Excerpts from the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter
April 1, 2002
* IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy are collaborating on a Science
Grid. Grid computing makes data storage and processing power available to
users the way the electricity grid makes electrical power available to
consumers. The Science Grid will store about 1.3 petabytes of data
(equivalent to 200 times the content of the Library of Congress), and
support computation at more than 10 trillion calculations per second. U.S.
scientists should have access to the grid by 2004.
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/16918.html
* A beta or "first internet test version" of the Scientific Information
Service (SIS) is now online. SIS is a free online archive of biomedical
research methods that make animal experimentation unnecessary. It also
includes related biomedical information and research results. SIS is
funded by the European Commission.
http://ecvam-sis.jrc.it/
(Thanks to EuroCrisNews.)
* The UK's Re:source (Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries) has
given £22,500 to the National Council on Archives to fund Phase 2 of the
Access to Archives (A2A) project, which makes nine centuries' worth of
archival content from around the UK freely available online.
http://www.resource.gov.uk/news/press_article.asp?articleid=314
* The Text Encoding Initiative has approved and released version 4 of its
Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (FOSN for 8/7/01,
8/23/01). Version 3 has been in use since 1994. The new version is a very
extensive document providing XML tags to mark nearly every conceivable
aspect of a text that might have to be identified or processed by
software. The online edition of version 4 conforms to its own guidelines
and contains the tags necessary to process it with existing XML tools.
http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/
* The European Commission invites expressions of interest to help shape the
agenda for the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). The earlier Framework
Progammes not only funded research and technological development, but
funded ways to make their results freely available online. Expressions of
interest in FP6 will be accepted until June 7.
http://www.cordis.lu/fp6/eoi-instruments/
(Thanks to EuroCrisNews.)
* In the April issue of _Information Today_, Richard Poynder interviews
Elsevier CEO Derk Haank. Some highlights. (1) Haank explains the rapid
rise in journal prices through exchange rates and a vicious circle in which
library cancellations force publishers to recoup their costs from a smaller
subscriber base. Elsevier profit margins are decreasing. (2) His response
to frustrated librarians and researchers is to deliver more for the price,
not to decrease the price. "The long-term solution today...lies in
converting people to our electronic products, and then delivering a service
where people say, 'Wow!' If we can do this, then the money that our
customers spend with us will be perceived as reasonable." (3) He describes
the ScienceDirect licence as "too good to be true for users". (4) What
does he think of the Budapest Open Access Initiative? "We consider open
archiving to be in line with our policy of open linking, which we have
always supported." But doesn't this confuse standards of interoperability
with free online access? Perhaps, but "[i]f people feel unhappy and want
to develop alternatives, that is always possible. But is it wise?" He is
confident that open-access journals will not be able to cover their
costs. (4) He implies that Elsevier allows author self-archiving of
refereed postprints, but in fact it only allows the self-archiving of
unrefereed preprints. (5) He asks: if users are employed by institutions
that pay for their access to online journals, regardless of how much the
institution has to pay and regardless of how many fellow researchers must
do without, "[w]hat more would they want?"
http://www.infotoday.com/it/apr02/poynder.htm
* The April issue of _Learned Publishing_ is contains many FOS-related
articles:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?U6A223C9
Fytton Rowland, What do users want?
http://makeashorterlink.com/?E3D224C9
(Argues that different disciplines have different responses to FOS in part
because they differ in their percentages of journal readers employed
outside the academy. He also argues, as have Jean-Claude Guédon and
others, that researchers have an interest in FOS as readers that they do
not have as authors.)
Kent Anderson, The useful archive
http://makeashorterlink.com/?E5F262C9
(How moving archives online makes them more active and useful both for
publishers and readers.)
Keith Silver, Pressing the 'send' key --preferential journal access in
developing countries
http://makeashorterlink.com/?V21F51C9
(Reviews the major initiatives to provide free online access to developing
countries, tries to disentangle charitable motivations from PR, and
explores ways for the various initiatives to coordinate with one another to
make their projects more useful for end users.)
Walt Crawford, Free electronic refereed journals: getting past the arc of
enthusiasm.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q34362C9
(Tracks 104 free online refereed journals from 1995, and finds that more
than half are still publishing. While this is a survival rate he finds
promising, very few are included among ISI's indexed journals and very few
can be called significant in their fields. However, their survival rate
proves that the economics can work. "It's not easy, but it can work. It
does work....Libraries should pay attention to those journals and
librarians should be part of the efforts to expand the field. It is not a
total solution, but it is one counterbalance to the power of the
international journal publishers.")
Emily McElroy, Dos and don't for electronic journal management: some
advice for publishers
http://makeashorterlink.com/?R53F12C9
(Recommendations from librarians to publishers of ejournals, based on a
recent survey. We'd all be better off if publishers would adopt these
recommendations.)
Carol Hansen Montgomery, Print to electronic: measuring the operational
and economic implications of an electronic journal collection
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Y36F21C9
(What does it really cost libraries to migrate from print journals to an
all-electronic collection?)
Lara Carim, Serial killers: how great is the e-print threat to periodical
publishers?
http://makeashorterlink.com/?G59F32C9
(Tries to explain why online preprint archives have not disrupted
traditional journals. They are more central to some disciplines than
others, they do not use formal peer review, and they lack the "brand" of
established journals. They will become more significant, and threatening,
as we develop widely recognized metrics that measure the impact of
individual articles rather than whole journals.)
* In a story in the March 29 _HERO_ (Higher Education and Research
Opportunities in the UK), an anonymous author summarizes Stevan Harnad's
Self-Archiving Initiative and the Open Society Institute's Budapest Open
Access Initiative, and challenges journal publishers to respond. He/she
suspects that it's too late even for nimble and long overdue publisher
action to contain the FOS genie now that it is out of the bottle.
http://www.hero.ac.uk/inside_he/the_ghost_is_out_of_the_b1365.cfm
* The March issues of the _High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine_ contains
several FOS-related articles:
http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/6/index.html
Luisella Goldschmidt-Clermont, Communication Patterns in High-Energy Physics
http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/6/papers/1/
(Argues in favor of a system for exchanging preprints that takes advantage
of modern advances in rapid communication. If this sounds like old hat,
the reason is that Goldschmidt-Clermont envisioned and inspired the online
preprint exchanges we see to day in so many disciplines. She wrote this
article in February 1965,and for complex reasons it has not been published
until now. For the past 37 years it has circulated as a preprint, guiding
the work of many network engineers and science librarians, including her
own subsequent work. Goldschmidt-Clermont was for many years the Senior
Scientific Information Officer at CERN and a consultant to SLAC and MIT.)
Jens Vigen, New Communication Channels: Electronic Clones, but Probably
the First Steps Toward a New Paradigm
http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/6/papers/2/
(Explains why Goldschmidt-Clermont's article, above, had to wait 37 years
for publication and describes the role she has played in various FOS
initiatives.)
Heath O'Connell, Physicists Thriving with Paperless Publishing
http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/6/papers/3/
(Describes the history of online publishing in high energy physics back to
1974.)
Bernd Wegner and Michael Jost, EMIS 2001: A Portal to Mathematics in Progress
http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/6/papers/4/
(Describe the recent and ongoing emergence of the European Mathematical
Information Service.)
Renato Spigler, Peer Reviewing and Electronic Publishing
http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/6/papers/5/
(Compares and evaluates different methods of using the web to facilitate
the peer review of ejournals.)
* In the latest (undated) issue of the _Journal of Electronic Publishing_,
there are several FOS-related articles.
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/
Julie Martin and David Coleman, Change the Metaphor: The Archive as an
Ecosystem
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-03/martin.html
(Online archives are continuously changing. Their utility and future
depend on how we conceptualize them, and we should conceptualize them more
as dynamic ecosystems than as passive repositories.)
Heather Joseph, An Economic Model for Web Enhancements to a Print Journal
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-03/joseph.html
(An FOS success story from a society publisher. "By July 1999, the journal
found that by increasing its income from other sources and reducing the
dependency on institutional subscriptions, it was indeed possible to
consider offering the electronic journal free electronically.")
Susan Lukesh, Revolutions and Images and the Development of
Knowledge: Implications for Research Libraries and Publishers of Scholarly
Communications
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-03/lukesh.html
(Considers FOS the "fourth revolution" in the dissemination of knowledge,
which she traces to the writings of Stevan Harnad, and explores its
similarities to the third revolution, the Gutenberg press.)
* In the early spring issue of _Cites and Insights_, Walt Crawford responds
to Donald Hawkins on ebooks, recent web filtering developments, and the
last batch of papers from the Text-e symposium.
http://home.att.net/~wcc.techx/civ2i6.pdf
* In the Winter 2002 issue of _Issues in Science and Technology
Librarianship_, Leila Fernandez summarizes the results of survey of York
University scientists on their satisfaction with various current awareness
(CA) services. I'm fascinated by the possibilities for CA, and therefore
appreciated these details on what the York scientists use and what they
like. Even those using paper CA (like browsing journal TOCs in the
library) are enthusiastic about the possibilities for electronic CA when
more of the relevant literature is online. Most thought the services to
digest online scholarship for CA had not yet realized their full potential.
http://www.istl.org/istl/02-winter/article3.html
* In an issue of the _Rutgers Computer & Technology Law Journal_ that
appeared in November 2001, F. Gregory Lastowka argues that free online
access need not infringe or threaten copyright. However, current copyright
law tends to presume that copyright holders wish to limit access to their
work, and that reading, copying, and printing without paying are
infringements. Consequently, it overprotects online content and disregards
an entire class of copyright holders. In Section VIII of his article,
Lastowka shows how large the class of disregarded copyright holders is,
through a brief overview of the many kinds of free content on the
internet. In Section IX he offers some suggestions for amending the DMCA
to help (consensual) free access thrive alongside paid and limited access.
http://www.chaihana.com/Paper.pdf
Following up
To see past coverage of these stories in FOSN, use the search engine at the
FOSN archive.
http://www.topica.com/lists/suber-fos/read
* The Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services (NIWI) is a
free online archive disseminating scientific information in biomedicine,
the social sciences, history, and Dutch language and literature. It also
provides information on Dutch researchers in all fields and their research
projects.
http://www.niwi.knaw.nl/us/homepag.htm
(Thanks to EuroCrisNews.)
Conferences
If you plan to attend one of the following conferences, please share your
observations with us through our discussion forum.
* New Developments in Digital Libraries
http://www.iceis.org/workshops/nddl/nddl-cfp.htm
Ciudad Real, Spain, April 2-3
* The New Information Order and the Future of the Archive
http://www.ed.ac.uk/iash/archive.conference.html
Edinburgh, March 20-23
* Copyright Management in Higher Education: Ownership, Access and Control
http://www.umuc.edu/distance/odell/cip/copy_manage2002/
Adelphi, Maryland, April 4-5
* Global Knowledge Partnership Annual Meeting
http://makeashorterlink.com/?F21C3456
Addis Ababa, April 4-5
* What Scholars Need to Know to Publish Today: Digital Writing and Access
for Readers
http://library.albany.edu/symposium/
Albany, New York, April 8
* International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing
http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~srimani/itcc2002/cfp.html
Las Vegas, April 8-10
* E-Content 2002. Dreams and Realities. [On eBooks]
http://litc.sbu.ac.uk/econtent/
London, April 10
* NetLab and Friends: 10 Years of Digital Library Development
http://www.lub.lu.se/netlab/conf/
Lund, April 10-12
* E-Content 2002 (on ebooks)
http://litc.sbu.ac.uk/econtent/index.html
London, April 11
* Censorship and Free Access to Information in Libraries and on the Internet
http://www.db.dk/kon/temadag/Censurogytringsfrihed_eng.htm
Copenhagen, April 11
* International Learned Journals Seminar: We Can't Go On Like This: The
Future of Journals
http://www.alpsp.org/s120402.htm
London, April 12
* SIAM International Conference on Data Mining
http://www.siam.org/meetings/sdm02/
Arlington, Virginia, April 11-13
* Creating access to information: EBLIDA workshop on getting a better deal
from your information licences
http://www.eblida.org/conferences/licensing/licensing.htm
The Hague, April 12
* Copyright in the Private Sector: An Engine of Free Expression or a Tool
of Private Censorship?
http://www.cardozo.yu.edu/aelj/new_page_3.htm
New York, April 15
* Licensing Electronic Resources to Libraries
http://www.arl.org/scomm/licensing/pworkshop.html
Philadelphia, April 15
* United Kingdom Serials Group Annual Conference and Exhibition
http://www.uksg.org/conference.htm
University of Warwick, April 15- 17
* Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy
http://www.cfp2002.org/
San Francisco, April 16-19
* EDUCAUSE Networking 2002
http://www.educause.edu/netatedu/events/net2002/
Washington, D.C., April 17-18
* Museums and the Web 2002
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2002/
Boston, April 17-20
* Legal Guidelines for Use of Intellectual Property in Higher Education
http://www.oneonta.edu/conference/copyright/
Oneonta, NY, April 19
* OCLC Institute. Steering by Standards. (A series of satellite
videoconferences.)
http://www.oclc.org/institute/events/sbs.htm
OAIS, April 19. Metadata standards in the future, May 29.
* Information, Knowledges and Society: Challenges of A New Era
http://www.congreso-info.cu/venglish.htm
Havana, April 22-26
* Current Awareness Services on the Net
http://ce.fis.utoronto.ca/courses/cason.asp
Toronto, April 22 - June 3
* DAI Institute on The State of Digital Preservation: An International
Perspective
http://www.clir.org/agenda-digpres.html
Washington, D.C., April 24-25
* CLIR Sponsors' Symposium: New Challenges, New Solutions: Libraries for
the Future
http://www.clir.org/agenda_sponsorsymp.html
Washington, D.C., April 26
* The European Library: The Gate to Europe's Knowledge: Milestone Conference
http://www.europeanlibrary.org/
Frankfurt am Main, April 29-30
* WebSearch University
http://www.websearchu.com/
Stamford CT, April 30 - May 1; Washington DC, September 23-24; Chicago,
Octeober 22-23; Dallas, November 19-20.
* Council of Science Editors Annual Meeting
http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/events_01annualMtg.shtml
San Diego, May 4-7
* Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
http://arbor.ee.ntu.edu.tw/pakdd02/
Taipei, May 6-8
* DLM-Forum 2002. Access and Preservation of Electronic Information. Best
Practices and Solutions.
http://europa.eu.int/historical_archives/dlm_forum/doc/forum2002announcementrev2.pdf
http://www.dlmforum2002.org/angles/inscripcions.htm
Barcelona, May 7-8
* ContentWorld 2002 [mostly for commercial content]
http://www.contentworld.com/conference/2002conference/index.html
San Jose, California, May 13-16
* National Conference for Digital Government Research
http://www.dgrc.org/dgrc/dgo2002/
Los Angeles, May 19-22
* Libraries in the Digital Age 2002
http://www.ffzg.hr/infoz/lida/
Dubrovnik, May 21-26
* CAiSE '02. Advanced Information Systems Engineering
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/caise02/
Toronto, May 27-31
* Workshop on Personalization Techniques in Electronic Publishing on the
Web: Trends and Perspectives
http://www.dimi.uniud.it/~mizzaro/AH2002/
Malaga, Spain, May 28
* Society for Scholarly Publishing (AAP)
http://www.sspnet.org/public/articles/index.cfm?Cat=5
Boston, May 29-31
* Off and Wall and Online: Providing Web Access to Cultural Collections
http://www.nedcc.org/owol/owol1.htm
Lexington, Massachusetts, May 30-31
* Advancing Knowledge: Expanding Horizons for Information Science
http://www.fis.utoronto.ca/cais-acsi2002/
Toronto, May 30 - June 1
* Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2002
http://ce.byu.edu/cw/etd2002/
Provo, Utah, May 30 - June 1
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Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters
Copyright (c) 2002, Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/copyrite.htm
Received on Tue Apr 02 2002 - 00:59:28 BST