Welcome to the Free Online Scholarship (FOS)
Newsletter
December 19, 2001
Developments
* _Cortex_, a journal of the nervous system and behavior, has just freed
its contents, making its online edition free of charge to all readers with no
enforced waiting periods. The new policy is the work of the new editor,
Sergio Della Sala. _Cortex_ still publishes a print edition with a
subscription fee, but to coincide with the new access policy it has reduced the
subscription price. The journal is betting that free online access will
not significantly diminish its revenues. If it does, then non-subscribers
may have to wait a few months after the print edition appears before they have
free online access. _Cortex_ is published by Masson Italia, a for-profit
publisher.
Cortex home page
Guest editorial ("Viewpoint") by Stevan Harnad on the occasion of the
change of policy
* BioMed Central will institute processing charges for articles starting on
January 1. The standard charge will be $500 per article, though it will be
waived for authors from developing countries and in cases of hardship.
(PS: See my thoughts on this funding model from
FOSN for 9/6/01. My
views haven't changed in substance since then, but in temperature I've
definitely warmed to the BMC model. If access is to be free, then journal
operating costs must be paid by knowledge producers or third parties, not
knowledge consumers. Or, funders should pay for dissemination, not for
access. Hence, BMC is on the right track, all the more so for avoiding the
term "author fees" for these processing charges.)
* The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) library of images is now
available at a greatly subsidized price to UK institutions. The subsidy is
provided by JISC and applies to a new interface for the collection created by
the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN). The existing
interface, created by the Research Libraries Group (RLG), is still
available.
* In related news, the AMICO Library will also be distributed by VTLS Inc.,
a library automation company.
* Academic Press journal articles are now searchable through Scirus.
Scirus permits free full-text searching of texts that are not available for free
full-text reading or printing (see
FOSN for 5/25/01).
* Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) has completed its "Scientific Century"
project, the retroactive digitization of its collected bibliographic citations
and abstracts. The CAS online database now contains 20.5 million records
from 1907 to the present. The new historical content is part of the
standard CAS license and is not separately available.
* _Nature_ and three other journals have pooled their contents to create a
free online collection of research papers and reviews reflecting 100 years of
research on cell division. The costs are being picked up by Boehringer
Ingelheim, a drug company. The site title, "Web Focus on Cell Division",
suggests that this may become a series with other installments or foci in the
future.
* Internet Database Service (IDS) searches now produce hits with links
directly to full-text articles from Project MUSE, Ingenta, and
PsycARTICLES. IDS is offered by Cambridge Scientific Abstracts and is not
free.
* JAKE (the Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment) has moved.
Note the new URL.
* Congressman Mark Green (Republican from Wisconsin) believes that anyone
providing books to terrorists should be punished by up to 10 years in
prison. Asked for an example of dangerous books, Green mentioned
"textbooks on nuclear physics". Green is proposing a bill to close the
"loophole" in recent counter-terrorism legislation that allows the free
circulation of dangerous books. His bill would only punish those who
provide assistance or information "with the intent that [it] be used in carrying
out an act of terrorism". This clause would protect most librarians and
webmasters but not until they were grilled about their intentions by an FBI
agent, prosecutor, or grand jury. The ALA and ACLU are reserving judgment
until they know more about Green's bill.
* Yaga is a P2P distribution system for all kinds of digital content, from
music, video, and software to ebooks and documents. It has just added an
option to its service allowing content providers to price their work as they see
fit. If they choose to give away their work without charge, then anyone
may download it including non-subscribers to Yaga's basic service. If
priced, then only those submitting an electronic payment may download it.
This is novel, even if not very progressive for scholarship: an
infrastructure that provides neither free access nor priced access, per se, but
whatever access the participating providers would like --a bazaar in which FOS
providers might have a stall next to Elsevier, Disney, or Microsoft.
Yaga announcement
(Not yet available on the Yaga site)
Yaga home page
Yaga directory of ebooks and documents
* An English court has ruled that statements that are protected from
defamation suits when published in print might not be protected when republished
on the web. Part of the reason seems to be traditional deference to a free
press. (If so, it's oddly hide-bound to fail to include the online
press. If the press has a role to play in public affairs that justifies
this deference, then the role is independent of the medium in which it
publishes.) But part of the reason seems to be that the newspaper had
notice that someone regarded certain statements as defamatory and that it was
therefore "irresponsible" for the paper, even though protected, to republish
them. (Is the problem the republishing or the republishing in a medium of
much greater reach than print? Does the deference to a free press depend
on the limited visibility of print?)
* The European Union has decided to levy a value added tax (VAT) on web
downloads. The primary target seems to be games, software, and
entertainment. But the language in the EU press release is unqualified and
might apply as well to scholarly articles that are (otherwise) free to
readers. If so, the EU will undermine FOS with its right hand while
supporting it (through many IST and CORDIS initiatives) with the left
hand.
* The U.S. Supreme Court is temporarily accepting the electronic submission
of briefs and other documents. The reason is not to streamline operations
or permit searching and interlinking, but to minimize the danger of anthrax
infection or the loss of documents in post offices closed for anthrax
decontamination. Except for Bush v. Gore, which required expedited
hearing, this is the first time the court has allowed electronic
submission.
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New on the net
* The text-e online seminar has moved on to a new essay: The Future
of the Internet: A Conversation with Theodore Zeldin. The Zedlin
essay will be the subject of discussion until December 31.
* Summaries of the four major talks at the November Open Access Forum at
the British Library are now online.
* Most of the proceedings of the November ICOLC conference in Finland are
now online, with the rest to come soon. A large number of the papers are
FOS-related.
* Charles W. Bailey, Jr. has put version 40 of his Scholarly Electronic
Publishing Bibliography online. The new version cites over 15,000
articles, book, and other resources on- and off-line.
* The University of Kansas Anschutz Library has launched AmDocs, a free
online archive of documents for the study of American history. It's
organized by chronological period.
* On October 10, the ACM launched the online version of Computing
Reviews. This is roughly for computer scientists what the Faculty of 1000
is for biologists (see
FOSN for 11/16/01). The function is similar, to
guide working scientists through the wilderness of published research with short
reviews of the most notable new work, when these decisions are made by a large
community of experts hand-picked by the editorial board. The print version
of Computing Reviews is more than 40 years old, but has definitely improved in
its transition to the net. Registered users may customize a page
containing reviews of new articles in their specializations and sign up for
email notification of new articles as well as new hits on stored searches.
One puzzle: The site lists fairly steep subscription prices, but I was
able to get every service I tried for free.
* The Humbul Humanities Hub (from RDN) has launched My Humbul, a
customization option that lets users sign up for email alerts to new content in
their areas of interest and new hits matching their stored searches.
* The European Union IST Programme has launched TREBIS (Trial and
Evaluation of a Biodiversity Information System). It's a free online
natural history museum using state of the art database and digital mapping
technologies. The trial version focuses on the natural history of the
Austrian state of Voralberg.
* The IST has also launched the beta version of Renardus. Renardus is
a project to improve access to existing academic content on the internet.
It provides a unified interface and common search engine for distributed content
portals maintained by subject-matter experts throughout Europe.
* The European Union's 5th Framework Programme has launched VRCHIP (Virtual
Reality Cultural Heritage Information Portal), a free online archive of
Knutsford, England, with a virtual reality interface. "Users will navigate their
way around the virtual towns and through time and, with sound and animation of
vehicles, machinery and life providing realism, become immersed in an
environment which enhances the learning experience."
* Two Illinois colleges have received a grant from the Illinois State
Library to test and integrate ebooks into their libraries and English literature
classrooms.
* The Scottish Science Library and the Scottish Business Information
Service are closing. It appears that this decision was made without regard
to the adequacy of print or electronic alternatives.
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Share your thoughts
* INTERGRAF (the International Confederation for Printing and Allied
Industries) is conducting an online questionnaire on the future of print --or
rather 12 questionnaires for people with any of 12 different perspectives on the
question. Click on your primary job description and you'll receive the
questionnaire matching your position.
* The DNER Journals Working Group has created the first of a series an
online surveys to help it understand the serials requirements of higher
education institutions in the UK. The current survey asks about journals not
currently available through JISC licensing agreements. Replies will be
collected until December 24.
* The Canadian National Archives has put up an online questionnaire to help
with its Accessible Archives project. The project is to make the National
Archives more accessible online, and the questionnaire will help it meet user
priorities. Non-Canadians are welcome to fill out the questionnaire.
Replies will be accepted until March 2, 2002.
* The U.S. General Services Administration is redesigning the FirstGov
website. It has issued a public call for comments, suggestions, and bids
on running usability tests.
* Marin Hensel would like your comments on his library ebook lending
proposal, in which his company, Texterity, plays the role of providing MARC
records.
----------
In other publications
* In the January 2002 issue of _Learned Publishing_, there are several
FOS-related articles:
Peter Fox takes a closer look at what it will cost to preserve electronic
journals for the long term.
Andrew Odlyzko argues that scholarly communication is evolving rapidly
while scholarly journals are evolving slowly. If present trends continue,
then "print [journals] will be eclipsed" and non-traditional channels for
scholarly communication will replace journals. Recent data undermine the
early fears that internet growth will cause information overload and industry
hopes that scholarly journals are not substitutable. "To stay relevant,
scholars, publishers and librarians will have to make even greater efforts to
make their material easily accessible."
Joost Kircz outlines how scientific papers might evolve when released from
the constraints of print. He argues for a "different granularity" in which
the components of a modular publication might be separately and more
specifically peer-reviewed, have their own metadata (allowed by the DOI
standard), perhaps their own URLs, and their own sections in a modular
abstract. Relationships between published components, represented by
hyperlinks, can make significant contributions to knowledge in their own
right.
David Goodman describes Princeton's two-year experience receiving some
major journals only in electronic form. It has been so positive that
Princeton plans to expand the program, at least when the financial savings is
significant and when the publisher can provide "effective guarantees of
continuing access". In practice this has five dimensions: (1) providing
near 100% uptime, (2) allowing long-term retention of purchased issues without
new payments, and (3) assuring that rights will not be revoked e.g. if the
publisher is sold, (4) offering long-term digital preservation and access, and
(5) offering "very long-term" preservation and access, probably in some
non-electronic form.
Diana Rosenberg describes the INASP program, African Journals Online, which
provides free online access worldwide to abstracts and tables of contents of
scholarly journals published in Africa. She argues that the program is
inexpensive to maintain, once set up, but that it is only one step toward the
wider use of African journals outside Africa.
Jane Dorner explores what the rise of ebooks will mean for authors rights,
plagiarism, the concept of "out of print", niche markets, quality control, and
the exploitation of unwary authors by amateur or grasping epublishers.
* The January 2002 _Cites & Insights_ from Walt Crawford is now online
with its usual informative mix of library, book, and technology news and
reviews.
* In a December 18 article in _Silicon.com_, Sally Watson shows that
non-academic publishers are learning from academic publishers about aggregation
and forcing users to make painful all-or-thing decisions.
* In the December issue of _RLG DigiNews_ editor Anne Kenney interviews
Robin Dale (from RLG) and Meg Bellinger (from OCLC) on the RLG-OCLC
collaborative digital archiving initiatives.
* Also in the December _RLG DigiNews_, Margaret Hedstrom and Clifford Lampe
assess emulation and migration as two strategies for long-term digital
preservation. In their user test, they found no significant differences in
user satisfaction, object performance, or ease of use between the two
strategies.
* In the December _D-Lib Magazine_ there are several FOS-related
articles:
Christophe Blanchi and Jason Petrone propose a distributed interoperable
metadata registry. They argue that conversion middleware makes a single
syntax unnecessary and therefore is maximally accommodating to new forms of
metadata and minimally restrictive on compatibility.
Stephen Pinfield describes how officials at the University of Nottingham
studied arXiv and its use by physicists. Their purpose was to create an
institutional eprints archive at Nottingham with their eyes open to the many
issues it would raise --technical, economic, academic, legal, and
managerial. While there are differences between a disciplinary archive and
an institutional archive, much of the experience of the former is transferrable
to the latter. By summarizing the arXiv study, Pinfield has given other
institutions a shortcut to creating their own archives.
Hussein Suleman and Edward Fox propose to build on the success of the
Dublin Core and the Open Archives Initiative to create a framework for open,
interoperable, and extensible digital libraries. Basically they propose
that digital libraries should become OAI-compliant archives or networks of
OAI-compliant archives. Their contents and services can then be shared
through the OAI interface. What's "contentious" about the proposal, the
authors admit, is that it requires extending the OAI standard a bit.
Because the standard's simplicity is a major cause of its wide adoption, any new
complexity will be resisted. They argue that this extension is tolerable
because it will remain separable from the original standard, and justified by
the higher levels of library integration it will support.
Greg Karvounarakis and two co-authors describe RQL, their declarative query
language for RDF metadata. Such a query language has been a missing link
in the evolution of the semantic web.
Xiaoming Liu describes his DP9 software, which makes OAI-compliant archives
crawlable by major search engines like Google (see
FOSN for 11/26/01).
* The December issue of _Vine_ is devoted to ebooks and ejournals.
Several articles are FOS-related, but unfortunately only the table of contents
and some very short abstracts are freely available online.
* In the December issue of _Librarian's eBook Newsletter_, the editors have
written a report on the November NIST/NISO Electronic Book Conference in
Washington DC.
* The same issue contains a helpful, brief review of the five major ebook
publisher closings in recent weeks.
* The same issue also contains a brief story on Bookshare.org, a service
allowing the disabled to swap scanned books without having to seek permission or
pay royalties. Bookshare itself charges a small fee per ebook to defray
its costs. A 1996 amendment to U.S. Copyright law specifically
permits this sort of copying and distribution.
Bookshare.org
* In the December _Library Collection Development & Management_, James
Sweetland reviews the difficulties that make long-term digital preservation a
problem and recommends readings for those who'd like go further.
* In the December _ComputerUser_, Joe Farace goes over some of the nuts and
bolts of creating an ebook. He is refreshingly clear that one needn't use
any of the prevailing ebook file formats or dedicated hardware platforms except
to widen the potential market or audience for the book.
* In the September _Communications of the ACM_, 44(6) 48-52, Niv Ahituv
argues that the costs of protecting online information from non-paying users
will eventually lead most individuals and organizations to "give up the
effort". He sees signs of this happening already. Unfortunately the
phenomenon is general, and applies not only to scholarship but also to personal
information that individuals would like to keep private. Ahituv's article
is not free online, but the ACM does provide free online access to this review
by Brad Reid.
* In the September issue of _Vine_, Martin Radford criticizes electronic
journals that license to specific IP addresses rather than to institutional
employees, and shows how to use Squid on Unix to the latter job securely.
Only a short abstract of the paper is available for free online.
* The British National Preservation Office has put online a 12-page primer,
Managing the Digitisation of Library, Archive and Museum Materials.
----------
Following up
* In the last issue I reported that the DLF had commissioned Outsell, Inc.,
to study the information needs and usage patterns of university students and
faculty. Because other Outsell studies are neither free nor online, I
expressed the hope that DLF had reserved the right to make this report public
when it was finished. Dan Greenstein, Director of the DLF, writes to
assure me that, indeed, DLF will provide free online access to the report and
will deposit the underlying data with the ICPSR. At the same time he
included the URL for the original grant proposal to the Mellon Foundation, which
is funding the Outsell report.
* In the last issue I reported that a House subcommittee was holding
hearings on the U.S. Copyright Office's report that the DMCA did not need
significant revision. Now you can read the testimony of Marybeth Peters,
the Register of Copyrights. She is fairly accurate in summarizing the
criticisms of scholars, librarians, civil libertarians, and consumer
advocates. Then she replies, "We are not persuaded...."
* Federal prosecutors offered Dmitry Sklyarov a deal: they will drop
charges against him for violating the DMCA if he will testify against Elcomsoft,
his Russian employer. Sklyarov accepted the deal --facing 25 years in
prison if he didn't. Although Elcomsoft still faces DMCA charges, it is
pleased that Sklyarov himself has escaped legal danger. Elcomsoft's trial
has been set for April 15. Technically, the charges against Sklyarov have
been deferred, not dropped, and will be dropped if Sklyarov continues to
cooperate with the prosecution during the Elcomsoft trial.
Justice Department press release
Federal District Court decision freeing Sklyarov, including Sklyarov's
statement of his role in the "offense", December 13, 2001
David McGuire, Govt Will Free Sklyarov In Exchange for Testimony
Freed Dmitry Sklyarov will be home for the holidays
Michelle Delio, Russian Hacker Charges Dropped
U.S. to free Russian hacker on testimony
Jennifer Lee, U.S. Defers Digital Copyright Case Against Russian
Programmer
Jason Hoppin, Feds Drop Copyright Case Against Russian Programmer
EFF archive on the Sklyarov case
FOSN back issues on the Sklyarov case
* More on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision in the 2600 Magazine
DeCSS case (see
FOSN for 12/5/01).
Carl Kaplan writing in the _New York Times_ cites free speech advocates who
deplore the part of the decision holding 2600 Magazine liable for linking to
sites that violated the DMCA. They argue that publishing the same URLs in
a print newspaper would clearly be protected by the First Amendment. The
court found a constitutional difference between print URLs and live hyperlinks,
but of course the former become the latter when a print story is put
online. Journalists do not know when they face liability for writing a
news story about a copyright prosecution and providing links to the relevant
sites. This vagueness is itself a First Amendment problem with the recent
decision.
K. Matthew Dames writing for _LLRX.com_ argues that the decision against
2600 Magazine and the decision against Edward Felten both undercut the interests
of researchers and libraries. Quoting Peter Jaszi, professor of law at
American University: "I'm sorry that the judge didn't take more seriously
the real chilling effect that uncertainty about the scope of the DMCA tools
provisions is having on the scientific and academic communities, especially in
the field of computer science."
* The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) is still in
the wings, awaiting its turn for legislative action after Congress finishes
dealing with a series of post-9/11 economic measures. The SSSCA is the
radical extension to the DMCA which would require all computers to contain
government-approved security devices and which would make violations into
felonies (see
FOSN for 9/14/01). It's in the news this week because
industry leaders are quarreling among themselves about whether to achieve their
goal of total copy protection through the marketplace or through legislation
like the SSSCA.
Declan McCullagh and Ben Polen, A Call to End Copyright Confusion
Working draft of the SSSCA (August 6)
StopPoliceware.org (anti-SSSCA site)
----------
Catching up (old news I should have discovered earlier)
* Cheryl Martin maintains Psyche Matters, a free online collection of
bibliographies and full-text papers in psychoanalysis.
* The proceedings from the January 2000 ICSTI workshop in Paris on digital
archiving ("Bringing Issues and Stakeholders Together") are now online.
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Subscribing without loss of privacy
Now and then I get an email from a potential subscriber deterred by
Topica's intrusive questions about age, sex, address, and so on.
This is a sore spot with me because I don't use this information and wish Topica
didn't ask for it. I haven't switched hosts yet because I'm still looking
for one with all of Topica's virtues and none of its vices.
However, I can send anyone an email "invitation" to subscribe to the
newsletter. Replying to the invitation allows you to bypass all the
intrusive questions. If you're reading the newsletter on the web because
you prefer not to answer the questions required by the standard sign-up
procedure, then send me an email (peters [at] earlham.edu) and I'll send you an
invitation.
----------
Conferences
If you plan to attend one of the following conferences, please share your
observations with us through our discussion forum.
* Academic Institutions Transforming Scholarly Communications (SPARC/ARL
Forum at the ALA Midwinter Meeting)
New Orleans, January 18-23
* Intellectual Property and New Business Creation from Science and
Technology
Oxford, January 27 - February 1
* High Quality Information For Everyone And What It Costs
Bielefeld, February 5-7
* E-volving Information futures
Melbourne, February 6-8
* Book Tech 2002
New York, February 11-13
* ICSTI Seminar on Digital Preservation of the Record of Science
[No web site yet, but for registration info contact Barry Mahon, <icsti
[at] icsti.org>.]
Paris, February 14-15
* 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
* Digitization for Cultural Heritage Professionals: An Intensive
Program
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, March 10-15
* 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
* New Developments in Digital Libraries
Ciudad Real, Spain, April 2-3
* The New Information Order and the Future of the Archive
Edinburgh, March 20-23
* International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and
Computing
Las Vegas, April 8-10
* NetLat and Friends: 10 Years of Digital Library Development
Lund, April 10-12
* Creating access to information: EBLIDA workshop on getting a better
deal from your information licences
The Hague, April 12
* Information, Knowledges and Society: Challenges of A New Era
Havana, April 22-26
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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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FOS home page, general information, subscriptions, editorial position
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Guide to the FOS Movement
Peter Suber
Copyright (c) 2001, Peter Suber