Welcome to the Free Online Scholarship (FOS)
Newsletter
December 12, 2001
More on government self-censorship
* The U.S. government watchdog group, OMB Watch, has started an annotated
list of scientific and other information deleted from government web sites since
September 11.
If you're keeping track, the OMB Watch list now joins these two similar
lists already in progress:
* Most articles I've seen on this subject focus on the conflict between
keeping citizens informed and keeping terrorists uninformed. In this
December 8 story for the Fort Worth _Star-Telegram_, Jennifer Radcliffe focuses
on the worries and resistance of librarians.
* Postscript. While the government is deleting bona fide but
high-risk scientific information from its web sites, it has also taken the
trouble to translate and put online extensive portions of the Al Qaeda Training
Manual.
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Recent news on egovernment
I won't always cover developments in egovernment, but there has recently
been a spate of interesting news. Like scholarly articles, government
information is produced for the public good rather than profit. Hence,
many of the same arguments for free online access that apply to scholarly
articles apply to it as well. In addition, when government services are
available online, access by citizens improves even if digital infrastructure is
unevenly distributed, and the interactive net offers revolutionary possibilities
for democratic participation in government.
* Ministers and State Secretaries representing 28 countries issued a
statement on November 30 that egovernment should be a higher priority.
* Also on November 30 the European Union launched a series of egovernment
awards for all levels of government.
* Also on November 30 the Gartner Group released a study showing that staff
shortages threatened egovernment initiatives in the U.S.
* On November 15 the Center for Digital Government awarded Honolulu the
distinction of having the best egovernment of any large city in the U.S.
Plano, Texas, won for medium-sized cities, and Roanoke, Virginia, won in the
small city category.
* IT managers for local governments in Britain report that 28% of British
government functions are now online. Tony Blair has vowed to put all
government functions online by 2005, and the report says the government is on
track to achieve this goal.
* The Joint Center on eGovernance has been launched by the National Academy
of Public Administration and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University. The new center will encourage governments to make more of
their information and services available online.
* The Congress Online Project from George Washington University released a
report on November 1 concluding that the web sites of members of Congress do not
contain enough information, including such basics as the member's email address
and voting record.
* In late October, the Office of Mangement and Budget funded 22 initiatives
in U.S. egovernment.
* In late October the European Commission adopted rules to minimize the
barriers to the full access and use of public sector information produced
throughout Europe.
As part of its deliberations, the European Commission produced this Green
Paper on Public Sector Information In the Information Society.
Appendix 3 summarizes the situation in the U.S.
* The papers from the European Commission conference in Brussels on
egovernment (November 29-30) are now online.
* Postscript. Thanks to Richard Swetenham's QuickLinks, from which I
learned about most of the stories above.
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Developments
* The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) has just launched four new online
journals in macroeconomics. They are free for the time being but will soon
carry price tags. Bepress promises that the prices will be "at least 33%
below the disciplinary average" for economics.
* XML Publication has launched its namesake suite of tools for translating
standard desktop file formats into HTML. I don't know how good it is, but
Microsoft and Corel can definitely use the competition. XML Publication is
open source and distributed under the GNU Public License.
* Genias Benelux has released the Genias Virtual Media Publisher (G-VMP),
based on XML and other open standards. This looks like another program for
the growing list of programs to automate the operations, and hence lower the
operating costs, of ejournals. I assume it's expensive, however, since the
price is impossible to discover from the web site.
* The LANL Research Library has released version 2.0 of FlashPoint, a
cross-archive search engine specifically designed for MathSciNet, SciSearch,
BIOSIS, and the DOE Energy database.
* Lexis-Nexis has greatly enlarged Scholastic Universe and reduced the
price. Scholastic Universe is its database of law and news aimed at
secondary schools.
* Ovid will offer full-text access to 700 Kluwer journals early in
2002. The access is not free.
* ebrary now offers scientific, medical, and business ebooks from Wiley and
Greenwood, and the Penguin Classics Library. ebrary ebooks are free to
read and search online, but not free to print.
* A House subcommittee is holding two days of hearings on whether to modify
the DMCA in light of the August report on the statute prepared by the Copyright
Office. In its report, the Copyright Office supported virtually none of
the objections to the DMCA raised by scholars and librarians (see
FOSN for
8/31/01). The new hearings could be an occasion to rethink the wisdom of
dismissing these objections and leaving the DMCA intact, but the witness list
suggests that the subcommittee is more interested in hearing from the IP lobby
than advocates for readers, consumers, and libraries.
Brian Krebs and Robert MacMillan, House Subcommittee Revisits Online
Copyrights
DMCA Report by the U.S. Copyright Office
* The copyright treaty sponsored by the UN and WIPO was drafted five years
ago, but is in the news this week because Gabon's ratification gave it the 30
ratifications it needs to become law. The U.S. has already ratified the
treaty, but the 15 members of the European Union have not. (Their
ratification must be "all or nothing" which has prolonged their
deliberations.) The new treaty requires signatory nations to adopt
domestic legislation implementing the treating, including an equivalent of the
DMCA anti-circumvention clause. The treaty will take effect for
signatories on March 6, 2002.
Alexander Higgins, Web Copyright Treaty Set for March
Brian Krebs, Global E-Copyrights Treaty to Take Effect in March 2002
WIPO press release on the occasion of the 30th ratification
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New on the net
* The LibLicense discussion list has created a web page of initiatives that
provide free or affordable peer-reviewed online journals to developing
nations.
* On December 11, Google launched the first complete archive of usenet
newsgroups. For scholars who used usenet newsgroups for professional
dialog and communal reference help (before spammers and blowhards ruined them),
this a major FOS initiative. It is to usenet roughly what the Internet
Archive's Wayback Machine is to the web. The archive is integrated into
Google's existing structure of usenet groups, not a separate database. No
previous collection of usenet groups has offered the complete backlist back to
1981, the year usenet was created. To piece the whole backlist together,
Google had to arrange to use (buy?) portions of the archive held by many
individuals.
* The Electronic Resource Preservation and Access NETwork (ERPANET) has
launched. ERPANET is a major new initiative in long-term preservation of
digital content. It's a collaborative project by four universities in
Scotland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Italy, and funded by the European
Commission. In addition to preserving cultural heritage and scientific
content, it will offer a large database of best practices on digital
preservation itself.
* Chris Sherman and Gary Price are two indefatigable net scholars.
Chris writes about search engines and Gary about libraries; I regularly read
Chris' newsletter and Gary's blog and often glean FOS news items from
them. Now they've collaborated to produce a directory to the invisible
web, to follow up their recent book on the same subject. Online databases
that produce dynamic web pages on demand are "invisible" because they can't be
crawled by standard search engines. However, many have their own search
engines and don't require passwords or registration. A lot of academic
content exists on the invisible web, and most of the sites covered in this
directory are free. Check it out.
* The IMLS has put online the proceedings of a February conference on
libraries and museums in the digital world. The IMLS site includes the
agenda, resource list, and post-conference report. The conference papers
without these associated documents were previously published online in the April
issue of _FirstMonday_.
* The powerpoint presentations from the October Dublin Core and Metadata
conference in Tokyo are now online.
* Until scholars hold the copyright to their scholarship, national
copyright rules can limit its accessibility and utility. You need to know
the rules to work effectively to change them or simply to skate on the
edge. For either purpose, the new WIPO Guide to Intellectual Property
Worldwide will be useful. Look up a country and find up to date citations
to relevant domestic law and treaties (but not excerpts of the laws themselves)
and addresses and phone number of relevant organizations.
* Abamedia is digitizing and putting online a huge archive of Russian films
and photographs. More than 100 Russian government workers are
painstakingly writing searchable text to associate with each film and
photo. Already 25,000 films are searchable in Russian, 5,000 in
English. Abamedia earlier put online the Russian State Archive of
Scientific and Technical Documents. Both archives are free for
non-commercial purposes.
* TheScientificWorld has added methodsBASE to complement sciBASE.
This gives users online access to methods and protocols to complement existing
access to full-text articles. methodBASE is made by BIOSIS. Searches
and access to citations and abstracts at TheScientificWorld are free, but access
to full-text is not.
* TheScientificWorld has also launched worldMEET, a free online database of
scientific conferences. You can search the collection by keyword or create
a personalized subset with all the conferences from selected scientific
fields. worldMEET will also put conference proceedings online at no
cost.
* The Libraries of the University of Nevada at Reno have put online an
annotated list of tools and resources for editing and publishing online
journals, including some organizations and initiatives that support them.
* Matthew Eberle has put online his PubMed Javascript Feeds, which
syndicate PubMed search results. Right now the page contains six hardwired
feeds, but will eventually contain source code for doing it yourself.
----------
Share your thoughts
* The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DMCI) has released a newly revised
recommendation for the RDF/XML expression of the Dublin Core. It will
welcome public comment until January 7.
* JISC has put online a draft plan for an Information Environment (IE) that
would provide "secure and convenient access to a comprehensive collection of
scholarly and educational material". More specifically, the IE would
enable links between online information and learning resources, enable
downloading and use of online content without violating intellectual property
rights, and open up access to restricted resources. JISC invites comments
on the plan, which should be sent to <information.environment [at]
kcl.ac.uk>.
* The LANL Research Library is running a December-long trial of Columbia
Earthscape, a priced portal on the environmental aspects of earth science.
If you'd like to participate in the test and share your feedback, contact the
library.
* The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is looking for creative slogans
to help the general public understand the problems with the DMCA. If you
come up with a good one, email it to EFF at <slogan [at] eff.org>.
Winners get EFF T-shirts.
----------
In other publications
* Harvard University and Inera Inc. have put online their joint report on
ejournal archiving. The report investigates the question whether a common
DTD (Document Type Definition) for scholarly journals could be developed into
which different publishers and archives could translate their SGML files.
The investigators studied DTD's used by many major publishers of electronic
scholarly journals.
* In the latest issue of the _International Journal on Digital Libraries_,
Simon Buckingham Shum and two co-authors review ScholOnto, an ontology-based
digital library server for research documents and dialog about them. Only
the abstract of this article is free online.
* In the December issue of _First Monday_, Christopher Kelty looks closely
at the analogy between free software and free science (FOS) and the sense in
which "reputation" can replace money and ground a gift economy in the two
domains. He concludes that the informal rules that govern the gift economy
in science are complex and subtle, and that citations cannot do everything in
the economy of science that money does in the economy of goods and
services.
* Also in the December _First Monday_, Philip Mirowski looks at specific
ways in which changing copyright law and the commercialization of science
together endanger scientific research, publication, and even debate.
* In the November-December 2001 _Educause Review_, James Hilton debunks
some common copyright myths. In the end he argues that what is most
distinctive about the present age is not information processing but "viewing
information as property" and that this tendency "threatens scholars' ability to
conduct research and teach".
* In the November _High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine_, Arturo Montejo
Ráez and David Dallman summarize their work at CERN in using classification
software to automate the process of attributing keywords to physics
articles.
* In a fall 2001 article for the _National Coalition Against Censorship_,
the Free Expression Policy Project has summarized every study and test of
internet filters that it could find --and it found over 70 of them.
* In the latest issue of _Interlending & Document Supply Journal_,
Janet Brennan Croft describes what counts as a model license for interlibrary
loan and document delivery from electronic sources, discusses several examples,
and shows their advantages for both libraries and vendors.
* In the latest issue of the _IBM Systems Journal_, R. Mack and two
co-authors describe how knowledge management software can produce "knowledge
portals" for the "emerging digital workplace".
* In the same issue of _IBM Systems Journal_, T. Nasukawa and T. Nagano
describe how software for text analysis can be made useful for knowledge
mining.
* In the October issue of the _Bulletin of the Medical Library
Association_, Frances Chen and two co-authors study how online access affects
the print subscription prices to medical journals. Their data show that
percentage price increases were lowest for journals with no online access and
for journals in aggregates. Free online access to accompany paid print
subscriptions was formerly a popular model but has largely been abandoned.
The price variation among journals with similar online access rules suggests
that journals are still trying to figure out how much online access really costs
and how much the market will bear.
* In an October speech to the Colorado Library Association, Robert Martin
argued that librarians make a mistake to describe libraries as in "the
information business". That invites comparisons to the internet, which
libraries will lose, if not in reality then at least in popular
imagination. He calls on libraries to recall their functions in
communities, for hosting local events, for economic development, for enjoyment,
and above all for education.
* Outsell, Inc. has recently released one report of interest to FOSN
readers and started work on another. The first is a study of the market
for scientific, technical, and medical information (released November 19), and
the second will document the information needs and usage patterns of university
students and faculty. The second report was commissioned by the Digital
Library Federation (DLF) with funds from the Mellon Foundation. The first
report is neither free nor online. Let's hope the DLF has the right to
make the second one more accessible.
----------
Following up
* More news coverage of the DMCA defendants:
On the cluster of these recent decisions
* The French groups that originally wanted Yahoo to stop auctioning Nazi
artifacts, at least on web pages visible in France, have appealed the U.S.
decision against them to a higher U.S. court. The appeal will be heard by
the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. For the FOS implications of this
lawsuit, see
FOSN for 11/16/01.
* In the last issue I reported that JournalSeek and LinkOpenly will merge
into a new service called LinkFinderPlus, a library-based (as opposed to
publisher-based) reference linking system. A reader wrote in concerned
that LinkFinderPlus is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Elsevier. Is this
worrisome? Quoting Eric Heller, President of Openly Informatics:
"We've licensed JournalSeek and Link.Openly to Endeavor for their LinkFinderPlus
product; they've also been licensed to 2 other library automation
companies. We hope that having this data widely available to libraries
will make it easier for them to include free journals in their library-supported
information environments." Hellman plans to add information on ejournals
to the JournalSeek web site.
* GovNet is a proposed alternative to the public internet for sensitive
government information (see
FOSN for 10/12/01). In October the General
Services Administration (GSA) called for comments and bids on the idea.
When the comment period ended in late November, the GSA had received 167
responses from businesses willing to build parts of the network. The GSA
will evaluate the responses and report to the White House in February.
* AOL Time Warner is closing iPublish (see
FOSN for 5/7/01). iPublish
was partly an ordinary ebook division of a print publisher and partly an attempt
to harness an interactive web site to ferret out the good books that
conventional publishers were rejecting.
* In
FOSN for 7/24/01 I reported on the case of a Mexican banker suing
Mexican and U.S. journalists in a U.S. court for defamation. The
journalists had identified him as a drug lord and his suit seemed to be yet
another attempt at cross-border censorship. On December 10, the Supreme
Court of New York threw the banker's suit out of court, ruling that online
journalists in the U.S. have the same First Amendment rights as print
journalists. This means that defamation plaintiffs who are public figures
must prove actual malice, not mere falsehood. This cuts journalists the
necessary slack to write their stories without fear of lawsuits.
(PS: I cover this story because if journalists can be silenced or
intimidated by lawsuits, so can scholars.)
----------
Catching up (old news I should have discovered earlier)
* In February, Europe's Information Society Technologies Programme (IST)
funded a 30 month project to build The European Library (TEL), an interoperable
network of 10 digital libraries located around the continent.
* Thoemmes Press is publishing a free online Encyclopedia of the History of
Ideas. It adds new entries in real time as they are written.
(Free registration required.)
* MENALIB is a free online library of resources for Middle East and Islamic
Studies. It contains digital contents, which may be browsed or searched,
and citations to paper sources.
* Knovel is an online full-text archive of over 250 handbooks and databases
in engineering and science. It's not free but offers a one month free
trial.
* The Scottish Research Information System is a free online directory of
academic and industrial research groups, projects, and funding sources in
Scotland.
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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.
* The Electronic Library: Strategic, Policy and Management
Issues
Loughborough, December 9-14
* 4th International Conference of Asian Digital Libraries
Bangalore, December 10-12
* Academic Institutions Transforming Scholarly Communications (SPARC/ARL
Forum at the ALA Midwinter Meeting)
New Orleans, January 18-23
* High Quality Information For Everyone And What It Costs
Bielefeld, February 5-7
* Book Tech 2002
New York, February 11-13
* Electronic Journals --Solutions in Sight?
London, February 25-26
* International Spring School on the Digital Library and E-publishing for
Science and Technology
Geneva, March 3-8
* Database and Digital Library Technologies (part of the 17th ACM Symposium
on Applied Computing)
Madrid, March 10-14
* Computers in Libraries 2002
Washington D.C., March 13-15
* The Electronic Publishers Coalition (EPC) conference on ebooks and
epublishing (obscurely titled, Electronically Published Internet Connection, or
EPIC)
Seattle, March 14-16
* Internet Librarian International 2002
London, March 18-20
* The New Information Order and the Future of the Archive
Edinburgh, March 20-23
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The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter is supported by a grant from the
Open Society Institute.
==========
This is the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter (ISSN 1535-7848).
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Peter Suber
Copyright (c) 2001, Peter Suber