Planet DHASS

The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory project (CWRC) led by Dr. Susan Brown has been funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation's Leading Edge Fund to develop an environment for distributed digital editing. CWRC builds on the achievements of the Orlando Project, a database of women's writing in the British Isles. For more see the story by Erin Prenoslo.

Peter Suber will "step back from systematic daily blogging" on Open Access News so that he can focus on his new job at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

The open access movement owes a huge debt of gratitude to Peter and to Gavin Baker (who joined OAN on February 03, 2008) for their incredible work on OAN, which passed 15,000 posts on September 29, 2008. Unless you have done it, it's difficult to appreciate how time-consuming doing this kind of high-volume news and commentary blogging is, which involves a considerable amount of effort to identify, filter, summarize, and comment on relevant and timely news items. OAN is not just an excellent current news source—it's an important advocacy platform and the best historical chronicle of the open access movement that exists.

Here's an excerpt from "Housekeeping":

Today I step back from systematic daily blogging in order to free up time for my new position at the Berkman Center. 

The blog itself will continue and Gavin will continue at something like his current pace.  I will continue my daily crawl for OA-related news.  I'll continue to tag what I find for the OA tracking project (OATP).  I'll continue to write the monthly SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN).  I'll continue to work full-time for OA. 

I'll even continue to blog, though only sporadically.  Open Access News (OAN) will be smaller and more selective than in the past.  I cannot assure you that the news it covers will be the most important subset.  (That presupposes that Gavin and I will be on top of all new developments and in a position to pick the most important.)  I'll blog what I notice, what moves me, and what I have time for, with the accent on the third criterion.  It should be a eclectic bunch.  I know that I'll notice a lot of important news, thanks to OATP, and I know that I'll be moved to blog a lot of it.  But because of my new projects, even the most important news will be important news that I only have time to tag, not to blog.

For a comprehensive source of OA news, subscribe to the OATP feed, which is available by RSS, email, and a blog-like web page with the most recent items displayed first.  The OATP feed has been more comprehensive than this blog since April and it grows more comprehensive and useful every day.  To help the cause, please join OATP as a tagger and help select new items for inclusion in the feed.  For more details, see the OATP home page or my SOAN article about it from May 2009. 

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2. Open Access Bill: Senators Cornyn and Lieberman Re-Introduce Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)
3. Harvard Graduate School of Education Faculty Adopt Open Access Policy
4. AAP/PSP Endorses IPA/IFLA “Enhancing the Debate on Open Access” Statement
5. Three New Videos on Open Access from the SPARC Video Channel

In "Saving Texts From Oblivion: Oxford U. Press on the Google Book Settlement," Tim Barton, President of Oxford University Press, discusses the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement.

In conclusion. he states:

So we at Oxford University Press support the settlement, even as we recognize its imperfections and want it made better. As Voltaire said, "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien," the perfect is the enemy of the good. Let us not waste an opportunity to create so much good. Let us work together to solve the imperfections of the settlement. Let us work together to give students, scholars, and readers access to the written wisdom of previous generations. Let us keep those minds alive.

Related Posts

1. Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 4
2. Google Book Search Settlement: Interview with Michael Healy, Expected Executive Director of the Book Rights Registry
3. “Google Book Search Settlement: Foster Competition, Escrow the Scans”
4. Justice Department Sends Civil Investigative Demands to Google about Google Book Search Settlement
5. “Deal or No Deal: What If the Google Settlement Fails?”

In "University Open-Access Policies as Mandates," Stuart M. Shieber, Director of Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication, discusses the difference between university open access policies and university open access mandates and whether it matters.

Here's an excerpt:

Try the following thought experiment. Suppose a policy on faculty were established that granted to the university a license in faculty articles but did not explicitly provide for a waiver of the license. Now imagine that a faculty member has an article accepted by a highly prestigious journal that does not allow for author distribution and will not accept an amendment of its copyright transfer policy. Perhaps the author is a junior faculty member soon up for tenure, whose promotion case will be considerably weakened without the publication in question. The author might naturally want to have the license waived even though no waiver is explicitly provided for. The faculty member is likely to storm into the dean’s office, howling about the unconscionable practice of taking rights even when it harms the faculty member. Is the university going to distribute the article anyway against the express wishes of the faculty member? Be serious. The dean says "Fine, we won’t make use of the license for this article." Voilà, a waiver. So much for university rights retention mandates.

Related Posts

1. “Open Access Policy for University Of Kansas Scholarship”
2. University of Kansas Becomes First U.S. Public University to Pass University-Wide Open Access Policy
3. Harvard Graduate School of Education Faculty Adopt Open Access Policy
4. “Achieving the Full Potential of Repository Deposit Policies”
5. University of Oregon Department of Romance Languages Adopts Open Access Mandate

In "Interesting Development in Georgia State Case," Kevin Smith provides an update on Cambridge University Press et al. v. Georgia State University, an important case about copyright and electronic reserves in libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

Earlier this year, the Georgia Regents adopted a new copyright policy after a select committee reviewed and entirely rewrote the older one. The new policy is shorter, more easily comprehended and more pragmatic. . . .

After this new policy was adopted, attorneys for GSU filed a motion for a "protective order" which would state that only information about electronic course content going forward, under the new policy, could be "discovered" by the plaintiffs. GSU argued that since they were a state institution, and therefore entitled to immunity from damages, the plaintiffs could only get prospective relief (an injunction) and therefore should be limited to information about practices related to the policy under which GSU would go forward. After some legal maneuvering, the Judge granted this request last week.

Related Posts

1. Oxford University Press Backs Google Book Search Settlement
2. Public Perceptions of Copyright and the Creative Commons: Bunnyfoot User Testing Report: OPSI—Crown Copyright
3. Introducing Copyright: A Plain Language Guide to Copyright in the 21st Century
4. Podcast about Copyright Office Meeting on Copyright Exceptions for the Blind or Other Persons with Disabilities
5. Ed Felten Proposes “Three Strikes” Copyright Law for Print

The Association of Research Libraries has published Author Addenda, SPEC Kit 310. The table of contents and executive summary are freely available.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This survey was distributed to the 123 ARL member libraries in February 2009. Respondents were asked to provide information on the use of author addenda at their institutions, which rights authors were encouraged to retain, and the methods by which libraries were conducting promotion and outreach efforts on the topic of author rights and addenda. Seventy libraries (57%) responded to the survey. Of those respondents, 35 (50%) indicated that authors at their institutions were using author addenda, and 33 libraries (47%) indicated that they “did not know.” Only two libraries indicated that authors at their institutions were not using author addenda.

The majority of respondents (77%) did not formally collect information on the use of author addenda on their campuses at the time of this survey. Evidence was gathered mostly in an informal way, either when an author contacted the library with a question related to copyright or an author addendum, or through anecdotal stories of success or failure in using an addendum. Fifty-two percent (36) of the responding libraries reported that an author addendum had been endorsed by administrators or a governing body at their institution or by their consortia, while 62% (43) responded that there had been no endorsements. There had been more endorsements at the consortial level than at the institutional level. Eight libraries (12%) reported that an institutional endorsement was under consideration at the time of the survey. A larger number of libraries (46 or 68%) reported that their institution or consortium had worked to promote the use of an author addendum by providing links to an author addendum and copyright information on library Web sites or making faculty presentations on author rights (particularly pertaining to the NIH Public Access Policy).

This SPEC Kit includes documentation from respondents in the form of sample addenda, brochures, handouts, and author rights Web sites and slides from presentations to faculty and library staff.

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1. A Guide for the Perplexed Part II: The Amended Google-Michigan Agreement
2. Public Perceptions of Copyright and the Creative Commons: Bunnyfoot User Testing Report: OPSI—Crown Copyright
3. Google and University of Michigan Sign Expanded Digitization Agreement
4. Long Tail Author Chris Anderson Interviewed about Free Publishing
5. University of Washington Faculty Senate Passes Resolution Concerning Scholarly Publishing Alternatives and Authors’ Rights

I am working on a frequency-based dictionary of Early Modern English drama. This is an offshoot of the MONK project and depends on the data created there. MONK includes approximately 340 plays from 1550 to 1642, including all of Shakespeare's plays and most of the other plays that have survived from his day. The texts come from the Text Creation Partnership. We transformed them into XML files that parse under TEI-P5 and added linguistic annotation with Phil Burns' MorphAdorner.

read more

The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind are suing Arizona State University for its use of the Amazon Kindle to distribute electronic textbooks to students, saying the device cannot be used by blind students.

The groups say the Kindle has text-to-speech technology that reads books aloud to blind students, but that the device’s menus do not offer a way for blind students to purchase books, select a book to read, or even to activate the text-to-speech feature, according to a joint statement by the two groups.

In a lawsuit filed last week, a journalism student was also named as a plaintiff.

“While my peers will have instant access to their course materials in electronic form, I will still have to wait weeks or months for accessible texts to be prepared for me,” said the student, Darrell Shandrow, in the groups’ statement. “These texts will not provide the access and features available to other students.”

In a statement to the Library Journal,

a university spokeswoman, Martha Dennis Christiansen, did not answer any specific questions pertaining to the lawsuit.

“Arizona State University is committed to equal access for all students. Disability Resource Centers are located on all ASU campuses. The centers enable students to establish eligibility and obtain services and accommodations for qualified students with disabilities,” she said. “These efforts are focused on providing the necessary tools so that all students with disabilities have an equal opportunity to be successful in their academic pursuits.”

The complaint asked the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate similar practices at Case Western Reserve University, Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, Pace University, Princeton University, and Reed College. —Marc Beja

Of the four universities linked originally by the proto-Internet in 1969, two of them were part of the University of California system: the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara campuses. Now, as the system grapples with a staggering budget crisis that might close institutions and forever alter what’s considered one of the crown jewels of public education, a proposal comes suggesting that salvation lies in going online.

A new cyber-campus “would have selective admissions; tuition somewhere between community college and the on-campus UC price, part-time and ‘anytime’ options and lectures by the best faculty from the entire UC system,” wrote Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the law school at the system’s Berkeley campus, in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. “Our online students might miss the keg parties, but they would have the same world-class faculty, UC graduate student instructors, and adjunct faculty.”

“UC-XI,” which is what Mr. Edley calls his vision for an 11th system campus, can be built upon social networks that connect students to instructors and to one another. Hard-to-virtualize facilities like science laboratories could be opened up at night or on weekends. And, Mr. Edley says, the faculty can step up to ensure “UC-caliber instruction and learning.”

Mr. Edley does acknowledge that there have been some failures in online education, “but none involved degree-granting instruction by a premier institution with the kind of market appeal that UC campuses enjoy.” Well, the Board of Trustees of the Illinois system, which sent its expensive GlobalCampus online project back to the drawing board earlier this spring, might disagree. And one can argue about the definition of “market appeal,” but officials in Texas and Utah, both struggling with online-education initiatives, clearly thought their institutions had a certain cachet, at least within their states. But Mr. Edley prefers to focus on more successful ventures like Britain’s Open University and the for-profit University of Phoenix.

“We’ve had decades of increasing dysfunction in Sacramento and smoldering doubts in some quarters about the value of supporting public education,” Mr. Edley writes. “Now comes the resulting surge in victims — present and future — in families and throughout the economy.”

Online learning, he concludes, could save the California dream of a top-notch education for all. The best offense in a crisis, he concludes, “is often innovation.” —Josh Fischman

Cnn.com posted an interesting item today about the increasing use of twitter and smartphones in farming. Aside from using the phones to monitor weather, pesticide application, soil moisture, etc. (with an increasing number of apps in the works; cool!), what is particularly exciting to me are the implications this has for the local/sustainable food movements: 

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/02/twitter.farmer/index.html

 

Some professors are unsubscribing from scholarly e-mail lists because they say that discussion has shifted to academic blogs, to social networks like Facebook, and to Twitter. In response, the groups running some of the largest academic e-mail lists are adding Web 2.0 features to their mix of services. Many devoted fans of e-mail lists, meanwhile, say that the form is far from dead, and that discussion on e-mail lists are richer than what’s happening in the blogosphere or other new forms.

The latest installment of The Chronicle’s College 2.0 column argues that e-mail lists may soon occupy a space like radios did in the television age, sticking around but fading to the background. Are e-mail lists still part of your online diet?

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Beth Canter, the social media networking consultant, is a blogger who not only writes smart things but has a talent for finding other smart bloggers and reblogging them.  What I love about her work (including the re-work) is that she is a pro.  As in p-r-o.  She has experience and so she doesn't just invent things (i.e. the wheel) and assume that no one else has, no one else knows what it will do, and no one else knows how it works.  No, as with all forms of media, new media also operate by certain kinds of tacit community rules, expectations, and norms.   And people like Beth have huge first-hand experience assessing those needs.  She doesn't just make it up.  This is a breath of fresh air in the world of new media insights, which come fast and furious and often don't hold any water or have any traction or whatever metaphor you want to use:  they just don't do it.

 

The insight today, in a blog post reblogged by Nina Simon, is that by far and away the most visitors to a website are spectators or, crudely, lurkers.  (Cat in the Stack readers will note that I've written numerous columns on "Lurkers Welcome!" and I know from this blog as well as from my Facebook life that most people watch, they don't actually do.)   The big insight here, though, is that watching isn't about not caring, it is not feeling confident of a point of entry.  This is why the simple "Like" check mark on Facebook gets so many more hits than "Comment."  You can like anything for any reason and it's a low point of entry to click on the "Like" box.   

 

Simon's advice, analogously, is to CONSTRAIN self-expression.  That seems contradictory to the Everyone Her/His Own Self-Creator rhetoric of Web 2.0, but it makes sense.  As she says, not everyone will paint an image on a mural if given a paint brush.  But give someone premixed paints and ask them to please fill in this one box, and they often cheerfully comply.   

 

Guess what?  It is the old Biz School truism:  collaboration doesn't just happen!   Collaboration needs planning, even in Web 2.0 world.  Except for cranks who love to zip in, leave a snarky comment, and then zip out, most people, faced with a blank COMMENT box, have no idea what to write and don't like the frightening feeling of leaving a mark that may live on the Internet forever.  Even my 20 year old friend, a Level 80 World of Warcraft computer genius,  expressed nervousness about blogging, putting ideas out there that would live long after he had his first job as an investment banker where snarkiness might not be the preferred mode, at least not in public.   But a simple, anonymous  task that contributes to a greater whole?  That's a different matter.

 

Anonymous participation, even mental or highly specific, should be part of the repertoire of Web 2.0 participatory choices.  You cannot enforce freedom of choice.   So then, we need an array of kinds of choices if we are really going to make participation participatory.   I like that concept a lot.

 

Here's the url for this very thoughtprovoking blog, with a shout out of appreciation to both Beth Kanter and Nina Simon:  http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2009/03/self-expression-is-over-rated-bett....

I just mailed the July issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.  This issue takes a close look at OA and the variety of digitization projects.  How far can we defend the principle that the results of publicly-funded digitization projects should be OA?  What if the public funds are supplemented by private funds?  What if the works to be digitized are under copyright?  What if the project wants to provide gratis rather than libre OA?

The round-up section briefly notes 166 OA developments from June.

I recently attended a workshop sponsored by the Joint information Systems Committee (JISC) that presented some of the findings from the JISC funded community engagement and virtual research environments (VRE) projects. The three community engagement projects presented were the engage project (engaging researchers with e-infrastructure), the e-uptake project (enabling uptake ...

Sun has launched its Enterprise-Wide Digital Repository and Archive solution.

Here's an excerpt from Enterprise-Wide Digital Repositories and Archives:

The result is a solution which is more than the sum of its parts. Drupal with Islandora provides an easy, powerful way to create customized Web sites with an organization's own unique content and branding and offers fine control over access to collections and individual data assets. Adding the Fedora Repository provides durability to the content while also enabling seamless sharing of content with other applications. The Sun Open Archive Framework’s Preservation Software layer adds robust storage protection and data handling combined with powerful management tools, while Sun Open Storage delivers the most cost effective and easily deployed storage available. Together these components get customers up and running fast with the assurance they will be able to grow and evolve the system gracefully, protecting investments.

Read more about it at "New Fedora-based Solution Offerings from Sun and its Partners."

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5. Fedora 3.2 Released

Hugh Glaser, Ian Millard, and Les Carr have self-archived "RKBExplorer: Repositories, Linked Data and Research Support" in the ECS EPrints Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

RKBExplorer (http://rkbexplorer.com/) is a system for publishing Linked Data to Semantic Web standards, also providing a browser that allows users to explore this interlinked Web of Data, primarily in the domain of scientific endeavour. As part of the activity, we have harvested the metadata from a number of the larger ePrints repositories into http://eprints.rkbexplorer.com, and republished it as Linked Data. This allows the RKBExplorer browser to present a unified view of these repositories and related data from other sources such as dblp and dbpedia (a Semantic Web version of Wikipedia). Users can thus investigate concepts related to the ePrints people and articles, such as related people, projects and institutions.

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5. SWORD Named Most Innovative Project at JISC Repositories and Preservation Conference

Alma Swan has self-archived her presentation "Keynote: Remember Repositories? They Were All the Rage" in The ECS EPrints Repository.

Related Posts

1. “RKBExplorer: Repositories, Linked Data and Research Support”
2. “Beyond Institutional Repositories”
3. Interoperable Repositories Infrastructure Project
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5. SWORD Named Most Innovative Project at JISC Repositories and Preservation Conference

The National Library of Medicine's Reference & Web Services Section is recruiting a Systems Librarian.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

As a member of our staff, you will have the opportunity to:

• Develop and support Web 2.0 technologies like blogs and wikis
• Manage websites, including http://www.nlm.nih.gov
• Manage and support applications such as Vivisimo, NLM's search engine application and TeamSite, NLM's primary web content management system
• Collaborate with the MedlinePlus management team to ensure usability and customer satisfaction on http://medlineplus.gov, NLM's consumer health website
• Serve as technical liaison to NLM's IT department

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Depending on the news source, the Harvard University Press has cut either six or seven positions.

Read more about it at "Layoffs and Restructuring Hit Harvard U. Press" and "Reorg at Harvard University Press Eliminates Six Positions."

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Cardiff University's Information Services Directorate is recruiting a Project Manager for the Integrated Workflow for Institutional Repository Enhancement Project.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Cardiff University's Information Services Directorate (INSRV) provides a full range of IS, IT and Library services, supporting staff and students in their academic, research and business functions. MWE is a large IT project involving the deployment of Portal Services, Collaborative Tools and Business Integrations to Cardiff University's users, and will transform the day-to-day working experience of staff and students. The Institutional Repository (ORCA—Online Research @ Cardiff) is a digital repository for the University's research publications, making the full text freely available where possible.

The I-WIRE Project will develop a workflow and toolset, integrated into the MWE research portal, for the submission, indexing, and re-purposing of data and full text for staff publications in ORCA. You will have a significant role in the successful delivery of this externally-funded project.

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The Chesapeake Project has released its Two-Year Pilot Project Evaluation.

Here's an excerpt:

The Chesapeake Project began as a collaborative, two-year pilot program with the goal of preserving born-digital legal information published directly to the Web. It was implemented in early 2007 by the Georgetown Law Library and the State Law Libraries of Maryland and Virginia. Having successfully completed its pilot phase, The Chesapeake Project' legal information archive is now expanding.

The following document comprises the final evaluation and account of The Chesapeake Project's accomplishments during its two-year pilot phase, spanning from February 27, 2007, to February 28, 2009.

During this time, the project's digital archive was populated with more than 4,300 digital items representing nearly 1,900 Web-published titles, the vast majority of which have no print counterpart. Each of these titles were harvested from the Web, stored within a secure digital archive and assigned permanent archive URLs. Today, each archived digital title remains accessible to users, despite whether or not the original digital files have been altered or removed from their original locations on the Web.

A 2008 analysis of the digital archive's content showed that more than eight percent of the titles archived by The Chesapeake Project had disappeared from their original URLs within the project's first year, but remained accessible thanks to the project's efforts. The current evaluation demonstrates that this figure has increased significantly over the past year. In fact, as of March 2009, nearly 14 percent of the project's archived titles—approximately one in seven—have disappeared from their original locations on the Web.

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Anne Gentil-Beccot, Salvatore Mele, and Travis Brooks have self-archived "Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics. How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

Contemporary scholarly discourse follows many alternative routes in addition to the three-century old tradition of publication in peer-reviewed journals. The field of High- Energy Physics (HEP) has explored alternative communication strategies for decades, initially via the mass mailing of paper copies of preliminary manuscripts, then via the inception of the first online repositories and digital libraries.

This field is uniquely placed to answer recurrent questions raised by the current trends in scholarly communication: is there an advantage for scientists to make their work available through repositories, often in preliminary form? Is there an advantage to publishing in Open Access journals? Do scientists still read journals or do they use digital repositories?

The analysis of citation data demonstrates that free and immediate online dissemination of preprints creates an immense citation advantage in HEP, whereas publication in Open Access journals presents no discernible advantage. In addition, the analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the field shows that HEP scientists seldom read journals, preferring preprints instead.

Related Posts

1. “Beyond Institutional Repositories”
2. Interoperable Repositories Infrastructure Project
3. Japanese Institutional Repositories: IRDB Contents Analysis System Enhanced
4. Blog Reports from Open Repositories 2009
5. Digital Repositories Workshop: Tools and Infrastructure Presentations

A survey presented at a recent Wiley-Blackwell Executive Seminar on "Journals Publishing: Policy and Practice in an Uncertain Market" shows that scholarly societies are surprisingly optimistic about the effect of the global downturn on their publishing operations.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Sixty percent of professional and scholarly societies believe that the global economic downturn might be a stimulus to introducing efficiencies within their organizations, while 57% think it might provide opportunities for launching new activities or services for their members, according to a new study presented at the Wiley-Blackwell Executive Seminar held at the Royal Society, London, on June 19th 2009.

The study, carried out by Wiley-Blackwell, the leading publisher for professional and scholarly societies, examined the potential impact of the economic downturn on its society publishing partners. Sixty-eight percent characterized the global economic downturn as moderately negative, while 17% stated that it will have minimal negative impact or may even be beneficial.

Asked to rank the expected impact of the economic downturn on each category of their organization’s revenues or assets, more than 75% of society officers believed that there would be a very or slightly negative impact on their membership dues and conference income, with the most concern expressed about endowments and investments. Thirty-two percent did not anticipate any change in income from publishing, forty-seven percent believed it could be slightly affected, while 17% percent felt this area may be very affected.

In terms of strategies to ride out the economic crunch, 41% said that they would consider downsizing while a further 41% said they would consider expanding. More than half (54%) felt that the way to navigate the recession was outsourcing some of their core activities, such as publishing. Two-thirds thought that their publishing needs would not change during the recession, while one-third thought they would. . . .

The survey, carried out by Wiley-Blackwell in Spring 2009, was completed by 47 officers from scholarly and professional societies ranging in size from less than 500 members to more than 25,000, and from a variety of subject disciplines. The majority of respondents were based in Europe and the United States.

Related Posts

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The Economic Development and Infrastructure Committee of the Parliament of Victoria, Australia on June 24 released the final report of its Inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data. (Thanks to Dave Bath.)

See especially Recommendation 8:

That the Victorian Government encourage as part of its funding agreements with research agencies and higher education institutions that research results be deposited in open access journals or repositories. The Government should consider providing additional funds to these agencies to allow them to publish in open access journals that charge a fee for publication.

From the report:

In its report Public sector support for science and innovation, the [Australian Government] Productivity Commission argued that mandatory requirements would better meet the aim of free and public access to publicly-funded research results. This is despite claims that requiring publicly funded research to be made available via open access could have a detrimental impact on the journal publishing industry. According to the Australian Publishers Association, the increasing availability of peer-reviewed manuscripts in repositories “will lead to cancellations and the eventual demise of the journal upon which their peer-reviewed process depends.” A possible solution, as noted by the Productivity Commission, is the ”author pays” approach whereby authors are responsible for paying publishers or repositories a fee on the basis that the publication is publicly and freely accessible. ...

While it would be difficult for the Victorian Government to require research agencies and higher education institutions to completely comply with an open access policy, it does have a role in encouraging this practice. The Government should encourage, as part of its funding agreements with these organisations, that research results be deposited in open access journals or repositories. The Committee believes this is an important step to maximise the value of the Government’s research and development investment, and further contribute to scientific research and innovation.

Tim Barton, the president of Oxford University Press has written a thoughtful article for the Chronicle on the Google Book Search settlement, “Saving Text From Oblivion: Oxford U. Press on the Google Book Settlement.” Barton makes the point that,

What once seemed at least debatable has now become irrefutable: If it’s not online, it’s invisible. While increasing numbers of long-out-of-date, public-domain books are now fully and freely available to anyone with a browser, the vast majority of the scholarship published in book form over the last 80 years is today largely overlooked by students, who limit their research to what can be discovered on the Internet.

Barton argues for accepting the settlement, even if it is imperfect. This came to me via Twitter from Andrew Logemann.

One reason I was abashed when the plagiarism accusations (justified, owned, apologized for, and, I hope, corrected)  came out about Chris Anderson's new book FREE is that I find him terrifically interesting and unusually thoughtful, even if his contribution is chiefly in raising timely questions, not answering them.  Fortunately, his unacknowledged borrowings from Wikipedia have not swamped the fact that we all urgently want a conversation on what is or isn't free and whether being free is or isn't good for us.

 

Here's the beginning salvo, fired by Malcom Gladwell, another popularizing author whom I admire very much for the way he brings complex questions into a national conversation.   Gladwell in the New Yorker and then Anderson's response in Wired.  

Here's the url for Gladwell's review, "Writing for Free."  You can feel his anxiety (justified, of course) in this writing, as he sees one after another of his fellow journalists left without jobs as this or that newspaper and magazine folds.   But are his conclusions logical, justified, the only way of thinking about the future of journalism (even if print newspapers and magazines are lost):  http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_...

 

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090701/0422125421.shtml

 

Here is the punchline from Gladwell's review of Anderson and it is so true that I urge you to read this exchange and think about it.  I think Gladwell is exactly right in this conclusion:

"And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both. Who knows? The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws."

 

Read them, and the energetic conversation about what it means for information to be "free" in an era of escalating debt, unemployment, layoffs, bankruptcies, and collapse.  Who pays in the end for what's free?  That is the question.  Attention to next year's HASTAC Scholars:   this will be a great forum topic.  In the meantime, let us know:  What do YOU think?   It won't cost you a cent.   After all, to be a HASTAC member doesn't cost you a thing.  No dues.  Nothing.   After all, HASTAC, like all information, wants to be free.  Right?  

 

Well, not exactly.  And that's Gladwell's point.  A lot of what seems, on the consumer end, to be free, isn't free at all when you look at the producers.  That is one of the many factors fudged by a glib definition of what a "prosumer" (producers who are also consumers) really is.   Production and consumption come with different outlays, different responsibilities, and, well, different costs.  And understanding the nature of those costs is what every communications media participant is trying to figure out for the digital age.  The real question isn't "is it free?" but "free to whom?"  And, what are the hidden costs of a zero pricetag?  And the hidden benefits of offering a product that costs something--in time if not in money--for "free."

 

Gladwell notes the perplexing examples of our time, that Apple may well make more from iPod downloads and iPhone aps then from the machinery; that the NY Times is struggling and having a hard time giving selling its products on line but the Wall Street Journal seems to be thriving with its pay-to-read online subscriptions.  Amazon makes more money from its technologies (software and hardware) for online product delivery than from the books it sells.  On and on.

 

These are complex issues for a fascinating and infinitely complex, transitional time, and give new twists and turns to Stewart Brand's original battle cry that "information wants to be free."

 

 

 

 

 

I recently attended a workshop sponsored by the Joint information Systems Committee (JISC) that presented some of the findings from the JISC funded community engagement and virtual research environmen [read more...]

Here’s the first post from this month’s guest blogger, David Wiley.

Summer is a time to take a step back and review campus policies while fewer students are on campus. As you do, please consider this parable of the inventor and the trucker.

Once upon a time there was a brilliant inventor. Day and night she dreamed and schemed, until one sunny day she had a “Eureka!” moment. She sketched out the design of a breakthrough product, and worked and reworked it by showing it to friends and getting their feedback.

When she was satisfied that the design was ready to take to production, she began contacting venture-capital organizations and banks. It was a long, painful process, but finally she acquired the money she needed to put her ideas into motion.

Money in hand she began searching for employees – production specialists, designers, marketing experts, and others. Finding the right people for the enterprise proved more difficult than finding the money to start the enterprise, but at last she succeeded in hiring the right people.

They all set to work. It was alternately glorious and tedious, fulfilling and demoralizing. There were false starts and breakthroughs; there was tension and laughter; there were tears of frustration and tears of joy. They persevered through it all, and at length the day arrived when they had a product ready to ship.

Relieved and ecstatic, the inventor began contacting shipping companies. But she could not believe what she heard. The truckers would deliver her goods, but only subject to the most unbelievable conditions:

• The inventor had to sign all the intellectual-property rights to her product over to the truckers.
  
• The truckers would keep all the profits from sales of the inventor’s product.
  
• The shipping deal had to be both exclusive and perpetual, never subject to review or cancellation.
  

Every shipping company she contacted gave the same response. Dejected, but unwilling to see the fruits of all her labor go to waste, she eventually relented and signed a contract with one of the companies.

This parable is, of course, a story about a researcher and her interactions with academic-journal publishers. While the scenario is all too familiar to us as academics, the parable hopefully sheds some light on the way academic publishing works. As a faculty member, I am expected to:

• Come up with original ideas for useful research.
  
• Find grants or other financing with which to conduct the research.
  
• Identify and hire graduate students and other professionals to help conduct the research.
  
• Participate in actually conducting the research.
  
• Determine what the results of the research mean for my field and for society.
  
• Write up the results of the research in a clear and communicative manner.
  
• Surrender all my rights to the written results of my research to a publisher who will sell my work and make a huge profit by so doing.
  

And when I say a “huge profit,” let me provide a concrete example. Reed Elsevier reported profits over $800-million from its Elsevier publishing division in 2008. Not over $800-million in total revenue – over $800-million in profit.

How does a company make such an incredible amount of money? By persuading you and I to do their work as volunteers. We not only write the articles they publish, but we also volunteer our time to review the papers they publish. And then, inexplicably, our universities pay publishers exorbitant subscription fees so that we can regain access to the results of our own research, writing, and peer-review efforts.

Unfortunately, this lunacy is the water in which all academic fish swim, making it sometimes difficult to recognize. There was a time in the past when publishers held a monopoly on distribution and academics had no method of disseminating their work that did not involve giving away their rights and interest in their own work. The Internet has changed the status quo, however, and each of us now has equal access to a means of distribution exponentially more powerful and affordable than the paper-based distribution of yesteryear.

Since we faculty already write and review the articles, and we have direct access to the most efficient distribution system in the history of humanity, why are we still handing over billions of dollars of increasingly scarce resources to journal publishers? You will find that the answers to this question have nothing to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge or the economics of those activities.

I believe that colleges should take some time this summer to consider how they might shake up the old publishing system and encourage free open access to their professors’ research articles. Institutions like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and most recently the University of Kansas have made great strides in improving the dissemination of their faculty’s research output while simultaneously helping faculty members reclaim their interests in their own work by adopting “open access” policies. Perhaps it’s time for your university to consider an open-access policy, too. —David Wiley

David Wiley

Welcome to our new guest blogger, David Wiley, who we’ve featured in past articles for his innovative experiments in open education.

Mr. Wiley is an associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, where he studies open education and walks the talk by doing open teaching of his BYU courses. He’s also tinkering with new open textbook models as “chief openness officer” of Flat World Knowledge and as a member of the board of the Open High School of Utah. This month Mr. Wiley will be sharing some ideas here on Wired Campus. Thanks for joining us, David.

Emily Thompson is one of the best thinkers out there on how we hear and the relationship between aurality and culture.  Her lecture on "The Soundscape of Modernity" is now available on video from MIT Press which also published her book,  The Soundscape of Modernity:  Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933.   I came across this today on Facebook (a common source for some of my most interesting thoughts of the day) and it made me think about last night's Nova program which featured the VoCoder and showed the ways that it can be used to enhance a voice but also to keep someone tone-deaf on key by artificially manufacturing the right pitch.  

 

Thompson makes the point that even such "givens" as pitch are in fact culturally specific.  We hear differently depending on what technologies we hear through as well as through the conventions of our time and place.  It's a fascinating example of perception and culture, as always, co-existing and co-forming one another, mind and brain in tandem.

 

Here's the link: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/19

 

. 

The "Open Access Policy for University Of Kansas Scholarship" is now available.

Here's an excerpt :

Each faculty member grants to KU permission to make scholarly articles to which he or she made substantial intellectual contributions publicly available in the KU open access institutional repository, and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. This license in no way interferes with the rights of the KU faculty author as the copyright holder of the work. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while a faculty member of KU. Faculty will be afforded an opt out opportunity. Faculty governance in consultation with the Provost's office will develop the details of the policy which will be submitted for approval by the Faculty Senate.

In "More on the U. Kansas OA Policy,"Gavin Bakerr comments:

A Web version of the text of the University of Kansas' new OA policy confirms what I'd suspected in my last post: that the policy as passed doesn't contain an OA mandate. It commits the university to OA, gives the university permission to provide OA to its faculty's research via the IR, and establishes a task force to work out the details—including the details of how the manuscripts will get into the IR.

Related Posts

1. Stuart Shieber on “University Open-Access Policies as Mandates”
2. University of Kansas Becomes First U.S. Public University to Pass University-Wide Open Access Policy
3. Harvard Graduate School of Education Faculty Adopt Open Access Policy
4. University of Oregon Department of Romance Languages Adopts Open Access Mandate
5. University of Calgary Academic Council of Library and Cultural Resources Adopts Open Access Mandate

Laurent Romary and Chris Armbruster have self-archived "Beyond Institutional Repositories" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

The current system of so-called institutional repositories, even if it has been a sensible response at an earlier stage, may not answer the needs of the scholarly community, scientific communication and accompanied stakeholders in a sustainable way. However, having a robust repository infrastructure is essential to academic work. Yet, current institutional solutions, even when networked in a country or across Europe, have largely failed to deliver. Consequently, a new path for a more robust infrastructure and larger repositories is explored to create superior services that support the academy. A future organization of publication repositories is advocated that is based upon macroscopic academic settings providing a critical mass of interest as well as organizational coherence. Such a macro-unit may be geographical (a coherent national scheme), institutional (a large research organization or a consortium thereof) or thematic (a specific research field organizing itself in the domain of publication repositories).

The argument proceeds as follows: firstly, while institutional open access mandates have brought some content into open access, the important mandates are those of the funders and these are best supported by a single infrastructure and large repositories, which incidentally enhances the value of the collection (while a transfer to institutional repositories would diminish the value). Secondly, we compare and contrast a system based on central research publication repositories with the notion of a network of institutional repositories to illustrate that across central dimensions of any repository solution the institutional model is more cumbersome and less likely to achieve a high level of service. Next, three key functions of publication repositories are reconsidered, namely a) the fast and wide dissemination of results; b) the preservation of the record; and c) digital curation for dissemination and preservation. Fourth, repositories and their ecologies are explored with the overriding aim of enhancing content and enhancing usage. Fifth, a target scheme is sketched, including some examples. In closing, a look at the evolutionary road ahead is offered.

Related Posts

1. “Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics. How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories”
2. “AAHSL Institutional Repositories (IR) Survey Summary and Analysis: 2008 Survey, 2005-2008 Comparison”
3. Japanese Institutional Repositories: IRDB Contents Analysis System Enhanced
4. Blog Reports from Open Repositories 2009
5. DSpace and Fedora Commons Merge to Form DuraSpace

DuraSpace is recruiting a Web Developer.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The Web developer will join the team designing, building, and supporting the DuraCloud durable storage service and related Web sites for the DSpace Foundation, Fedora Commons, and other open source projects. The developer will be responsible for all aspects of requirements gathering, technical analysis, and development, testing, and documenting customer-facing applications, working both alone and as a member of a team. The position, which reports to the Chief Technology Officer, requires a knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and self-motivated individual with extensive experience in user interface design on the Web and thorough grounding in HCI principles and practices.

Related Posts

1. Digital Library Jobs: Digital Projects Developer at Duke University
2. Digital Library Jobs: Library Applications Developer at the University of Maryland
3. Digital Library Jobs: Associate Director for Technical and Digital Services at Florida International University
4. Digital Library Jobs: TDL Team Leader at Texas Digital Library

In "Mass Digitization Mini-Symposium: A Reverse Travelogue," Eric Lease Morgan reports on a mass digitization mini-symposium at the Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame. His post includes links to the summarized presentations.

Related Posts

1. Planning and Managing the Digitization of Library and Archive Materials: A Multi-Model Approach Presentation
2. eIFL Case Studies on Low Cost Digitisation Projects: Final Report
3. Nevada Statewide Digital Planning 2008-2009: Final Report
4. Welsh Journals Online: Final Report
5. Google and University of Michigan Sign Expanded Digitization Agreement

The Fedora Commons has released version 3.2.1 of Fedora Repository.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The current release of Fedora Repository is 3.2.1 is a minor upgrade that addresses a security issue discovered in Fedora 3.2. . . .

Included within is the long-awaited, web-based administrative client, initial integration with the emerging Akubra storage-abstraction layer, many useful bug fixes, and the experimental release of a Fedora decoupled from the familiar 'fedora' context path.

Related Posts

1. Sound Archives Film Image Repository Project: SAFIR Final Report
2. “Evaluation of Digital Repository Software at the National Library of Medicine”
3. DSpace and Fedora Commons Merge to Form DuraSpace
4. SWORD Named Most Innovative Project at JISC Repositories and Preservation Conference
5. Fedora 3.2 Released

The Duke University Libraries are recruiting a Digital Projects Developer.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Under the direction of the Head of the Digital Projects Department, the developer will explore, adapt, and support library information technologies for digital projects, including the application of standards, metadata, and discovery interfaces appropriate to specific projects. The developer is responsible for helping Library staff design user interfaces that successfully navigate and integrate various resources specific to research libraries.

Related Posts

1. Digital Library Jobs: Web Developer at DuraSpace
2. Digital Library Jobs: Library Applications Developer at the University of Maryland
3. Digital Library Jobs: Associate Director for Technical and Digital Services at Florida International University
4. Digital Library Jobs: Digital Projects Librarian at Truman State University
5. Digital Library Jobs: Digital Projects Coordinator at Mississippi State

The article "Is This the Future Bookstore?" includes a digital video that shows the detailed operation of the Espresso Book Machine. Be sure to stick around after the first overview of the paperback production process for the subsequent close-up view.

Related Posts

1. Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 4
2. Papers and Presentations from EPUB 2009—Rethinking Electronic Publishing: Innovation in Communication Paradigms and Technologies
3. Springer Launches MyCopy: E-Book Users Can Order Fixed-Price Paperback Copies
4. Justice Department Sends Civil Investigative Demands to Google about Google Book Search Settlement
5. Print-on-Demand/Short Run Book Titles Increase 132% in 2008, Exceeding Traditional Book Titles for First Time

The Knowledge Exchange has released Open Access—What Are the Economic Benefits? A Comparison of the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Denmark.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In June 2009 a study was completed that had been commissioned by Knowledge Exchange and written by Professor John Houghton, Victoria University, Australia. This report on the study was titled: "Open Access—What are the economic benefits? A comparison of the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Denmark." This report was based on the findings of studies in which John Houghton had modelled the costs and benefits of Open Access in three countries. These studies had been undertaken in the UK by JISC, in the Netherlands by SURF and in Denmark by DEFF.

In the three national studies the costs and benefits of scholarly communication were compared based on three different publication models. The modelling revealed that the greatest advantage would be offered by the Open Access model, which means that the research institution or the party financing the research pays for publication and the article is then freely accessible.

Adopting this model could lead to annual savings of around EUR 70 million in Denmark, EUR 133 million in The Netherlands and EUR 480 in the UK. The report concludes that the advantages would not just be in the long term; in the transitional phase too, more open access to research results would have positive effects. In this case the benefits would also outweigh the costs.

Related Posts

1. Open Access: Text of Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009
2. A Brief Look Back at Twenty Years as an Internet Open Access Publisher
3. Open Access Bill: Senators Cornyn and Lieberman Re-Introduce Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)
4. Costs and Benefits of Research Communication: The Dutch Situation
5. Gustavus Adolphus College Library Faculty Adopt Open Access Pledge

Well I finished editing my conference report on Digital Humanities 2009. I’m sure it’s still full of typos as it was largely written live, but it is time to move on. Great conference with neat swag, excellent papers, and a lovely venue! For other perspectives see the Twitter thread or South Jersey Digital live blogs.

jonathan harris, one of the most brilliant designer/thinkers around has just launched an awesome new project -- Sputnik Observatory.

As the National Education Computer Conference (NECC) celebrated its 30th Anniversary in the nation’s capital, the CHNM Outreach Team was on-hand Monday to enjoy a busy afternoon speaking with an international audience at the Convention Center in Washington, DC. The CHNM poster session highlighted free tools for teachers that promote digital literacy and critical thinking: Zotero, Omeka, ScholarPress, and the National History Education Clearinghouse Tools for Teachers.

The annual NECC conference—presented by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and keyed to the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS)—features innovative workshops, including Model Lessons, BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop) sessions, and Open Source Labs. The nonprofit ISTE focuses on improving teaching, learning, and school leadership by advancing the effective use of technology in PK–12 and teacher education.

Stephen Ramsay has created a xtra normal movie of our Untitled #4 (PDF) dialogue on Writing as Programming as Writing. xtr normal lets you create a movie from text using text-to-speech with virtual characters - an interesting variant on visualization and a different way of representing a text. I want it known that I look nothing like the character he chose for me.

Update: The dialogue is now up on YouTube in two parts. See Part I and Part II.

Robots could roam the Moon within the next three years, thanks to scientists and students across the world who are vying for the Google Lunar XPrize, a $30-million international competition to collect data and images with robots and send them back to the earth.

“The Moon is the hottest real estate in the solar system right now,” said William Pomerantz, senior director of space prizes at the XPrize Foundation, which is sponsoring the competition. “Every major space agency across the planet is looking to go back to the Moon, which means every university that has space research is focusing on the Moon.”

To win the prize, teams must safely land a robot on the Moon’s surface, travel at least 500 meters, and send a specified package of data, called a “Mooncast,” back to Earth. Mr. Pomerantz said the “Mooncast” would likely be one gigabyte, which translates to about 15 or 20 minutes of high-definition video and a collection of panoramic pictures.

The first team to complete that task by December 31, 2012, will win $20-million. The second team to land will win $5-million, and another $5-million will be awarded in bonus prizes. If no prize is claimed by the first deadline, teams will have until December 31, 2014, to claim a reduced prize of $15-million.

Mr. Pomerantz said the vehicles would be the first to land on the moon since 1976, and that the U.S. hadn’t seen any live or new surface data since 1972. “We’re hoping to show that these robots have capacities to show real scientific research,” Mr. Pomerantz said. “We want to inspire and educate people in same way Apollo did.”

Of the 19 teams, which must get at least 90 percent of their financing privately, several include groups of students or faculty members paired with researchers. About 30 universities are involved with the teams, Mr. Pomerantz said.

They include Omega Envoy, led by students at the University of Central Florida; Astrobotic, led by William L. Whittaker, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, with support from the University of Arizona; Stellar, whose team includes several faculty members from North Carolina State University and Duke University; Jurban, comprising researchers and a consortium of historically black colleges and universities; Italia, an effort by four Italian universities, and Independence–X Aerospace, which has a partnership with Malaysia’s MARA University of Technology.

“Tranquility Trek” is the name of the first mission for Astrobiotic, scheduled to begin in May 2011, and researchers plan to use the robot to inspect the historic Apollo 11 site. Team Jurban plans to launch September 12, 2011.

The competition is “a wonderful stepping stone as we try to move out further into the cosmos,” Mr. Pomerantz said. —Erica R. Hendry

Anyone with a feed reader can now follow public Zotero libraries simply by clicking the feed icon at the right-hand side of the browser address bar. Feeds are generated at the library and collection level, and for group libraries as well as individual libraries.

This feature provides a great way for people both inside and outside the Zotero community to keep track of the latest and greatest additions to libraries and collections, and it will work with any browser and feed reader.

Moffett Field, Calif. — An unusual new academic institution called Singularity University, run by a well-known entrepreneur and a futurist known for his claims that computers will soon outsmart human beings, welcomed its first class of students last night. But first the new students posed for a class picture and had a “spit party,” where they submitted saliva samples to have their DNA sequenced.

The premise of the university is that a range of technological fields — including nanotechnology, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence — are advancing more rapidly than many people realize. They’re accelerating exponentially, the university’s leaders argue, and so big changes may soon seem to sweep in all at once, even though initial developments happened less quickly.

The university’s goal is to train emerging leaders in business, government, and academe to prepare for what’s ahead — and possibly dream up a few new technological applications. The institution’s first program — a nine-week summer session — offers students a survey of the latest developments and trends in several high-tech disciplines, taught by experts from universities, government agencies, and technology companies. Classes are taking place at NASA’s Ames Research Center here, set in the heart of Silicon Valley. Google is a corporate sponsor, and the company gave every student a cellphone running the company’s Android operating system.

Peter Diamandis, the university’s founder, said at an opening ceremony on Monday that the institution is meant to supplement more-traditional options. “Today’s institutions of greater learning — where you go and get your doctorate degree — teach you to focus so narrowly,” he said. “Where do you learn to pull way back and think about the biggest issues on the planet? That’s what we hope to bring you here today. Not to compete with the great institutions out there but to give you a different way of thinking.”

Forty students were selected for the inaugural class, though leaders hope to expand that to 130 next summer. Tuition is $25,000 for the summer.

Mr. Diamandis modeled the institution on another one he created, the International Space University, a graduate-level training center to which NASA and other space agencies have sent students for 22 years.

For Singularity University, Mr. Diamandis teamed up with Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist who argues that by 2030, a moment — the “singularity” — will be reached when computers will outthink human brains.

Mr. Kurzweil goes further than many academic researchers in his predictions of what the future will look like — and how fast it will arrive. In his latest book, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, which he wrote with the physician Terry Grossman, he predicts that computers and human bodies will soon intermix, greatly extending lifespans. “Instead of repairing our genetic code, we will eventually be able to completely replace our DNA with microscopic computers whose code could be wirelessly reprogrammed to quickly address threats, such as a viral infection or cancer,” he wrote.

In an interview with The Chronicle on Monday, Mr. Kurzweil said that he believes such new technologies are sure to come, but that how they will be used is far from certain. “I think it’s important that people be aware of these exponentially growing information technologies and their power, for both promise and peril, so we can harness the former and control and harness the latter,” he said.

He seems as concerned about the dangers as he is excited by the promises. “We’re democratizing the tools of destruction, and there are things we can do about that, but we need to do them,” he said. “We are reprogramming biology away from heart disease and aging. But the same tools could be use by a bioterrorist to reprogram a virus to make it more deadly.”

“It’s potentially more dangerous than an atomic bomb, and the tools to do it are much more widespread,” he said. “It’s not so easy to create an atomic bomb — Iran still doesn’t have one. But the tools to create a bioengineered biological virus are in a typical college bioengineering laboratory.”

Several students and instructors said they were not here to enact Mr. Kurzweil’s visions. “We’re much more for the practical and pragmatic technologies that are five to 10 years out,” said Sterling Wright, a teaching fellow for the university.

Jessica Scorpio, a student from Canada who founded a nonprofit organization, said she sees “huge potentials” in emerging technologies and is hoping to find new ways to use them to help people. For her, the idea of a “singularity” is not her reason for attending, despite the university’s title. “If you call it ‘Emerging Technology University,’ that’s not a catchy title,” she said.

As for the “spit party” where students had their DNA analyzed, Ms. Scorpio said it was a good bonding experience, and a way to think about medical technologies on the horizon. “It was actually hard for me because I got a lot of bubbles in the tube, but you had to have nonbubbly saliva,” she said. —Jeffrey R. Young

Willard McCarty on Humanist (Vol. 23, No. 116.) pointed to some early films about computing which are worth looking at. One is “The Information Machine” from IBM in 1956. It is an animated cartoon which presents the computer in a history of human information invention. It presents three functions for computing:

1. Control or Balance (controlling complex systems)
2. Design (helping us design and think)
3. Simulation (modelling and predicting)

Another film is On Guard! The Story of SAGE also from IBM. This is about IBM’s contributions to air defense, specifically the SAGE system and the development of airborn modular computing. There is a fun part about the interactive operator terminal that visualizes data (as opposed to a TV that shows video.) The narrator actually talks about visualization (though not interactivity.

The digital Classicist seminar on Friday 26th June: Marco Büchler and Annette Loos (Leipzig) - Textual Re-use of Ancient Greek Texts: A case study on Plato’s works. [read more...] e-Science

"Our goal is to ensure that they leave with a better sense that they can make things when they leave as when they arrived . . .and kids learn that all things go awry, and every step in a project is closer to success or gleeful calamity. . . . Failures are celebrated and analyzed."  --Gever Tulley, at TED.

All education should be like this!!!     Watch the TED talk by Gever Tulley.

(The magnifying glass is perhaps a form of 'Interpretation Support System'. The eSAD project is another ambitious and well-conceptualised project from AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative (sorry, an overly complicated set of acronyms here...my acronym is bigger than your acronym!) Anyhow what particularly attracts me to this project is its use ...

An article in the Times Higher Education supplement about the Arts and Humanities e Science support Centre (AHESSC) here at King's College in London. Imagine the research possibilities of being able to view three-dimensional scans of museum objects, write dance moves electronically or study ancient documents that were previously considered too ...

Elsevier has launched SciVal Spotlight.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

SciVal Spotlight uses an innovative visualization technique to produce customized maps that provide graphical views of an institution's performance over time and across scientific fields, focusing on specific topical areas. By pinpointing a university's topical strengths and identifying leading researchers and institutions in each area, the tool is designed to help academic decision-makers optimize funding allocations and enhance hiring and collaboration decisions.

Quantifying the overall size of each topical area, the tool allows institutions to understand the significance of their article and market shares and how they rank compared to competitors in those areas. It also assesses article and market growth or decline over the last five years, offering an average rate for each using a two year sliding scale. Additionally, it determines if an institution's work is building upon the most recent discoveries; providing a "state of the art quotient" by analyzing how recent the citations are within its published output.

"We recognized a need to change the way research is currently being measured, and designed the tool to provide a more holistic and integrated view of performance," explained Jay Katzen, Managing Director, Academic and Government Products. "By capturing the unique research fingerprint of each institution, we can help academic executives better understand their core strengths and potential weaknesses so they can develop and implement successful long-term research strategies."

Moving beyond the traditional method of measuring research output by journal count, SciVal Spotlight is based on a more detailed model of the current structure of science. The model, covering virtually all of the research being published across the globe, was developed using co-citation analysis of a comprehensive database that includes 6.1 million separate papers published between 2004 and 2008, and another two million of the highly-cited references from these papers.

Leveraging this new model of science, SciVal Spotlight identifies and focuses on the inter-related work being done within an institution which represents the unique topical areas or "distinctive competencies" in which it is a leader. It also offers an opportunity to better understand which institutions are true competitors by revealing those that compete within the same research competencies.

"The square peg, round hole nature of evaluating research performance based on the broad classifications of journals no longer captures the reality of today's multidisciplinary scientific landscape," explains Kevin Boyack, a senior development advisor for Elsevier. "SciVal Spotlight provides academic decision-makers with a more accurate picture of research productivity. It allows them to evaluate performance based on the breakthroughs they are trying to achieve, rather than the classification of the journals in which their researchers are publishing articles."

Related Posts

1. Open Access—What Are the Economic Benefits? A Comparison of the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Denmark
2. Elsevier Fails to Block Release of Its Licensing Contract with Washington State University
3. Springer Launches MyCopy: E-Book Users Can Order Fixed-Price Paperback Copies
4. The UK’s Share of World Research Output: An Investigation of Different Data Sources and Trends
5. O’Reilly Launches Open Feedback Publishing System

Senator John Cornyn, Sens. Cornyn & Lieberman Team Up To Increase Public Access To Taxpayer Funded Research, press release, June 25, 2009.

U.S. Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Joe Lieberman, I-CT, introduced legislation today to expand the public's access to the research they help fund by shedding additional light on federal research projects. Their legislation, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), would require every federal department and agency with an annual extramural research budget of $100 million or more to make their research available to the public within six months of publication.

"Our legislation would give the American people greater access to the important scientific research they help fund, which will accelerate scientific discovery and innovation, while also making sure that funding is being spent appropriately to ensure taxpayers are receiving a return on their research investments and they are not having to pay twice for the same research - once to conduct it, and a second time to read it. I will continue to advocate for greater transparency measures across all of our governmental departments and agencies, and I urge our Senate colleagues to support this legislation," said Sen. Cornyn.

"The United States has some of the best and brightest researchers," said Lieberman. "I continue to be impressed by their ideas and feel strongly that the American public should have access to what they discover. The internet makes it possible to provide public access to federally funded research and I am pleased to lead the effort to make this information more accessible." ...

Sens. Cornyn and Lieberman first introduced this legislation in the 109^th Congress [Note: 2006]. ...

Specifically, the FRPAA would:

• Require every researcher with an annual extramural research budget of $100 million or more, whether funded totally or partially by a government department or agency, to submit an electronic copy of the final manuscript that has been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
• Ensure that the manuscript is preserved in a stable digital repository maintained by that agency or in another suitable repository that permits free public access, interoperability, and long-term preservation.
• Require that each taxpayer-funded manuscript be made available to the public online and without cost, no later than six months after the article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

See also the press release by the Alliance for Taxpayer Access:

... The proposed bill is welcomed by the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of research institutions, consumers, patients, and others formed to support open public access to publicly funded research. ...

The bill gives individual agencies flexibility in choosing the location of the digital repository to house this content, as long as the repositories meet conditions for interoperability and public accessibility, and have provisions for long-term archiving. ...

The bill covers unclassified research funded by agencies including: Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation. ...

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access calls on organizations and individuals to write in support of the bill ...

Comment. This is big. FRPAA would open a massive amount of research, expanding the NIH policy to most agencies across the government. The six-month embargo is shorter than the NIH policy and closer to most other funder policies.

I can't find the bill number or text online yet, but we'll post it here on OAN when it's available.

The environment for FRPAA should be even more positive than during its first iteration. In addition to the growth of OA generally:

• The U.S. now has the NIH mandate as an example policy; the success of its implementation should count in FRPAA's favor.
• In 2006, FRPAA was referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs; Lieberman was then the committee's ranking member, but he now chairs the committee, increasing his influence on the bill's fate.
• The first FRPAA was introduced toward the end of the Congress, decreasing the likelihood that it could clear all the legislative hurdles required to become law before it died with the Congress. This time, it's a year earlier in the process, giving it a more meaningful chance of becoming law.
• We can hope that President Obama's professed interests in advancing science and transparency will lead to his support for FRPAA. (Remember too that Obama was himself an academic.)

Importantly, the first iteration of FRPAA inspired a wave of support that drew many into the OA movement for the first (including myself). Look for renewed interest in OA around the U.S.

See also our past posts on FRPAA.

Update. For more coverage, see the items tagged oa.frpaa in the OA Tracking Project.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued a call to action about the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009 (S 1373).

Here's an excerpt:

On June 25, Senators Lieberman (I-CT) and Cornyn (R-TX) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (S.1373), a bill that would ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies. S.1373 would require those agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from such funding no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The bill gives individual agencies flexibility in choosing the location of the digital repository to house this content, as long as the repositories meet conditions for interoperability and public accessibility, and have provisions for long-term archiving.

The bill specifically covers unclassified research funded by agencies including: Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation.

S. 1373 reflects the growing trend among funding agencies—and college and university campuses—to leverage their investment in the conduct of research by maximizing the dissemination of results. It follows the successful path forged by the NIH’s Public Access Policy, as well as by private funders like the Wellcome Trust, and universities such as Harvard and MIT.

Detailed information about the Federal Research Public Access Act is available at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/frpaa.

All supporters of public access—universities and colleges, researchers, libraries, campus administrators, patient advocates, publishers, consumers, individuals, and others—are asked to ACT NOW to support this bill. Here’s how:

• Contact Congress now to express your organization's support for public access to taxpayer-funded research and for this bill. Act now through the ATA Legislative Action Center.
• Contact Congress now to express your individual support for public access to taxpayer-funded research and for this bill.
• Send thanks to the Bill's sponsors—Senators Lieberman and Cornyn.
• Issue a public statement of support from your organization and share it widely with members, colleagues, and the media. Send a copy to sparc [at] arl [dot] org to be featured on the FRPAA Web site.
• Share news about this bill with friends and colleagues.
• Post the "I support taxpayer access" banner on your Web site.

Related Posts

1. Open Access: Text of Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009
2. U.S. Dept. of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences Has Adopted Open Access Policy
3. Open Access Bill: Senators Cornyn and Lieberman Re-Introduce Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)
4. Position Statement From University Press Directors on Free Access to Scholarly Journal Articles
5. Water Environment Research Foundation Adopts Embargo Free Access Policy

Several blog reports are available about the recent National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program partners meeting.

• 2009-06-29: NDIIPP Partners Meeting
• NDIIPP Project Partners Meeting, Day One
• NDIIPP Project Partners Meeting, Day Two
• NDIIPP Project Partners Meeting, Day Three

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3. Digital Preservation: PARSE.Insight Project Reports on First Year Achievements
4. Library Trends Thematic Issue on the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program
5. Safeguarding Collections at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Describing Roles & Measuring Contemporary Preservation Activities in ARL Libraries

The text of the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009 (S 1373) is now available.

Here's an excerpt:

SEC. 4. FEDERAL RESEARCH PUBLIC ACCESS POLICY.

(a) In General- Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, each Federal agency with extramural research expenditures of over $100,000,000 shall develop a Federal research public access policy that is consistent with and advances purposes of the Federal agency.

(b) Content- Each Federal research public access policy shall provide for—

(1) submission to the Federal agency of an electronic version of the author's final manuscript of original research papers that have been accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals and result from research supported, in whole or in part, from funding by the Federal Government;

(2) the incorporation of all changes resulting from the peer review publication process in the manuscript described under paragraph (1);

(3) the replacement of the final manuscript with the final published version if—

(A) the publisher consents to the replacement; and

(B) the goals of the Federal agency for functionality and interoperability are retained;

(4) free online public access to such final peer-reviewed manuscripts or published versions as soon as practicable, but not later than 6 months after publication in peer-reviewed journals;

(5) production of an online bibliography of all research papers that are publicly accessible under the policy, with each entry linking to the corresponding free online full text; and

(6) long-term preservation of, and free public access to, published research findings—

(A) in a stable digital repository maintained by the Federal agency; or

(B) if consistent with the purposes of the Federal agency, in any repository meeting conditions determined favorable by the Federal agency, including free public access, interoperability, and long-term preservation.

(c) Application of Policy- Each Federal research public access policy shall—

(1) apply to—

(A) researchers employed by the Federal agency whose works remain in the public domain; and

(B) researchers funded by the Federal agency;

(2) provide that works described under paragraph (1)(A) shall be—

(A) marked as being public domain material when published; and

(B) made immediately available under subsection (b)(4); and

(3) make effective use of any law or guidance relating to the creation and reservation of a Government license that provides for the reproduction, publication, release, or other uses of a final manuscript for Federal purposes.

(d) Exclusions- Each Federal research public access policy shall not apply to—

(1) research progress reports presented at professional meetings or conferences;

(2) laboratory notes, preliminary data analyses, notes of the author, phone logs, or other information used to produce final manuscripts;

(3) classified research, research resulting in works that generate revenue or royalties for authors (such as books) or patentable discoveries, to the extent necessary to protect a copyright or patent; or

(4) authors who do not submit their work to a journal or works that are rejected by journals.

(e) Patent or Copyright Law- Nothing in this Act shall be construed to affect any right under the provisions of title 17 or 35, United States Code.

(f) Report-

(1) IN GENERAL- Not later than October 1, of each year, the head of each Federal agency shall submit a report on the Federal research public access policy of that agency to—

(A) the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs of the Senate;

(B) the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of the House of Representatives;

(C) the Committee on Science and Technology of the House of Representatives;

(D) the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the Senate;

(E) the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions of the Senate; and

(F) any other committee of Congress of appropriate jurisdiction.

(2) CONTENT- Each report under this subsection shall include—

(A) a statement of the effectiveness of the Federal research public access policy in providing the public with free online access to papers on research funded by the Federal agency;

(B) a list of papers published in peer-reviewed journals that report on research funded by the Federal agency;

(C) a corresponding list of papers made available by the Federal agency as a result of the Federal research public access policy; and

(D) a summary of the periods of time between public availability of each paper in a journal and in the online repository of the Federal agency.

(3) PUBLIC AVAILABILITY- The Federal agency shall make the statement under paragraph (2)(A) and the lists of papers under subparagraphs (B) and (C) of paragraph (2) available to the public by posting such statement and lists on the website of the Federal agency.

Related Posts

1. Alliance for Taxpayer Access Call to Action about Federal Research Public Access Act
2. U.S. Dept. of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences Has Adopted Open Access Policy
3. Open Access Bill: Senators Cornyn and Lieberman Re-Introduce Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)
4. University of Oregon Department of Romance Languages Adopts Open Access Mandate
5. Water Environment Research Foundation Adopts Embargo Free Access Policy

The Library of Congress has released a digital video, Bagit: Transferring Content for Digital Preservation.

Here's the description:

The Library of Congress's steadily growing digital collections arrive primarily over the network rather than on hardware media. But that data transfer can be difficult because different organizations have different policies and technologies.

The Library—with the California Digital Library and Stanford University – has developed guidelines for creating and moving standardized digital containers, called "bags." A bag functions like a physical envelope that is used to send content through the mail but with bags, a user sends content from one computer to another.

Bags have a sparse, uncomplicated structure that transcends differences in institutional data, data architecture, formats and practices. A bag's minimal but essential metadata is machine readable, which makes it easy to automate ingest of the data. Bags can be sent over computer networks or physically moved using portable storage devices.

Bags have built-in inventory checking, to help ensure that content transferred intact. Bags are flexible and can work in many different settings, including situations where the content is located in more than one place. This video describes the preparation and transfer of data over the network in bags.

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2. DPC What’s New in Digital Preservation, No. 20
3. Digital Preservation: PARSE.Insight Project Reports on First Year Achievements
4. Library Trends Thematic Issue on the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program
5. Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use

Shawn Averkamp and Joanna Lee have published "Repurposing ProQuest Metadata for Batch Ingesting ETDs into an Institutional Repository" in the latest issue of the Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

This article describes the workflow used by the University of Iowa Libraries to populate their institutional repository and their catalog with the data collected by ProQuest UMI Dissertation Publishing during the submission of students' theses and dissertations. Re-purposing the metadata from ProQuest allowed the University of Iowa Libraries to streamline the process for ingesting theses and dissertations into their institutional repository The article includes a discussion of the benefits and limitations of the workflow described.

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Our CAUT/ACPPU Bulletin has a front-page story about the Lakehead Faculty Association grievance against Lakehead for moving everyone onto gmail. While the arbitrator decided to dismiss the grievance, I doubt this will go far - I suspect all sorts of bodies from Faculty Associations to student unions will start pressuring their univeristies to protect our privacy better. Here is a quote from the story.

In his decision, arbitrator Joseph Carrier acknowledged the university exposed its aca­demic staff to greater danger because “…the likelihood of such incursions by U.S. authority into a private e-mail system (Lakehead’s own former system) was marginal compared to what might occur in the presence of the Google system.”

He also commented favourably on the opinion of Stephen Schulhofer, the faculty association’s expert witness and the Robert B. McKay Professor of Law at New York University.

“I am satisfied Professor Schulhofer’s opinion was valid and more than adequate to confirm that e-mail originating within Canada and coming within the jurisdiction of U.S. authorities would be open to surveillance by agencies of that country and, but for safeguards here, would expose the author to potential consequences of the U.S. antiterrorism legislation,” Carrier’s decision states.

Yet, the collective agreement language does not prevent the employer from endangering the privacy of LUFA members because the agreement does not specify the obligation to ensure “absolute privacy to faculty members,” Carrier argues. (Page A1, “Arbitrator Dismisses Google Grievance”, Vol. 56, No. 6, June 2009)

The University of Kansas will make more of its faculty research free to the public online.

“The University of Kansas has been interested in reforming what has been kind of a dysfunctional system of scholarly communication for years,” said Ada Emmett, an associate librarian at the university. “People fundamentally agree with providing the widest possible access to our scholarship.”

The university already has over 4,400 articles in its digital repository of scholarly work, ScholarWorks, which was opened in 2005. Any new research will be added to that collection, and Ms. Emmett estimated that anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 articles are published by the university each year. She will oversee a task force to administer the program. The plan has not yet been finalized, but she hopes it will be in place by next year.

After Harvard University passed a similar plan last February, faculty members at the University of Kansas began to research how they could adopt one.

In April the University of Maryland rejected a plan to allow for open access to its research journals. Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College and a longtime promoter of open access to scholarly publishing, wrote that the reason many of the faculty voted against the plan was because they feared that the policy would limit the freedom of professors to submit work to journals, or that it would harm subscriptions to other journals, and that there was no specified opt-out clause. The University of Maryland’s proposal was not a mandate, but a suggestion.

“Ironically, because the Maryland policy mandated nothing, there was no need to build in a waiver provision,” Mr. Suber wrote. “Hence, no one could point to an explicit waiver option to answer fears that encouragement might harden into an expectation.”

A. Townsend Peterson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, said that similar issues arose there but that after the faculty members were able to ask questions of the university senate, their fears of publishing restrictions were dispelled. Faculty members can request a waiver if they do not want their work to be used, he said.

“Anybody who is in academia should be aware of and concerned about the commercialization of academic publication,” Mr. Peterson said. “Academic communication should not be about typing in your credit-card number. It should be something we’re trying to share globally.”—Marc Beja

YouTube will make its debut in classes at Brigham Young University this fall, after administrators decided to lift a nearly three-year ban on the video-sharing Web site.

As of last Friday, students and faculty and staff members could access YouTube from anywhere on the campus, said a university spokeswoman, Carri Jenkins. Previously, students could choose to view YouTube off the campus, but the site was restricted from all campus computers, including those connected to the Internet in campus housing.

“We looked at the increasing opportunities for educational material and information on YouTube, particularly to be used in the classroom by students and faculty,” Ms. Jenkins said.

The university first restricted access to YouTube in 2006, after administrators said certain content could be found offensive and was inconsistent with the university’s mission statement and honor code, which requires faculty and students to avoid online content that is not “virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy.”

The university reconsidered the ban earlier this month, following complaints from professors and shortly after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released an official YouTube channel, Mormon Messages.

To help students filter the content they can now access on YouTube, the university now provides BeSafe@BYU, which lists its Internet policies and offers tips for dealing with violent, pornographic, and profane material. —Erica R. Hendry

NCSA, I-CHASS provide 1 million hours of supercomputing time to projects in the humanities, arts, social sciences                                  

I just stumbled on the Lost Museum web site which is about the American Museum that Phineas Taylor Barnum opened in New York in 1841. Until 1865 when it burned, it offered everything from stuffed animals, wax figures, voyeuristic exhibits and strange documents.

What is interesting is that they (the American Social History Project) created a 3D model of the museum and you can explore it through an interactive interface that lets you pan, zoom and connect to the archives. It has a somewhat 1990s feel as if created by Voyager in Quicktime VR. There is a very good reflective essay by Joshua Brown, “History and the Web, From the Illustrated Newspaper to Cyberspace: Visual Technologies and Interaction in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries” where he talks about that period when new media designers were trying to emulate Myst,

Emulating 3-D games such as Myst and Doom, The Lost Museum took users on a seamless, self-contained narrative journey, preserving (as best as we could given the technical limitations of online technology) an illusion of visiting another place in another time. On the other hand, The Lost Museum transcended commercial 3-D explorations’ vapid content while also rejecting the fragmentation of data-bases and the derivative hybridity or scrapbook orientation of most multi-media.

That was our intention. We quickly learned, however, that we had fallen into a pattern that is seemingly intrinsic to the spatial interactive game approach. Instead of expanding the historical imagination of users and promoting their active inquiry, we had actually limited the choices open to them, in particular curtailing their ability to make informational linkages and to draw their own conclusions. In short, the narrative outcomes were preordained, confirming only the predominance of designers over users—as demonstrated by ‘test’ audiences of teachers and students who gleefully clicked on different 3-D exhibits but professed utter bewilderment about the significance of what they found. (On the coercive power of the multi-media designer, see Cubitt 2000, pp. 167–168.)

None the less, I find the virtual space compelling, if only because it too is of its time. Every museum is both about something and an exhibit itself of the concerns of its age. Just as the American Museum was in its eclectic entertainment a work of the 19th century, so the Lost Museum is also one of the best of a particular type of experiment.

In an as yet unpublished manuscript, historian Marshall Poe writes: "A book is a machine for focusing attention; the Internet is machine for diffusing it." I can see how he gets there, particularly if it's a P-book rather than an E-book, but it raises a bunch of interesting questions. If true, what are the implications . . . . ?

It was 2002 when David Theo Goldberg and I left a meeting where there was an awful lot of handwringing about the crisis in the humanities and a lot of grousing about how "technology" was destroying the humanities, and said, "Hey! It's the Information Age. This is our age. There have to be other scholars and teachers around the country who realize that the issues of the Information Age are so momentous and happening so fast that we all need to be working together on them, we need to be collaborating, we need to be redefining our fields and rethinking what 'education' means, together, so we can think through social, political, moral, economic, ethical dimensions of all the new ways communicating together are changing our lives."

 

Well, we may not have used exactly those words, but that was the intent. By early 2003, we had called together about a hundred people at UCHRI and had a meeting to think about a new way of thinking, where "the crisis of the humanities" was irrelevant because we had, from such a crisis, an opportunity to rethink it all. What is education? What is learning? What is individuality, specialization, collaboration, interaction? What are institutions? What are networks? What about an organization whose cost of membership is participation?

 

We were fortunate that our institutions, UCHRI and the John Hope Franklin Center and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute as supported by Duke University more generally, thought we were on to something and allowed us to, mostly on our own hour, not part of our jobs but as an add-on, to develop outreach for this thing called "HASTAC." (Don't ask on what dark night that acronym evolved . . . but we were amazed when scientists, especially, liked it, liked the homonymic "haystack" but also the naming of all the disciplines. "Advanced?" I think Kevin Franklin may have come up with that because "academic" was in there originally and we realized there were lots of people who had no academic affiliation who were also interested in playing along with us, in thinking about how you think online, anonymously, collaboratively, globally. "What's another 'A' word?" Thank goodness it wasn't "aardvark" or, well, "awkward." As the cheerleaders say, "Give me an A!!!")

 

Okay, so over the years it has been amazing to watch who has stepped up. Who "gets it" (thank you, Larry Grossman, Anne Murphy, and Newt Minow for being the first, at Digital Promise; thank you, Miriam Heller from NSF for being the first of the major federal agencies; and, above all, thank you MacArthur Foundation). Who contributes. The numbers of individuals and institutions--hundreds and hundreds--who have joined in on various projects, who have nominated and been mentors to HASTAC Scholars, who have hosted small or large events: it's astonishing. So is the traffic, every day, to this website.

 

I'm writing a piece for the ADE Bulletin (Association of Departments of English) and wondering how many of my articles in print publications have as many "eyeballs" (in geek language) as my blogs? Interesting question, no?

 

So, the subtitle of this little nostalgic paean to participation and contribution was inspired by yet another email this morning from one of our Steering Committee members, the renowned interdisciplinary studies scholar Julie Thompson Klein. I have an email from Julie at least once a week and it is always with an idea that she follows through on. Imagine that! Julie is one of those rare human beings who comes up with an idea, checks out with everyone to make sure it isn't being done (she is efficiency personified) and, if it isn't, she comes up with an action plan and makes it happen. Astonishing. Wayne State, where Julie teaches, is incredibly fortunate to have a colleague who does so much in so many innovative directions, and who can be relied on, always, to carry through. Some of us think she needs a title within HASTAC. Goddess of HASTAC's Interdisciplinary Ideas and Implementation? But it's hard, in an organization without real titles, to figure out how you reward participation among participators? As we think further about the goddess title (!), this blog will just have to suffice, with a big round of virtual applause for Julie, who makes things happen.

The Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance has strengthened its OA policy from a request to a requirement.  (Thanks to Jim Till.)

From the old policy (adopted April 2007):

CBCRA requests that grant holders supply an electronic copy of final, accepted manuscripts funded in whole or in part by CBCRA grants.  CBCRA requests that grant holders supply an electronic copy of final, accepted manuscripts funded in whole or in part by CBCRA grants. These articles will be posted on the CBCRA Open Access Archive as soon as possible after publication. A publisher’s embargo period of up to six months will be permitted....

From the new policy (revised April 2009):

CBCRA requires that grant holders supply an electronic copy of final, accepted manuscripts funded in whole or in part by CBCRA grants, to be posted in the CBCRA Open Access Archive, as soon as possible after publication. A publisher’s embargo period of up to six months will be permitted....

Comments

• In addition to the new language mandating deposit in the OA repository, the new policy encourages grantees to retain the right to authorize OA through the repository.  Kudos to all involved.
• Also see my post from October 2007 calling for precisely this change, and my other past posts on the CBCRA.

A number of new technologies in computer graphics, online searching, and workplace collaboration — many of which may soon become available to colleges and universities — were on display Wednesday at the Microsoft Research TechFair 2009, in Washington D.C.

Many of the 13 projects on exhibit — all of which are under development in Microsoft’s six worldwide labs — involved workplace communication and research. Project designers say the tools could help make academic collaboration, either between students and professors or among universities, much easier.

“Our goal really is, how can we further research, how can we further education, how can we really change the way people think about the work that they do?,” said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research.

Highlights from the fair included:

The Social Desktop
It’s easy to share a link to a Web site because of its URL, but there’s no way to link directly to items stored on a computer’s desktop, said Cezary Marcjan, principal software design engineer for Microsoft Research.

Mr. Marcjan’s project, Social Desktop, adds URLs to files and folders on a computer desktop, allowing other users to access them — and add comments or make changes — using any type of browser.

“Especially if people are using different operating systems, it becomes very, very hard,” Mr. Marcjans said. “This way, we can just publish this content and ask people for annotations, and we can collect those items on the desktop.”

Viveri: A Platform for Search Incubation
Scott Imig, a senior software-design engineer, calls Vivieri, Microsoft’s ongoing search-engine project, a “platform for new search ideas.” Vivierie collects content from multiple sites and can present that data in typical search-engine style or in a topic-specific form. Results from a general search may be listed or categorized by Web site, Mr. Imig said, but topic-specific searches can be represented as word clouds or other interactive features.

Mr. Imig also says researchers are experimenting with ways to use tools like OpenSearch and RSS to sort search results intelligently.

For highlights of the research behind other projects including Social Views of E-Mail and the Research Desktop, watch our video coverage of the fair:

—Erica R. Hendry

The Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research is actually writing a report on the construction of a national repository for the humanities. [read more...]

Introduction

In June 1989, I launched PACS-L, a LISTSERV mailing list. PACS-L was one of the first library-oriented mailing lists, and, at the time, it was unusual in that it had a broad subject focus (public-access computer systems in libraries, such as online catalogs) rather than a narrow focus on a specific library automation system. Although PACS-L's greatest contribution may have been in raising librarians' awareness of the importance and potential of the then fledgling Internet, it was also the platform on which my initial scholarly digital publishing efforts were based.

In August 1989, I began my scholarly digital publishing efforts, launching one of the first e-journals on the Internet, The Public-Access Computer Systems Review.¹ This journal, if it was published today, would be called a "libre" open access journal since it was freely available, allowed authors to retain their copyrights, and had special copyright provisions for noncommercial use.

Aside from Public-Access Computer Systems News (also "libre" open access), my subsequent digital publications, such as the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, were "gratis" open access until 2004, when all new versions of existing publications and new publications became "libre" open access under various versions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.²

For current information about my publication activities, see "Brief Resume of Charles W. Bailey, Jr." and "Selected Publications of Charles W. Bailey, Jr."

Chronology

Below is an abbreviated chronology of my digital publishing efforts from June 1989 through June 2009. See "A Look Back at Twenty Years as an Internet Open Access Publisher" for a more detailed chronology, articles about these digital publications, and research studies that included the PACS Review.

• June 29, 1989. Established the PACS-L mailing list, acted as list owner and, later, as its first moderator. Sent the first PACS-L message welcoming subscribers. The establishment of PACS-L facilitated the development of my scholarly digital publications.
• August 16, 1989. Established The Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review, also known as PACS-R), a free scholarly e-journal, and acted as its first Editor-in-Chief (announcement). (See the list of PACS Review editorial staff.)
• January 3, 1990. Published the first PACS Review issue. Articles were selected by the editors. They were distributed as ASCII files using the LISTSERV software (see example); table of contents messages were e-mailed to subscribers.
• March 5, 1990. Established and acted as co-editor of Public-Access Computer Systems News, a free electronic newsletter (first issue). Acted as co-editor until the end of 1992.
• November 11, 1991. Changed the PACS Review to a peer-reviewed journal.
• November 15, 1991. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS-L moderator. PACS-L had over 3,100 subscribers at the time.
• January 13, 1992. Established the PACS-P mailing list to distribute the University of Houston Libraries electronic publications and Current Cites (announcement).
• April 6, 1992. Published the first peer-reviewed PACS Review article.
• January 29, 1994. Made the PACS Review and PACS News available via a Gopher server.
• March 21, 1995. Published the first HTML version of the PACS Review and established a policy that allowed authors to update articles. This issue was composed of the first version of my "Network-Based Electronic Publishing of Scholarly Works: A Selective Bibliography." This article had 26 versions, with the last version being published on October 25, 1996. Starting with version 23 (June 25, 1996), the bibliography was searchable.
• September 12, 1996. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS Review Editor-in-Chief at the end of 1996.
• October 30, 1996. Published the first HTML version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB), a free, updated electronic book (announcement) that provides references to new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers. The bibliography is searchable. See the "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" for a detailed history of the bibliography from 1996 to 2001.
• November 15, 1996. Published the first Word version of SEPB in version 2.
• December 17, 1996. Published the first Acrobat version of SEPB in version 3.
• September 16, 1997. Published the first version of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (SEPR).
• June 7, 2001. Began the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) (first posting at bottom).
• April 19, 2002. With Version 42 of SEPB, ceased publishing a corresponding Word version.
• September 22, 2003. Established the SEPW@LISTSERV.UH.EDU mailing list and distributed the first ASCII version of SEPW.
• July 13, 2004. Put SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.
• March 2, 2005. The Association of Research Libraries published my Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (OAB). The book included an introduction to open access and references to over 1,300 works about it. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License in print and PDF formats. In cooperation with ARL, I made the PDF version freely available.³
• March 15, 2005. Added an RSS feed to SEPW using a mirror Blogger Weblog and FeedBurner.
• April 20, 2005. Established DigitalKoans on my new escholarlypub.com domain using WordPress for the Weblog and FeedBurner for the (RSS feed). DigitalKoans is a Weblog that provides news and commentary on digital copyright, digital curation, digital repositories, open access, scholarly communication, and other digital information issues. (offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License).
• July 8, 2005. Published the first version of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography.
• August 10, 2005. Made a preprint of the "Open Access Webliography" available (coauthored with Adrian K. Ho).
• October 25, 2005. Published the first version of the Google Book Search Bibliography.
• December 31, 2005. There were over 352,000 escholarlypub.com Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2005 by over 146,00 visitors from 163 countries.
• January 8, 2006. Established the digital-scholarship.com domain to replace the escholarlypub.com domain.
• February 6, 2006. Published the Open Access Bibliography Author Index and the Open Access Bibliography Title Index.
• March 22, 2006. Published an HTML version of the OAB.
• April 28, 2006. With Version 62 of SEPB, ceased publishing a corresponding Acrobat version.
• November 1, 2006. Resigned my position as Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development at the University of Houston Libraries, where I had worked since November 1987 (previously as either Assistant Dean for Systems or Assistant Director for Systems).
• November 3, 2006. Migrated SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW from the University of Houston Libraries' servers to escholarlypub.com. Discontinued the SEPW LISTSERV mailing list, and replaced it with a FeedBurner mailing list.
• December 14, 2006. Established the digital-scholarship.org domain on a second hosting service in order to mirror DigitalKoans and other files for increased reliability.
• December 18, 2006. Announced the digital-scholarship.org domain, branding it and digital-scholarship.com under the name "Digital Scholarship."
• December 31, 2006. There were over 2.3 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2006 by over 663,000 visitors from 195 countries.
• December 31, 2006.There were over 4.2 million Gopher or Web file requests for PACS Review files from January 1994 through December 2006 (use data after December 2006 is not available).
• March 14, 2007. Published the first annual PDF version of SEPB.
• December 31, 2007. There were over 7.3 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2007 by over 1.8 million visitors from 206 countries.
• January 6, 2008. Published Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite.
• March 21, 2008. Became a member of the Open Access Directory Editorial Board. Helped build the initial Wiki, and continue to add content to it.
• April 29, 2008. Published the second annual PDF version of SEPB. In this version, links were added for e-prints of published articles from disciplinary archives and institutional repositories, and many additional links were added for freely available versions of articles from publishers.
• May 12, 2008. Published version 2 of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography.
• May 27, 2008. Published version 2 of the Google Book Search Bibliography.
• June 14, 2008. Authorized using the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals as the basis for a new wiki bibliography on the Open Access Directory, called the Bibliography of Open Access.
• December 9, 2008. Published version 3 of the Google Book Search Bibliography
• December 31, 2008. Published the third annual PDF version of SEPB.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 15.9 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2008 by over 3.4 million visitors from 214 countries.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 8.6 million Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography Web file requests from October 30, 1996 though December 31, 2008.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 313,000 Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals Web file requests from March 3, 2005 though December 31, 2008.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 71,000 "Open Access Webliography" Web file requests from August 10, 2005 though December 31, 2008.
• January 20, 2009. Published version 3 of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography.
• May 5, 2009. Published Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008 Annual Edition as a print-on-demand paperback book under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. (Equivalent PDF version was freely available.)
• May 12, 2009. Published version 75 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography.
• June 5, 2009. There were over 20 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though June 5, 2009 by over 4 million visitors from 221 countries.
• June 29, 2009. Published version 4 of the Google Book Search Bibliography
• June 29, 2009. There were over 2,100 DigitalKoans posts in over 90 categories.

Notes

1. In 1989, the Internet was much more fragmented than it is today, and the primary information access tools were e-mail, FTP, mailing lists, and Usenet newsgroups. In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote "Information Management: A Proposal," which tried to persuade CERN officials to support a global hypertext system (it was not called the World Wide Web until October 1990, when he coded the first server and browser). Gopher servers, which represented a significant advance in information access, would not become available until 1991, and NCSA Mosaic, an early Web browser that ignited interest in the Web, until 1993. You can place my publications in the context of the development of the Internet by consulting the Hobbes' Internet Timeline and Internet History. Thanks to Robin N. Downes, then Director of the University of Houston Libraries, for his strong support for my digital publishing efforts from 1989-1996.

2. You can place my publications in the context of the development of the open access movement by consulting the Timeline of the Open Access Movement.

3. Thanks to Peter Suber for his assistance with the Open Access Bibliography and his encouragement during its writing.

Related Posts

1. “Publisher ‘Threat’ to Open Access”
2. What Progress Have the University of Houston Libraries Made in Achieving Their Scholarly Communication Goals During the Last Three Years?
3. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (5/15/09)
4. University of Pittsburgh Press Makes 500 Titles Open Access and Print-on-Demand
5. Version 75, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

According to "Library Releasing New Publishing Tool," the Public Knowledge Project will launch its new Open Monograph Press during the Second International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference on July 8-10.

Here's an excerpt from the Open Monograph Press home page:

Open Monograph Press, a new open source publishing product under development by the Public Knowledge Project, will establish an online workspace for publishing monographs, edited volumes, and scholarly editions, while keeping an archival record of the process (compatible with the Fedora repository). . . .

The plans for OMP also include the potential for users to set up a Social Networking Incubator and Workspace system, which would enable editors to create a workspace for authors who appear to have a potential monograph project in hand, giving the author a chance to develop ideas within an invited or more open community, before moving into a formal book proposal and submission process.

This will provide author and editor with a series of tools and spaces that will allow them to see if there is a book residing within the author's article-length work, by bringing together authors and collecting pieces for engagement and response by select communities of interest or potentially by anyone interested, at the author and editor's discretion (Access Scheduler).

Related Posts

1. Position Statement From University Press Directors on Free Access to Scholarly Journal Articles
2. “Enhancing the Debate on Open Access: A Joint Statement by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions and the International Publishers Association”
3. University of Washington Faculty Senate Passes Resolution Concerning Scholarly Publishing Alternatives and Authors’ Rights
4. “No-Fee OA Journals in the Humanities, Three Case Studies: A Presentation by Open Humanities Press”
5. University of Pittsburgh Press Makes 500 Titles Open Access and Print-on-Demand

Version 4 of the Google Book Search Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship.

This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.

For a discussion of the numerous changes in my digital publications since my resignation from the University of Houston Libraries, see the Digital Scholarship Publications Overview.

Related Posts

1. Google Book Search Settlement: Interview with Michael Healy, Expected Executive Director of the Book Rights Registry
2. A Guide for the Perplexed Part II: The Amended Google-Michigan Agreement
3. “Google Book Search Settlement: Foster Competition, Escrow the Scans”
4. Justice Department Sends Civil Investigative Demands to Google about Google Book Search Settlement
5. Version 75, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

The Association of Research Libraries has released ARL Statistics Tables 2007-08 (Preliminary).

Related Posts

1. ARL Board Passes Resolution against Nondisclosure or Confidentiality Clauses in Publisher/Vendor Agreements
2. Safeguarding Collections at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Describing Roles & Measuring Contemporary Preservation Activities in ARL Libraries
3. ARL Developing Alternative to Library Investment Index
4. University of California Systemwide 2008 Use Statistics for Databases, E-Books, and Journals
5. University of Calgary Academic Council of Library and Cultural Resources Adopts Open Access Mandate

Massachusetts General Hospital's Treadwell Library is recruiting a Systems Librarian.

Here's an excerpt from the ad (use job ID 2190657 in advanced search):

Under the general direction of the Library Director, the Systems Librarian is responsible for the overall management and support of the library's Innovative Library System and for the technical aspects of electronic resources management. In collaboration with the library's Webmaster/ System Technologist, the incumbent contributes to ongoing development and enhancement of library's web presence. The incumbent also provides Research and Reference services to library users (physicians, nurses, researchers, medical students, patients and their family members, and non-medical MGH staff) and to hospital committees or special interest groups within the wider MGH community. The incumbent serves as a member of the Treadwell Library Teaching Team.

Related Posts

1. Library IT Jobs: Systems & Electronic Services Librarian at Genesee Community College
2. Library IT Jobs: Information Systems Librarian at Queen’s University Library
3. Library IT Jobs: Systems/Electronic Resources Librarian at Pratt Institute
4. Library IT Jobs: Systems Librarian at San Jacinto College
5. Library IT Jobs: Web Services Librarian at Golden Gate University

Papers and presentations from EPUB 2009—Rethinking Electronic Publishing: Innovation in Communication Paradigms and Technologies are now available.

Here's a quick selection of papers:

• Connecting Readers with Open Access Resources: The CUFTS Free! Open Access Collections Group
• Development of Institutional Repositories in Chinese Universities and the Open Access Movement in China
• Overlay Publications: A Functional Overview of the Concept
• PEER: Publishing and the Ecology of European Research
• PLoS One: Background, Future Development, and Article-Level Metrics

Related Posts

1. Presentations from CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI6)
2. PLoS Progress Report: June 2009
3. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (6/10/09)
4. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (5/15/09)
5. Version 75, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Alma Swan has announced that, as a result of a DRIVER/JISC/SURF March workshop, plans for improving interoperability between repositories are being developed by the Interoperable Repositories Infrastructure Project in four areas: citation services, interoperable identification systems, repository handshaking (interoperable deposit systems), and repository organization (supporting repositories around the world).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Since the workshop, teams have taken the discussions forward and are developing action plans and project proposals for each topic. Here is an update:

1. The CITATION SERVICES team now have a draft project proposal available for community review. Please take a look at it give your comments. It is on the project wiki here: http://repinf.pbworks.com/Citation-Services-draft-project-proposal
2. The wiki also provides an update on all four plans: the team leaders made short presentations on developments at the OAI6 conference last week and their Powerpoint files are on the wiki, along with an Update document summarising the progress and future timelines. Here are the links: Update: http://repinf.pbworks.com/Update-June-09 Powerpoints: links from the front page: http://repinf.pbworks.com/
3. Finally, the wiki provides extensive background information on repositories in the form of Briefing Materials under a number of headings. These are presented in both text and map form on the wiki, accessible from the links on the wiki front page here: http://repinf.pbworks.com/.

Related Posts

1. DISC-UK DataShare Project: Final Report
2. Digital Repositories Workshop: Tools and Infrastructure Presentations
3. Sound Archives Film Image Repository Project: SAFIR Final Report
4. Policy-making for Research Data in Repositories: A Guide
5. SWORD Named Most Innovative Project at JISC Repositories and Preservation Conference

The University of Kansas has become the first U.S. public university to pass a university-wide open access policy. (Thanks to Open Access News.)

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Under the new faculty-initiated policy approved by Chancellor Robert Hemenway, digital copies of all articles produced by the university’s professors will be housed in KU ScholarWorks, an existing digital repository for scholarly work created by KU faculty and staff in 2005. KU ScholarWorks houses more than 4,400 articles submitted in digital formats that assure their long-term preservation.

Professors will be allowed to seek a waiver but otherwise will be asked to provide electronic forms of all articles to the repository. KU’s Faculty Senate overwhelmingly endorsed the policy at a meeting earlier this year, but additional policy details, including the waiver process, will be developed by a senate task force in the coming academic year, said Faculty Senate President Lisa Wolf-Wendel, professor of education leadership and policy studies. The task force will be led by Ada Emmett, associate librarian for scholarly communications.

"Academic publishing has become increasingly commercial and unavailable to other scholars, or to the general public, in recent years," said A. Townsend Peterson, distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and curator at the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center at KU. " This new policy offers a voluntary means of opening doors to much of KU's journal-based scholarship. This policy represents a first step towards a new means of scholarly communication, in which the entire global academic community has access to the totality of scholarship. We all can participate in the scholarly exchange that leads to new knowledge creation."

Peterson said open access policies such as KU's will bring greater visibility to the authors' work and will showcase the breadth and depth of the faculty's contributions to academic research and to the university's mission.

"Granting the university the right to deposit a copy of scholarly journal articles in an open digital repository extends the reach of the scholarship, providing the widest possible audience and increasing its possible impact," said Lorraine J. Haricombe, dean of libraries.

Related Posts

1. Open Access: Text of Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009
2. Harvard Graduate School of Education Faculty Adopt Open Access Policy
3. University of Oregon Department of Romance Languages Adopts Open Access Mandate
4. University of Calgary Academic Council of Library and Cultural Resources Adopts Open Access Mandate
5. University of Oregon Library Faculty Adopt Open Access Mandate

Bernard Rentier has announced the launch of the web site for Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS).  Read his announcement in French or Google's English.  EOS is the successor to EurOpenScholar (also EOS), which was launched in October 2007.  The first EOS was European, while the second is global.  Rentier is the rector of the University of Liege and the Chair of the new EOS.

The official launch of the organization itself, as opposed to the web site, should follow shortly.  The EOS advisory board is meeting in Brussels today to make the final arrangements.

From the new EOS web site:

EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) is a membership organisation for universities and research institutions. The organisation is a forum for raising and discussing issues around the mission of modern universities, particularly with regard to the creation, dissemination and preservation of research findings.

The context for the establishment of the EOS forum has been:

• the findings of the ‘Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of Scientific Publications Markets in Europe’ (European  Commission, DG Research, project report, January 2006)
• the subsequent major conference in Brussels in February 2007 held jointly by the European Commission’s DG Research and DG Information and Media, ‘Scientific Publishing in the Digital Age’
• the outstanding success of the research community’s petitionon Open Access to Scientific Information to the European Commissioner for Research (summary of petition and its presentation)
• the recommendations on Open Access of the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB)
• the mandatory policy on Open Access to research it funds under the Seventh Framework Programme from the European Research Council
• the European University Association recommendations on Open Access adopted by the EUA Council in March 2008 ...

Anyone who is interested in enrolling their institution as a member, or in attending an EOS meeting or briefing session, is invited to email the convenor of the group, Dr Alma Swan (contact details) .

PS:  One of the top priorities for EOS will be to help universities adopt effective OA policies.  With that in view, note the very strong optimal institutional Open Access policy and FAQ at the EOS web site.  Also see our past posts on the new and old EOS.

Back in 2003, at the Digital Humanities conference in Athens, Georgia, Geoffrey Rockwell and I threw all caution to the wind and performed a live Brechto-Socratic dialogue on the relationship between programming and writing. People still ask us about it, but we’ve never been sure exactly what to do with it.

The intellectual glow of THATCamp must have put me in the mood, because this afternoon it came to me — the ideal forum for what Geoffrey and I privately refer to as “Untitled #4.”

It was impossible to give Geoffrey’s character his signature beard, but other than that, I would say it perfectly recreates the original performance (including our extraordinary range as “voice talents”). Enjoy!

You can also see it (and download it) here. Or here and here. Or, um, here.

A laptop containing the names and Social Security numbers of some 45,000 Cornell University students and faculty members has been stolen, The Cornell Daily Sun reports.

The computer was stolen earlier this month, when a university employee was correcting file-processing transmission errors and left the computer unattended.
In a press release, the university said it will offer a year’s worth of free credit reports, credit monitoring, and identity-theft protection to anyone affected.

On a separate Web page, the university said it would not provide any additional information on the theft, as local police are investigating the incident.

Aaron Lewis, a New York State police investigator, told The Sun that the theft appeared to be a “crime of opportunity,” not a concerted effort to steal sensitive information. He said the media attention devoted to the theft could inform the thief of the sensitive information contained on the laptop. “It’s obviously a Cornell computer and has a Cornell sticker,” he said. —Marc Beja

Northwestern University has put online more than 7,000 rare photographs of East Africa that document the European colonization of the area from 1860 through 1960.

The images made available to the public today in the Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs were purchased by the university in 2002 for an undisclosed price.

David L. Easterbrook, curator of the university’s Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, said the collection contains photographs and postcards showing how Europeans used the landscape for commercial purposes, as well as images made by anthropologists that focuse on the daily lives of East Africans. The combination helps document how European colonization changed the area, as well as what existed before the Europeans arrived.

The visual record “adds to a written record,” Mr. Easterbrook said. The pictures “give us an opportunity to look at Africa in a different time.”

While several libraries have smaller galleries that include photographs of East Africa during this period, Mr. Easterbrook said Northwestern’s is the first large collection available online. The image-search feature on the Web site is extensive, tagging both dates and keywords. The Institute of Museum and Library Services helped cover the cost of digitizing the photographs.

The Web site was designed to be used by students as young as age 5. It has links to other resources as well as lesson plans and assignments for students at all levels. —Marc Beja

University of Kansas, KU becomes first U.S. public university to pass an open access policy, press release, June 26, 2009. (Thanks to A. Townsend Peterson.)

The University of Kansas has become the nation’s first public university to adopt an “open access” policy that makes its faculty’s scholarly journal articles available for free online. ...

Under the new faculty-initiated policy approved by Chancellor Robert Hemenway, digital copies of all articles produced by the university’s professors will be housed in KU ScholarWorks, an existing digital repository for scholarly work created by KU faculty and staff in 2005. ...

Professors will be allowed to seek a waiver but otherwise will be asked to provide electronic forms of all articles to the repository. KU’s Faculty Senate overwhelmingly endorsed the policy at a meeting earlier this year, but additional policy details, including the waiver process, will be developed by a senate task force in the coming academic year, said Faculty Senate President Lisa Wolf-Wendel, professor of education leadership and policy studies. The task force will be led by Ada Emmett, associate librarian for scholarly communications. ...

Via email: The policy was approved by the Faculty Senate on April 30, 2009; by the Provost on May 19; and by the Chancellor on May 22. From the text of the policy:

... Each faculty member grants to KU permission to make scholarly articles to which he or she made substantial intellectual contributions publicly available in the KU open access institutional repository, and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. This license in no way interferes with the rights of the KU faculty author as the copyright holder of the work. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while a faculty member of KU. Faculty will be afforded an opt out opportunity. Faculty governance in consultation with the Provost's office will develop the details of the policy which will be submitted for approval by the Faculty Senate.

Comment. The university's press release is a bit misleading. Both the University of Oregon and Oregon State University, which are public universities, have departmental mandates. But KU is the first university-wide institutional mandate of any American public university, and only the second of any American university, after MIT.

I haven't found a final version of the policy text online. But an earlier draft of the policy contains several features missing from the version I received by email, most notably a deposit mandate. The version I received authorizes the university to provide OA to faculty articles (with an opt-out), but doesn't state that faculty will be required to deposit a copy. (The press release says that authors will be "asked" to deposit.)

We are the South Jersey Center for Digital Humanities, housed at the School of Arts and Humanities, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

Our faculty affiliates come primarily from the School of Arts and Humanities, and our staff affiliates come from the Library and from the Office of Computer and Telecommunication Services. Affiliate status is open to any faculty or staff member working on a digital humanities project, regardless of his/her disciplinary specialty. 

In keeping with the liberal arts mission of our college, our purpose is to promote innovation in digital technologies used in teaching, research, and college service. 

We look forward to joining the digital community at HASTAC.

Visit us at our home page and our blog, South Jersey Digital.

 

German geologists Thursday said they have discovered in India one of the world’s rarest rocks, dating back to the birth of the planet when the Earth was covered with a hot ocean of melted stone.

The fragment from the primeval crust is only the second ever discovered, said scientists at the University of Muenster.

The ancient magma formed more than 4 billion years ago as the planet slowly cooled in the Hadean period. The fragment, found in Orissa state, yields answers about what the Earth was like in those times.

The find was detailed in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

The only other piece of early magma, which was located in Canada, has been dated at 4.3 billion years old.

Normally, old rock is sucked back into the ground by the churning of tectonic movement and melted again, but the finds show some pieces of the old crust still exist.

A new version (0.3.5) of the SEASR Analytics for Zotero Firefox plugin has been released. The new version adds support for Zotero 1.0.* - 2.0b5 and Firefox 2.0 - 3.5.*. A new set of flows (applications) are available, including: Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test, Tag Cloud Viewer, Date Entities to Simile Timeline, HITS Summarizer, and Author Centrality Analysis.

Our user community wanted a different naming strategy, so that one could tell what items were analyzed. If a single item is selected, then the results item maintains the same name as the item. If multiple items are selected, then the results item uses the collection name followed by the number of items selected. In both cases, the name of the service that is executed is provided in the “Creator” attribute. The selected items are also added to the “Related Items” section - a problem with populating these items was also fixed.

We made several changes to improve configuration file specification. One change includes the ability to specify a configuration file in XML format (json support still exists) with additional error messages to indicate problems with parsing your custom configuration file. This configuration file may exist on your local machine and you can use a file browser to find the local file.

The new release can be downloaded at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10020.

A complete list of changes for what is new in version 0.3.5 can be found at http://repository.seasr.org/Zotero/Releases/experimental/0.3/changelog-0.3.5.xhtml.

In today’s college classroom, it seems that more students have laptops than don’t. In many lecture halls, professors see several of their students typing away all class long. But some professors have to wonder: how many of them are taking notes, and how many of them are checking Facebook.

To help professors keep students concentrated on class work, several colleges have offered guidelines and suggestions for curbing misuse of computers in class and setting “netiquette” standards, like turning off the computer’s volume before class begins. Other college guides give tips on ways professors can use technology better in their class, as long as they comply with copyright laws.

The University of Wisconsin suggests professors implement a “no laptop time” when “laptop users must close their lids.” An online guide also says professors may want to create a policy in the event a student breaks the established laptop rules.

In past years, several law schools have banned all laptop use in class in an effort to guarantee students aren’t surfing the Internet during lectures.

Northern Michigan University’s guide, “Suggestions for Addressing Computer Use in the Classroom,” lists sample policies either limiting or prohibiting computer use that can be printed in a professor’s syllabus, and offers philosophical rationales for imposing the rules. “Laptop misuse is today’s version of having a ‘dirty’ magazine hidden in the pages of the textbook,” the guide says. “It is the student’s responsibility to use the laptops responsibly.”

The University of Dayton’s guide doesn’t dwell as much on student misuse of laptops during class time, but it offers ways professors can use computers to enhance learning strategies. — Marc Beja

when the news broke, the Internet slowed down.

I was actually in the hotel lobby at UMUC, just waiting to leave from DH09. Someone came into the lobby and screamed the news - and everyone turned to the web to verify, amongst a chorus of "no ways!" and some screams.

As we mentioned on the HASTAC blogs last week, you can now download or purchase a copy of the report entitled The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, co-authored by Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, with assistance from Zoe Marie Jones, our former colleague extraordinaire. Here are the details from MIT Press:

 

Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg in an abridged version of their book-in-progress, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, argue that traditional institutions must adapt or risk a growing mismatch between how they teach and how this new generation learns. Forms and models of learning have evolved quickly and in fundamentally new directions. Yet how we teach, where we teach, who teaches, and who administers and serves have changed only around the edges. This report was made possible by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in connection with its grant making initiative on Digital Media and Learning.

Key Findings

 

Young people today are learning in new ways that are both collective and egalitarian.They are contributing to Wikipedia, commenting on blogs, teaching themselves programming and figuring out work-arounds to online video games. They follow links embedded in articles to build a deeper understanding. They comment on papers and ideas in an interactive and immediate exchange ofideas. All these acts are collaborative and democratic, and all occur amid a worldwide community of voices.

Universities must recognize this new way of learning and adapt or risk becoming obsolete.
The university model of teaching and learning relies on a hierarchy of expertise, disciplinary divides, restricted admission to those considered worthy, and a focused, solitary area of expertise. However, with participatory learning and digital media, these conventional modes of authority break down.

Today’s learning is interactive and without walls.
Individuals learn anywhere, anytime, and with greater ease than ever before. Learning today blurs lines of expertise and tears down barriers to admission. While it has never been confined solely to the academy, today’s opportunities for independent learning have never been easier nor more diverse.

 

Ten Principles for Redesigning Learning Institutions The authors offer ten principles that can guide universities and other institutions of learning in adapting to learning in a digital age. They focus on college-aged students, although the recommendations also apply generally for all age groups.

 

Self-learning:Today’s learners are self-learners. They browse, scan, follow links in mid-paragraph to related material. They look up information and follow new threads. They create their own paths to understanding.

Horizontal structures: Rather than top-down teaching and standardized curriculum, today’s learning is collaborative; learners multitask and work out solutions together on projects. Learning strategy shifts from a focus on information as such to learning to judge reliable information. It shifts from memorizing information to finding reliable sources. In short, it shifts from learning that to learning how.

From presumed authority to collective credibility: Reliance on the knowledge authorities or certified experts is no longer tenable amid the growing complexities of collaborative and interdisciplinary learning. A key challenge in collaborative environments will be fostering and managing levels of trust.

A de-centered pedagogy: To ban or limit collective knowledge sources such as Wikipedia in classrooms is to miss the importance of collaborative knowledge-making. Learning institutions should instead adopt a more inductive, collective pedagogy based on collective checking, inquisitive skepticism, and group assessment.

Networked learning: Learning has traditionally often assumed a winner-take-all competitive form rather than a cooperative form. One cooperates in a classroom only if it maximizes narrow self-interest. Networked learning, in contrast, is committed to a vision of the social that stresses cooperation, interactivity, mutual benefit, and social engagement. The power of ten working interactively will invariably outstrip the power of one looking to beat out the other nine.

Open source education: Traditional learning environments convey knowledge via overwhelmingly copyright-protected publications. Networked learning, contrastingly, is an “open source” culture that seeks to share openly and freely in both creating and distributing knowledge and products.

Learning as connectivity and interactivity: Challenges in a networked learning environment are not an individual’s alone. Digital tools and software make working in isolation on a project unnecessary. Networking through file-sharing, data sharing, and seamless, instant communication is now possible.

Lifelong learning: The speed of change in this digital world requires individuals to learn anew, face novel conditions, and adapt at a record pace. Learning never ends. How we know has changed radically.

Learning institutions as mobilizing networks: Rather than thinking of learning institutions as a bundle of rules, regulations, and norms governing the actions within its structure, new institutions must begin to think of themselves as mobilizing networks. These institutions mobilize flexibility, interactivity, and outcomes. Issues of consideration in these institutions are ones of reliability and predictability alongside flexibility and innovation.

Flexible scalability and simulation: Learning institutions must be open to changing scale. Students may work in small groups on a specific topic or together in an open-ended and open-sourced contribution.

 

These ten principles, the authors argue, are the first steps in redesigning learning institutions to fit the new digital world. By assessing some of the institutional barriers to change, the authors hope to mobilize institutions to envision formal, higher education as part of a continuum of the networked world that students engage in online today.

 

The full The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age report is now available for free online from MIT Press. A print version of the report can also be ordered from the Press. For more information please visit the MIT Press website.

To order print copies of this report, visit: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11841

ISBN: 978-0-262-51359-3 | Price: $14.00

To view the report online, visit:http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/Future_of_Learning.pdf

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning are available here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/browse/browse.asp?btype=6&serid=178

In one of the best articles I've read in a long time on the possibilities for new technologies to enhance and save scholarly publishing from its crisis, Robert C. Binkley, in the Yale Review, remembers all the elements that are essential if we really are going to make a difference in our Digital Futures. His piece remembers historical examples that did or did not prove revolutionary. Rather than techno-determinism, he understands technology as part of vast social changes and underscores the relationship between economics, opportunity, interest, possibility, and social dynamics. He remembers aesthetics, and the sheer beauty of an object and its reduction when mechanically reproduced or its potential for enhancement through new technologies. And he realizes that culture is continuous and global, not provincial: his examples range across 15th century Chinese Sung Era bookmaking that made Chinese classics as well as Christian and Greco-Roman works available to a wider audience than ever before. He also makes reference to American Indian language specialists and the use of images as well as text to convey information. And he never strays far from the actual details of the technology, what it costs relative to other consumer goods (for text is also that), and how issues of archiving and distribution, production and consumption, individuals and institutions (libraries and presses, writers and readers, universities and IT departments) are all interconnected in scholarly communication.

 

But what makes this article so brilliant is that, unlike so much blather on electronic publishing, this article talks about the good and importance of scholarship in the world, talks about scholars as if we were also (imagine that!) workers who produced something of value, and then considers the arrangements of professionalization, training, and credentialing that go into the professional scholar and argues that, in this confluence of social conditions and technologies, now is the right time for the rise of the "amateur scholar." "Open access" doesn't matter if there is no one who wants to "access" what is "open." In other words, our demand for information that is free has to be accompanied by a responsibility to teach/support/develop a readership vitally interested in that information. If learning and curiosity are impoverished, who cares if our archives are lock-box or open? Why poor millions and millions into digital projects if there is no public excited to take advantage of such archives? Technology and information cannot be divorced from learning and the imperative to teach far and wide, beyond a handful of specialized scholars. We need "Citizen Scholars." And we need "Citizen Educators" for the new information technologies or why bother?

 

You don't write to archive. You write to be read. That doesn't mean you always write for the same audience. The point is that with variable modes of accessing scholarship, you can address a widespread but still niche audience. But not if that audience doesn't exist, isn't supported by networks and communities. (That is part of the Creative Commons mantra: we need to place less emphasis on "content" and more on "community." ) Content does not exist in a vacuum any more than does technology. The production of knowledge and the production of readers is a continuous process with technological development; knowledge is not some fly preserved in amber, all of its features in tact and utterly untouchable.

 

Binkley calls for "local studies" and a kind of distributed model of teaching scholarship, what a scholar does, what a scholar's methods are, why serious study (no matter the object) counts as part of technology's designs for universality, a distribution of teaching that works informally, outside of any professionalized, specialized school or educational or professional school credentialing. A community of readers suitable to the new and revolutionary technologies of communication. He calls this a "pilot of democracy." Where "science and scholarship and the intellectual ideal are not a doctrinaire respect for a participant's interest" but a de-centralized and expansive collaborative model where every home is a "library," every dining room a school room, and every person a "man of letters." [sic]

 

As he concludes, "Towards this end technology offers new devices and points the way."

 

Oh, one catch: the new technologies he is talking about in his brave new world of scholarly publishing may not be available to all. His focus is "near print" and micro-photography and photo-off set, mimeography and hectographing. Binkley's article was published in 1935.

 

I learned about this essay this morning on Facebook from Rutgers University professor and scholar Meredith McGill. (She says she learned about it from Lisa Gitelman in their American Antiquarian Society Seminar and Lisa received it from Rick Prelinger. I don't know where he first learned of it.) And you can read the article here, because Binkley's works have been lovingly digitized by those who remember him and are available on line:

http://www.wallandbinkley.com/rcb/articles/newtools-output.html

 

Here's a favorite section: "These three processes, photo-offset, micro-copying, and near-print, each important when considered by itself, offer an imposing prospect when they are considered together. . . . The duty of making reading matter accessible to the scholar may be assumed increasingly by the micro-copying process, and near-print may become the normal channel by which the creative worker, whether in literature or in scholarship, can be guaranteed communication with a limited group that shares his interesets, leaving publication in printed forma s the channel of communication with a larger public."

 

And then this section, on the "amateur scholar": "The professional scholars cannot indefinitely continue indifference to the prospects of amateur scholarship, for they are facing a crisis themselves. The strain that is appearing in their system of recruiting and maintaining financially a professional personnel will force them to consider the redistribution of scholarly labor and the reorganization of scholarly communications."

 

Wikipedia, anyone?

 

 

 

We are now about to hear from the speakers in the fourth in this excellent series. For those of you that are unable to make the seminar itself, we are again recording each event and podcasting it along with slides on the DC website seminar page.

In addition to this we are also featured along with some discussion (and pix where possible) on the arts-humanities.net community blog.

We now have a Twitter hash tag (#digiclass) which means you can follow what’s new there as well. Just put #digiclass in your Twitter search box.

In "Institute of Education Sciences Has an Open Access Policy," Stuart Shieber reports that the U.S Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences has an open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from a recent EIES grant announcement, which was listed in the Federal Register on March 23, 2009:

Recipients of awards are expected to publish or otherwise make publicly available the results of the work supported through this program. Institute-funded investigators should submit final, peer-reviewed manuscripts resulting from research supported in whole or in part by the Institute to the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC, http://eric.ed.gov) upon acceptance for publication. An author's final manuscript is defined as the final version accepted for journal publication, and includes all graphics and supplemental materials that are associated with the article. The Institute will make the manuscript available to the public through ERIC no later than 12 months after the official date of publication. Institutions and investigators are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning submitted articles fully comply with this requirement.

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1. Open Access: Text of Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009
2. University of Kansas Becomes First U.S. Public University to Pass University-Wide Open Access Policy
3. Open Access Bill: Senators Cornyn and Lieberman Re-Introduce Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)
4. Harvard Graduate School of Education Faculty Adopt Open Access Policy
5. University of Oregon Library Faculty Adopt Open Access Mandate

U.S. Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) re-introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) today. (Thanks to Open Access News.)

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Their legislation, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), would require every federal department and agency with an annual extramural research budget of $100 million or more to make their research available to the public within six months of publication.

"Our legislation would give the American people greater access to the important scientific research they help fund, which will accelerate scientific discovery and innovation, while also making sure that funding is being spent appropriately to ensure taxpayers are receiving a return on their research investments and they are not having to pay twice for the same research - once to conduct it, and a second time to read it. I will continue to advocate for greater transparency measures across all of our governmental departments and agencies, and I urge our Senate colleagues to support this legislation," said Sen. Cornyn.

"The United States has some of the best and brightest researchers," said Lieberman. "I continue to be impressed by their ideas and feel strongly that the American public should have access to what they discover. The internet makes it possible to provide public access to federally funded research and I am pleased to lead the effort to make this information more accessible."

Background:

Sens. Cornyn and Lieberman first introduced this legislation in the 109th Congress. In 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) implemented their public access policy. It is estimated that approximately 80,000 papers are published each year from NIH funds.

• Require every researcher with an annual extramural research budget of $100 million or more, whether funded totally or partially by a government department or agency, to submit an electronic copy of the final manuscript that has been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
• Ensure that the manuscript is preserved in a stable digital repository maintained by that agency or in another suitable repository that permits free public access, interoperability, and long-term preservation.
• Require that each taxpayer-funded manuscript be made available to the public online and without cost, no later than six months after the article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

See also "Taxpayer Alliance Applauds Bill to Broaden Access to Federal Research Results."

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4. Position Statement From University Press Directors on Free Access to Scholarly Journal Articles
5. Water Environment Research Foundation Adopts Embargo Free Access Policy

John Weaver et al. have made their "Planning and Managing the Digitization of Library and Archive Materials: A Multi-Model Approach" presentation available on SlideShare.

Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

This workshop will enable you to:

• Identify different models and methods for digitizing library and archival materials
• Identify the relative advantages and disadvantages of these models
• Define and evaluate a potential digitization project at your library
• Identify key considerations in planning and funding a digitization project
• Identify and develop management and production processes for different types of digitization projects
• Discover additional, relevant resources for planning and managing digitization projects

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Seattle Public Library is recruiting an Information Technology Director.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The Information Technology Director reports to the City Librarian and plays a lead role in developing and maintaining a leading-edge technology infrastructure to ensure the success of the Library's vision and strategies. The Information Technology Director leads and participates in short-term and long-range strategic planning with the Library Leadership Team to address current and emerging service needs and develops, recommends and implements effective technological responses to those needs. The Information Technology Director directs, supervises and evaluates the activities and performance of Information Technology Division staff and vendor, project or consultant staff assigned to information technology projects or activities.

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John Wiley & Sons has announced fiscal year 2009 results and third quarter fiscal year 2009 results.

Read more about it at "Sales Down, as Professional/Trade Takes Hit at John Wiley" and "UPDATE:John Wiley 4Q Net Dn 16%;Fiscal Year View Below Street."

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4. Wolters Kluwer 2009 First-Quarter Update
5. Digital Videos from Columbia’s Scholarly Communication Program’s Research without Borders 2008-2009 Program

The Australian National Data Service has launched two research data services: Identify My Data and Register My Data.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Register My Data services allow you to register descriptions of your research data. These descriptions are then published in a number of discovery environments. The first of these is the Research Data Australia gateway (to be launched by ANDS in July) which aspires to include any Australian publicly funded data relevant to research and enable innovative cross-disciplinary re-use. Data descriptions registered with ANDS are also fed into other data discovery portals in Australia and internationally, including the big search engines such as Google. The Identify My Data services allocate persistent identifiers to data. These identifiers enable continuity of access even when the location of the data on the internet changes.

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2. Keeping Research Data Safe 2: The Identification of Long-lived Digital Datasets for the Purposes of Cost Analysis: Project Plan
3. U.S. Federal Government Launches Data.gov
4. Dryad Repository Gets $2.18 Million Grant from the National Science Foundation
5. Digital Repositories Roadmap Review: Towards a Vision for Research and Learning in 2013

Presentations from the Research in the Open: How Mandates Work in Practice meeting are now available. The meeting was sponsored by the Repositories Support Project and the Research Information Network.

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4. Papers/Presentations from Open Repositories Conference 2009
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Over at The Chronicle’s Brainstorm blogs, Mark Bauerlein raised some interesting questions this week about students’ views of cheating.

Mr. Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, points to a new survey showing that about half of students have used their cellphones or other technology to cheat, and that many students do not consider their behavior to be cheating.

He suggests that they may have a point. “Don’t we see here a prime example not of the decay of personal integrity but instead the healthy spread of ‘participatory culture’?” Mr. Bauerlein wrote. “In the digital age, intelligence is a collective thing, the individual now not a repository of knowledge but a dynamic component of it. We have entered a new realm, and if the definition of knowledge has changed, then so must the definition of cheating. Right?”

centerNet met with a representative from Google Book Search, Jon Orwant, about how Google could support the humanities. I believe there are four levels of collaboration.

• Content Curation Interface: We could partner to make possible the careful cleaning and encoding of the books scanned. In most cases the quality of the OCRed text is still poor. It would be nice to have a social layer that allowed people to sign out texts voluntarily to clean them out. We could also help with the selection of editions that are scanned.
• Collections Research Interface: Google could make it possible to build tools that let users create research study collections that are subsets of Google Books that can be studied. For this we need access to an API so research portals can access collections not just individual texts. Google will want assurance that those who have access don’t abuse it.
• Social Research Tools Interface: We need a way to run tools against texts and collections. We need an API so that tools can be plugged in that can then access texts and collections. Again there is an issue of access. Perhaps Open Social could become a standard for tool plug-ins.
• Republication Interface: We need a way to be able create study sites for research groups or courses that make some subset of texts and tools available for a specific purpose.

In all these cases it is clear that Google doesn’t want to read applications, correct lost of texts, or build tools. For that matter none of us know what tools should be written. They see themselves doing smart engineering that creates a platform that enables others who might build layers (research tools, collections portals, and so on) which might be used by others.

John spoke to the centerNet meeting at DH 2009. The motto of Google is to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful. The crawl, index, and search the web. One can index and search the world’s books, but it is hard to crawl books (or newpapers or movies.)

There are about 120 millions works in the world and 165 million manifestations. They have an agreement in principle with the publishers that has still not been ruled on. (I think I have that right.) If it is approved in court then Google will be able to some cool things:

• Authors/publishers will be able to opt in or out.
• If authors/publishers opt in then Google could sell their book if they are still under copyright. They have algorithmic pricing to figure out what to charge.
• They could give universities access to the full text of collections of out of date works for a license.
• They could create a terminal at every library that has every book that is out of copyright.
• They could create a “research corpus” that could be used released for experimentation under a creative commons license. This could be used in contests like T-REX.

John gave some fascinating examples of things his intern has been doing from within the firewall.

The number of colleges offering applications for their students’ iPhones seems to grow every day. Campus maps, class schedules, and bus routes are some common ones. Now the Medical College of Georgia is pushing apps into new territory: health science education.

Starting today, student with iPhones or iPod Touches can download a calculator that will let budding opticians or ophthalmologists determine intermediate and near vision prescriptions as well as the proper lens curvatures of glasses or contacts. Students can also get an app that determines proper cholesterol levels, another that lists medical abbreviations, and a device called the Medmath Medical Calculator — which churns through 135 common medical calculations, such as cardiac output, Apgar score, and the Abbreviated Mental Test score.

The medical college worked with Terriblyclever Design, a software company founded by Stanford University students that has been rolling out apps for educational institutions. —Josh Fischman

I love Jack Dorsey's wry interview with The Onion, "I Never Intended for Twitter to be Useful." Isn't that what every educator, every newspaper commentator, every pundit has said about Twitter? It's useless, stupid, narcissistic, exactly right for this "dumbest generation" of narcisstic YouTube obsessed anti-intellectual, anti-social, anti-political dweebs. So then, how come it is being used by freedom-fighters worldwide? How is that possible? Read Jack Dorsey's not-even-a-gleam-in-the-eye interview here: http://tiny.cc/E06pJ

 

(Ah, sigh, too bad: YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, now even Twitter is breaking our useless, frivolous heart.   Another trivial, mindless social networking toy ruined by urgency, another one of the dumbest generation who turns out to be smarter than we are. Stop that now!)

 

 

 

 

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Please click on the image provided by Flickr community member "faramarz" for the full photostream and complete documentation. Special thanks for posting this for us to share.

Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor has created an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture. The entire film can be downloaded from here.

The Université de Genève adopted an OA policy, which took effect on June 1, 2009. A directive (in French) detailing the policy was approved on May 18, 2009 by the university's Rectorat. The university's IR also has a page on its policies, including in English. (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.)

Comment. My French isn't great and I haven't found an English translation of the directive. To my (potentially incorrect) understanding, the policy applies to articles as well as books, book chapters, and doctoral dissertations. Deposit is required, but the author can choose to restrict access to the full text to the university Intranet or completely; temporary embargoes are also an option. The directive refers to these options as a "choice" which is the "author's responsibility", rather than as a waiver or exception from OA.

If you have more information in English, please let me know.

Stuart Shieber, Institute of Education Sciences has an open access policy, The Occasional Pamphlet, June 24, 2009.

I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere, but it seems that the Institute of Education Sciences in the [U.S.] Department of Education is now requiring its funded research be made openly available through the ERIC repository. The policy looks analogous to that of the NIH. The pertinent clause from the current IES Request for Applications is:

Recipients of awards are expected to publish or otherwise make publicly available the results of the work supported through this program. Institute-funded investigators should submit final, peer-reviewed manuscripts resulting from research supported in whole or in part by the Institute to the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) upon acceptance for publication. An author’s final manuscript is defined as the final version accepted for journal publication, and includes all graphics and supplemental materials that are associated with the article. The Institute will make the manuscript available to the public through ERIC no later than 12 months after the official date of publication. Institutions and investigators are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning submitted articles fully comply with this requirement. ...

Comment. My title for this post is perhaps too timid. The question seems to be not whether the Institute has an OA policy, but when and how it was adopted and how it will be implemented.

While we’re sad to see you go, if you have any questions about leaving Maryland, please ask.

We have some information on our transportation page, and here are several numbers for taxi cabs. (If you don’t have a phone, ask either at the registration desk or at the information desk on the first floor, and someone can call one for you.)

Silver Cab of Prince Georges County: 301-277-6000
Greenbelt Taxi Service: 301-441-8400
Langley Park Taxi: 559-0000

You can also take a cab or the green line to the Greenbelt metro station and catch the B30 bus to BWI airport. The bus runs every 40 minutes—check here for the timetable.

Just a note to let you know that our penultimate event, the centerNet meeting and Google Books Search presentation will start at 12:50pm in the Charles Carroll room.

So you might want to get a sandwich first and head over to eat during the meeting.

In preparation for my West Coast trip, where I will be interviewing many of the most innovative open source thinkers and entrepreneurs, I've been noodling around on websites. This is also useful because HASTAC is in the final stages (I almost wrote "death throes") of migrating our content to our new site . . . and, well, some of our content is hopelessly outdated. When you start in 2002, and innovation and the "future of thinking" are your bywords, you can carret in a lot of new ideas and adjectives but, one day, you have to bite the bullet and rewrite the content. 2002 is not 2009. Wikipedia was barely a glimmer in Jimmy's eye in 2002. Time to start from scratch.

 

So I'm reading websites and watching web videos. There's a fantastic new video up on Creative Commons, for example. Here's the URL: http://creativecommons.org/videos/a-shared-culture/. Our beloved colleague James Boyle, of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain and a Creative Commons leader, author most recently of The Public Domain, has a great phrase in the video: "Saving the World from Failed Sharing." [Are you listening, Chris Anderson?] Sharing is not borrowing without attribution. It's not cut-and-paste thinking. It's not plagiarism. It is finding a way to think together creatively while giving credit, and making sure that the law poses the fewest possible impediments to that process.

 

That leads to another great line in the video: Creative Commons licensing seeks to "enable the creative energy that new technology lets loose--and get the law out of the way."

 

HASTAC: seeks to enable the creative energy that new technology lets loose--and get educational bureaucracy out of the way. That's pretty close to what we aspire to!

 

On the Creative Commons website, the keywords are "Share, Remix, Reuse--Legally." On Mozilla the keywords are "Openness, Innovation, Opportunity."

 

HASTAC's keywords are new technology, collaborative learning, critical thinking . . . creative, critical, open, together. Learn. Share. Remix. Inspire. Create. Critique. Think. Dream. Design. Oh, yes, plus "Always historicize!" (--attribution, Fred Jameson, for anyone who doesn't recognize the reference.)

In the Creative Commons video, one of the very engaging talking heads says, that we need to help build a sharing culture, we need to move from an emphasis on content to an emphasis on community. Isn't that exactly what learning should be about?

 

 

 

 

 

Its worth reading the comments on this guardian story, asking people to "share your novel in 140 characters or less!" to see just how over twitter some people are getting.

The Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford has released The Internet in Britain 2009.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

One of the main challenges in creating a Digital Britain will be to change the perceptions of the third of the British population who choose not to use the internet, according to the latest in a series of Oxford University Surveys.

The Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS) 2009, published on 22 June 2009, shows that while most British internet users (84%) are extremely confident about using new technology and see the Internet as central to many activities, over half of non-users of the internet (57%) now distrust new technology more than they did before.

The survey, conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute, questioned 2000 people in 2009 and found that cost, a lack of access and a lack of interest were the main reasons that led to people deciding to stop using the Internet. OxIS 2009 provides a detailed breakdown of where the digital divide lies: twice as many people from higher than lower socio-economic groups use the Internet. Age too has a dramatic impact on digital choices with the proportion of Internet users between 25-54 increasing considerably since 2003, but not changing significantly for other age groups. The proportion of retired people going online has inched forward from 30% in 2005 to 34% in 2009. However, the gap between male and female users has nearly closed with 71% of men and 68% women now using the Internet; gaps in self-confidence between men and women, however, remain. 100% of students and 88% of households with children said they had access to the Internet.

OxIS 2009 concludes that the Internet is a valuable resource for people to find information, communicate with others, and find entertainment 'in ways that could well give advantages to them over those who choose not to use the Internet'. The 'Digital Britain Report' (published by the UK Government on 16 June 2009) contains pledges to provide universal access to a broadband connection, but according to OxIS Principal Investigator, Professor William Dutton, the heart of the matter is about persuading those who choose to exclude themselves. . . .

While users opt for the Internet as their most trusted medium, non-users or people who have stopped said they trusted television and radio the most. Non-users were most concerned about the negative aspects of online communication, with 86% agreeing that people can find personal information too easily online, as compared with only half of users. Over two-thirds (68%) of non-users said that there was too much immoral material online and nearly three quarters (71%) of non-users wanted greater government regulation of the Internet, as compared with 57% of users.

See also "Digital Britain: The Final Report."

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Jane Lee, California Digital Library Assessment Analyst, has released "E-Books: Understanding the Basics."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This article (PDF) covers the e-book essentials that will help you make sense of the headlines and get involved in the conversation.

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4. University of California Systemwide 2008 Use Statistics for Databases, E-Books, and Journals
5. Cornell Lifts Use Restrictions on Reproductions of Public Domain Works, Including over 70,000 E-Books

The Center for History and New Media, George Mason University has released the Image Annotation Plugin 1.0 beta for Omeka.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Have you ever wanted to annotate your images on Omeka like you can on Flickr?

Now you can with the beta release of Omeka's Image Annotation plugin! Using an adaptation of Chris Woods' jQuery plugin, jquery-image-annotate, Omeka's new Image Annotation plugin allows users to add textual annotations to images. To add an image annotation, users select a region of the image and then attach a textual description.

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Presentations from the CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI6) are now available. (Thanks to Open Access News.)

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5. “Leading Change in the System of Scholarly Communication: A Case Study of Engaging Liaison Librarians for Outreach to Faculty”

The University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library Science has received a grant of over $900,000 from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services for its Digital Information Management (DigIn) online graduate certificate program. The grant will primarily be used to fund scholarships.

Here's the press release:

The DigIn curriculum combines intensive, hands-on technology learning with a thorough grounding in the theoretical principles needed to manage large and complex digital collections.

The program takes a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to managing digital information and is designed to support a wide range of career paths, especially involving libraries, museums, archives, and records management.

Graduate certificates are increasingly being recognized as a means for professionals with advanced degrees to update their knowledge and skills. DigIn also offers a path for those with undergraduate degrees who are interested in digital collections but who may not yet be ready to commit to a full degree program.

The grant will also greatly boost DigIn's mission to foster disciplinary, institutional, geographic, and cultural diversity in the management of digital collections and services.

Thus, DigIn strongly encourages scholarship applicants representing historically underserved institutions, regions, and communities, as well as students expressing interest in working with digital collections in culturally diverse settings.

DigIn is now accepting applications for admission and financial aid for the Fall 2009 semester. The application deadline has just been extended to July 10.

Late applications will be accepted, though Fall admission cannot be guaranteed once the July 10 deadline has passed. Late applicants will also be considered for admission in the Spring 2010 semester.

The program is delivered entirely online and does not require students to reside in or travel to Tucson. Students generally complete the certificate in 4-6 semesters (15-27 months).

DigIn was founded in 2007 with major funding from Institute of Museum and Library Services, the primary source of federal support for the nation?s 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute's mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas.

Our current partners also include the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Sedona Conference.

Additional details on the program including course descriptions, admissions requirements and application forms may be found on the program website:

digin.arizona.edu

Prospective applicants are also welcome to contact the DigIn staff at:

digin@email.arizona.edu

Read more about it at "SIRLS Earns Federal Grant to Train More Tech Savvy Librarians ."

Related Posts

1. University of Arizona Digital Information Management Certificate Program Fall 2009 Applications
2. Foundation Grants for Preservation in Libraries, Archives, and Museums, 2009 Edition
3. Digital Library Federation Spring Forum 2009 Presentations
4. Dryad Repository Gets $2.18 Million Grant from the National Science Foundation
5. Advancing the State of the Art in Distributed Digital Libraries: Accomplishments of and Lessons Learned from the Digital Library Federation Aquifer Metadata Working Group

Stuart Lewis has released the SWORD PHP Library Version 0.7.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This latest version adds two new features:

• When performing a deposit, the client now sets the 'Content-Disposition:filename' header so that the SWORD server knows what to name the file. . . .
• When performing a deposit, the optional X-No-Op (pretend to perform the deposit) and X-Verbose (provide a verbose response) headers can now be sent (as per http://www.swordapp.org/docs/sword-profile-1.3.html#b.9.2)

Related Posts

1. Microsoft Releases Research-Output Repository Platform Version 1.0
2. EPrints Version 3.1.3 Released
3. djatoka Version 1.1/djatoka Viewer Version 2.0 Released
4. SWORD Named Most Innovative Project at JISC Repositories and Preservation Conference
5. IR Deposit Using Embedded Document Metadata: Deposit Plait: Final Report

Leslie Carr has identified the top 10 "hard working" UK and U.S. digital repositories based on "the number of days deposit activity that they achieved in the last year according to ROAR."

The number one U.S. repository was the RIT Digital Media Library and the number one UK repository was the University of Kent.

Read more about it at "Hard Working Repositories" and "Hardworking Repositories: Comparing UK & US."

Related Posts

1. Blog Reports from Open Repositories 2009
2. Digital Repositories Workshop: Tools and Infrastructure Presentations
3. “Evaluation of Digital Repository Software at the National Library of Medicine”
4. SWORD Named Most Innovative Project at JISC Repositories and Preservation Conference
5. Digital Repositories Roadmap Review: Towards a Vision for Research and Learning in 2013

Daniel Scott Poynter's Digital Democracy Contest is a 2009 HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media & Learning winner, and already he has partnered with the Sunlight Foundation in an effort to crowdsource some new and exciting twists on up-and-coming digital citizens.

From Connor Kenny's blog over at Sunlight:

Todd Presner launched his new blog today, a worthy addition to any digital humanities RSS feed. Todd focuses on "the development of the geo-spatial web, augmented reality, issues of temporality and GIS, and the technical media that enable visualizations of complex city spaces."

Like a lot of things related to digital humanities, it can take me a few moments to really GET what some of this new media research and work is about, probably because there is often a visual, audio, networked and time-shifting component that text strains to capture. This is part of what makes Todd's work so fascinating, the ability to use different media to explore "layered histories," beyond text. But the learning dimension of Hypercities is equally fascinating, particularly when people actively seek to record digital stories, and embed them in the geo-spatial web.

Last year, members of Historic Filipinotown participated in this kind of digital storytelling. A group of youth did video interviews of neighborhood elders, participated in historic tours of the newly designated area, and captured a non-linear, visual,and oral history of a dynamic and meaningful community space. It inspired me to think more deeply about questions of place: What does it mean to inhabit a community, and how does that community tell its story over time? Who should tell those stories, and how do we understand history when it is collaborative, as opposed to authoritative. Even though I did not participate in the program, I was drawn into the narrative, and not just through the interactive end product. There seemed to be so many important points of contact in the process of gathering and recording stories, not just for the youth and the professors, but for the graduate students, community members, and especially the elders.

Is this what learning looks like in the 21st century?

Todd describes Hypercities as "an interactive, web-based research and teaching environment for authoring and analyzing the cultural, architectural, and urban history of cities." But it is more than that, too, since Hypercities is redefining and reconceptualizing the humanities with technical media, in often brilliant ways.

In his first blog post, Todd writes about the Digital Humanities Manifesto, which he helped compile, along with Jeffrey Schnapp, Peter Lunenfeld and approximately 100 people who contributed through guided workshops and Commentpress.

The Digital Humanities Manifesto, writes Todd,  is intended to "arouse debate about what the Humanities can and should be doing in the 21st century, particularly concerning the digital culture wars...This is a watershed moment in the history of human civilization, in which our relationship to knowledge and information is changing in profound and unpredictable ways. Digital Humanities studies the cultural and social impact of new technologies as well as takes an active role in the design, implementation, interrogation, and subversion of these technologies."

It always helps, during watershed moments in the history of human civilization, to have a good blog to shine a light on things. I'll be following Todd's work and Hypercities, gathering insights and adding them to my own conversation about participatory learning in the 21st century.

This week Blackboard’s new head of course-management software, Ray Henderson, sent a letter to customers pledging that the company will do more to follow industry software standards, and to participate more actively in their development.

Blackboard has long played a role in the education-technology standards developed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium. But in his letter, Mr. Henderson admits that the company “has not necessarily been a consistent standards leader.”

Among the pledges Blackboard makes in the letter is to offer full support for the so-called Common Cartridge, which lets publishers create plug-ins that they know will work with any course-management system that follows the standard. One of the stated goals of the standard is to “reduce vendor/platform lock-in,” so the plug-in components will work even if a college switches to another course-management system. “As our first new step towards leadership in standards, I’m excited to share that we are committing to fully support both the import and export of this format,” Mr. Henderson said in the letter.

Mr. Henderson has long been active in standards development, as was Angel Learning, where he was an executive before Blackboard bought the company this year.

“While we need to complement these words with the deeds of shipping software — I hope this message provides a sense of direction that you may expect from Blackboard as we review our approach and commitment to this important area of industry collaboration,” he concluded in the letter.

Michael L. Chasen, president and chief executive of Blackboard, elaborated on the policy change in an e-mail interview. “As we’ve looked harder at how we can best support our clients, especially given where we are in the e-learning industry today, we felt it was time to take a stepped-up approach to standards,” he said.

“Following the ANGEL acquisition, we have an opportunity to push harder on interoperability by driving hard to strengthen support for standards in e-learning, especially with the leadership of someone like Ray Henderson who has spent a career doing just that.” —Jeffrey R. Young

Instead of reaching the Oregon University System’s Web site this morning, visitors found an angry message directed at President Obama.

Diane Saunders, a university spokeswoman, said hackers had redirected the system’s home page to a site claiming to be “from Iran.” The message was up for approximately 90 minutes before an employee arrived at work and found the breach.

The Web page, which was sent to The Chronicle and the Associated Press by the university system, told “Stupid Fly Catcher Obama” to stop talking about Iran and the recent Iranian election, which has prompted protests since the June 12 vote.

“Iran’s election doesn’t have problem and Moosavi with his tiny brain will be in jail in near future, so don’t pay your time and money for him and for his fans,” the site reads. “70-80% of Iranian people hate Moosavi nowadays… We never cheated in elections and even Moosavi knows that.”

A message sent to the e-mail address listed on the Web site was not returned. Ms. Saunders said the hackers were most likely able to access the university Web page through ClickHeat, a free program that documents what areas of Web sites are being clicked most. She said the program does not automatically update solutions to problems that are found, and the university had not downloaded the most recent security update.

The university will pay more attention to updates for ClickHeat and five other third-party programs it uses that do not perform automatic updates, and Oregon State University is trying to find out exactly how someone was able to access the Web site, she said.

Ms. Saunders said she did not know why the university system’s page was targeted. “My guess is that hackers have ways of finding vulnerable entry points in Web sites,” she said. “I don’t know if this was a random or purposeful selection of going through our site.” — Marc Beja

As instructors prepare for the fall semester, colleges are trying to make sure their teachers aren’t breaking any copyright laws in their lectures.

The City University of New York’s Baruch College recently released an interactive guide to using multimedia in courses.

Baruch’s online guide begins with background information on copyrighted material, presented by a computer-animated middle-age man. Instructors can then click through the system’s “Copyright Metro,” which gives step-by-step verbal and written instructions on determining what materials can be used in courses legally. There are three “metro lines” that can be taken, depending on if the instructor plans to use the material in class or online, or if they have copyright-holder permission to use the material – which gets you a ride on the “express train” to the final stop, which says you can use the material.

Baruch is not alone in trying to prevent legal problems for itself or its professors. Among other institutions, Reed College has a traditional Web page that offers advice about using materials, with links to information from other college Web sites. The University of Maryland University College also has a site that has information for students and professors who want to legally use copyrighted material in classes and on the Internet. —Marc Beja

Over on Facebook, I'm engaged in a very interesting conversation sparked by Siva Vaidhyanathan's posting of this excellent expose in VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW of all the passages in Chris Anderson's new book FREE that were taken all too freely from other people, mainly Wikipedia, mistakes and all, without fact checking, and without attribution. Bad, bad, bad . . . Inexcusable. Not acceptable. Intellectually lazy. Reprehensible.

 

And yet . . .

 

It's a little terrifying for a fellow author to read this, especially one such as myself who is making the transition from my insanely meticulous scholarly way of writing to trade writing. Yesterday, I'm delighted to say, I delivered Part one of THE REWIRED BRAIN: THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF THINKING FOR THE INFORMATION AGE to my editor at Viking Press. Here's the count: 153 pages of text and 20 pages of endnotes. In tiny type. The printed book will not look like this.

 

In academic publishing, every idea is attributed to a scientist or another researcher and that person's affiliation is included in the text which then has an endnote with the relevant research fully cited. When I look through the trade publications on my shelf, there are rarely endnotes. When there are, it's usually something quite scant with "note to page 34" and then maybe one citation. Maybe a bibliography. Maybe a bibliographic essay. Maybe not even. Oi vey.

 

I'm not being negative about trade publishing. There are conventions specific to different kinds of scholarship and different national settings. These are conventions and like all conventions we develop them over time. But endnotes are not the way to get the message about big, important, meaningful, transformative ideas to a mass audience. Endnotes should "PROFESSOR!" and, well, we profs don't expect thousands, tens of thousdand, hundreds of thousands of readers. By last count, the typical university press monograph had something like 800 readers. I happen to think the research I am doing on a new model of mind adequate to the last twenty years of neuroscientific research and helpful in addressing the complexities of our interactive, global, collaborative Information Age deserves more than 800 readers. I do want to change the world. Yep, that's my goal.

 

How do you change the world and footnote the work of some new center for cognition and digitality at this or that university? We don't have conventions for that yet. What we do have conventions for is a hugely rushed (this is true in academic publishing too, by the way) end copy edit through a manuscript, where mark after mark changes the order of things, changes content, and realligns the endnotes and the author sees her baby cut up like one of those diagrams of a cow on the way to slaughter (Here Thar Be Flank Steak, Here Thar Be Filet Mignon), and the clock is ticking, and nothing says "attention blindness" like worrying over thousands ofsmall details under a deadline.

 

Oy vey.

 

Do I forgive Chris Anderson for sloppy research, snagging whole passages from Wikipedia without checking or attribution? No way! Am I feeling the anxiety of competing versions, visions, goals, and methods of authorship this morning? You betcha.

Here's the rest of the story, as a famous old newscaster used to say. There is an excellent moral to this story of "Free" publishing that we can use when we lecture next fall on plagiarism. Even the pros do it. And even the pros get caught.

 

------------------

 

This is from Publisher's Lunch: And here's the url to the expose itself:

http://tinyurl.com/mfbp8l

Free Indeed; Anderson's New Book Lifts Numerous Passages from Wikipedia
The Virginia Quarterly Review convincingly reproduces a number of incidences in Chris Anderson's new book FREE: The Future of a Radical Price that reproduce nearly verbatim portions of a number of Wikipedia articles.

Anderson admits fault via e-mail, saying "all those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources." He intended to "do a write-through" of "source material without an individual author to credit (as in the case of Wikipedia)," and says that "obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad.... I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced.

"I think what we'll do is publish those notes after all, online as they should have been to begin with. That way the links are live and we don't have to wrestle with how to freeze them in time, which is what threw me in the first place."

As you can imagine, Hyperion supports Anderson's statement: "We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson's response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book."

But Fast Company observes: "What's more disconcerting is that Anderson was relying so heavily on Wikipedia for his information in the first place; even middle-school book-reports shouldn't be crafted with ancillary information from that site. Confoundingly, many of the passages that appear lifted were readily-available definitions of terms that would appear in more credible reference books like the Oxford English Dictionary."

Subsequently, Ed Champion finds and blogs about various other lightly rewritten or borrowed phrasings from other sources (including a passage from a book by Wired colleague Kevin Kelly). "A cursory plunge into the book's contents reveals that Anderson has not only cribbed material from Wikipedia and websites (sometimes without accreditation), but that he has a troubling habit of mentioning a book or an author and using this as an excuse to reproduce the content with very few changes -- in some cases, nearly verbatim."
VQR

There is a sweet sadness in handing over the reins of the HASTAC Scholars Program.  This past year has been such a marvelous experience, getting to know and work with (both virtually and f2f) so many extremely talented, creative, visionary people.  I am sad to leave, but the true beauty of virtual community is that it is only my role that is shifting, not my ability to participate, and my ties with HASTAC will simply evolve along with me.  What else is HASTAC about if not flexibility, change and new horizons?

Perhaps the sweetest part is that I am truly delighted to get to introduce to you the next Director of the HASTAC Scholars Program, Fiona Barnett.  When we conducted the search for this position, Fiona's letter and resume were clear standouts to everyone who read them.  We all thought, "wow, she not only gets HASTAC - she is HASTAC!"  (whatever that means exactly...  We may still be looking for that perfect explanation for HASTAC, but we recognize it when we see it -- someone innovative, creative, savvy, hooked in, open-minded, pushing boundaries -- not to mention that she's also brilliant, charming and funny!)  During the interview, it was obvious just how perfect a fit Fiona was for the job, so much so that at the close of the interview as we told her "we'll let you know within a few days," we all looked around at one another as if to say "Don't we know already?  Can't we just offer it to her?"  And so we did offer her the job on the spot - and she accepted.  Sometimes the fit is just that clear!  Let me share with you a little more about Fiona...

Fiona Barnett is a Ph.D. candidate in the Literature Program and Women's Studies at Duke University. She graduated with a B.A. in Modern Culture & Media from Brown University in 2001, and then spent several years working in a multimedia studio in Vancouver, BC.  Her scholarly work is at the intersection of feminist and queer theory, science studies, critical theory and visual studies. She is currently at work on her dissertation, entitled Turning the Body Inside Out, which is a genealogy of the fantasy that the body requires investigation, and traces the attachment to the kind of knowledges that can be produced by examining the body (both inside and out). It considers the social, scientific, aesthetic and theoretical practices which discursively produce the body as a visible – and thus knowable –  object by repeatedly staging the scene of its dissection. In particular, her project focuses on the historical practices and contemporary situations that reinscribe the desire for an open and legible body, including the autopsy, dissection, lens technologies, museum exhibits, freak shows, serial killers, DNA and especially critical theory itself.  At Duke, Fiona also enjoys organizing the Women's Studies Graduate Scholars Colloquium, a unique program that generates a supportive intellectual community for graduate students.  In her free time, she loves to practice her photography, enjoy the vibrant Durham community and foster dogs through a local rescue organization.

I know that Fiona is thrilled to be joining the HASTAC team - perhaps as thrilled as we are to have her on board!  Please join me in welcoming Fiona to HASTAC!