Excerpts from the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter December 19, 2001
Developments * _Cortex_, a journal of the nervous system and behavior, has just freed its contents, making its online edition free of charge to all readers with no enforced waiting periods. The new policy is the work of the new editor, Sergio Della Sala. _Cortex_ still publishes a print edition with a subscription fee, but to coincide with the new access policy it has reduced the subscription price. The journal is betting that free online access will not significantly diminish its revenues. If it does, then non-subscribers may have to wait a few months after the print edition appears before they have free online access. _Cortex_ is published by Masson Italia, a for-profit publisher. Cortex home page http://www.cortex-online.org/ Guest editorial ("Viewpoint") by Stevan Harnad on the occasion of the change of policy http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1734.html * BioMed Central will institute processing charges for articles starting on January 1. The standard charge will be $500 per article, though it will be waived for authors from developing countries and in cases of hardship. (PS: See my thoughts on this funding model from FOSN for 9/6/01. My views haven't changed in substance since then, but in temperature I've definitely warmed to the BMC model. If access is to be free, then journal operating costs must be paid by knowledge producers or third parties, not knowledge consumers. Or, funders should pay for dissemination, not for access. Hence, BMC is on the right track, all the more so for avoiding the term "author fees" for these processing charges.) http://www.managinginformation.com/news/content_show_full.php?id=279 * Academic Press journal articles are now searchable through Scirus. Scirus permits free full-text searching of texts that are not available for free full-text reading or printing (see FOSN for 5/25/01). http://www.scirus.com/press/Ideal106.htm * Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) has completed its "Scientific Century" project, the retroactive digitization of its collected bibliographic citations and abstracts. The CAS online database now contains 20.5 million records from 1907 to the present. The new historical content is part of the standard CAS license and is not separately available. http://www.cas.org/New1/1907.html * _Nature_ and three other journals have pooled their contents to create a free online collection of research papers and reviews reflecting 100 years of research on cell division. The costs are being picked up by Boehringer Ingelheim, a drug company. The site title, "Web Focus on Cell Division", suggests that this may become a series with other installments or foci in the future. http://www.nature.com/celldivision/ * The European Union has decided to levy a value added tax (VAT) on web downloads. The primary target seems to be games, software, and entertainment. But the language in the EU press release is unqualified and might apply as well to scholarly articles that are (otherwise) free to readers. If so, the EU will undermine FOS with its right hand while supporting it (through many IST and CORDIS initiatives) with the left hand. http://makeashorterlink.com/?O14223B3 * The text-e online seminar has moved on to a new essay: The Future of the Internet: A Conversation with Theodore Zeldin. The Zedlin essay will be the subject of discussion until December 31. http://text-e.org/conf/index.cfm?ConfText_ID=9 * Summaries of the four major talks at the November Open Access Forum at the British Library are now online. http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/blforum.asp * Most of the proceedings of the November ICOLC conference in Finland are now online, with the rest to come soon. A large number of the papers are FOS-related. http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/finelib/programme.html * Charles W. Bailey, Jr. has put version 40 of his Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography online. The new version cites over 15,000 articles, book, and other resources on- and off-line. http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html * The University of Kansas Anschutz Library has launched AmDocs, a free online archive of documents for the study of American history. It's organized by chronological period. http://www.ukans.edu/carrie/docs/amdocs_index.html * On October 10, the ACM launched the online version of Computing Reviews. This is roughly for computer scientists what the Faculty of 1000 is for biologists (see FOSN for 11/16/01). The function is similar, to guide working scientists through the wilderness of published research with short reviews of the most notable new work, when these decisions are made by a large community of experts hand-picked by the editorial board. The print version of Computing Reviews is more than 40 years old, but has definitely improved in its transition to the net. Registered users may customize a page containing reviews of new articles in their specializations and sign up for email notification of new articles as well as new hits on stored searches. One puzzle: The site lists fairly steep subscription prices, but I was able to get every service I tried for free. http://www.reviews.com/home.cfm * The European Union IST Programme has launched TREBIS (Trial and Evaluation of a Biodiversity Information System). It's a free online natural history museum using state of the art database and digital mapping technologies. The trial version focuses on the natural history of the Austrian state of Voralberg. http://www.trebis.org/english/index.html * The European Union's 5th Framework Programme has launched VRCHIP (Virtual Reality Cultural Heritage Information Portal), a free online archive of Knutsford, England, with a virtual reality interface. "Users will navigate their way around the virtual towns and through time and, with sound and animation of vehicles, machinery and life providing realism, become immersed in an environment which enhances the learning experience." http://www.nnc.co.uk/vrchip * INTERGRAF (the International Confederation for Printing and Allied Industries) is conducting an online questionnaire on the future of print --or rather 12 questionnaires for people with any of 12 different perspectives on the question. Click on your primary job description and you'll receive the questionnaire matching your position. http://www.future-of-print.org/index-questionnaire.htm * The DNER Journals Working Group has created the first of a series an online surveys to help it understand the serials requirements of higher education institutions in the UK. The current survey asks about journals not currently available through JISC licensing agreements. Replies will be collected until December 24. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/journals/survey.html * The Canadian National Archives has put up an online questionnaire to help with its Accessible Archives project. The project is to make the National Archives more accessible online, and the questionnaire will help it meet user priorities. Non-Canadians are welcome to fill out the questionnaire. Replies will be accepted until March 2, 2002. http://accessible.archives.ca/01/11_e.html * The U.S. General Services Administration is redesigning the FirstGov website. It has issued a public call for comments, suggestions, and bids on running usability tests. http://www.eps.gov/spg/GSA/OGP/OAP/GS00A02PDR0001/SynopsisP.html * In the January 2002 issue of _Learned Publishing_, there are several FOS-related articles: http://makeashorterlink.com/?I2FC16D3 Peter Fox takes a closer look at what it will cost to preserve electronic journals for the long term. http://makeashorterlink.com/?N47C52D3 Andrew Odlyzko argues that scholarly communication is evolving rapidly while scholarly journals are evolving slowly. If present trends continue, then "print [journals] will be eclipsed" and non-traditional channels for scholarly communication will replace journals. Recent data undermine the early fears that internet growth will cause information overload and industry hopes that scholarly journals are not substitutable. "To stay relevant, scholars, publishers and librarians will have to make even greater efforts to make their material easily accessible." http://makeashorterlink.com/?O19C23D3 Joost Kircz outlines how scientific papers might evolve when released from the constraints of print. He argues for a "different granularity" in which the components of a modular publication might be separately and more specifically peer-reviewed, have their own metadata (allowed by the DOI standard), perhaps their own URLs, and their own sections in a modular abstract. Relationships between published components, represented by hyperlinks, can make significant contributions to knowledge in their own right. http://makeashorterlink.com/?K5AC21D3 David Goodman describes Princeton's two-year experience receiving some major journals only in electronic form. It has been so positive that Princeton plans to expand the program, at least when the financial savings is significant and when the publisher can provide "effective guarantees of continuing access". In practice this has five dimensions: (1) providing near 100% uptime, (2) allowing long-term retention of purchased issues without new payments, and (3) assuring that rights will not be revoked e.g. if the publisher is sold, (4) offering long-term digital preservation and access, and (5) offering "very long-term" preservation and access, probably in some non-electronic form. http://makeashorterlink.com/?W1BC23D3 Diana Rosenberg describes the INASP program, African Journals Online, which provides free online access worldwide to abstracts and tables of contents of scholarly journals published in Africa. She argues that the program is inexpensive to maintain, once set up, but that it is only one step toward the wider use of African journals outside Africa. http://makeashorterlink.com/?H1DC25D3 * In the December issue of _RLG DigiNews_ editor Anne Kenney interviews Robin Dale (from RLG) and Meg Bellinger (from OCLC) on the RLG-OCLC collaborative digital archiving initiatives. http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews5-6.html#interview * Also in the December _RLG DigiNews_, Margaret Hedstrom and Clifford Lampe assess emulation and migration as two strategies for long-term digital preservation. In their user test, they found no significant differences in user satisfaction, object performance, or ease of use between the two strategies. http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews5-6.html#feature1 * In the December _D-Lib Magazine_ there are several FOS-related articles: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december01/12contents.html Christophe Blanchi and Jason Petrone propose a distributed interoperable metadata registry. They argue that conversion middleware makes a single syntax unnecessary and therefore is maximally accommodating to new forms of metadata and minimally restrictive on compatibility. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december01/blanchi/12blanchi.html Stephen Pinfield describes how officials at the University of Nottingham studied arXiv and its use by physicists. Their purpose was to create an institutional eprints archive at Nottingham with their eyes open to the many issues it would raise --technical, economic, academic, legal, and managerial. While there are differences between a disciplinary archive and an institutional archive, much of the experience of the former is transferrable to the latter. By summarizing the arXiv study, Pinfield has given other institutions a shortcut to creating their own archives. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december01/pinfield/12pinfield.html Hussein Suleman and Edward Fox propose to build on the success of the Dublin Core and the Open Archives Initiative to create a framework for open, interoperable, and extensible digital libraries. Basically they propose that digital libraries should become OAI-compliant archives or networks of OAI-compliant archives. Their contents and services can then be shared through the OAI interface. What's "contentious" about the proposal, the authors admit, is that it requires extending the OAI standard a bit. Because the standard's simplicity is a major cause of its wide adoption, any new complexity will be resisted. They argue that this extension is tolerable because it will remain separable from the original standard, and justified by the higher levels of library integration it will support. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december01/suleman/12suleman.html Greg Karvounarakis and two co-authors describe RQL, their declarative query language for RDF metadata. Such a query language has been a missing link in the evolution of the semantic web. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december01/12inbrief.html#KARVOUNARAKIS Xiaoming Liu describes his DP9 software, which makes OAI-compliant archives crawlable by major search engines like Google (see FOSN for 11/26/01). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december01/12inbrief.html#LIU * The December issue of _Vine_ is devoted to ebooks and ejournals. Several articles are FOS-related, but unfortunately only the table of contents and some very short abstracts are freely available online. http://alidoro.catchword.com/vl=406186/cl=21/nw=1/rpsv/catchword/litc/03055728/contp1-1.htm * In the last issue I reported that the DLF had commissioned Outsell, Inc., to study the information needs and usage patterns of university students and faculty. Because other Outsell studies are neither free nor online, I expressed the hope that DLF had reserved the right to make this report public when it was finished. Dan Greenstein, Director of the DLF, writes to assure me that, indeed, DLF will provide free online access to the report and will deposit the underlying data with the ICPSR. At the same time he included the URL for the original grant proposal to the Mellon Foundation, which is funding the Outsell report. http://www.diglib.org/use/grantpub.pdf Declan McCullagh and Ben Polen, A Call to End Copyright Confusion http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,49201-2,00.html * Cheryl Martin maintains Psyche Matters, a free online collection of bibliographies and full-text papers in psychoanalysis. http://www.psychematters.com/ * The proceedings from the January 2000 ICSTI workshop in Paris on digital archiving ("Bringing Issues and Stakeholders Together") are now online. http://www.icsti.org/2000workshop/index.html Conferences If you plan to attend one of the following conferences, please share your observations with us through our discussion forum. * 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 * E-volving Information futures http://www.vala.org.au/conf2002.htm Melbourne, February 6-8 * ICSTI Seminar on Digital Preservation of the Record of Science [No web site yet, but for registration info contact Barry Mahon, <icsti [at] icsti.org>.] Paris, February 14-15 * Electronic Journals --Solutions in Sight? http://www.subscription-agents.org/conference/200202/index.html London, February 25-26 * 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 * Digitization for Cultural Heritage Professionals: An Intensive Program http://www.ils.unc.edu/DCHP/ Chapel Hill, North Carolina, March 10-15 * 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 * 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 * International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~srimani/itcc2002/cfp.html Las Vegas, April 8-10 * NetLat and Friends: 10 Years of Digital Library Development http://www.lub.lu.se/netlab/conf/ Lund, April 10-12 * 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 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