Excerpts from Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter December 5, 2001
Budapest FOS conference On December 1-2 I attended a small, intense, productive, and very enjoyable conference in Budapest to map strategies for achieving FOS world-wide. The conference was hosted by the Open Society Institute (OSI), which supports this newsletter with a grant. Formally around a table and informally at meals and in walks along the Danube, we talked and talked and talked about our separate FOS initiatives, how they could achieve synergy and assist one another, how OSI could assist us, and how to accelerate progress for all. We're still at work on a product of the conference, which I'll be able to describe more fully when it's ready for the public. The conference was deeply gratifying for several reasons. It was gratifying that a major foundation was committed to the FOS cause and had brought us together to work out a common strategy. It was gratifying to find that we could agree on a path forward. It was gratifying to be thrown together with this bunch of knowledgeable and hard-working people. We were able to put aside the burden of informing newcomers and answering critics --the walking FAQ problem-- and enjoy the company and unique perspectives of like-minded activists from around the world. We were able to presuppose esoteric knowledge and jump-start deep and fruitful conversations. We were able to draw on the wide experience in the room to examine FOS obstacles in detail and take their true measure. We are able to meet people whose work we had long admired. We made many new friends. We juiced our confidence that FOS is inevitable. The trip took four days out of my news-gathering schedule. I'm about half caught up and have decided to draw the line here for this issue. By next week's issue should I should be back up to date. I'm eager to tell you the rest of the conference story, but first I have to carve out some time for the conference homework. To be continued. ---------- The living dead problem In the November 27 _Los Angeles Times_, David Colker points out that sensitive information removed from the web to keep it from terrorists is still available in many web archives (e.g. the Wayback Machine) and search engine caches (e.g. Google's). David Colker, The Web Never Forgets http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-000094419nov27.story Chris Sherman deserves credit for making the same point as early as October 9. http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/01/sd1009-google-cache.html The difficulty of total deletion of net content is only a problem for information that lends itself to abuse, like open discussions of security gaps at nuclear power plants. But for valuable content like FOS, it's a boon. The difficulty of total deletion is really a proof-of-concept for LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe), a strategy for long-term preservation that systematically caches content in a self-correcting P2P network. See FOSN for 6/25/01. LOCKSS http://lockss.stanford.edu/ The difficulty of total deletion has one more benefit for FOS. If you put an unrefereed preprint of your work on the web, well before the moment when you might assign the copyright to a journal, and then later publish a revised or unrevised version in a journal, the journal may ask you to remove the preprint from the web. You needn't comply; but even if you try to do so, the preprint will almost certainly survive in some freely accessible form. A recent thread of the September98 forum discussed the effect of this phenomenon on copyright negotiations. Thread name, "Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations" http://makeashorterlink.com/?R5D84203 (The topic is more explicit later in the thread than earlier.) ---------- * JournalSeek and LinkOpenly will merge into a new service called LinkFinderPlus. The result is a library-based (as opposed to publisher-based) reference linking system. LinkFinderPlus is based on OpenURL metadata. http://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc/lt/2001/news2214.html * The Canadian National Site Licensing Project (CNSLP) is an unusual and award-winning national consortium to bargain down the price of licences to priced online journals. (See FOSN for 9/14/01.) CNSLP met in late November to discuss expanding the scope of its activities. http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0111/msg00031.html * On November 28, BioOne announced the first 15 consortial subscriptions since its launch nine months ago. BioOne aggregates 46 influential, peer-reviewed online science journals and makes them available at a low, competitive price. (This announcement from SPARC, one of BioONe's founding organizations, is not yet on the web at SPARC or BioOne. Sorry I can't give you a link.) * On November 28, ISI announced the official launch of its Web of Knowledge service, a very unfree library of online science and related tools. http://library.northernlight.com/FC20011128530000074.html * The International Digital Electronic Access Library (IDEAL) has announced that eight African nations (Sudan, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia) have acquired the reduced-rate national license it offers through Academic Press. Some of the nations are receiving financial help for the license from the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP). http://www.idealibrary.com/news/idw14e.jsp * At the conclusion of its November conference in Qatar, the World Trade Organization issued a statement asserting that public health supersedes intellectual property rights. The intent is clearly to increase the accessibility of medicines, and therefore pertains more to patents than copyrights. But the statement's language is intriguingly general. The WTO's new TRIPS agreement (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) "does not and should not prevent Members from taking measures to protect public health." If we read this principle as extending to copyrights, then it might imply e.g. that a licensee of ScienceDirect may share articles on medical research with non-licensees in developing countries. Does anyone know of a test case in the pipeline? WTO statement http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/ip-health/2001-November/002405.html Paul Blustein, Getting WTO's Attention http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37845-2001Nov15.html PPS. In November the Open Digital Rights Language Initiative released version 1.0 its language, which will require no licensing payments. This culminates a six-month series of sub-1.0 releases. http://odrl.net/ ICOLC has also revised its statement on selecting and buying electronic information. The revised version includes an update on licensing ejournals. This is the first revision since March 1998. http://www.library.yale.edu/consortia/2001currentpractices.htm * The proceedings of the Science and Technology Libraries Section of the August IFLA conference at Cornell University are now online. http://www.library.ucsb.edu/istl/01-fall/conf1.html * Florida Atlantic University has put up a web page comparing the costs of journals and databases to luxury items like cars and houses. http://www.library.fau.edu/depts/ref/infocost.htm See Brown University's similar page on outrageous journal prices. http://www.brown.edu/Administration/George_Street_Journal/vol24/24GSJ19c.html Recall Cornell's Sticker Shock page (FOSN for 8/16/01) http://www.englib.cornell.edu/displays/stickershock/default.html * An article forthcoming in the January 2002 _Portal_ is excerpted in the October-November _SPARC E-News_. Lance Lugar and Kate Thomes survey the ways that ARL member libraries use their web sites to help patrons understand the controversies affecting access to scholarly literature. No one doubts that ARL is a champion of free and affordable online access, especially through SPARC and CNI. However, the survey shows that the "ARL libraries do not make widespread, extensive use of their capacities for web publishing to present the issues of scholarly communication to their patron groups." ?page=g21#6 * The December 3 issue of ISI's _InCites_ computes England's percentage of the world's published papers in 22 scientific fields and its national citation impact in the same fields. (PS: Next, tenure will depend on one's national impact factor.) http://in-cites.com/research/2001/december_3_2001-2.html * In the December _Journal of Electronic Publishing_ (JEP), Charles Bailey tells the 10-year story of the evolution of his huge and useful Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-02/bailey.html * Also in the December _JEP_, Mike Sosteric, Yuwei Shi, and Olivier Wenker issue a call to arms to fight for FOS. A key breakthrough, they argue, will be the shift from paper-first journals to electronic-first journals. To prepare a document first for print and then for the web requires unnecessary DTD's and effort, while new tools make the reverse path highly efficient. The authors include a detailed account of how two organizations, ICAAP and BlueSky, implement electronic-first publishing and how much it can reduce journal operating costs. http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-02/sosteric.html * Also in the December _JEP_, Marshall Poe describes why online publishing will save the specialized monograph. You'll enjoy his funny, first-person account of an experiment with informal peer review, the public domain, Printing Service Providers (PSP's), and print-on-demand. http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-02/poe.html * In the December 1 _Econtent_, Martin White analyzes the serials pricing crisis for an audience of commercial publishers. For example, as journal prices rose, "[t]he publishers were in an enviable position, as journals are not substitutable." Or, "[t]he problem is that no one walks into a library and asks for all the Elsevier journals on hypertension. They want all the journals on hypertension." Or, "[l]ibraries are very keen to have [the data generated by publishers], since it would enable them, for the first time, to have reliable usage statistics on which to base their cancellation policy. For obvious reasons, publishers are unwilling to release this information!" http://www.econtentmag.com/Magazine/Columns/firewall12_01.html * In the November issue of the _High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine_ (HEPLW), Guenther Eichhorn gives a comprehensive tour of the NASA Astrophysics Data System, a major source of FOS in astronomy and astrophysics. http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/5/papers/1/ * Also in the November _HEPLW_, Jean-Blaise Claivaz, Jean-Yves Le Meur, and Nicholas Robinson describe a method worked out at CERN to automate the extraction of structured citations from full-text documents. This should be seen in the larger context of automating the extraction of metadata from arbitrary resource files and automating retroactive reference linking within a set of arbitrary resources. http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/5/papers/2/ * Chris Ridings has written the most detailed account I've seen of Google's algorithm for computing page-rank. http://www.goodlookingcooking.co.uk/PageRank.pdf At the same time, Google is planning to tweak its algorithm to allow user ratings to affect page-rank. http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5099968,00.html Download the 1.1.51 beta of Google's new toolbar which lets you rate pages (IE users only). http://toolbar.google.com/ * In the last issue I reported that University of California libraries received a Mellon grant to study how users respond when they have online access, and not print access, to selected journals. But I linked to a news story which didn't in turn link to the study. Here's the home page for the study. http://www.ucop.edu/cmi/ Conferences If you plan to attend one of the following conferences, please share your observations with us through our discussion forum. * Online Information 2001 http://www.online-information.co.uk/online/ London, December 4-6 * Second Meeting of the Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS) Educational Content Special Interest Group (EC SIG) http://www.cetis.ac.uk/groups/20010809144711/viewGroup Luton, December 7 * 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 * Moving Beyond the Catalog: Bibliographic Access in a Web World http://www.nelinet.net/conf/special/movingbc/program.htm Worcester, Massachusetts, December 11 * Academic Institutions Transforming Scholarly Communications (SPARC/ARL Forum at the ALA Midwinter Meeting) http://www.ala.org/events/midwinter2002/ New Orleans, January 18-23 * Book Tech 2002 http://www.booktechexpo.com/bt_index.bsp New York, February 11-13 * 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 * Database and Digital Library Technologies (part of the 17th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing) http://notesmail.cs.odu.edu/faculty/zubair/workshop.nsf/sacdl02?OpenPage Madrid, March 10-14 * Computers in Libraries 2002 http://www.infotoday.com/cil2002/default.htm Washington D.C., 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 * 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 ---------- 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 colleagues. If you are reading a forwarded copy of this issue, you may subscribe by signing up at the FOS home page. FOS home page, general information, subscriptions, editorial position http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/index.htm FOS Newsletter, subscriptions, back issues http://www.topica.com/lists/suber-fos FOS Discussion Forum, subscriptions, postings http://www.topica.com/lists/fos-forum Guide to the FOS Movement http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/guide.htm Peter Suber http://www.earlham.edu/~peters Copyright (c) 2001, Peter Suber http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/copyrite.htm