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FOS Newsletter, 1/23/02
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Peter Suber
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Jan 23, 2002 09:13 PST
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Welcome to the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter
January 23, 2002
All three of the top stories in this week's issue would normally go in my
section of old news that I should have discovered earlier. I hope you'll
agree that they are important enough to promote.
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The Havana Declaration
In April 2001, two Latin American conferences on health science jointly
issued the Declaration of Havana Towards Equitable Access to Health
Information.
The Declaration opens with a strong statement of FOS
principle: "[S]cientific-technical information is a global public good
essential for social development, and...[its] universal and equitable
dissemination should be assured by national and international public
policies."
Another part of the declaration asserts that "the unjust, unnecessary and
avoidable" health differences among individuals and groups are due in part
to "inequitable access to health information and knowledge".
The remedy for both health inequalities and poverty is political
participation, which in turn depends on "access to information and
communication".
Apart from the statement of principle, one purpose of the declaration is to
elicit world-wide support for the Virtual Health Library, a free online
source of health information.
Declaration of Havana Towards Equitable Access to Health Information
http://www.bireme.br/crics5/I/declara.htm
(Thanks to Jan Velterop.)
Virtual Health Library / Biblioteca Virtual en Salud
http://www.bireme.br/bvs/I/ihome.htm
* The declaration was issued by the participants in the following two
conferences.
Second Regional Coordination Meeting of the Virtual Health Library
http://www.bireme.br/crics5/I/reuniao_program.htm
V Regional Congress on Health Sciences Information
http://www.bireme.br/crics5/I/homepage.htm
* Postscript. The Havana Declaration is an exemplary reminder that FOS
doesn't merely accelerate research. If it did, FOS would be of merely
academic interest. By accelerating research, FOS accelerates the benefits
of research, such as health care. By spreading knowledge, FOS spreads the
benefits of knowledge, such as informed political participation.
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The Street Performer Protocol
In the June 1999 issue of _First Monday_, John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier
proposed a simple new method to fund FOS. Readers or institutions with
means and good will, and interested in seeing a certain work finished and
freely available, place donations in escrow. The funds are released to the
author when the work is put into the public domain. Kelsey and Schneier
call this the Street Performer Protocol (SPP).
Actually, they didn't propose the SPP in order to fund FOS. They wanted to
fund works for which authors expected profit, like novels, music CDs, and
movies. If the profit from these works is drained by copyright violators,
then we need new inducements to keep creators creating. The SPP is
designed to fill this need.
Kelsey and Schneier were trying to solve a problem that has greatly
decreased in urgency since 1999. In 1999 it seemed that the internet would
kill copyright by enabling users to copy and distribute digital literature
and music ad lib. Today the aggressive legal and technical protection
schemes of the content industry are far more conspicuous and newsworthy
than their occasional penetration by hackers. But don't conclude that
Kelsey and Schneier were myopic. It's precisely because smart people in
1999 saw the internet as the death of copyright that the behemoth motion
picture and music industries mobilized to buy legislation to save their
assets. It's precisely because legislatures (and international
organizations like WIPO) rolled over for these industries that the future
of digital copyright has turned 180 degrees since 1999. It's precisely
because the view from 1999 caused a hugely funded sector of the economy to
panic, which in turn persuaded legislators to panic, that copyright law no
longer balances the interests of publishers and readers, but gives
everything to publishers.
Kelsey and Schneier briefly draw an analogy between the SPP and the funding
model for public television, an analogy that shows the FOS connection most
clearly. In both cases, some donors pay for all users. In both cases,
some up-front funding makes the output free for all. In both cases,
donations cover dissemination fees so that the content may be disseminated
without charging access fees (see FOSN for 1/1/02).
There are endless ways to modify the SPP, and Kelsey and Schneier suggest
many themselves. One they don't mention is to require free online access
without requiring the public domain. This variation would be more
comfortable to most scholars, who want a legal basis to stop plagiarists,
ensure proper citation, and prevent the publication of mangled versions of
their work. Public TV also suggests this variation. Street performances
are in the public domain, but Sesame Street isn't. The Public Library of
Science takes a middle ground, and wants scientists to hold the copyright
to their articles but grant an irrevocable license to the public domain.
There are two reasons to resurrect this excellent 1999 essay. The first is
that the SPP or public TV model is still worth trying. It isn't only for
an era in which copyright is circling the drain. It isn't only for
creators who hope to profit from their creations. It isn't only for street
performers, who don't need much subsidy. It also works for expensive
propositions like public TV, whose operating costs far exceed those of any
scholarly journal. It needn't be the model for every FOS provider, but it
might work for some.
The second reason is to be reminded of how quickly copyright law was
amended to squash the threat perceived to arise from the internet. How
quickly can copyright law be brought back into balance? Unfortunately, no
heavily funded industry is lobbying Congress to make this happen, just a
loose coalition of academics, librarians, music fans, intellectual property
law professors, and civil libertarians. Some of them represent a model of
music distribution that (whatever its merits) Congress has already
rejected. Some represent the future of research.
John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier, The Street Performer Protocol
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/index.html
Public Library of Science licensing agreement
http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/ploslicense.htm
* Postscript. We might return to the days when the future of copyright
looks very bleak. If we do, it will be through changes in technology, not
changes in law. And of course these changes in technology are perfectly
conceivable. It was technology, not law, that grounded the 1999 forecast
that the internet would kill copyright. Copyright law has since caught up
and now prohibits the threatening circumvention technologies. Moreover,
copyright law is fortified by increasingly sophisticated technologies of
its own. But on the other side, circumvention technologies continue to
spread through the network of users and continue to match the
copy-protectors in sophistication. The war is not over; on the contrary,
it is escalating. In this arms race, if the circumventionists are more
clever than the anti-circumventionists, even if copyright law is unchanged
by Congress and courts, then the future of copyright might again look as it
did in 1999. If the anti-circumventionists are more clever, however, or if
their friends in prosecutors' offices are diligent, we might go further
back, roughly to 1984.
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More on cross-border censorship
On November 20, 2000, a French court ruled that French laws against hate
speech prohibit Yahoo from selling Nazi artifacts on auction pages served
to French citizens. Just about a year later, November 7, 2001, a U.S.
court ruled that it would be unconstitutional for any U.S. court to enforce
a French restraint on U.S. speech (see FOSN for 11/16/01). The French
plaintiffs have appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (see FOSN
for 12/12/01); the appeal is still pending and we'll hear more about it in
due course. Remember that the law being hammered out here isn't just about
online auctions that cross national boundaries. It's about offensive
content of any kind that crosses national boundaries, such as online
scholarship about Tiananmen Square, sexuality, or evolution. It affects
scholars as much as antique dealers.
I recently learned that in October 2001, the Council of Europe was already
crafting another sort of response to cases of cross-border offense. In
October, the Council of Europe proposed to protect nations like France with
a protocol that prohibits hate speech and introduces a new method of
stopping it. Some signers of the protocol (call them "Type A" countries)
might agree to the binding prohibition of hate speech. Other signers
("Type B" countries) might have strong free-speech rules incompatible with
the binding prohibition of hate speech and could sign a weaker clause of
the agreement. The protocol would prevent Type B countries from
disseminating hate speech from internet sites within their jurisdiction
"aimed exclusively at an audience in a less permissive state", i.e. an
audience in a Type A country. See Document 9263, Section II.E.16 (link below).
Of course this wouldn't reverse the Nazi auction decision unless the U.S.
signed on to the new protocol. But what's interesting is the two-tiered
strategy: prohibit hate speech in one kind of country and in other
countries prohibit hateful broadcasts "aimed exclusively" at nations of the
first kind. The second tier allows more freedom than the first (broadcasts
to other audiences, broadcasts to one's own citizens), and consequently may
tempt nations to sign on that would not have signed on to a monolithic
strategy of prohibition.
The problem with the second tier is that it tells nations whose free-speech
rules aren't compatible with a ban on hate speech: don't use your freedom
to offend people protected by censorship elsewhere. Or, don't take
advantage of your freedom or let citizens of censored countries take
advantage of your freedom. Will a nation whose free-speech rules are so
strong that they do not permit the prohibition of hate speech agree to
cooperate with censorship in other countries? Time will tell.
The protocol doesn't exactly say that citizens of less free countries
wouldn't benefit from broadcasts from the more free countries, but it does
try to ban a subset of those broadcasts in deference to the lawmakers who
have decided that less freedom is better than more. In short, it puts
sovereignty ahead of freedom. How many countries with strong free-speech
rules will do the same?
Document 9263, proposing the new protocol
http://stars.coe.fr/doc/doc01/EDOC9263.htm
(Thanks to GILC Alert.)
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Priced online scholarship newsletter
I often cover developments in priced online scholarship. Sometimes these
developments are relevant to the broad topic of the newsletter ("how the
internet is transforming scholarly research and publication") even if not
to the narrow topic ("free online scholarship"). Sometimes they count as
progress over the recent past, even if not yet free. Sometimes it helps to
know what the other side is doing to thwart progress or delay the inevitable.
This week there are more stories than usual from the priced side of the
line. If I ran them as ordinary FOS news items, I'd run the risk of making
the newsletter look like it had changed its mission. So I'm putting them
in this special section where they can conveniently be ignored or
deleted. --I'm also thinking that the newsletter is getting too long to
include any of these stories in the future, unless there is some special
reason to include them or it's a dry news week.
* On January 18, Elsevier Science announced that institutions could now
subscribe to its ScienceDirect journals in electronic form only, if they
choose. Until now, institutions had to subscribe to the print edition to
get the online edition. When Elsevier acquired Harcourt General last year,
it acquired the Academic Press journals, 175 of which are also part of the
new "E-Choice" electronic-only offer. The remaining Academic Press
journals will be part of ScienceDirect and E-Choice by May.
http://chronicle.com/free/2002/01/2002012102t.htm
* ebrary has launched ebrarian 2.0 with selected customers. The new
version integrates better with other library management software and
removes limitations on the number of patrons who may view the same content
simultaneously. ebrary gives users free access for reading (partially
subsidized by the institutional subscriber), but charges users for printing
or copying. A large number of academic and university presses provide
electronic editions of their books through ebrary.
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb020121-2.htm
(Thanks to NewsLink.)
* Gale and ingenta have agreed to support a common search engine to range
over their two collections of online journals. This could mean that users
could search over 10,000 journals in all, though the total for a given
search will depend on the licenses held by the user's institution. The new
search engine will be called InfoTrac Plus and will launch this
summer. Viewing full-text hits will require an institutional license or
pay-per-view. The press release doesn't make clear whether searching
without reading will be free.
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb020121-1.htm
(Thanks to NewsLink.)
* The Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) and Scoop ReprintSource have formed
a joint venture. Publishers using CCC's DRM software, RightsLink, can let
their users order reprints directly from Scoop --at a price, of course.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?C2C26525
(Thanks to Online Publishing News.)
* Infotrieve has signed up the American Psychological Association, Gordon
and Breach, and Thieme. Infotrieve users may now order pay-per-view
articles from all these publishers.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z5E23225
* OCLC has three new digitization services: the Digital & Preservation
Co-op, the Digital Archive, and the Digital & Preservation Resources Centers.
(Thanks to NewsLink.)
Digital & Preservation Co-op
http://www.oclc.org/digitalpreservation/about/co-op/
("Co-op participants will work together to develop educational resources on
standards and best practices for digitization and preservation and to
provide access to a growing body of networked digital collections worldwide.")
Digital Archive
http://www.oclc.org/digitalpreservation/about/archive/
("Choose the type of storage you need for each collection. Retain the
rights to your collection. Assure long-term preservation. Rely on
standards-based archiving to ensure long-term access. Reduce the costs....")
Digital & Preservation Resources Centers
http://www.oclc.org/digitalpreservation/about/centers/
("Services range from basic reformatting to metadata creation, text
conversion and mark-up and delivery of web-ready packages of digital
collections.")
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Developments
* SciDev.net is a new non-profit free online source of science news and
research "relevant to sustainable development and the social and economic
needs of developing countries". It's an outgrowth of a web site hosted by
_Nature_ since 1999. In its new incarnation it was launched on December 3,
co-sponsored by _Nature_ and _Science_, in association with the Third World
Academy of Sciences.
http://www.scidev.net/
(Thanks to Paul Pival.)
* Starting this month, the full-text of _Physics Today Online_ (PTO) will
be accessible only to members of the American Institute of Physics
(AIP). Only selected parts of the online journal will be freely accessible
to all. Neither the PTO nor AIP web sites explains the new policy.
http://www.biblio-tech.com/UKSG/S_PD.cfm?alert=91
(Thanks to Serials eNews.)
* JISC has launched the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR),
a program to support access to institutional content in higher
education. It is currently soliciting proposals from UK institutions. It
prefers projects that use the harvesting of metadata to support data
services. The proposal deadline is February 28.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub02/c01_02.html
* JISC has also launched Exchange for Learning (X4L), a program to take
advantage of earlier investments in digital academic content by making it
available for learning (as opposed to research). Like FAIR, X4L is also
soliciting proposals with a deadline of February 28.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub02/c02_02.html
* HighWire Press now supports a Topic Map, a graphical browsing tool that
lets you navigate through the HighWire contents (301 full-text journals) by
viewing all the indexed topics as colored boxes and their connections to
one another as gray lines. Click on a topic and it moves to the center of
the window, surrounded by its sub-topic and super-topics. Double-click on
a topic and it opens in your larger browser window. The software is from
Inxight (see FOSN for 8/23/01 and 11/9/01). Definitely cool.
http://highwire.stanford.edu/
(Thanks to eLib.)
* eXist is an open source XML database. The code for version 0.7 has now
been released and may be downloaded from the site.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/exist/
(Thanks to El.pub Weekly.)
* The Computer Systems Policy Project (CSPP) has issued a public statement
seeking a balance between copyright owners and consumers in the further
evolution of copyright law and DRM software (FOSN for 10/26/01). (PS: The
CSPP is backed by heavyweights like IBM, Intel, Compaq, Dell, Hewlett
Packard, and Motorola. If you think that these companies have an interest
in one-sided DRM, to protect their own IP, realize that this is one issue
on which the content and entertainment industries are much more radical
than the technology industry, forcing tech associations to speak for
moderation.)
http://makeashorterlink.com/?V5EF2125
(Thanks to C-FIT.)
* In this year's Internet Villain competition, the only three nominees are
government agencies. The contest is sponsored by the UK's ISP
industry. (PS: When will the U.S. have its own version of this contest?)
Matt Looney's ZDNet story on the contest
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2102741,00.html?rtag=anchordesk
The Internet Villain contest
http://www.ispaawards.org.uk/html/vi_internet_villain.asp
* China now holds ISP's responsible for subversive political content on web
sites and in private emails. ISP's must turn "sensitive" content over to
authorities and delete any web content on prohibited topics. Among the
prohibited content is anything that hurts China's reputation. (PS: Hence,
the new ruling will not be announced on Chinese web sites.)
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,49855,00.html
(Thanks to Freedom News.)
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New on the net
* Public Knowledge now has its own web site. (It formerly had a section of
David Bollier's site.) PK describes itself as "a public-interest advocacy
organization dedicated to fortifying and defending a vibrant 'information
commons' --the shared information resources and cultural assets that we own
as a people." Among its FOS-related projects are making copyright law
serve art, culture, democracy, and science.
Public Knowledge home page
http://www.publicknowledge.org/
(Thanks to Doug Bennett.)
Public Knowledge projects
http://www.publicknowledge.org/projects/
* Ken Frazier of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, libraries, has
written an open letter to UW faculty explaining why the library must cancel
some journals. It's an excellent introduction to the serials pricing
crisis for faculty who haven't quite tuned in yet. The letter closes with
some suggestions about how faculty can help alleviate the problem.
http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/journalcuts.htm
(Thanks to the ERIL list.)
* Gerry McKiernan has launched IDEALS, "A Registry of Emerging Innovative
Augmented Digital Library Services". This is categorized list of links to
digital library services designed to help patrons find, use, and manipulate
digital information.
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/IDEALS.htm
(Thanks to the lis-elib list.)
* The proceedings of the NISO Workshop on Networked Reference Services
(Washington DC, April 25-26) are now online.
http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/netref.html
* A report summarizing the April/May 2001 workshop on ebooks in Australian
libraries is now online.
http://www.alia.org.au/conferences/public/2001/papers/hutley.joseph.saunders.html
(Thanks to NewsAgent.)
* El.pub Weekly has put online its summary of electronic publishing
initiatives and funding opportunities under the EU's 5th Framework
Programme. (PS: If you've been baffled or deterred by the sheer size of
the 5th Framework Programme, this is a good overview.)
http://www.elpub.org/top020.htm
* Peter Ludlow has put online 29 of the 33 essays from his print anthology,
_High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace_
(MIT Press, 1996), plus most of the prefatory matter, all the appendices,
and 33 supplementary readings not in the print edition.
http://semlab2.sbs.sunysb.edu/Users/pludlow/highnoon.html
(Thanks to C-FIT.)
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Share your thoughts
* Last week I reported that the Gates Foundation had picked CLIR (Council
on Library and Information Resources) to administer its annual million
dollar award, Access to Learning. This week CLIR seeks applicants and
nominations for the award. Nominees should be libraries or comparable
organizations, outside the U.S., that have been "innovative in providing
free public access to information". The deadline is April 15.
http://www.clir.org/pubs/press/gates2.html
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In other publications
* In a January 25 story in the _Chronicle of Higher Education_, Scott
Carlson describes how the Supreme Court's June decision in New York Times
v. Tasini (FOSN for 7/17/01) has affected scholarship. Rather than pay
freelance writers to make their print stories accessible in electronic
archives, many newspapers are simply deleting the stories from their online
archives. As a result, the newspaper archives are now much less reliable
for scholars. Quoting David Kennedy, professor of history at
Stanford: "This was exactly the fear of those of us who signed the
[amicus] brief [for the publishers] --that this would create an inferior
online source." Stanley Katz, professor of history at Princeton, supported
the writers but agrees that the outcome has been "devastating....Oh God,
it's just terrible....The people who are worst hit are the social
scientists." Historians studying a particular region can still travel to
that region to read paper archives, but historians and other social
scientists trying to compare many regions have little choice but to use the
electronic archives. Steven Tepper, also of Princeton, has been studying
controversies about artworks in many different cities: the post-Tasini
purge "really biases the results --the difference between 12 cases and
eight cases can be really important when you're doing statistical
analysis." Most newspapers contacted by the _Chronicle_ would not even
provide a list of which articles they have deleted from their online archives.
http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i20/20a02901.htm
* In the January 23 _Chronicle of Higher Education_, Jeffrey Young
describes the initiative by the Big 10 and University of Chicago to
distribute ebooks and ejournals published by any member to all the other
members free of charge (FOSN for 12/26/01). (PS: If a dozen universities
can make this agreement, why can't 1,000? Why not an open "treaty" that
admits new signatories at any time?)
http://chronicle.com/free/2002/01/2002012301t.htm
* In the January 21 _O'Reilly Network_, Richard Koman interviews Brewster
Kahle, creator of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/webservices/2002/01/18/brewster.html
(Thanks to Gary Price's VASND.)
* In the January 21 issue of _The New Yorker_, James Surowiecki reflects on
the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, other recent acts of aggression
against the public domain, and Lawrence Lessig's attempt to mobilize
opposition to them.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?R2062505
(Thanks to The Filter from the Berkman Center.)
* In a January 17 article posted to the _O'Reilly Network_, Andy Oram
reviews the state of 2600 Magazine's legal prospects in light of its recent
defeat in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. 2600 was found guilty of
violating the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause for publishing the DeCSS
source code and linking to other sites that did the same (see FOSN for
12/5/01). This is one of the best accounts of the DMCA for non-lawyers
I've seen --perhaps because it agrees with my view that the
anti-circumvention clause cannot be construed as "content neutral".
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/1068
(Thanks to the Cyber-Rights list.)
* In the January 16-17 _Planet PDF_, there are two articles of interest to
those studying the history of PDF.
Bernd Zipper's interview with John Warnock on the past, present, and future
of PDF
http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=1841
An electronic reprint of John Warnock's 1991 essay on "Camelot", the
technology that became Adobe/PDF
http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=1851
* In the January 15 _Open Source Schools_, Patrick Bryant describes how
he's combining homegrown open source software and public domain texts for
his Ph.D. dissertation in English literature. He's making an electronic
edition of Emily Dickinson's correspondence. "One important goal for the
project is to establish a loose set of recommendations and protocols for
how to create similar editions and make them inter-operable."
http://makeashorterlink.com/?U2A91225
* In a January 15 article in _United Press International_, Sam Vaknin
explores the future of ebooks, especially in light of the recent demise of
many ebook publishers. "Paradoxically, e-publishing's main hope may lie
with its ostensible adversary: the library. Unbelievably, e-publishers
actually tried to limit the access of library patrons to e-books. But,
libraries are not only repositories of knowledge and community centers,
they are also dominant promoters of new knowledge technologies. They are
already the largest buyers of e-books."
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=15012002-114354-4715r
* In a January 9 note from EPS, David Worlock gives a positive review of
the BioMed Central method of funding free online access to its
journals. The funding model "has several neat effects....[It] provides
additional value to institutions, which they can offer to researchers who
they seek to recruit, and provides an inducement to publish that aligns
with the institution's needs as well as the individual's career
requirements. And, of course, it preserves the free and open access policy
which is clearly close to contributor/user perceptions of good practice."
http://makeashorterlink.com/?O4952605
(Thanks to LibLicense.)
* In the January 7-14 issue of _The Nation_, Mark Crispin Miller identifies
the 10 largest media corporations and exactly what properties they
own. (PS: If you thought media consolidation was incendiary hype, this
will be an eye opener.)
http://www.thenation.com/bigten/
(Thanks to The Filter from the Berkman Center.)
* The January issue of _D-Lib Magazine_ contains several FOS-related articles.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january02/01contents.html
Suzana Sukovic reports that libraries are increasingly involved in text
encoding projects. She argues that, despite appearances, this is congruent
with traditional library roles, improves the functionality of texts, and
aids information retrieval.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january02/sukovic/01sukovic.html
William Arms and seven co-authors describe NSDL (National SMETE Digital
Library) and the lessons learned in implementing it to date. They argue
that interoperability can be achieved among cooperating sites if all adopt
the same standard, but that this is difficult to arrange. For a
heterogeneous collection of collections, like NSDL, it makes sense to
achieve interoperability at some "levels" and not necessarily at
others. Movement to higher levels can take place over time as costs drop
or incentives rise. (The OAI standard is one of the lower levels and they
recommend it as a minimum.)
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january02/arms/01arms.html
Tony Gill points out that there are many digitization projects, but little
harmony of digitization standards. He describes the joint effort by UKOLN,
CIMI, and Re:source to work out international digitization standards.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january02/gill/01gill.html
Hilary Berthon and two co-authors describe the Safekeeping project, a
subset of PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) in which selected
resources on digital preservation are themselves preserved in a
distributed, permanent collection.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january02/berthon/01berthon.html
Michael Nelson and B. Danette Allen wanted to know how well digital
libraries support long-term access to their contents. They picked 20
digital libraries (some leading FOS archives like PubMed and CogPrints) and
50 digital objects from each library. Then they set a robot to check the
availability of each object three times a week for a year. At the end of
the year, 31 objects, or 3.1%, had become unavailable. The article breaks
down the results by library. (PS: I'm sure the authors are right that
this rate of loss is, as it ought to be, lower for digital libraries than
for the general web. But is 3% a year a disturbingly high number for
digital libraries, or a reassuringly low number? What do you think?)
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january02/nelson/01nelson.html
PS: Nelson and Allen don't give comparable data on the loss rate for the
general web, perhaps because no one has collected these data yet. The
closest study I've seen is the OCLC analysis of "IP address volatility" for
1998-2000. OCLC put the rate at about 45% per year.
http://www.oclc.org/news/research/webstatistics.shtm
* In the January issue of _American Libraries_, David Dorman writes about
the rapid rise of OpenURL. SFX has made it popular. NISO likes
it. Openly Informatics likes it. OCLC likes it. A growing list of
commercial publishers like it. It even has a theme song.
http://www.ala.org/alonline/ts/ts102.html
(Thanks to Shelflife.)
OK, I wanted to find the OpenURL theme song too. But when I clicked on the
link, I found two full-length videos without helpful labels. Sorry, I'm
too busy to run this story to the ground. (There goes my Pulitzer.) If
you find a better URL, please let me know.
http://www.astralwerks.com/fbs/woc/
* In January, Steven Clift put online a revised version of his July speech
to the International World Futurist Society, "The Future of
E-Democracy: The 50 Year Plan."
http://www.publicus.net/articles/future.html
(Thanks to C-FIT.)
* In the December issue of _Policy Perspectives_, the Knight Higher
Education Collaborative has written a summary of its March 2001 conference,
Roundtable on Scholarly Communication in the Humanities and Social
Sciences. The conference was sponsored by the Association of Research
Libraries (ARL), National Humanities Alliance (NHA), and the Knight
Collaborative. The shortest way to characterize this piece is to say that
it's the best single article I've seen on the special FOS issues faced by
the humanities and social sciences, and the reasons why most FOS
initiatives are concentrated in the natural sciences or STM fields.
Abstract of "Op. Cit."
http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/cat.pl#V10N3
(If this doesn't take you directly to it, click on the online catalog for
_Policy Perspectives_ and then on the first article in the list.)
Full-text of "Op. Cit."
http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/pp-pubs/V10N3.pdf
(Free registration required. Go the abstract, above, for the registration
option.)
ARL press release on the article
http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0201/msg00033.html
(Thanks to LibLicense.)
* In a recent but undated article in _Physics Today_, Spencer Weart tells
the story of the Center for the History of Physics, a print library with a
growing free online collection.
Spencer Weart, Preserving the Heritage of Discovery
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-55/iss-1/p28.html
The Center for the History of Physics
http://www.aip.org/history/
----------
Following up
* Last week I quoted a line from a January 6 D.C. Denison article in the
_Boston Globe_: "The Internet may be the world's greatest library, but
let's face it: All of the books are scattered on the floor." Now I find
that in a December 17 column posted to his web site, Gerry McGovern used a
similar line: "Unfortunately, the Web is a library that very often has the
books on the floor and the lights turned out." Did Denison copy from
McGovern? Is this a commonplace that I never heard before? I'm not asking
because I suspect plagiarism, but because I like the line.
McGovern's 12/17/01 column
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2001/nt_2001_12_17_design.htm
(Thanks to Shelflife.)
* Last week I wrote about Golan v. Ashcroft, a challenge to two provisions
of U.S. copyright law that shrink the public domain. In November, David
Horrigan profiled the co-plaintiffs in the case, Lawrence Golan and Richard
Kapp, for the _National Law Journal_. If you didn't believe that rules of
law enforceable in the U.S. could actually withdraw works from the public
domain and grant them retroactive copyrights, then read this. Golan and
Kapp are orchestral conductors. Kapp used to be able to buy sheet music
for works by Stravinsky and Shostakovich for under $100 per work. Now that
these works have been yanked from the public domain and retro-copyrighted,
he can't buy them at all and can't rent them for less than $1,000 per
work. Since the rental period is only for one performance, this amounts to
$1000 per work per performance, which essentially excludes these works from
the repertoires of small orchestras.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?O2E52505
(Thanks to The Filter, from the Berkman Center.)
* In FOSN for 1/8/02, I wrote about the FOS recommendations produced in
July 2001 by a working group of the International Union of Pure and Applied
Physics (IUPAP). Here is a web site on the IUPAP's November 2001 meeting
to follow-up the July recommendations. Note especially the recommended
reading list for meeting participants and Arthur Smith's subsequent report
on the November meeting.
http://publish.aps.org/IUPAP/
* In FOSN for 12/26/01, I reported on David McOwen, who faced 120 years in
prison for installing distributed.net software on his university's
network. The software harnesses unused CPU cycles to make a distributed
supercomputer for computationally intensive scientific problems. The
prosecutor has been persuaded to back off, though not completely. McOwen
will receive one year of probation, pay $2100 in restitution, and perform
80 hours of community service.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173751.html
* In FOSN for 12/5/01, I reported that the International Coalition of
Library Consortia (ICOLC) had revised its guidelines for measuring the
usage of electronic journals. Now Elsevier has endorsed the ICOLC guidelines.
Elsevier press release
http://makeashorterlink.com/?O43E51E4
(Thanks to the DigLib list.)
The ICOLC guidelines
http://www.library.yale.edu/consortia/2001webstats.htm
----------
Catching up (old news I should have discovered earlier)
* Because open source is an important kind of software, it's also a growing
topic of scholarship. MIT hosts the Open Source Research Community, an
online registry of scholars interested in the open source and free software
movements, and a free online archive of their scholarship.
http://opensource.mit.edu/
(Thanks to C-FIT.)
* O'Reilly Computer Books sponsors the Open Books Project, a free online
collection of out-of-print books in computer science in English, French,
and German. Most of them were published by O'Reilly, which has adopted the
policy that when a book goes OP, it should enter the public domain.
http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/
(Thanks to The Filter from the Berkman Center.)
Tim O'Reilly's argument that out-of-print books and software no longer
maintained by its manufacturer should enter the public domain. (PS: A
great argument. Of course I hope it is applied to OP books. But I confess
that I'm most eager to have Netmanage apply it to Ecco Pro, the single most
useful piece of software I've ever used.)
http://www.oreillynet.com/timo.html
* The Western European Studies Section of the ACRL has a directory of free
online literary texts from 17 language groups.
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/wess/etexts.html
* In March 2001, Linda Beebe reviewed four online peer review
systems: Global Editor, Manuscript Central, PaperWeb, and Rapid Review.
http://sspnet.org/public/news/details.cfm?id=1
* I just discovered that since September, FOSN has been a "featured
journal" at the e-journals directory of electronic journals.
http://www.e-journals.org/
----------
Corrections
* In the last issue I inadvertently gave the same URL for two articles from
the January/February issue of _CLIR Issues_. Here are the correct
URLs. (Thanks to Karyn Popham for pointing out the error.)
Deanna Marcum, "A National Plan for Digital Preservation: What Does it
Mean for the Library Community?"
http://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/issues25.html#plan
Jerry George, "DLF Form Participants Ask: Can Libraries Keep Up with Users?"
http://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/issues25.html#dlf
----------
No comment
* On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (January 21), James Swanson wrote in an
article for the Cato Institute: "Ignoring intellectual property rights, a
cornerstone of the liberty Martin Luther King, Jr. fought to secure, is an
inauspicious way to celebrate his birthday."
http://www.cato.org/research/articles/swanson-020121.html
(Thanks to Freedom News.)
----------
Conferences
If you plan to attend one of the following conferences, please share your
observations with us through our discussion forum.
* Changing Business Models for Journal Publishing
http://www.alpsp.org/s240102.htm
London, January 24
* Intellectual Property and New Business Creation from Science and Technology
http://www.culturalpolicy.org/resources/event.cfm?ID=562
Oxford, January 27 - February 1
* Secure electronic publishing and data protection
http://www.onlinepublishingnews.com/htm/e20020130.064117.htm
London, January 30
* CIMI Institute Forum. New Developments in Standards for Digital Preservation
http://www.cimi.org/ci/ci_0102_forum_reg.html
Washington, D.C., January 31
* EBLIDA workshop on the national implementation of the EU copyright directive.
http://www.ifla.org/VII/s8/eblidaws.htm
London, February 1
* High Quality Information For Everyone And What It Costs
http://www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/2002conf/
Bielefeld, February 5-7
* International Conference on Bioinformatics 2002: North-South Network
http://incob.biotec.or.th/
Bangkok, February 6-8
* E-volving Information futures
http://www.vala.org.au/conf2002.htm
Melbourne, February 6-8
* Kongress für digitale Inhalte
http://www.e-content-forum.de/
Wiesbaden, February 7-8
* Book Tech 2002
http://www.booktechexpo.com/bt_index.bsp
New York, February 11-13
* Society for Scholarly Publishing, Top Management Roundtable. Successful
Publishing in the Global Environment.
http://sspnet.org/public/articles/index.cfm?cat=45
Washington, D.C., February 13-14
* ICSTI Seminar on Digital Preservation of the Record of Science
http://www.alpsp.org/meetdb/searchresdet.cfm?ID=222
Paris, February 14-15
* Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics
http://www.cic.ipn.mx/cicling/2002/
Mexico City, February 17-23
* Wissensmanagement im universitären Bereich
http://www.mathematik.tu-darmstadt.de/ags/ag1/wisman01/
February 19-20
* Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems
http://foiks.massey.ac.nz/
Schloß Salzau, February 19-23
* Fifth International Publishers Association Copyright Conference
http://www.ipa-uie.org/ipa/AccraCoverpage.html
Accra, Ghana, February 20-22
* Integrating @ Internet Speed: Strategies for the Content Community
[conference on reference linking]
http://www.pa.utulsa.edu/nfais/Conf2002/anco2002highlights.htm
Philadelphia, February 24-27
* Getting your message across: How learned societies and other
organizations can influence public and government opinion
http://www.alpsp.org/s250202.htm
London, February 25
* Electronic Journals --Solutions in Sight?
http://www.subscription-agents.org/conference/200202/index.html
London, February 25-26
* [Public lecture], Will Thomas and Ed Ayers, "The Next Generation of
Digital Scholarship: An Experiment in Form
http://www.neh.gov/news/ehumanities.html
Washington, D.C., February 27
* A Symposium on the Research Value of Printed Materials in the Digital Age
http://www.lib.umd.edu/TSD/PRES/symposium.html
College Park, Maryland, March 1
* International Spring School on the Digital Library and E-publishing for
Science and Technology
http://cwis.kub.nl/~ticer/spring02/index.htm
Geneva, March 3-8
* Search Engine Strategies
http://seminars.internet.com/sew/spring02/index.html
Boston, March 4-5
* Towards an Information Society for All
http://www.britishcouncil.de/e/infoexch/berlin.htm
Berlin, March 8-9
* 17th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. Special tracks on Database and
Digital Library Technologies; Electronic Books for Teaching and Learning;
and Information Access and Retrieval
http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2002/Tracks.htm
Madrid, March 10-14
* Digitization for Cultural Heritage Professionals: An Intensive Program
http://www.ils.unc.edu/DCHP/
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, March 10-15
* EUSDIC Spring Meeting. E-Content: Divide or Rule
http://www.eusidic.org/Paris2002Spring%20Meeting.htm
Paris, March 11-12
* Knowledge Technologies Conference 2002
http://www.knowledgetechnologies.net/
Seattle, March 11-13
* Computers in Libraries 2002
http://www.infotoday.com/cil2002/default.htm
Washington D.C., March 13-15
* International Conference on the Statistical Analysis of Textual Data
http://www.irisa.fr/manifestations/2002/JADT/welcome.htm
St. Malo, March 13-15
* The Electronic Publishers Coalition (EPC) conference on ebooks and
epublishing (obscurely titled, Electronically Published Internet
Connection, or EPIC)
http://www.epccentral.org/epic.html
Seattle, March 14-16
* Digital Resources and International Information Exchange: East-West
http://www.iliac.org/seminar/sem1.html
March 15 (Washington DC), 18 (Flushing NY), 20 (Stamford CT)
* Internet Librarian International 2002
http://www.internet-librarian.com/index.html
London, March 18-20
* The New Information Order and the Future of the Archive
http://www.ed.ac.uk/iash/archive.conference.html
Edinburgh, March 20-23
* Advanced Licensing Workshop
http://www.arl.org/scomm/licensing/advlic.html
Dallas, March 20-22
* Electronic Publishing Strategy
http://www.alpsp.org/tEPS220302.htm
London, March 22
* OCLC Institute. Steering by Standards. (A series of satellite
videoconferences.)
http://www.oclc.org/institute/events/sbs.htm
Cyberspace. OAI, March 26. OAIS, April 19. Metadata standards in the
future, May 29.
* WebSearch University
http://www.websearchu.com/
San Francisco, March 25-26; Stamford CT, April 30 - May 1; Washington DC,
September 23-24; Chicago, Octeober 22-23; Dallas, November 19-20.
* European Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research
http://www.cs.strath.ac.uk/ECIR02/
Glasgow, March 25-27
* e-Content: Discovering and Delivering Value
http://www.informationhighways.net/conf/cindex.html
Toronto, March 25-27
* 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
* International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing
http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~srimani/itcc2002/cfp.html
Las Vegas, April 8-10
* NetLab and Friends: 10 Years of Digital Library Development
http://www.lub.lu.se/netlab/conf/
Lund, April 10-12
* 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
* United Kingdom Serials Group Annual Conference and Exhibition
http://www.uksg.org/conference.htm
University of Warwick, April 15- 17
* 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
* Information, Knowledges and Society: Challenges of A New Era
http://www.congreso-info.cu/venglish.htm
Havana, April 22-26
----------
The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter is supported by a grant from the
Open Society Institute.
http://www.osi.hu/infoprogram/
==========
This is the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter (ISSN 1535-7848).
Please feel free to forward any issue of the newsletter to interested
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Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters
Copyright (c) 2002, Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/copyrite.htm
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