutional for a U.S. court to enforce a French restraint on U.S. speech,
it is irrelevant whether the technology exists to allow a U.S. publisher to
comply with such a restraint. If the court's principle is sustained on
appeal, then we will face the stark choice without mitigation.
I'm also afraid, however, that the middle path of IP-tracking and deference
to repressive nations will ultimately prevail. U.S. courts don't want
France limiting the speech of Americans. But IP-tracking software gives us
a way to avoid that result; and when that result can be avoided, U.S. courts
might well recognize the sovereign right of France to control what French
citizens can do in France, and ask Americans to respect that sovereign
right.
Issues for the future: If a court in some nation (perhaps the U.S.)
tells a publisher to use IP-tracking software on its web site and block access
to users from a certain country, what grounds will the publisher have to
refuse? Is the right of free speech compatible with a rule requiring
speakers to limit the access of some listeners to their speech? Under such
a rule, speakers may still say whatever they like, but to a smaller audience
than the full set of web surfers; moreover, speakers will be conscripted to
censor their own work for the excluded portions of their audience. Can a
nation force its citizens to become censors over citizens of other
countries? Will censorship be implemented at the free end of the
transmission, by the speaker, or can we tell nations that wish to ban certain
content that they will have to find technologies to do it at the receiving
end?
RealMapping and GeoPoint (IP-tracking)
How IP tracking software works
NetGeo (finds the longitude and latitude of the host of a given domain
name)
Text of the Judge Fogel's decision for Yahoo (November 7, 2001)
EFF's page of links on the Yahoo case (small but growing)
* Postscript. The three members of the panel advising the French
court on IP-tracking were Vinton Cerf, Ben Laurie, and François Wallon.
After the French court ruled against Yahoo, both the non-French members of the
panel criticized the decision.
Report of Vinton Cerf's criticism
(Cerf made his criticism in an email to Agence France-Presse, which I have
not been able to find on the web.)
Ben Laurie's public statement
* PPS. If you live in a country likely to be blocked by someone's use
of IP-tracking software, then you can hide your nationality by logging on to the
net through a large multi-national ISP like AOL, or by using one of these
filters to hide your IP address.
Junkbusters
Zero Knowledge
* PPPS. There are many recent news stories and analyses of Judge
Fogel's decision in favor of Yahoo. Here are some of the better ones I've
seen.
Carl Kaplan, Was the French Ruling on Yahoo Such a Victory After All?
(Kaplan quotes constitutional law experts who argue that Yahoo's victory is
just a PR victory that adds nothing to its legal immunity from French
judgments.)
Tamara Loomis, Internet Companies Sighing With Relief, For Now
("Had the decision gone the other way, experts say, it could have paved the
way for a global meltdown of the Internet.")
Kieren McCarthy, US Judge's Nazi Net Ruling Turns Worldwide Law on its
Head
("By ruling that the company can't be held to account, [Judge Fogel] risks
provoking years of in-fighting between different countries' legal
systems.")
Troy Wolverton, Court Shields Yahoo from French Laws
(Quoting Mark Radcliffe, American lawyer for the French plaintiffs:
"This was a relatively easy case to decide [because of the First Amendment
issues.] Cases where you've got some economic regulation or copyright issue are
going be a lot tougher to justify." )
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Faculty of 1000
Biology Reports Ltd. and BioMed Central have launched Faculty of 1000, a
nifty service to help biologists find important articles in the jungle of
published literature. Hand-picked biologists from all specializations
recommend the best 2-3 articles they've read in the past month, post a comment
and a rating for each article, and classify the article by specialization and
kind of importance (novel finding, technical advance, interesting hypothesis,
important confirmation). The ratings of multiple recommenders are churned
into a single "F1000" number for each article. The service consists of
these comments and recommendations, not the articles themselves, although when
possible the recommendations will link to abstracts or full-text. Users
can sign up for regular email delivery of the top 10 recommendations in their
specialization.
The site calls itself "the next generation literature awareness tool" and I
agree. I'm excited because Faculty of 1000 is retroactive peer review and
because it goes beyond peer review for quality control to peer review for
resource identification and cutting through information overload. I'm
excited because it rates articles by their individual importance, independently
of the journal in which they were published. Every discipline ought to
have a Faculty of 1000.
My only quarrel is that after December 31, it will cost $50 for individuals
and $1500 for institutions. Like journal articles, these recommendations
and ratings are donated, and should find their way to researchers without a
toll-keeper. I don't want to be presumptuous about the back-end costs
here; they might be steep. But when we have open source tools for managing
this kind of community project, there should be imitators in other disciplines
that do not charge users. (Programmers, start your engines.)
Faculty of 1000
Jeffrey Young, New Online Service Lets Biologists Vote on Most Important
Articles
* Postscript. Phil Agre has managed an all-volunteer community web
filter "by hand" for years and has thoughts on how to automate the
process.
Also see this discussion of Agre's ideas.
* PPS. I praised Faculty of 1000 for using a form of retroactive peer
review. Why is this important? One reason is that it allows infinite
fine-tuning of the function of peer review. The general endorsement of a
general editorial board is not enough for many research purposes. The
endorsement of a group with your precise specialization, methodological
approach, or interdisciplinary interests will often be more helpful.
Moreover, new advances can make the original board's endorsement obsolete, or
relative to past knowledge; researchers will need the evaluations of
contemporary reviewers to help identify older literature useful to their
research. These evaluative judgments complement one another even when they
conflict, so there is no need to limit their number. Faculty of 1000 is
one step toward a system of evaluative filters from multiple perspectives from
which users may choose based on their own needs and projects.
I know that this will lead to neo-Nazi filters on historical literature,
and religious fundamentalist filters on biological literature. But
analogous problems already exist when these groups create their own
journals. As usual, the remedy is more speech and more education, not
less. Expect to see evaluative filters of evaluative filters.
Another reason why retroactive peer review is important is that it can
convert self-publishing, which bypasses peer review, into refereed publishing,
and thereby create one more short path to refereed FOS. By expressing the
hope that this becomes possible, I don't mean to give this method exclusivity or
even prominence. I'd like it to be one among many paths to refereed
FOS.
If you're worried about the multiplicity and competition of evaluations,
although it doesn't differ in kind from the situation today, then you might be
interested in my discussion in this 1992 essay.
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Removing scientific content from government web pages, cont.
In past issues I've reported on the removal of scientific content from web
sites in response to the September 11 attacks (see
FOSN for 10/5/01,
10/12/01). So far this has been voluntary. On November 8, the House
Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Subcommittee on Water Resources
and Environment, held hearings on whether it should become
involuntary.
In her testimony, Amy Smithson criticized the public law that encouraged
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to inform the public how the nation's
largest industrial plants used certain hazardous chemicals, and to publish the
worst case scenarios for industrial accidents and the risk management plans for
different scenarios. She praised the decision to take this information
offline after September 11 (see
FOSN for 10/5/01), and argued that the
government should close down sites with similar content still online. "In
this day and age, Washington can no longer afford to hand any interested
individual a road map to the chemical calamities they could cause with the toxic
materials located in communities nationwide....Immediately, these interest
groups must cease and desist activities that make data on hazardous materials
facilities available to widespread public view, removing this data from their
websites. Failing their voluntary cooperation, the US government should
take swift steps to close down the pertinent segments of these organizations'
websites and take legal steps to prohibit them from distributing this data in
the future on the Internet or by other means (e.g., mass mailings)."
Smithson is a senior associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center and director of
its Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project.
She was opposed at the hearing by Jeremiah Baumann of the U.S. Public
Interest Research Group. Baumann testified that "[t]he right to know is a
proven tool for increasing public safety....Restricting public access makes the
community less safe, because the ability of individuals and communities to
participate in safety decisions ranging from chemical management and hazard
reduction to site security and emergency response planning, has been reduced and
potentially eliminated."
Smithson's testimony
Baumann's testimony
In a related story, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), which
normally favors open government, wrote a public letter to Spencer Abraham,
Secretary of the Department of Energy (DOE), urging him to remove from the DOE
web site information on where to find U.S. nuclear power plants and plutonium
stockpiles. The DOE has at least temporarily complied.
POGO press release
* Postscript. Clearly, the information deleters here are motivated to
avoid the greater evil. To point out that this is the motivation of all
censors is not yet to find fault with their actions. To make this clear,
we can agree that terrorism is a greater evil than putting some information
behind a need-to-know firewall. After agreeing on this, however, there is
still a lot of room to disagree on which means are necessary to avert that
evil.
----------
Developments
* Project Gutenberg, the venerable (1971) free online collection of etexts,
has put out a call for donations of money, time, or resources. It recently
produced its 4,000th etext, and now claims to produce 100 new ones every
month. It has harnessed the labor of 2,000+ volunteers. By its own
estimate, it provides access to a trillion dollars' worth of etext --if you
assume that access to each of its etexts is worth $2.50 and that its online
texts are accessible to 1.62% of the world's population. It needs money
and/or legal services to finish the job of registering as a 501(c)(3) non-profit
corporation in all 50 states. This will enable it to raise money in all 50
states. It also needs money for the copyright research needed to prove
that certain books are in the public domain.
Call for help
Project Gutenberg
* HighWire Press is now the world's largest free online archive of articles
in the life sciences and overall second only on to the NASA's Astrophysics Data
System. HighWire now hosts 100 journals that provide free online access to
their full-texts, including back issues, and it recently hosted its 330,000th
free online article. Fifty HighWire journals are planning to add free
online access to their back issues in the near future.
(Thanks to David R. Krathwohl for pointing this out to me.)
* The Supreme Court has allowed Washington state's anti-spam law to
stand. The law prohibits email with misleading subject lines or
false return addresses, and gives the recipients a right to sue the
senders. This is good news for FOS if only because scholars, students, and
teachers will feel freer to sign up for email newsletters, current awareness
services, and other forms of electronic delivery of scholarly content, when they
can be confident that they will not be punished for their curiosity by
spammers. (Despite this FOS connection, I promise not to cover all spam
and anti-spam news.)
* In the first half of 2002, Adobe Systems will stop charging transaction
fees for use of its Content Server Application. This will make it less
expensive for publishers to distribute their ebooks on Adobe's platform.
At about the same time, Adobe will also merge its eBook Reader with its Acrobat
Reader, which use a common file format (PDF) and incompatible DRM
components.
* Wiley InterScience is republishing and "re-purposing" some of its print
books in electronic form, creating a database of scientific texts which will be
integrated into InterScience. It will start with 300 titles in early
2002. Apart from a free trial period, the service will only be available
to paying subscribers of Wiley InterScience.
* Columbia University Press has announced that it will publish a guide to
digital publishing. The guide will appear both in print and online and
will have sections for authors, editors, and publishers, and cover the entire
process of digital publication.
(Not yet on the CUP site.)
* OCLC FirstSearch now allows subscribing libraries to link from
FirstSearch to their own OpenURL-compliant servers. This allows libraries
to integrate FirstSearch into their other web resources and simplify the
interface they present to users.
* OCLC has offered to buy netLibrary and netLibrary has accepted the
offer. The deal only awaits the approval of netLibrary's Colorado
bankruptcy judge.
* InfoTrieve has launched a free table-of-contents email alert service to
complement its priced collection of full-text articles.
* Texterity Inc. has launched a "make Adobe ebook" service that not only
automates the production of the PDF text files and associated navigation tools,
but also distributes them to ebook vendors like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and
Yahoo.
* Aportis Technologies has released a $19.95 Windows program to convert
DOC, WPD, PDF, RTF, HTML, and plain ASCII files into a format readable on any
palmtop machine running the AportisDoc viewer.
* The U.S. federal government will organize its free online science at a
new portal, science.gov, in early 2002.
science.gov (currently an empty shell)
Background on the creation of this portal
(Thanks to Gary Price, VAS&ND, for pointing this out.)
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New on the net
* The online text-e seminar has moved on to a paper by Stevan Harnad.
Harnad's paper will be the focus of discussion from November 14 to November 30.
Read his paper and the comments, and consider registering to post your own
comments.
text-e seminar
Stevan Harnad, Skyreading and Skywriting for Researchers: A
Post-Gutenberg Anomaly and How to Resolve It
* _Ariadne_ is one of a fairly small number of scholarly journals willing
to publish articles on FOS issues. It has just put online the copy
deadlines for its next five issues.
* The University of Chicago Press asked nine of its authors to write essays
on life after September 11. They agreed and the result is a free online
anthology of thoughtful analysis. The site also functions as an
advertisement for 40+ Chicago books relevant to the September 11 issues.
These 40+ books are not online, although Chicago claims they are full-text
searchable online. When you search, however, you are told which books
contain the searchstring and nothing more.
* Barbara Semonche has put online highlights of last week's Pasadena
conference on the Internet Librarian.
* FORTH has released a suite of open source tools for the semantic
web. All the components are now available for downloading.
* Gordon and Breach / Harwood Academic Publishing is cancelling 64
scholarly journals which had not published issues "for some time" and has put
the list of cancelled titles online.
* Marian Dworaczek has put online the November 15, 2001, edition of her
huge and hugely useful Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of
Information.
* If an institution has a paid subscription to a print journal provided by
EBSCO, then it may obtain free online access to an electronic version through
EBSCO Online. However, librarians are unhappy with EBSCO Online and share
their grievances in this thread from the Electronic Resources in Libraries
(ERIL) listserv.
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In other publications
* In the November 16 _Chronicle of Higher Education_, Scott Carlson reports
that students are doing so much of their research online that there is
noticeable new elbow room in university libraries. This is not entirely
due to the growing adequacy of online research. A good deal seems due to
the widespread belief that online sources are more adequate than they are, and
that if a text isn't available online, then either it doesn't exist or it isn't
worth finding. (PS: FOS proponents above all should be wary of this
falling in to this trap; see the Ellen Roche story in
FOSN for 8/23/01.)
* Also in the November 16 _Chronicle_, Dan Carnevale reports that a bill to
extend the same fair use right to distance education courses that are enjoyed by
classroom courses may die in the Senate, a victim of the Senate's preoccupation
with economic and counter-terrorist legislation. (See
FOSN for
5/25/01.)
* The November 16 _Chronicle_ also published my letter to the editor in
response to John Ewing's October 12 article, in which he offered several
arguments against FOS. My letter is a slightly revised and shortened
version of the reply to Ewing I published in
FOSN for 10/12/01.
* In his November 11 column for _Planet eBook_ Sam Vaknin reviews the
debate among ebook publishers on whether to encrypt and copy-protect the text or
to set it free. He argues that the medium is at least as important as the
message, and that many users will always prefer printed books. To compete,
ebook publishers should "let go" and make their ebooks at least as
accessible.
* In the November 11 _New York Times_, Amy Harmon has an excellent overview
of the aggressive expansion of patent and copyright protections enacted over the
last decade. It covers the spectrum from AIDS drugs in Africa to publisher
resistance to the Public Library of Science. She quotes scholars and
business leaders who are starting to notice that, while intellectual property
rights were created in order to protect creativity and innovation, they now
function to stifle it. The article puts the FOS-related copyright issues
into a very wide context.
* In a November posting to _LTWorld_, the PALS Usage statistics working
group outlines its work in setting standards for collecting usage statistics for
online databases and journals.
* In a November 8 posting to _ClickZ_, Gerry McGovern tells us "how free
content has damaged the content industry". Of course he's talking about
non-academic content, but it's fascinating to read his a priori argument that
free content can never be high quality. (PS: Compare the quality of
the average paper in CogPrints, say, with the quality of the average episode of
_The Dating Game_.)
* In the November 1 _Library Journal_, Andrew Richard Albanese reviews
recent initiatives by SPARC, the Public Library of Science, arXiv, and a handful
of others, to produce free or affordable alternatives to traditional print
journals, and focuses on the role of librarians in these initiatives. He
concludes with an interview with Karen Williams, who leads the effort by the
University of Arizona library to publish the free online _Journal of Insect
Science_ (see
FOSN for 10/19/01).
* In the November issue of _EContent_ Robert McGarvey presents the views of
Dan Harple, CEO of ContextMedia. Harple argues for free online
*commercial* content, which is rarely done nowadays. Quoting Harple, "If
digital content never becomes monetizable, it doesn't matter to us. There will
still be a need to share, collaborate, and make disparate pockets of content
available within enterprises and across partner networks."
* The Research School of BioSciences at the University of Kent has put
online a review of the many methods for automating searches, or receiving
current awareness alerts, in biomedicine.
* In the November/December _Educause Review_, Kevin M. Guthrie reviews the
methods and importance of digital archiving. He concludes that archiving
for preservation is less sexy than digitizing for access, but is still less
expensive than print archiving and deserves a higher priority than many
institutions are giving it.
* Lev Ginsburg writes a strong review of Jessica Litman's _Digital
Copyright_ (see
FOSN for 10/19/01) in a recent but undated issue of UCLA's
_Journal of Law and Technology_.
* In a recent but undated article in _Foreign Policy_, Lawrence Lessig
argues that recent developments in intellectual property law threaten the
innovation and creativity that have marked the internet from its
inception. In the beginning, "...the core resources of the Internet were
left in a 'commons.' It was this commons that engendered the extraordinary
innovation that the Internet has seen. It is the enclosure of this commons
that will bring about the Internet's demise." The article is based on
Lessig's new book, _The Future of Ideas_ (Random House, 2001).
Also see Steven Levy's interview with Lessig about his new book in the
November 19 _Newsweek_.
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Share your thoughts
* The U.S. Department of Commerce has announced that Educause will take
over the management of the .edu domain. Educause has created a discussion
forum in which the public can request and discuss changes to the policies
governing the .edu domain.
* Educause also invites your nominations for its 2002 annual awards for
individual and institutional achievement with information technology in higher
education. The nomination deadline is February 15.
* Archives and Museum Informatics would like your nominations for the
museum site deserving its 2002 Best of the Web award. It will accept
nominations until February 15, 2002.
* Nelinet, a consortium of New England libraries and sponsor of the New
England Digital Library, has created an online survey to gather the thoughts of
libraries on digitization. Nelinet especially encourages replies from
libraries with materials relevant to New England.
* The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) would like your nominations for
its annual Pioneer Awards. Nominees should be individuals or organizations
that "have made a substantial contribution to the health, growth, accessibility,
or freedom of computer-based communications". The EFF will accept
nominations until February 15, 2002.
(The web site is for the 10th award in 2001, but in fact EFF wants
nominations for the 11th award in 2002.)
* The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is making a map of cooperative
collection development projects. If your institution has such a project
ongoing, consider filling out the CRL survey and putting yourself on the
map. The CRL deadline for survey responses is December 7.
----------
Following up
* In
FOSN for 10/19/01 when I was writing about the Office of Homeland
Security, it didn't have a web site. Now it does.
----------
Catching up
* The Digital Asia Library (DAL) is a very extensive, free, searchable and
browsable archive of online resources about Asia. It is especially strong
in the data useful for the social sciences such as education, political science,
sociology, business, economics, finance, demography, and some natural sciences
such as health and environment. Users may run keyword searches over
full-text, or field searches by subject, title, summary, author, or
publisher. Searches may be limited by subject category, region, resource
type, or language. The contents are selected by subject specialists and
catalogued by librarians. DAL is a cooperative venture of the Ohio State
University Libraries, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Libraries, and the
University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries.
----------
No comment
At Microsoft's November 7 shareholder's meeting, Bill Gates digressed from
his criticism of the open source software movement in order to take credit for
it. "Really, the reason you see open source there at all is because we
came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and
millions of machines."
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Conferences
If you plan to attend one of the following conferences, please share your
observations with us through our discussion forum.
* First Annual Meeting of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium
Pisa, November 16-17
* British Library and BioMed Central Open Access Forum
London, November 19
* NINCH Town Meeting: Copyright and Fair use: Creating
Policy
Eugene, November 19
* ARL Workshop for Publishers: Licensing Electronic Resources to
Libraries: Understanding Your Market
Philadelphia, November 19
* Electronic Journals within Art & Design: Flash in the Pan or
Here to Stay?
Northampton, November 21
* A Day in the Life of a Journal Publisher
Bradford, England, November 22
* Eighth Call for Proposals of the European IST Programme
London, November 27
* European Forum on Harmful and Illegal Cyber Content
Strasbourg, November 28
* Canadian Digital Library Symposium
Toronto, November 28-29
* Fall 2001 CNI Task Force Meeting
San Antonio, November 29-30
* eGovernment [in Europe]: From Policy to Practice
Brussels, November 29-30
* Digital Media Revolution in the Americas
Pasadena, November 29 - December 1
* Fourth SCHEMAS Workshop: Sharing [metadata] schemas
The Hague, November 30
* 2001 IST Exhibition and Awards
Düsseldorf, December 3
* School for Scanning: Creating, Managing, and Preserving Digital
Assets
Delray Beach, Florida, December 3-5
* Developing Digital Collections: Why, What, Who, How?
Southborough, Massachusetts, December 4
* Online Information 2001
London, December 4-6
* Second Meeting of the Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability
Standards (CETIS) Educational Content Special Interest Group (EC SIG)
Luton, December 7
* The Electronic Library: Strategic, Policy and Management
Issues
Loughborough, December 9-14
* 4th International Conference of Asian Digital Libraries
Bangalore, December 10-12
* Moving Beyond the Catalog: Bibliographic Access in a Web
World
Worcester, Massachusetts, December 11
* Academic Institutions Transforming Scholarly Communications (SPARC/ARL
Forum at the ALA Midwinter Meeting)
New Orleans, January 18-23
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The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter is supported by a grant from the
Open Society Institute.
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This is the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter (ISSN 1535-7848).
Please feel free to forward any issue of the newsletter to interested
colleagues. If you are reading a forwarded copy of this issue, you may
subscribe by signing up at the FOS home page or the FOS Newsletter
page.
FOS home page, general information, subscriptions, editorial position,
feedback form
FOS Newsletter, subscriptions, back issues
FOS Discussion Forum, subscriptions, postings
Guide to the FOS Movement
Peter Suber
Copyright (c) 2001, Peter Suber