Technology Blog

Lesley Perkins, Ego? What ego? OA Librarian, April 26, 2006. Excerpt:

One of the biggest challenges for academic librarians is getting faculty to deposit their articles into the university’s institutional repository (IR), assuming there is one, of course. There are numerous reasons why faculty don’t or won’t deposit their articles, and there are numerous strategies, some more effective than others, for convincing them to do so. John Willinsky (UBC professor, and author of The Access Principle) believes the key is to appeal to their ego. Faculty love to see their work widely disseminated, read, praised and cited. It feeds their ego, they’re human. But what’s the hook? John suggests putting a section on the university website homepage that advertises the IR and the university’s research output with a feature called “Faculty Article of the Day” (or week, if daily seems too arduous), with a link to the article in the IR. He claims that many faculty check their institution’s homepage regularly to see what’s new and which faculty member’s work is getting attention. It won’t take long before faculty realize that if they want their research featured on the homepage, they’d best find a way to deposit it in the IR. Why not go a step further and add the same feature to the university library homepage? Double-boost those egos, and increase access and exposure while you’re at it?

PS: The Dutch take this idea a step further with Cream of Science, which showcases to the whole country –or, actually, the whole world– the best work on deposit in Dutch OA repositories. The strategy has been very successful both in attracting readers and stimulating deposits.

source: Using the carrot

Open Business has interviewed Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks (Yale 2006, both in print and OA editions). Excerpt:

2. You also mention “non-monetary” incentives. What are those?

There is something of a joke in the very posing of the question on a business site. Nonmonetary motivations are what make you stop on the street for a moment to answer a stranger who asks you for the time or directions; what makes you travel five hundred miles to be with you family for the holidays, and what makes you tell a friend a joke, or listen to it. They are also the motivations that lead some of the world’s leading minds to work for what, by comparison to other lines of business in which they could succeed, is a pittance-to satisfy their curiosity, for fame, or because of the sheer fun.
These are motivations on which all of us act many times a day, but which have been shunted to the periphery of the economy throughout much of the industrial period. What we see now, as the two core inputs into information production have become widely distributed in the population (that is, computation and communications capacity, on the one hand, and human creativity, experience, and wisdom, on the other hand), these same motivations have moved from the domain of the social and personal to occupy a larger role smack in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world today….

5. Can copyright block these open forms of collaboration - how?

Certainly. Copyright blocks access to the inputs into information production that are copyrighted….Annotated books, illustrated editions, updated guide books, so many other things that are much easier to imagine, once one looks at wikipedia or sites like tripadvisor provide a much more immediate sense of how much is lost because of copyright. Now, that doesn’t mean that we should get rid of all of copyright immediately. It is merely to offer an example of how copyright dampens the possibilities of social production, because it increases the costs, and often simply blocks completely, access to the raw material of any information production activity –existing information. More threatening still is not copyright proper, but the steady assault that the copyright industries have been mounting on the free information ecology through statues like the digital Millennium Copyright Act and the efforts to pass a regulatory requirement that all equipment capable of rendering digital media be designed so that it will behave predictably in the hands of its user, and that users will not be able to do things –like implement new pieces of software or copy files– that might threaten the tightly controlled distribution pipes of copyrighted material. These acts threaten the very foundations of the networked information ecology, because they seek to change the basic instrumentalities of social production and the free and easy flow of information across the network that makes it possible.

6. There is a tricky economic question when it comes to free (as in beer) distribution of media - books, text, music, film - how can, in this environment, artists be remunerated?

I think here the answer is different for different forms of expression. In general, thinking at the broad abstract level of “copyright” and “information” leads to excessive concern with copyright….Much of text publication has long been outside the needs of copyright: –newspapers and magazines have long been based on advertising and attention brokerage, not on copyright. Books are different, and the current solution –which is that people habits of reading books are still allowing free distribution online to be couple with sales may not be long lived….

source: Interview with Yochai Benkler

source: ARROW roadshows for 2006

JISC announced the launch of PerX in September 2005, and today released an update on its progress. Excerpt:

A pilot service providing subject resource discovery across a variety of digital repositories of interest to the engineering learning and research communities has been released by the JISC-funded PerX project.  Although the repositories included in the pilot are relevant to engineering, the cross-searching methods and interface used, plus the range of repository types included, should be of interest to many as a demonstrator of one method of resource discovery across multiple digital repositories. Twenty-eight repositories are currently cross-searched by the pilot whose basic search interface and advanced search interface enable cross-searching of the repositories, and allow filtering by resource type: articles, theses and dissertations, technical reports, books, learning and teaching resources, key websites, industry news and new job announcements. Overall, more than 1.5 million resources are cross-searched by the pilot service.  Access to the full text of items found is available from many of the repositories. In a few cases, the full items consist of details of books, articles, learning objects or websites, and in some others the full text may be available to subscribing institutions or by pay-per-view.

An important purpose of the PerX pilot is to help scope a possible future cross-search service.  With this in mind, feedback on the Pilot would be much appreciated by project staff. A 60 second survey is available and those providing feedback will be entered into a draw to win £100 of Amazon vouchers.

source: Update on the PerX project

source: Documenting the deficiencies of Google Scholar

The May issue of Walt Crawford’s Cites & Insights is now online. A full half of this issue (pp. 12-21) is devoted to Library Access to Scholarship. Walt reviews six months of news and comment on OA, including many of my own writings. He covers the launch of OA Librarian, the ACRL adoption of delayed OA for College & Research Libraries, Hindawi’s expanding line of OA journals, the DC Principles Coalition proposal for rolling back the NIH policy, the OA experiment at JMLA, Erik Engstrom’s confident misunderstandings of OA, Dorothea Salo’s reflections on the obstacles to OA archiving, Jan Velterop’s reflections on OA publishing, my review of OA in 2005 and my predictions for 2006, the Kaufman-Wills report, the analogy between OA and open source, Richard Poynder’s proposal of a central OA organzation, Charles Bailey’s overviews of OA –and more. You saw all of this here in OAN, but not with Walt’s commentary. Have a look.

source: April issue of Cites & Insights

I’m not quite sure what the title of this panel has to do with the description they’ve provided, but the lineup of speakers was interesting enough that I wanted to check it out.

• Mark Burnett, President and Founder, Mark Burnett Productions Inc.
• Kevin Conroy, Executive Vice President and COO, AOL Media Networks
• Kevin Corbett, Vice President, Digital Home Group, and General Manager, Content Services Group, Intel Corp.
• Blair Westlake, Corporate Vice President, Media, Content and Partner Strategy Group, Microsoft Corp.
• Moderator: Ken Rutkowski, Host, President, KenRadio Broadcasting

Westlake talks about the NAB conference—notes that HD was a huge focus, but the conference seemed light in terms of people.

(The moderator is extraordinarily annoying. I suspect he may have been a used car salesman before he became a radio announcer.)

Programming, search, playback, monetization—these are the important aspects of video that the AOL guy identifies. He leaves out things like “creation,” of course, because this panel is clearly about the Internet as a broadcast tool. (The description begins with the outrageous line “The Internet is finally emerging as a true entertainment medium.”) The world is divided up into “content owners” and “consumers.”

Burnett says the “new primetime” is 9-to-5, because so many people in offices have broadband access and use it constantly to access content for personal reasons (chat, email, shopping). But there’s “nothing to watch or do,” he says, which is what he sees as his job to remedy.

(Must. Not. Speak.)

Am looking around the room…once again, I seem to be the only person with an open computer. The free wifi has disappeared, much to my chagrin, but I’m using Ecto to write this so.

Moderator raises the “user generated content” flag—“what about YouTube? Will it make you more accountable?” Mark Burnett says he thinks YouTube is great. Why would anyone who’s a professional content maker fear user-generated content? In the end, it makes you better at your job, which is to give the advert-watching public what they want. And there are incredibly talented undiscovered filmmakers out there, who are using YouTube to get things out.

Burnett claims that the Intenret will allow us to know everything about who’s watching what. The complete disregard for privacy issues here is stunning. He dismisses those trying to block this kind of surveillance as blocking inevitable progress. “Of course we need to know exactly who’s watching.”

Burnett again: “Who would buy a computer without Intel? They’d be crazy to do that!” (Oy.)

AOL guy says “Version 1 of the internet was about typing in a URL and going to what we think of as an immersive experience.” (Huh?) New profiles are people who aren’t interested in going to a URL and being in the environment you create—they want the material made available to them (widgets, gadgets, etc). I think what he’s trying to describe is the aggregation process—people wanting to pull in your content into “their” space (MySpace page, etc). Ah, yes. Now he uses the “Web 2.0” term.

They’re all convinced that text gives way to audio which gives way to video—and that everything’s about video. Why would anyone want audio when they could have video? (And, implied, why on earth would they still be bothering with text?)

Blair gets tagged on DRM. “Unfortunately it’s gotten a bad reputation.” Notes that the Sony root kit was a big factor in making the perception more negative, but says the root kit was not DRM, and that those shouldn’t be confused.

AOL guy says this is a non-issue, that we just need a “rebranding effort” around DRM. All DRM is intended to do is establish some business rules. If you get it right, you can have new business models (like pay-per-view).

Burnett says he’s not concerned about illegal downloads. “Nobody up here is missing any meals as a result,” he points out to laughter. The opportunities to sell more content are massive, he says. Bigger than ever.

“It’s gone from the information superhighway to the content superhighway,” says the Intel guy.

The AOL guy says they’re building an interactive programming guide to online content. Search and browse becomes the organizing principle for finding interesting timely content. (That’s not an organizing principle!)

At this point I think I’ve heard enough. I’m off to take a break before the last panel of the day.

source: milken conference: “internet from 10 feet away”

Toru Iiyoshi, Opportunity is Knocking: Will Education Open the Door? Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, April 2006. (Thanks to A.G. Rud.) Excerpt:

[O]ne of open education’s most critical questions –how can open education’s tools and resources demonstrably improve education quality?– [is] rarely mentioned [at conferences on open education]….The main tenet of open education is to make educational assets freely available to the public. This is becoming easier and less expensive as network and multimedia technology evolves….But several obstacles may stand in the way of using these and other powerful tools and resources in ways that will actually improve the quality of education.

First, although the tools and resources are readily available, transferring practical knowledge about how to use them is not easy. Indeed, this kind of pedagogical know-how is notoriously hard to make visible and portable….[T]he vast majority of this kind of practical knowledge remains tacit and invisible in the experiences of the educator or educators who created the materials….This is why Carnegie’s Knowledge Media Lab is working…to develop and disseminate support tools and resources that capture not only materials but the stories and experiences of real teachers using those materials in…concrete settings….

Second, true success in open education requires a change in education culture and policy. The education community values activities like scholarly writing and pursuing new research questions….But…adapting or improving another’s educational materials is rarely understood to be a creative, valuable contribution….

Finally, we must look beyond institutional boundaries and connect efforts among many settings and open source entrepreneurs….An initiative like the Sakai Project, for example, which is working to design, build, and deploy a new online education platform that includes course management, electronic portfolio, assessment, collaboration, communication, and other tools actually coordinates multi-institutional collaborative efforts and offers institutions the chance to collectively advance teaching and learning….This is the kind of cooperation and knowledge sharing that will catapult open education to a new level.

…I anticipate three dramatic improvements over time: increased quality of tools and resources, more effective use, and greater individual and collective pedagogical knowledge. Ideally, all will occur simultaneously, combining local classroom innovations and learned lessons through global knowledge sharing….Opportunity is knocking. Will we open the door?

source: How can open courseware make education better?

• Chuq Von Rospach on the AOL email imbroglio
  Apple’s postmaster on the DearAOL.com blocking fiasco, and the economics of Goodmail. ‘Goodmail will likely fail on its own merits’
  (tags: goodmail anti-spam apple chuq-von-rospach aol dearaol)
• Phishers Snare Victims With VoIP
  ‘the scammers had used open-source software called Asterisk to convert a computer into a PBX … running an automated telephone information system. The voice system sound[ed] exactly like the bank’s phone tree’
  (tags: voip spam cloudmark phishing scams)
• hackdiary: Last.fm isn’t just for humans
  turns out a user named “sekrit” has actually been representing the output of the BBC 6Music radio station. awesome!
  (tags: bbc 6music via:2lmc last.fm radio music)

Tags: 

This post was written by dailylinks, source: links for 2006-04-26

source: Growing OA publisher for the developing world

There are disappointingly few people in this room, but the panel is a great lineup:

• Ronald Packard, Chairman and Founder, K12 Inc.
• Stephanie Rafanelli, Science Teacher, Menlo School
• Sally Ride, Former NASA Astronaut; President and CEO, Sally Ride Science
• Jane Swift, Former Governor of Massachusetts; Managing Partner, WNP Consulting LLC

It’s wonderful to hear these accomplished, articulate women speak.

Ride and Swift both do an overview of the depressing statistics on the underrepresentation of women in STEM education and careers.

Swift points out that our educational offerings are failing to engage girls (and boys) in science. She says that dramatic reform typically doesn’t come (from government) unless there’s a cataclysmic failure, a train wreck. The problem they’re talking about here is a quiet disaster, and hasn’t galvanized a response. She criticizes the assumption that if we focus on the needs of girls, and create separate learning spaces for them, that we shortchange boys. The point is to create complementary environments that are designed for learning needs, not to create an either/or dichotomy.

Packard talks about key approaches. You need to make science interesting through hands-on activities. Very few primary education teachers have science or math degrees, so their comfort level is low for teaching this material. His company has been developing materials to support teachers and increase their confidence in teaching science and math. He points out the problem with the lack of visible role models for women and minorities. They’ve been working in Philadelphia to highlight real people in scientific jobs to help change the perceptions of kids.

Last speaker is a high school science teacher who’s quite engaging. She’s taught at an all-girls’ school, but now teaches at a co-ed school. She asks her students every year to draw a picture of a scientist. Even in the girls’ school, these 7-9 graders almost always draw men with stereotypical ‘mad scientist’ characteristics. She’s never had more than 22% of her students in a given year draw pictures of women. Cultural perceptions aren’t changing. Even her school, which is highly supportive of her work and speaking, has only now (after 11 years) thought to have her speak to her colleagues about these issues.

She makes an important point about the extent to which the girls she teaches perceive their math and science skills as being weak. They’ll say they’re not good at math, when their grades contradict that. But once they’ve convinced themselves that “math is hard,” they start opting out of science and math classes.

An audience member—Paula Stern—asks what opportunities are out there inciting girls to involve themselves in math. She also plugs NCWIT’s upcoming town hall meeting.

Rafanelli makes a great point about kits and toys for teaching science—to attract girls, they need to be social. Girls want to do things with their friends, and if the kit is designed for one person it won’t be as attractive. Ride points out that science itself is collaborative and communicative, and the teaching tools need to reflect that.

Packard talks about the importance of contextualizing science education so that girls see the relevance to things that they care about.

Packard also says his experience is that if you don’t test something, it doesn’t get taught. If you’re going to test, you have to test everything—not just literacy and math. Rafanelli says that very few primary teachers do “real science” in their classrooms, because they’re having to teach to the tests, and the tests don’t include science. (They’re not arguing for the value of testing—they’re saying that if you’re going to have testing, you can’t have it focused so narrowly and still have broad education.)

source: milken conference: sally ride on engaging girls in science

source: Preview from PLoS Clinical Trials

Renate Ell, Publish or perish: self-archive to flourish, a posting on the ESOF2006 Conference blog, April 26, 2006. Excerpt:

“If I have been able to see further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants” – this famous quote from a letter by Isaac Newton is still a wonderful metaphor for the work of scientists. Research is always founded on other research, and it becomes a foundation for others’ research – at least if other scientists can (afford to) access the relevant publication. With 24000 peer-reviewed journals worldwide, that can be difficult. But the internet now provides a new way to “become a giant”: Researchers can complement access to their own published journal articles by also “self-archiving” them on the web….

To create a repository, an institution only installs a free GNU software. It is worth the effort: Complementary self-archiving increases the citation impact of an article by up to 250%. However, only 15% of scientists as yet enjoy this benefit. Some research institutions and funders (including the EC) are already proposing to request or even require open access self-archiving. But scientists only tap its full potential if they make their articles accessible immediately upon acceptance for publication. 93% of journals already allow that. Even for the rest, the self-archiving software offers a solution: If someone clicks on the title of the article, an automatic e-mail requests an e-print from the author.

In [the ESOF2006 open access] session, scientists and representatives of scientific and funding institutions are introduced to open-access self-archiving and its effect on research impact.

source: Self-archiving for flourishing

source: Open content in Nigeria

The University of Southampton has issued a press release on Stevan Harnad, Southampton’s globe-trotting archivangelist. Excerpt:

Southampton’s globe-trotting ‘archivangelist’ Professor Stevan Harnad, is currently promoting the benefits of University Open Access Self-Archiving as invited keynote speaker in Europe, the United States and Canada. ‘Self-Archiving’ means researchers depositing their published articles in their own university’s open-access web archives, making them accessible for free, for all users worldwide. Professor Harnad, one of the founders of the international Open Access movement and Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is informing his audiences in five locations around the world that so far only 15 per cent of researchers are self-archiving spontaneously, even though studies from the University of Southampton have shown that self-archiving increases research usage and impact by a dramatic 25-250 per cent in all disciplines….

Professor Harnad has presented/is presenting at the following five conferences: [1] Invited Plenary lecture, 1st European Conference on Scientific Publishing in Biomedicine and Medicine (ECSP) “Researchers and Open Access - the new scientific publishing environment” and also Workshop on “Self-archiving, Institutional Repositories, and its impact on research” Lund, Sweden 21- 22 April 2006. [2] The Access to Knowledge Conference (A2K) Yale Law School, New Haven, 21-23 April 2006. [3] Invited Keynote. Open Access and Information Management: An International Workshop, Organized by the Information Management Committee of Research & Technology Organisation of NATO, Oslo, Norway, May 10. [4]
Invited Keynote, Open Access Institutional Repositories, Current Research Information Systems. Bergen, Norway, 11-13 May 2006. [5] Congrès de l’ACFAS 2006, Colloque sur l’autoarchivage des articles de recherche, leurs libres accès et leurs impacts scientifiques, McGill, Montréal, 15 mai 2006.

source: Update on Stevan Harnad

Steven Breckler, Open Access and Public Understanding, APA Online, April 2006. Breckler is the Executive Director of the American Psychological Association. Excerpt:

Over the past year, NIH has been working to establish and grow a policy on public access. The goal is to post all of the journal publications that result from NIH grants, in a form that makes the full text freely available to the public. When the policy was first introduced, contributions to the public archive were voluntary. Now NIH and some members of congress want to make the contributions mandatory – if your published journal article is supported in any way by a grant from NIH, you would be required to deposit the full-text article in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central archive. APA joined with many other non-profit publishers of scientific journals to express concerns about the initial NIH policy. For one thing, NIH has not yet demonstrated that it can manage such a mammoth undertaking. Many of us also have serious reservations about concentrating so much gate-keeping authority in the hands of a federal agency. These agencies already control the direction of science through the allocation of funding. Under the new public access policy, it will be far too easy for the government to suppress research results that happen to be unpopular or politically unpalatable. It is an Orwellian nightmare for basic science. Perhaps the greatest concern, however, is the disingenuous premise on which the public access policy is based. In Publication No. 05-5775, NIH asserts the following:

“Ensuring access to the full text of NIH-funded research publications will improve the public’s understanding and appreciation of biomedical research findings. Enhanced access to information strengthens and expands the impact of research while disseminating it in a timelier manner. The online archive will increase the public’s access to health-related publications at a time when demand for such information is on a steady rise.”

…It is reasonable to ask whether lay members of the public – taxpayers whose hard-earned dollars helped to support this research – will gain from their reading of this article any better understanding of the research results. Some certainly will, but I suspect that most will not. For those who do want access, however, many options are available – a reprint request to the author, electronic access through a library, or purchase (for a nominal fee) directly from the APA website.

Comment. (1) The concern that NIH will be a gatekeeper that could suppress politically unpalatable results is completely misplaced. Breckler missed the fact that NIH is not the sole distributor of this research. The NIH policy only applies to articles published in independent journals. The NIH will only host copies of research published elsewhere. (2) On the benefit for lay readers, Breckler makes three mistakes. First, he mistakes the NIH priorities, which are to help researchers first and lay readers second. The policy puts it this way: “By creating an archive of peer-reviewed, NIH-funded research publications, NIH is helping health care providers, educators, and scientists to more readily exchange research results and the public to have greater access to health-related research publications. As the archive grows, the public will be more readily able to access an increasing number of these publications.” Second, he assumes that the NIH policy has no other justification than to help lay readers, so that if this one is weak, the policy cannot stand. Breckler misses not only the primacy of the benefit to researchers, but its immensity. Third, he assumes that because helping lay readers is secondary, it is therefore negligible or can be satisfied through priced-access models. For some evidence to the contrary, see testimonies from Merrill Goozner, Kuan-Teh Jeang, Ray Corrigan, and (if you only have time to read one) Sharon Terry. BTW, there’s a good thread at the AmSci OA Forum on the “lay reader” question.

source: More on OA for lay readers

source: Academic podcasts

Peter Monaghan, Digital Dissertation Dust-Up, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 28, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:

Virginia A. Kuhn, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, was having dissertation trouble. Nothing unusual about that. But it wasn’t that Ms. Kuhn was struggling to finish her thesis. The trouble was that officials at the institution could not figure out whether to accept it. Her thesis is not a printed document. It was born digital, in a multimedia format full of film clips, hyperlinks to other parts of the work, and other uses of electronic media….The biggest issue was copyright. Citing a snippet of text in a printed thesis is standard procedure, but including a piece of video or a still picture, which Ms. Kuhn says is critical to explain her points, can raise the ire of copyright holders, and sound the alarm among university attorneys. Although Ms. Kuhn lists detailed citations for all multimedia works in her thesis, she refused to ask permission to include them, because she insists that she should be able to cite them in the same way that print sources have long been cited. She says: “If you ask for permission, you’re screwed because you imply that you legally need it.” Instead, she says, “I’m doing all that’s incumbent on me legally to establish fair use.” The topic of the work, as it happens, is the challenges of adopting new technologies in teaching and learning. Even though university officials first approved her dissertation and tentatively granted her a doctorate in December, they quickly reconsidered and put a hold on her transcript while they deliberated on whether they could accept the thesis. Only in late March did the university grant her degree, after a nerve-racking delay….

Storing the dissertation could also cause problems, says Ewa E. Barczyk, interim director of the Golda Meir Library at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. The University of Wisconsin System is setting up a repository for a variety of digital documents from the system’s campuses. But the library requires that materials that are placed in the archive be “open-access compliant,” she says, so that anyone can get to them. And, she says, if Ms. Kuhn’s work is included in such a repository, that may create legal problems because copyright holders may consider the document’s accessibility a breach of their copyrights….

Even the copyright concerns struck [Charles I. Schuster, associate dean of humanities and member of Kuhn’s dissertation committee] as misplaced. The concept of “fair use” should apply, he said, because “this is a dissertation, not a commercial property.” Legal experts agree. “It seems to be classic fair use,” says Kenneth D. Salomon, a Washington lawyer who often represents colleges in intellectual-property cases. Courts determine fair use by considering several questions, says Peter Jaszi, a professor of law at American University. Is the use educational? Is it for commercial ends? Does it do measurable harm to a copyright holder’s prospects in the marketplace? Are the clips unnecessarily long or numerous? He agrees with Ms. Kuhn that images should be evaluated just as text is. “Case law makes that absolutely clear,” he says. Of course, he says, universities’ lawyers are paid to avoid risk, but they should beware of doing so at the cost of legitimate educational and research goals….

But even court rulings, say the two lawyers, do not prevent organizations such as University Microfilms Inc., the publisher and repository of 98 percent of doctoral dissertations completed in the United States, from imposing their own rules. And, in fact, Milwaukee officials did meet opposition when they tried to submit Ms. Kuhn’s work to that archive….According to company policy [ProQuest, owner of University Microfilms], authors must obtain “written permission to reproduce copyrighted images, video, graphics, animation, data, and images of individuals.” When copyright questions remain, “publication will be delayed until those concerns are resolved.”

Comment. Kudos to Kuhn and UWM for standing by fair use, refusing to seek permission when it wasn’t necessary, and helping future scholars face fewer permission barriers in writing up their research. If ProQuest will not accept dissertations that meet a university’s academic standards and comply with copyright law, then universities should cut ties with ProQuest. At the very least, ProQuest acceptance should never be a condition of university acceptance.

source: Fair use and OA for ETDs

The RCUK has announced an Analysis of data on scholarly journals publishing to be undertaken jointly with the RIN (Research Information Network) and DTI (Department of Trade and Industry). From the site:

This study got off the ground in mid-April 2006 and should conclude by the middle of summer.  It is being undertaken on behalf of the three joint funders by Electronic Publishing Services Ltd (EPS), in association with Loughborough University Department of Information Science.  The aim is to assist in UK domestic policy-making, by reviewing information about scholarly journal publishing, assessing the data available about the process and the reliability of that data. The main purpose of the study is to gain more reliable information about the operation of the journal publishing aspects of the scholarly communications process and its costs.  The study focuses specifically on journal publishing, but it should be viewed in the context of a projected body of work involving all key stakeholders in the context of the scholarly communications framework.  This is likely to include related but separate studies of other aspects of scholarly communications, including for instance the development, funding and viability of digital repositories.

The key objective of the project is to provide the three sponsors of the study, and other stakeholders in the scholarly journals industry, with an accurate review of reliable and objective information about the journals publishing process….

Scholarly journal publishing is a key component of the spectrum of functions and activities that form part of the scholarly communications process.  This has been the focus of much interest lately, in particular because of the considerable interest generated by recent debates on open access.  Although this level of debate has provided a welcome opportunity to consider challenges relating to the dissemination of research outputs, it has also been characterised by a degree of mutual suspicion and misunderstanding stemming from the often conflicting positions of the different actors and stakeholders with an interest in these issues. There has also been tension over the quality and completeness of the information and data that the different stakeholders have used in support of their respective positions.  As a result of these tensions and suspicions, it has been difficult to achieve a consensus on how best to exploit the potential of new technology for enhancing the scholarly communications process and its cost-effectiveness.  This has had implications for the development of public policy, as evidenced by the debates surrounding the Wellcome Trust’s policy on open access, and the delay in agreeing a definitive RCUK position statement.

In this context, there is a clear need for objective information that all stakeholders can agree upon as a means of defining and achieving common goals in scholarly communications.  The DTI-sponsored Research Communications Forum has provided a useful arena for the exchange of information and views.  The recently-created scholarly communications group facilitated by the RIN will work collaboratively to identify key issues in scholarly communications and gaps in our understanding, and to develop a better, evidence-based understanding of these issues - for instance, the development, funding and viability of digital repositories - as a basis for informing public policy.  This group includes representatives of all the key stakeholders (notably the Research Councils, the library community, publishers, the RIN and key Government Departments such as the DTI and OST).  The current study, focused on scholarly journal publishing - which has been the focus of some of the more lively debate - will be timely contribution to the development of understanding in the field of scholarly communications as a whole.

Comment. (1) The RCUK has not said whether it will wait to announce the final version of its OA policy until the new study is complete and fully digested. But it looks as though it will. It looks as though the voices calling for delay have prevailed. (2) Remember that the RCUK’s draft OA policy is already based on extensive fact-finding from the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee and summarized in its well-known report, Scientific Publications: Free For All? (3) The only relevant evidence not yet unearthed by previous studies is on the effect of high-volume OA archiving on journal subscriptions –outside physics, where we already know that high-volume OA archiving is either harmless or synergistic with journal subscriptions. But we cannot gather evidence on this question until we stimulate high-volume OA archiving in a field other than physics, e.g. by adopting a policy something like the RCUK’s draft OA policy. Let’s get on with it, adopt the policy, monitor the effects carefully, and be prepared to amend as needed. (4) Why does the list of “all the key stakeholders” omit researchers and universities?

source: A new RCUK-sponsored journal study

source: Two more institutions sign the Berlin Declaration