Welcome to the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter
July 10, 2001
Free online medical journals for the third world
Six major publishers are giving third-world universities and laboratories
free access to over 1,000 electronic medical journals. The gift was
coordinated by the World Health Organzation, which said that "it is perhaps
the biggest step ever taken towards reducing the health information gap
between rich and poor countries."
The participating publishers are Blackwell, Elsevier, Harcourt General,
Springer-Verlag, Wiley & Sons, and Wolters Kluwer.
The program is the latest phase of the larger UN effort, Health
InterNetwork, which makes all kinds of electronic information, from
journals to software, freely available to underdeveloped countries. The UN
is working with private sector partners including WebMD Foundation and the
Gates Foundation, though these organizations are not paying the publishers
to provide access. The UN is also working with the George Soros' Open
Society Institute, whose eIFL Direct program has been providing free online
journal access to Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin American since 1999.
This is an elegant win-win situation. The publishers are giving away
access to electronic journals they already publish. This costs them
nothing. They gain readers in regions where they have few paying
subscribers, and they do enormous good. Makers of AIDS drugs are obviously
much more constrained in giving away their product.
It would be churlish to wonder why the publishers didn't do this long ago
and on their own initiative. But one may wonder whether publishers will
see similar win-win logic in granting free access to other populations
without the means to buy subscriptions, such as teachers, students, and
libraries.
David Brown, Free Access to Medical Journals To Be Given to Poor Countries
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33714-2001Jul8.html
> From _The Washington Post_
United Nations, Health InterNetwork
http://www.un.org/millennium/media/health_kit.htm
WebMD Foundation (doesn't yet mention this program)
http://www.webmd.com/
Gates Foundation (doesn't yet mention this program)
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/
Open Society Institute (doesn't yet mention this program)
http://www.soros.org/osi.html
eIFL Direct
http://www.eifl.net/
> From the Open Society Institute and EBSCO
* Postscript. In several stages this summer and fall, eIFL Direct will
announce the extension of its program beyond humanities and social science
journals to natural science and technology journals. For the dates and
cities of the several launch events, see this schedule.
http://www.soros.org/eifl/S_T-1.htm
----------
If you build it, and give it away for free, they will come
One unexpected benefit of putting scholarship online free of charge is that
experimental web services can write applications for it to test their
software, show off their cool features, and make themselves instantly
useful. For a couple of years, the huge, free Open Directory Project (ODP)
was the primary beneficiary of this kind of adoption. It seems that just
about every experimental portal and search engine has used ODP data, at
least in a demo, to show the world what it could do.
Now there is some evidence that PubMed is receiving this kind of mutually
beneficial attention.
Antarcti.ca is a search engine that provides a graphical map of pages in
its index. Each colored region corresponds to a category of information
and the size of each region is proportional to the number of pages in that
category. When you run a search, hits are mapped as dots on this landscape
of categories. Click on the dots to retrieve pages from the categories of
interest.
Compare Stuff is a search engine that lets you compare any two things on
any given parameter. For example, enter search terms for two things to be
compared (e.g. Reagan and Kennedy) and a term for the parameter of
comparison (e.g. leadership). If you like, add an extra term you'd like to
see in all files consulted (e.g. president). This will narrow the search
to the most relevant pages. Click GO, and Compare Stuff will run two
general internet searches, looking first for files containing the terms
"reagan, president, leadership" and then for those with "kennedy,
president, leadership". Then it will tally the hits from each search and
create a bar chart comparing the percentage of "reagan+president" sites
also containing "leadership" with the equivalent percentage for Kennedy
sites. The comparison is obviously crude, since a president's leadership
qualities are not directly evidenced by the number of web sites asserting
them. But it's an interesting first whack at an answer, especially for
questions on which frequency of mention is more probative, for example,
which restaurant or movie to try next, which party has the confidence of
investors or environmentalists, or which procedure has carries more
unwelcome side-effects.
Compare Stuff and Antarcti.ca both launched as straight search engines and
then created PubMed versions to show what they can do within a specialized
domain. Give them a try to see for yourself.
Antarcti.ca PubMed
http://pubmed.antarcti.ca/start
Antarcti.ca straight
http://antarcti.ca
Compare Stuff PubMed
http://compare-stuff.com/pubmed/
Compare Stuff straight
http://compare-stuff.com
PubMed Central home page
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/
Open Directory Project
http://dmoz.org/
----------
Awards for electronic scholarly journals
The Charlesworth Group has been giving an award for excellent design and
content in electronic scholarly journals since 1996. Starting this year,
the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) will
co-sponsor the award and add five new awards to the original one. There
are now ALPSP/Charlesworth awards for learned journals, for house journals,
for publishing innovation, for non-profit publishing, for publisher-library
relations, and for service to ALPSP.
==> The deadline for nominations is July 31. <==
Self-nominations will be accepted. Application/nomination forms are on the
ALPSP web site below. Winners will be announced at the ALPSP annual dinner
in London on September 12.
Charlesworth award (for past winners)
http://www.charlesworth.com/awards_e.shtml
ALPSP/Charlesworth award (for the 2001 awards)
http://www.alpsp.org.uk/awards2001.htm
* Postscript. The only other award I know of for excellence in electronic
scholarly journals is given by the International Consortium for the
Advancement of Academic Publication (ICAAP). Unlike the ALPSP award, the
ICAAP award is limited to free journals. ICAAP does not provide for public
nominations, but I am one of the nominators and judges for this award and
would be happy to hear your ideas. The next ICAAP award will probably be
given in December.
ICAAP award
http://www.icaap.org/award/
----------
New collections for historians
* The American Chronicles project is digitizing the full text of 20,000
American newspapers dating back to the 17th century. The resulting
searchable archive will carry historians well past the days of reading
unsearchable text on microfilm or disintegrating paper. Access will not be
free, but the site does not give prices. The archive plans to launch in
September.
American Chronicles
http://www.americaschronicles.com/home.asp
* The University of Michigan, Oxford University, and ProQuest (a.k.a. Bell
and Howell) are digitizing 25,000 early English texts. The texts will be
rekeyed (not scanned) under the supervision of Oxford's Bodleian
Library. Once digitized, the texts will not be available free of
charge. Indeed, for the first five years they will not be available at all
outside the institutions which contributed funds to the project. The first
1,000 texts should be ready by the end of the year.
Early English Books Online
http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/eebo/
Goldie Blumenstyk, A Project Seeks to Digitize Thousands of Early English Texts
http://chronicle.com/free/2001/06/2001062901t.htm
> From _The Chronicle of Higher Education_
----------
New on the web
* Charles W. Bailey, Jr., has added a weblog to his Scholarly Electronic
Publishing Bibliography. The weblog promises to be an important source of
timely news for this field.
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog
http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepw.htm
* The European Union has launched EUR-Lex, a portal for EU law. Available
in 11 languages, it offers all the primary documents in full-text, most of
them free of charge.
EUR-Lex
http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/
* Cite-base can now search the LANL electronic preprint (e-print) archive
and rank the results by the number of times a paper is cited --the
scientific version of the Google popularity ranking algorithm.
Cite-base search
http://cite-base.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search
LANL e-print archive
http://xxx.lanl.gov/
* The July 3 issue of _Learned Publishing_ has appeared, but I haven't had
time to look it over. I'll mention some of the individual articles in an
upcoming issue.
http://cherubino.catchword.com/vl=89539110/cl=18/nw=1/rpsv/catchword/alpsp/09531513/v14n3/contp1-1.htm
----------
Following-up
* In the June 1 issue, I summarized some of the law on linking and how it
might affect FOS. Here are some additional resources.
Stefan Bechtold, The Link Controversy Page
http://www.jura.uni-tuebingen.de/~s-bes1/lcp.html
Ivan Hoffman, Linking and Crawling Issues
http://www.ivanhoffman.com/linking.html
* In the May 25 issue I reported on Peekabooty, an encrypted P2P
file-sharing program to bypass web censorship in politically oppressive
countries. The makers were to have released the program last week, but
decided to sit on it a while longer. The current version does not
sufficiently protect the identity of users from state security probes.
James Middleton, Peekabooty goes into hiding
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1123512
----------
In other publications
* In the July 3 _Washington Post_, Ariana Eunjung Cha has an eye-opening
report on the reluctance of publishers to sell e-books to
libraries. Publishers fear that library patrons will make illegal copies
of borrowed e-books. As a result, some publishers have simply stopped
selling e-books to libraries, and others have made their e-texts expire
after a certain date. Quoting Stanford librarian Michael Keller,
"Ironically, what the digitization of books has meant so far is reduced
access to information."
http://www.washtech.com/news/media/10956-1.html
* At the same time, the July 7 _Milwaukee Journal Sentinal_ describes the
importance of e-books and e-journals to small libraries which are not
otherwise suited for wide or deep research.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/racine/jul01/r-libes08070701a.asp
* In the July issue of _First Monday_ Joyce Latham assesses the ability of
public libraries to retain ideological neutrality after the Children's
Internet Protection Act.
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_7/latham/
* Also in the July issue of _First Monday_ Nuala Bennett and Beth Sandore
describe the community-building experience of a digitization project for a
group of Illinois museums, libraries, and elementary schools.
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_7/bennett/
----------
<comment>
Thoughts on the Hague Convention
In the last issue I wrote about the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and
Foreign Judgments, which would require signatory countries to enforce one
another's legal judgments. While this would allow one country's copyright
judgments to be enforced world-wide, it would give the same reach to
censorship judgments. This is an issue on which commerce and liberty
conflict, and unfortunately the treaty is being negotiated by delegates who
do not acknowledge the conflict and who seem to care much more about
commerce than liberty.
Case One: A Chinese-American in New York writes a scholarly article
documenting repression in China. China sues for subversion in a Chinese
court, wins, and gets the U.S. to enforce the judgment. Case Two: A
Chinese student in Beijing sells a pirated copy of Microsoft
Office. Microsoft sues for copyright infringement in an American court,
wins, and gets China to enforce the judgment. Today, neither scenario
could occur. Under the Hague Convention, both could occur, and the
convention delegates are giving clear signals that they will tolerate the
first in order to get the second.
The scenarios are realistic in the sense that the U.S. and China are both
members of the drafting conference. They are also realistic in the sense
that China just sentenced one writer, Liu Weifang, to three years in prison
for writing an online article critical of the Chinese Communist Party, and
just conducted a secret trial of another, Huang Qi, for putting information
about the Tiananmen Square massacre on his web site.
http://www.nando.net/technology/story/28874p-501592c.html (Liu Weifang story)
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=7&id=37941 (Huang Qi story)
I can't get this out of my head. So without the excuse of breaking news
directly on the Hague Convention, here are some further thoughts.
Hegel said that history is the story of freedom. The history of the
internet to date bears him out. One of the major threads in the history of
internet has been the changing relationship between the most free nations
and the least free. The internet allows users to engage in unregulated and
sometimes encrypted and anonymous acts of information sharing,
conversation, cooperation, and collaboration. Citizens of the most free
countries can do this most freely, but even citizens of the least free
countries can do it better with the internet than without. Where the
internet has reached, it has been liberating. The problem with the draft
Hague Convention in a nutshell is that it not only halts these liberating
tendencies but reverses them. Under the Hague Convention, the least free
nations could halt the influx of unwelcome content and could export their
censorship and oppression to the most free nations.
All that China, Iran, Libya, or Afganistan need to stop unwelcome content,
and export censorship, is the authority to bring effective legal action
against authors and publishers in other countries. This is exactly what
the Hague Convention gives them.
Until now the internet raised the standard of freedom around the world,
requiring the least free nations to cope with uncensored expression
crossing their borders and occasionally arising from within its
borders. The Hague Convention will lower the standard of freedom around
the world, requiring the most free nations to cope with despotic legal
judgments crossing their borders and a treaty obligation to give them
effect. Until now, the least free nations were on the defensive; after the
convention, the most free nations will be on the defensive.
What's worse, the obligation to enforce freedom-curtailing legal verdicts
will be self-imposed. Citizens in the most free nations will not only have
to fight back against their new legal liabilities to foreign governments,
but against their own governments who think that world-wide enforcement of
censorship and intimidation is a price worth paying for world-wide
enforcement of copyrights.
The internet crosses national borders, but then so did print
publications. Once a nation accepts telephone service, however, it is
easier for it to keep proscribed print publications from crossing its
borders than it is to exclude internet content. That's why the internet
has been liberating. But that's also why we cannot return to the days of
merely national jurisdiction over freedom of speech. Something has to
give: either the protections for free speech in the most free nations or
the censorship rules in the least free nations. Multiculturalists can ask
which group deserves to prevail. But scholars who require academic freedom
require the freedom of the internet.
Of all the supposed threats to the internet --viruses, denial of service
attacks, the rise of advertising, the fall of advertising, skittish venture
capital, Microsoft's monopoly, government eavesdropping, commercial
eavesdropping-- the Hague Convention the most ominous. Yet it is barely
being discussed.
I'm repeating the links on the Hague Convention from the last issue so you
don't have to look them up. Use them to spread the word. I particularly
recommend the CPT page.
Lisa Bowman, Global treaty--threat to the Net?
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5093109,00.html
> From _ZD Net News_
Boris Grondahl, Your Court Or Mine?
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,27176,00.html
> From _The Industry Standard_
CPT page on the Hague Convention (many links to documents and critics)
http://www.cptech.org/ecom/jurisdiction/hague.html
> From the Consumer Project on Technology (CPT)
Members of the U.S. delegation to the Hague Convention
http://www.cptech.org/ecom/jurisdiction/haguecontact.html#us
> From CPT
Hague Convention home page (not up to date)
http://www.hcch.net/e/workprog/jdgm.html
* And here are a couple of new links.
Letter from Fred Weingarten and Miriam M. Nisbet of the American Library
Assocation, to Jeffrey Kovar, head of the US delegation to the Hague
Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments
http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/hague-jur-commercial-law/2001-June/000048.html
Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), Resolution on the proposed Hague
Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments
http://www.tacd.org/cgi-bin/db.cgi?page=view&config=admin/docs.cfg&id=94
James Love, Hague Diplomatic Conference Ends, Badly For Now
http://www.cptech.org/ecom/jurisdiction/badly.html
Richard Stallman, Harm from the Hague
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/hague.html
Tom Vogt, Harassment from the Hague
http://web.lemuria.org/DeCSS/hague.html
</comment>
----------
Conferences
If you plan to attend one of the following conferences, please share your
observations with us through our discussion forum.
* First DELOS International Summer School on Digital Library Technologies
http://www.iei.pi.cnr.it/DELOS/delos2/SummerSchool/1stschool.htm
Pisa, July 9-13
* Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/open-archives/intro.html
London, July 11
* First DELOS International Summer School on Digital Library Technologies
http://www.iei.pi.cnr.it/DELOS/delos2/SummerSchool/1stschool.htm
Pisa, July 9-13
* Biological Research with Information Extraction & Open-Access Publications
http://bioinformatics.org/bof/brie-oap-01/
Copenhagen, July 26
* International Summer School on the Digital Library
http://cwis.kub.nl/~ticer/summer01/index.htm
Tilburg, Holland, August 5-10
* The International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting
http://www.archimuse.com/ichim2001/index.html
Milan, September 3-7
* 5th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital
Libraries
http://www.ecdl2001.org/guest
Darmstadt, September 4-9
* DELOS Workshop on Interoperability in Digital Libraries
http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/delite/DelosWorkshop01/frame-delos2001.htm
Darmstadt, September 8-9
* Experimental OAI Based Digital Library Systems
http://notesmail.cs.odu.edu/faculty/zubair/workshop.nsf/OaiEcdlWorkshop?OpenForm
Darmstadt, September 8
==========
This is the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter (ISSN 1535-7848).
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Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters
Copyright (c) 2001, Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/copyrite.htm
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Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT