Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts

From: Peter Suber <peters_at_earlham.edu>
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2001 19:50:05 +0000

      Excerpts from Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter
      October 26, 2001

More follow-up on the _Machine Learning_ resignations

* Andrea Foster has a good article about the resignations in the October 18
_Chronicle of Higher Education_.
http://chronicle.com/free/2001/10/2001101801t.htm

* Robin Peek tells the story for _InfoToday_, October 22.
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb011022-3.htm

* Tom Kirk, Head Librarian at Earlham College, wrote with another specimen
for the collection of editorial resignations. In 1998 most of the
editorial board of the _Journal of Academic Librarianship_ resigned to
protest the large hike in the subscription price imposed by
Pergamon-Elsevier after it bought the journal from JAI Press. Several of
the editors who resigned then created _Portal: Libraries and the Academy_
at Johns Hopkins University Press. In the first issue of _Portal_ Gloriana
St. Clair published a statement explaining why she and her co-founders
thought it necessary to create an affordable competitor to
JAL. Unfortunately, like other Portal articles, her statement is part of
Project MUSE and not available online for free.

I've written to _Portal_ for more details and may have them to report in
the next issue.

Gloriana St. Clair, statement in _Portal_ 1.1 on the need for _Portal_
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v001/1.1st_clair.html

(Accessible only to paid MUSE subscribers.)

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What are learned societies saying?

In FOSN for 8/16/01, I offered to make a web page collecting the policy
statements on FOS issues made by learned societies and professional
associations --if only you would send me the URLs of the statements in your
field or known to you. So far nobody has taken me up on the offer. I have
these two statements so far. Do you know of others? I'll include
statements by learned societies in any discipline and any country.

American Psychological Association
http://www.apa.org/journals/posting.html

American Physical Society
ftp://aps.org/pub/jrnls/copy_trnsfr.asc

* Postscript. I've add this list to the new page of FOS lists. If the
list grows, you can watch it grow there.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#statements

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* The NSF has awarded Cornell University a $1.56 million grant to develop
software to collect scientific information from hundreds of sites across
the internet, organize it, and make it accessible to users through a
unified front end. The software will mine OAI archives and "deep web"
sites inaccessible to most other search engines. The NSF calls this the
Core System for the National Science Digital Library. (PS: The heavy
reliance on government funding suggests that the final product will be free
for users, but I haven't seen this stated explicitly anywhere. Does anyone
know how this stands?)
http://www.newswise.com/articles/2001/10/NSDLCOR.CNS.html

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In other publications

* In an October 18 posting to the _Nature_ FOS debate, Carol Tenopir and
Donald King summarize their research on the use and costs of scientific
journals from 1960 to 2000. They point out but do not fully explain the
"paradox" that print journal prices have risen faster than inflation while
publishing costs per page, costs per author, and costs per reading have all
declined. One conclusion: "Much of the current ill will stems from
ignorance —-librarians and scientists do not understand the causes of
rising journal prices, and publishers...are afraid of becoming obsolete if
readers have access to articles without paying for them."
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/tenopir.html

* In another October 18 posting to the _Nature_ debate, David Worlock
argues that the nature of scholarship is changing faster than publishers,
scholars, and libraries can finish fighting their old
battles. Technologies like DOIs and CrossRef show unprecedented
collaboration between publishers and researchers, and the OAI will
transform article storage and searching. At the same time, the Semantic
Web is changing the unit of scholarship from the text article to the
knowledge-structure.
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/worlock.html

* In the October 15 _Library Journal_, Roy Tennant surveys a variety of
cross-database search technologies and describes the concept for newcomers.
http://libraryjournal.reviewsnews.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA170458
(Free registration required.)

* In the October issue of _Haematologica_, Moreno Curti and three
co-authors report on their longitudinal study of biomedical journals
from 1995 to 2000. During this period, 85% of the journals studied
added some kind of free online content. During the same period, the
median impact factor for the set of journals studied showed a
statistically significant rise. The association between higher impact
factors and free online content was also statistically significant.
http://www.haematologica.it/full/pdf/2001_10/861015.pdf

* In July, Steve Hitchcock and Wendy Hall argue that two steps are needed
to connect journal articles stored in open archives: (1) "decoupling
journal content from [the] publishing process" and (2) "defragmentation of
the control of access to works at the article level". They describe
_Perspectives in Electronic Publishing_, which Hitchcock conceived and
edits, as satisfying these conditions. Their paper was originally
presented at the ICCC/IFIP 5th Conference on Electronic Publishing at the
University of Kent.

Hitchcock and Hall, How Dynamic E-Journals can Interconnect Open Access
Archives
http://www.bib.ecs.soton.ac.uk/data/6878/html/elpub01-online.html

Perspectives in Electronic Publishing
http://aims.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pep.nsf

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Share your thoughts

* The ACM is seeking nominations for the biennial Eugene Lawler Award for
Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics. Among
the contributions that might earn someone this award are "creative research
concerning intellectual property issues" and "application of computers or
computing techniques to problems of developing countries". The ACM will
accept nominations until November 30.
http://www.acm.org/awards/lawlaward.html

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* In FOSN for 8/23/01, I announced the launch of the Chemistry Preprint
Server (CPS) and its plans to become OAI compliant. On October 24 it
announced that it has become OAI compliant.
http://www.chemweb.com/preprint?url=/CPS

* In FOSN for 7/31/01, I described the launch of the History E-Book Project
and its plan to digitize hundreds of historical monographs. The project
has now put online its list of 752 books for which it will seek the
electronic rights. The project is also interested in receiving book
nominations from readers.
http://www.historyebook.org/titlelist.html

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Correction

* In FOSN for 10/12/01, I wrote about the new partnership of the California
Digital Library (CDL) and Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress). I gave the
impression that some CDL archives created with bepress tools were OAI
compliant because the bepress tools were supplemented by eprints.org
software. In fact, some early CDL archives were OAI compliant thanks to
eprints.org software, but the significance of CDL's new partnership with
bepress is that CDL is now migrating from eprints.org to bepress tools,
which will create OAI compliant archives and meet other CDL needs as
well. Thanks to John Ober, CDL's Director of Education and Strategic
Innovation, for pointing this out.

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Conferences

If you plan to attend one of the following conferences, please share your
observations with us through our discussion forum.

* Copyright Issues in the Electronic Age
http://www.sspnet.org/public/articles/details.cfm?id=181
Waltham, Massachusetts, October 29

* Paperless Publishing: Peer Review, Production, and Publication
http://www.sspnet.org/public/articles/details.cfm?id=181
Washington, D.C., October 30

* The XML Revolution: What Scholarly Publishers Need to know
http://www.sspnet.org/public/articles/details.cfm?id=181
Waltham, Massachusetts, November 1

* Information in a Networked World: Harnessing the Flow
http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM01/index.html
Washington D.C., November 2-8

* Long Term Archiving of Digital Documents in Physics
http://publish.aps.org/IUPAP/
Lyon, November 5-6

* Electronic Book 2001: Authors, Applications, and Accessibility
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/ebook2001/
Washington D.C., November 5-7

* Internet Librarian 2001
http://www.infotoday.com/il2001/
Pasadena, November 6-8

* Content Summit 01: Funding opportunities for European digital content on
global networks
http://www.contentsummit.com/
Zurich, November 7-9

* Setting Standards and Making it Real (on Digital Reference Services)
http://vrd.org/conferences/VRD2001/program.shtml
Orlando, November 12-13

* First Annual Meeting of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium
http://www.tei-c.org/Publicity/pisa.html
Pisa, November 16-17

* NINCY Town Meeting: Copyright and Fair use: Creating Policy
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/ninch/
Eugene, November 19

* ARL Workshop for Publishers: Licensing Electronic Resources to
Libraries: Understanding Your Market
http://www.arl.org/scomm/licensing/pworkshop.html
Philadelphia, November 19

* Eighth Call for Proposals of the European IST Programme
http://www.ukishelp.co.uk/ukishelp/SI12254ku/system/Viewfull.cfm?ObjectID=318&Order=Current
London, November 27

* European Forum on Harmful and Illegal Cyber Content
http://www.humanrights.coe.int/media/cyberforum/main.htm
Strasbourg, November 28

* eGovernment [in Europe]: From Policy to Practice
http://europa.eu.int/information_society/eeurope/egovconf/index_en.htm
Brussels, November 29-30

* Digital Media Revolution in the Americas
http://www.iamericas.org/events/eventlist.html
Pasadena, November 29 - December 1

* Fourth SCHEMAS Workshop: Sharing [metadata] schemas
http://www.schemas-forum.org/workshops/
The Hague, November 30

* 2001 IST Exhibition and Awards
http://europa.eu.int/information_society/newsroom/istevent/programme/index_en.htm
Düsseldorf, December 3

* School for Scanning: Creating, Managing, and Preserving Digital Assets
http://www.nedcc.org/sfsfl1.htm
Delray Beach, Florida, December 3-5

* Online Information 2001
http://www.online-information.co.uk/online/
London, December 4-6

* The Electronic Library: Strategic, Policy and Management Issues
http://www.britishcouncil.org/networkevents/2000/0134p.htm
Loughborough, December 9-14

* 4th International Conference of Asian Digital Libraries
http://www.icadl2001.org/
Bangalore, December 10-12

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The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter is supported by a grant from the
Open Society Institute.
http://www.soros.org/osi.html

==========

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
Received on Fri Oct 26 2001 - 19:51:47 BST

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