Excerpts from the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter
December 12, 2001
* The LANL Research Library has released version 2.0 of FlashPoint, a
cross-archive search engine specifically designed for MathSciNet,
SciSearch, BIOSIS, and the DOE Energy database.
http://lib-www.lanl.gov/libinfo/news/2001/200112.htm#flashpoint
Brian Krebs and Robert MacMillan, House Subcommittee Revisits Online Copyrights
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172875.html
DMCA Report by the U.S. Copyright Office
http://www.loc.gov/copyright/reports/studies/dmca/dmca_study.html
Alexander Higgins, Web Copyright Treaty Set for March
http://www.latimes.com/technology/wire/sns-ap-world-copyright1206dec06.story
Brian Krebs, Global E-Copyrights Treaty to Take Effect in March 2002
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172799.html
WIPO press release on the occasion of the 30th ratification
http://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/releases/2001/p300.htm
* The LibLicense discussion list has created a web page of initiatives that
provide free or affordable peer-reviewed online journals to developing nations.
http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/develop.shtml
* On December 11, Google launched the first complete archive of usenet
newsgroups. For scholars who used usenet newsgroups for professional
dialog and communal reference help (before spammers and blowhards ruined
them), this a major FOS initiative. It is to usenet roughly what the
Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is to the web. The archive is
integrated into Google's existing structure of usenet groups, not a
separate database. No previous collection of usenet groups has offered the
complete backlist back to 1981, the year usenet was created. To piece the
whole backlist together, Google had to arrange to use (buy?) portions of
the archive held by many individuals.
http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html
* Chris Sherman and Gary Price are two indefatigable net scholars. Chris
writes about search engines and Gary about libraries; I regularly read
Chris' newsletter and Gary's blog and often glean FOS news items from
them. Now they've collaborated to produce a directory to the invisible
web, to follow up their recent book on the same subject. Online databases
that produce dynamic web pages on demand are "invisible" because they can't
be crawled by standard search engines. However, many have their own search
engines and don't require passwords or registration. A lot of academic
content exists on the invisible web, and most of the sites covered in this
directory are free. Check it out.
http://invisible-web.net/
* The powerpoint presentations from the October Dublin Core and Metadata
conference in Tokyo are now online.
http://dublincore.org/workshops/dc9/agenda-2001.shtml
* Until scholars hold the copyright to their scholarship, national
copyright rules can limit its accessibility and utility. You need to know
the rules to work effectively to change them or simply to skate on the
edge. For either purpose, the new WIPO Guide to Intellectual Property
Worldwide will be useful. Look up a country and find up to date citations
to relevant domestic law and treaties (but not excerpts of the laws
themselves) and addresses and phone number of relevant organizations.
http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/ipworldwide/
* TheScientificWorld has also launched worldMEET, a free online database of
scientific conferences. You can search the collection by keyword or create
a personalized subset with all the conferences from selected scientific
fields. worldMEET will also put conference proceedings online at no cost.
http://www.thescientificworld.com/WorldMeet/default.asp
* The Libraries of the University of Nevada at Reno have put online an
annotated list of tools and resources for editing and publishing online
journals, including some organizations and initiatives that support them.
http://www.library.unr.edu/ejournals/editors.html
* Matthew Eberle has put online his PubMed Javascript Feeds, which
syndicate PubMed search results. Right now the page contains six hardwired
feeds, but will eventually contain source code for doing it yourself.
http://www.meberle.com/pubmedjs.html
* The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DMCI) has released a newly revised
recommendation for the RDF/XML expression of the Dublin Core. It will
welcome public comment until January 7.
Simple DC, http://dublincore.org/documents/2001/11/28/dcmes-xml/
Qualified DC, http://dublincore.org/documents/2001/11/30/dcq-rdf-xml/
* JISC has put online a draft plan for an Information Environment (IE) that
would provide "secure and convenient access to a comprehensive collection
of scholarly and educational material". More specifically, the IE would
enable links between online information and learning resources, enable
downloading and use of online content without violating intellectual
property rights, and open up access to restricted resources. JISC invites
comments on the plan, which should be sent to <information.environment [at]
kcl.ac.uk>.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/development/IEstrategy.html
* Harvard University and Inera Inc. have put online their joint report on
ejournal archiving. The report investigates the question whether a common
DTD (Document Type Definition) for scholarly journals could be developed
into which different publishers and archives could translate their SGML
files. The investigators studied DTD's used by many major publishers of
electronic scholarly journals.
http://www.diglib.org/preserve/hadtdfs.pdf
* In the latest issue of the _International Journal on Digital Libraries_,
Simon Buckingham Shum and two co-authors review ScholOnto, an
ontology-based digital library server for research documents and dialog
about them. Only the abstract of this article is free online.
http://link.springer-ny.com/link/service/journals/00799/first/bibs/s007990000034.htm
* In the December issue of _First Monday_, Christopher Kelty looks closely
at the analogy between free software and free science (FOS) and the sense
in which "reputation" can replace money and ground a gift economy in the
two domains. He concludes that the informal rules that govern the gift
economy in science are complex and subtle, and that citations cannot do
everything in the economy of science that money does in the economy of
goods and services.
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_12/kelty/
* Also in the December _First Monday_, Philip Mirowski looks at specific
ways in which changing copyright law and the commercialization of science
together endanger scientific research, publication, and even debate.
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_12/mirowski/
* In the November-December 2001 _Educause Review_, James Hilton debunks
some common copyright myths. In the end he argues that what is most
distinctive about the present age is not information processing but
"viewing information as property" and that this tendency "threatens
scholars' ability to conduct research and teach".
http://www.cause.org/ir/library/pdf/erm0163.pdf
* In the November _High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine_, Arturo Montejo
Ráez and David Dallman summarize their work at CERN in using classification
software to automate the process of attributing keywords to physics articles.
http://doc.cern.ch/heplw/5/papers/3/
* In _IBM Systems Journal_, T. Nasukawa and T. Nagano
describe how software for text analysis can be made useful for knowledge
mining.
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/nasukawa.html
* In the October issue of the _Bulletin of the Medical Library
Association_, Frances Chen and two co-authors study how online access
affects the print subscription prices to medical journals. Their data show
that percentage price increases were lowest for journals with no online
access and for journals in aggregates. Free online access to accompany
paid print subscriptions was formerly a popular model but has largely been
abandoned. The price variation among journals with similar online access
rules suggests that journals are still trying to figure out how much online
access really costs and how much the market will bear.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z5941293
* Thoemmes Press is publishing a free online Encyclopedia of the History of
Ideas. It adds new entries in real time as they are written.
http://www.thoemmes.com/encyclopedia/list1.htm
(Free registration required.)
* Academic Institutions Transforming Scholarly Communications (SPARC/ARL
Forum at the ALA Midwinter Meeting)
http://www.ala.org/events/midwinter2002/
New Orleans, January 18-23
* High Quality Information For Everyone And What It Costs
http://www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/2002conf/
Bielefeld, February 5-7
* 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
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The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter is supported by a grant from the
Open Society Institute.
http://www.osi.hu/infoprogram/
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Peter Suber
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Copyright (c) 2001, Peter Suber
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