Open Access News

I'm a book author. My publisher [Simon & Schuster] is suing Google Print and that bothers me. I'd asked for my book to be included, because gosh it's so hard to get people to read a book [but Simon & Schuster refused.]...Kinda sucks for me, because not that many people know about my book and this might help them find out about it. I fail to see what the harm is in Google indexing a book and helping people find it. Anyone can read my book for free by going to the library anyway. In case you guys haven't noticed, books don't have marketing like TV and Movies do. There are no commercials for books, this website isn't produced by my publisher. Books are driven by word of mouth. A book that doesn't get good word of mouth will fail and go out of print. Personally, I hope that won't happen to my book, but there is a chance that it will. I think the majority of authors would benefit from something like Google Print.

The most critical data [for public policy] are microdata --data about individual people, households, and businesses and other organizations. The benefits of providing wider access to microdata for researchers and policy analysts are better informed policies. The risk of providing increased access to microdata is increased risk of breaching the confidentiality of the data....We believe that the changes we recommend will result in wider access to high-quality anonymized public-use files as well as to potentially identifiable microdata. But such expanded access requires expanded procedural and legal protections. The panel believes that users, like agencies, should be held accountable for safeguarding the confidentiality of microdata files to which they are granted access. We recommend that statistical agencies set up procedures for monitoring any breaches of confidentiality that may occur, as well as their causes and consequences. We recommend that agencies require auditing of license holders and penalties for violations of the license....The statistical system of the United States ultimately depends on the willingness of the public to provide the information on which research data are based. To ensure such willingness, there must be scrupulous attention to assuring the informed consent of data providers, as well as continuing research into public attitudes relevant to data collection, privacy, and confidentiality.

Abstract: The OECD’s Working Party on the Information Economy (WPIE) has recently published four extensive reports on digital content. Their relevance for the DRM discussion is analyzed in the course of this article. Where applicable, they are also contrasted with differing findings and positions.

From the body of the article:

The report then introduces the concept of open access publishing. Authors following this concept "grant to all users the free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose" (Bethesda Statement of Open Access Publishing 2003). Articles and papers are usually based on publicly funded research. Accordingly, funding agencies and institutions are more and more adopting the open access policy. Thereby, they are stressing the importance of knowledge creation and distribution and the integration of all the actors and activities within innovative systems. According to the report, DRM does not lend itself to the idea of open access publishing, as it is primarily meant to limit users’ rights in terms of openness and interoperability....I largely agree with WPIE’s assessment of the situation in online gaming and scientific publishing, especially when it comes to open access publishing.

Google calls the publishers' suit "near-sighted." And it probably is. The benefit to readers and researchers will be tremendous, as will (Google is eager to point out) the exposure for authors and publishers. But Google Print is undoubtedly an earth-shaking program. Look at the reaction in Europe, where alarm bells were rung by France, warning of cultural imperialism, of an english-drenched web. Heads of state and culture convened and initial plans for a European digital library have been drawn up....Google's book scanning touches a deep nerve, and the argument over intellectual property, signficant though it is, distracts from a more profound human anxiety -- an anxiety about the form of culture and the shape of thoughts. If we try to grope back through the millennia, we can find find an analogy in the invention of writing. The shift from oral to written language froze speech into stable strings that could be transmitted and stored over distance and time....This change not only affected the modes of communication, it dramatically refigured the cognitive makeup of human beings (as McLuhan, Ong and others have described). We are currently going through another such shift. The digital takes the freezing medium of text and throws it back into fluidity. Like the melting of polar ice caps, it unsettles equilibriums, changes weather patterns. It is a lot to adjust to, and we wonder if our great-great-grandchildren will literally think differently from us....In Phaedrus, Plato expresses a similar anxiety about the invention of writing....[Quoting Plato:] "For this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it; they will not exercise their memories, but, trusting in external, foreign marks, they will not bring things to remembrance from within themselves. You have discovered a remedy not for memory, but for reminding. You offer your students the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom. They will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing."...As I type, I'm exhibiting wisdom without the reality. I've read Plato, but nowhere near exhaustively. Yet I can slash and weave texts on the web in seconds, throw together a blog entry and send it screeching into the commons. And with Google Print I can get the quote I need and let the rest of the book rot behind the security fence. This fluidity is dangerous because it makes connections so easy. Do we know what we are connecting?

Google's latest ambition - to digitise practically every book ever written so they can be searched in a fraction of a second - is so alluring that I find myself hoping it will win the lawsuit brought against it by publishers, even though I can't for the life of me work out which side is legally in the right as regards copyright....[The project] could increase the knowledge of practically everyone willing to learn, cut down the years of research needed to do a PhD, and may even provide a legitimate reason for continuing improvements in our school and college examination results....There is no problem digitising books that are out of copyright - which could lead to a boom in the rapidly expanding print-on-demand industry. But publishers are very angry about Google scanning books that are still covered by copyright protection, even if they are out of print and even though Google has offered an opt-out clause for authors and publishers not wanting to be part of it. Google argues that for books not in the public domain it will merely provide pointers that contain the search terms used with, at most, a few lines of text. So if you want the whole book you will have to buy it at Amazon or your local bookshop. That seems fair enough and a lot less damaging to authors than readers going into their local library and photocopying page after page....Since, in the absence of this initiative, [in-copyright but out-of-print] books would stay in literary limbo, isn't Google doing the world a favour?...Google wouldn't exist if its content providers [for ordinary or non-book searchers] had demanded royalties. Why didn't they? It was partly because the internet hasn't managed to find an efficient system for collecting micro-payments. But it was also because there was, and is, a kind of collective, if subconscious acceptance that the benefits of having all that information available for nothing far outweighs the messiness of asking everyone to pay, say, 1p every time they view a page.

We intend to make it easier and more cost-effective for vendors and clients to think through relevant issues, memorialize them in cogent and legal agreements and build balanced, ongoing relationships. Contract Commons will also build a public education contracting community for procurement officials. The community will have access to various tools, including: [1] "Best of breed" technology contracts for public education, [2] Annotations to those contracts provided by top legal and technology professionals, [3] A searchable library of contract clauses, [4] A community forum to encourage debate, discussion and collaboration among procurement officials and vendors, [5] Primers on open source technology and contracts, and advice on how to integrate existing procurement practices with open solutions, [6] An expert contract drafting "wizard" to walk procurement officials through the business and legal issues necessary to consider when negotiating for technology, [7] A clearinghouse of vendor information, including information about vendor products and contract terms to create broader markets in public sector technology.

(PS: Though not directly related to OA, I'd be interested to hear from university libraries that use Contract Commons to improve their bargaining power with publishers and datababse vendors.)

Complex changes in data production, distribution and archiving--and issues they raise regarding who pays for data, who preserves it and who has access to it--should prompt an international initiative that ensures current and future scientists worldwide will have the information they need, according to a new report on challenges to data management and access presented today to the International Council for Science (ICSU). The report--written by an expert panel appointed by ICSU -- was formally presented today at the ICSU 28th General Assembly in Suzhou, China. It calls for establishing an international scientific data and information forum to promote a more coordinated approach to data collection and distribution. Such a forum could also play a key role in ensuring that scientists in developing countries have equitable access to scientific data and information....[According to Roberta Balstad, director of Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network and chair of the ICSU Priority Area Assessment (PAA) on Data and Information:] "For example, we don't always have the necessary legal and regulatory frameworks in place to get the full benefit of scientific data. We lack a coherent approach to preserving and archiving the incredible wealth of information being produced. And the more the access to long-term reservoirs of data becomes central to the modern scientific enterprise, the more it exacerbates inequities between scientists in rich and poor nations."...The panel examined a range of issues that affect data generation, quality and access. For example, its report notes that while public sector funding of data collection has been "a major factor" driving scientific progress over the past 50 years, decisions regarding data are often fragmented and taken without consultation with the scientific community. The result in "extreme cases" can be actions driven by political, administrative or budgetary factors that do damage to scientifically valuable data series. Meanwhile, the panel cautions that as the private sector plays a greater role in amassing and disseminating data, there is a risk that market demand, not scientific priorities, will determine what is collected and preserved and who has access. The panel notes that commercial interest in data collections can lead to license and user fees and intellectual property claims on data that become impediments to research. The report recommends that data produced commercially or through public-private partnership be provided for research and education purposes either free or at nominal cost. Price and other access barriers to scientific data weigh most heavily on researchers in poor countries...."A major problem for scientists in low-income countries is their lack of access to scientific publications, both as a means of learning about research in other parts of the world and as an outlet for their own research results," the report observes. Scientists are frequently charged not only to view but also to publish articles.

(PS: The press release doesn't link to the report it discusses, and the closest thing I can find at the ICSU web site is this report from December 2004. Note to ICSU: Can you make life easier for readers who want to learn what you're doing?)

Warning that changes in the global political climate and concerns about international terrorism pose new challenges to scientific freedoms, the International Council for Science (ICSU) today urged its members to consider a renewed and broader commitment to the organization's bedrock Principle of the Universality of Science. A statement on threats to the Principle was formally presented by ICSU's Standing Committee on Freedom in the Conduct of Science to the ICSU 28th General Assembly in Suzhou, China....The committee's review of the Principle of Universality cites two distinct threats. There are today greater restrictions on the freedom to associate, which are leading to the relocation or cancellation of scientific conferences. There are also increasing restrictions on the freedom to pursue science, including politically motivated boycotts against countries and scientific institutions, and new security policies that have a chilling effect on such matters as hiring decisions, access to equipment and materials, and scientific publication....The committee also points to a new emphasis on security that has imposed restrictions that, even when driven by legitimate concerns, end up "undermining the Principle of Universality." According to the committee, "these issues are often complex and may manifest themselves as cumbersome or time-consuming new procedures and regulations or even re-interpretation of existing regulations" that prompt, among other things, censorship by authorities or "self-censorship by scientific publishers." "They affect individual scientists," the committee observes, "but also have broader policy implications involving careful judgments as to the appropriate balance between the freedom to pursue science and national and international policy imperatives." The committee has proposed that ICSU adopt a restatement of its Principle of the Universality of Science that will serve both as strong call for scientists to recognize their responsibilities while insisting on maintaining their rights. The proposed language declares that:

"This principle embodies freedom of movement, association, expression and communication for scientists as well as equitable access to data, information and research materials. In pursuing its objectives in respect of the rights and responsibilities of scientists, the International Council for Science (ICSU) actively upholds this principle, and, in so doing, opposes any discrimination on the basis of such factors as ethnic origin, religion, citizenship, language, political stance, gender, sex or age."

Apparently, the conference is to be webcast, and the video will be uploaded five minutes after each session. URL for agenda and presentations: here....Welcome, Maximillion Metzger: CERN has been involved since the early 90’s in managing their own institutional repository. CERN participation in the open access movement due to its obligation to make the results of its work public. Erland Kolding-Nielson: LIBER is a major organization of major European research libraries. Its aim is to assist the research libraries to become a functional network across national bounaries. Herbert Van de Sompel: Herbert’s talk is a technical talk about OAI-PMH, especially about utilizing the OAI-PMH protocol for harvesting actual resources in addition to just metadata.

The entry also includes notes on talks by Michael Nelson, Simeon Warner, and Stu Weibel.

Also see OAI Day 1, Part II, October 20, 2005. Excerpt:

The first presentation after the break was the Ockham presentation. Eric [Lease Morgan] spoke (loudly) for Ockham, and how Ockham promotes open access to scholarly communication via lightweight protocols such as OAI-PMH....Eric described the Ockham alerting service to show a fairly simple alerting tool that utilizes OAI-PMH to pull content and SRU/W for search access. It alerts via email and RSS. Eric then described MyLibrary@Ockham to show a ‘how to find more like this one’ type of service. Eric related the registry to Herbert’s earlier presentation on aDORe and his use of OAI-PMH and Compound Objects alongside services. The best demo was Eric’s display of applying the spell recommender service to a search of the British Library. Stu Weibel presented for Jeff Young on Jeff’s WikiD project. WikiD extends the notion of Wikis to support multiple collections containing arbitrary XML schemas, and also it provides a number of different interfaces for access, such as OpenURL, SRU/W, RSS, OAI-PMH, etc....Johan Bollen presented on “A framework for assessing the impact of units of scholarly communication based on OAI-PMH harvesting of usage information.” Johan made a point that change in the scholarly communication process is a user-driven revolution (links, blogs, search engine use, etc.)....The final presentation of the day was by Tim Brody, on “Incites into Citation Linking using the OAI-PMH”. Tim showed a model for IR linking in Institutional Repositories. Tim recommends coupling OpenURLs within Simple DC accessed via OAI-PMH. His approach is to add OpenURLs not only for the object, but for the record itself, and to also add in reference data into a record as OpenURLs for cited items. Interesting, but it isn’t clear to me that the reward is great enough to overcome the barrier to adoption, especially if this is a bridging solution as opposed to a long-term solution. If folks start taking up the COinS approach, this may have a chance of being adopted, as COinS might encourage a range of functions that current do not exist.

• Paula Dehlez, Just de Leeuwe, and Ronald Dekker, "Beyond the photocopy machine" revisited: document delivery in a digital library environment
• Mercedes Echeverria and Pilar Barredo, Online journals: their impact on document delivery
• Joachim Schöpfel, Between open access and copyright: document supply in France
• Mary E. Jackson, The "bigger deal" is OpenURL

Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, has long promoted the use of open-source software, in which volunteers work collaboratively online to build and improve computer code. Now he hopes to bring the same basic concept to the development of online teaching materials. In a keynote speech on Wednesday at the Educause annual meeting in Orlando, Mr. McNealy announced the creation of a nonprofit organization called the Global Education and Learning Community, which will provide a framework for educators to work together to develop and distribute educational resources online. For now the project is focusing on K-12 education, but in an interview after his speech, Mr. McNealy said that he hopes to extend the system to higher education eventually. "It's optional. No parent, teacher, or student has to use GELC content, but it's there," he added. "It's just a broader and deeper and richer platform on which to build your curriculum, and at zero cost."

I spent some time yesterday and this morning speaking with Allan Alder, counsel for the AAP (see my initial post on this here). I came away convinced of what I initially suspected but so far had not stated: this is a far bigger issue than simply book publishers wanting to protect their business models (though there's plenty of that in here as well.)...[T]here are a few larger issues percolating here that bear discussion. First, who is making the money? Second, who owns the rights to leverage this new innovation - the public, the publisher, or ... Google? Will Google make the books it scans available for all comers to crawl and index? Certainly the answer seems to be no. Google is doing this so as to make its own index superior, and to gain competitive advantage over others. That leaves a bad taste in the publisher's mouths - they sense they are being disintermediated, and further, that Google is reinterpreting copyright law as they do it. And this is not just about books. If Google - and by extension, anyone else - can scan and index books without permission, why can't they also scan and index video? Look at who owns the book companies that are suing - ahhh, it's Newscorp (Harper Collins), Viacom (Simon&Schuster), Time Warner (Little Brown). As I said, I plan more posts/pieces on this, as the issues raised - of innovation, of intellectual property rights, of business models, of more perfect search - are fascinating. But they are also nuanced in that they reflect some of our most treacherous technology/policy debates: the tension between DRM and innovation, between a creator's rights and the public good, between open and closed (the Craigslist/Oodle debate, for example, is very much related to this). After staring at this for a day or so, it's clear to me that this case will go to court. No one wants to settle. Google is digging in, and so is the media world. Folks, we have a real battle on our hands.

This week Google introduced print.google.de, the German version of the search engine Google posted online this time last year. Google lets users type in a search term then scans its digitized library for the word or expression and produces a list of books where the term is mentioned. Users can then click on the results and a few pages of the text appear allowing users to read up online. The idea is to supplement Internet users with another source of material. In contrast to their American colleagues, German publishing houses have reacted well to the database. Google said that is discussing terms with all major German publishers. Langenscheidt, which publishes a large selection of dictionaries, said they had got on board. "We are starting with 160 books," Hubert Haarmann, head of the electronic publishing division and the publisher, told the Financial Times Deutschland. "We see it as an additional distribution possibility." An increased and more direct reach to the consumer is just one way Google is promoting its new project to skeptical publishers. The company also says that publishers will be able to monitor interest in titles through the search engine, and use the information in deciding whether to reprint certain books. Google has also promised publishers a cut of the advertising that will appear on the site. Not all German publishers are on board. In fact, the German association representing publishers has announced it will begin its own project where publishers can scan their own books, rather than let someone else do it.

(PS: Deutsche Welle misunderstands what's happening. The interviewed German publishers --like most US publishers-- support the Google Publisher project. There's no evidence yet whether they support or oppose the very different Google Library project. For more on the difference, see my article from the October SOAN. Basically, Google Publisher is opt-in and Google Library is opt-out. All five publishers now suing Google over its Library project are happy participants in the Publisher project.)

Many AAP members are participating in the Google Print Publishers' Program, which lets them offer books for copying, specify how much of a book can be revealed to searchers and earn a share of revenue from ads shown by Google against search results. But AAP President Patricia Schroeder said publishers were angry about the Library Program. "Part of why they were so surprised that they went ahead with the library program is that every one of the plaintiffs is one of their partners in Google Print," Schroeder said. "It's a funny way to treat your partners."...[The Google Library project] was presented as a fait accompli [to publishers], and Google already had been scanning books in the collection of the University of Michigan for nearly a year. Jim Gerber, Google director of content partnerships, recently told internetnews.com that the search Goliath had to wait until all the contracts with libraries were signed before it could reveal the project to publishers....In response to publishers' complaints, Google added two new features to the Library Project. Publishers can give Google a list of books they want added to their accounts if Google scanned them from the library; or they can give the company a list of books they didn't want scanned....Google claims that scanning and indexing the books is covered by fair use guidelines; it's taken to describing the Library Project as "creating a digital card catalog." "If that's all they're doing, they only need to copy the bibliographic material. If they want to make it searchable, it's not longer a card catalog," Schroeder responded.

In an e-mailed statement, David Drummond, Google's vice president for corporate development and general counsel, said, "Google Print is an historic effort to make millions of books easier for people to find and buy. "Creating an easy to use index of books is fair use under copyright law and supports the purpose of copyright: to increase the awareness and sales of books directly benefiting copyright holders. This short-sighted attempt to block Google Print works counter to the interests of not just the world's readers, but also the world's authors and publishers." Schroeder said, "I keep being blown away by how they seem to think they have the right to take everything from everybody, because it's going to be so good for you. 'You don't get it, but fine, we're going to take it.'" She said that regardless of whether it might, for example, be good for someone in Bangladesh to be able to search through a book, "We have the right to decide these things." The AAP and the other publishing organizations have been criticized for "old media thinking," but Schroeder said the organization will continue to work with the Open Content Alliance, which has similar plans to build a searchable index of works in print.

This international gathering has developed considerable momentum since the first workshop in 2001. Initially a wholly technical meeting, it now brings together representatives from the library, technical, publishing and academic communities to address the latest developments in repositories and the technical and metadata standards which underpin their development and use. Topics under discussions today include: the building of federations of repositories in order to make their contents available in increasingly useful and relevant ways to users; improving measures of research output, and developments in open access. Another theme is the need for the re-engineering of the infrastructure that supports scientific data creation and analysis, so we can do more of it, better, faster and cheaper. Among other questions delegates will be asking, and perhaps answering, are: how does one know which version of a research paper one is getting from a repository? And how does one know one can trust the repository to give this information?

Abstract: What are the stumbling blocks to digitization? Is copyright law a major barrier? Is it easier to negotiate with some types of publishers than with others? To what extent does the age of the material influence permission decisions? This report, by Denise Troll Covey, principal librarian for special projects at Carnegie Mellon University, responds to many of these questions. It begins with a brief, cogent overview of U.S. copyright laws, licensing practices, and technological developments in publishing that serve as the backdrop for the current environment. It then recounts in detail three efforts undertaken at Carnegie-Mellon University to secure copyright permission to digitize and provide open access to books with scholarly content.

Between June of 2004 and May of 2005, the number of unique users accessing the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) and its predecessor, the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association (BMLA), on the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central (PMC) system averaged just over 20,000 per month. When I first saw these numbers on the PMC administration site, I was astonished. The members of the Medical Library Association (MLA) itself (who we might presume are the main audience of the JMLA) number only about 4,500, and the print run of the journal is generally in the neighborhood of 5,000 copies. It seemed likely to me that the number of unique readers in any given month would be just some fraction of that core audience....I wondered if PMC has some kind of formula that they use to translate the number of IP addresses into number of readers, so I emailed Ed Sequeira, the project coordinator, at PMC. Further astonishment! He pointed out that it was likely that my supposition about DHCP was balanced by the aggregation of users behind corporate firewalls and then told me that, from surveys that they have done, there are half again as many actual users per IP address. Thirty thousand unique readers?...I can think of few things more likely to gladden the heart of an editor than this kind of evidence of the reach and impact of the journal on which he lavishes so much time and attention. I have no doubt that we would not be seeing these sorts of numbers if the JMLA were not freely available on the Web. From the standpoint of readership and reach, MLA's experiment with open access would appear to be a resounding success. But much of the discussion of open access during the past few years has focused on the risks. What of those?...So I looked at the revenue and membership figures for the last ten years. I wanted to examine the trend lines and see if anything appeared to change significantly around 2001/02, when the JMLA went up on PMC....Subscriptions had been falling for a decade, but the drop from 2002 to 2003 was far more dramatic than the previous declines. The number of subscriptions declined again in 2004, although not as dramatically, but revenue went up slightly, thanks to a modest rate increase. Whether this indicates a trend or not is still too early to say....Perhaps more worrisome from the standpoint of the long-term health of the association is the impact of an open access journal on the members' willingness to remain members. Here, the results are more encouraging. Total membership has declined during the entire period, but the biggest drop occurred in 2000/01, just before the PMC debut....To probe the views of members further, I worked up a quick online survey....I asked what degree of impact the JMLA's free availability had had on their decision not to renew their membership. Seventeen respondents fit in that category. Fourteen indicated little to no impact, two were neutral, and one indicated that it had had a major impact. When I asked the current members if the JMLA's free availability would make them more or less likely to renew their membership, 61% indicated that it would have no bearing; but, for 30%, it would make them somewhat to much more likely to renew. On the downside, 5% felt that it would make them much less likely to renew....Other questions in my survey indicated that the free availability would make people much more likely to read articles from the older issues and would make potential authors more likely to submit manuscripts. These, of course, are the things that an editor loves to hear....Despite what I said near the beginning of this editorial, it is too early to label the experiment an unqualified success. But has the attempt been worth it so far? I look again at the PMC statistics. Twenty to thirty thousand unique users? Has it been worth it? Oh, yes!

(PS: Read the whole article for Plutchak's judicious qualifications on the data. This is an exemplary report of a journal OA experiment. I wish other journals would follow suit, even if their experiments are less successful. We need to know not only what works and what doesn't, but what works in which niche.)

The following is a brief report on the results of two recent studies conducted in partnership with the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) and designed to look at the changing publishing practices of academic societies. Carried out from July 2003 through December 2004, these studies looked at the characteristics of journals published by academic societies affiliated with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), and High Wire Press as well as titles listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The first study was cosponsored by AAHSL and AAMC through its Council of Academic Societies (CAS), which included some ninety-four member societies representing academic disciplines taught in schools of medicine. The primary goal of this study was to help these societies, as well as AAMC member institutions and their libraries, understand the problems and opportunities faced by the CAS society journals as they shift from paper to electronic publishing. The second study was cosponsored by ALPSP, High Wire Press, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and AAMC and was conducted by the Kaufman-Wills Group in Baltimore, Maryland. Called “Variations on Open Access,” this study sought to determine the potential impact of open access publishing on the business, editorial, and licensing practices of scholarly society journal publishers.

Holtzbrinck Group, the parent company of scientific and business journal publisher Macmillan is to develop a searchable online repository for digital book content, which will be made available to other publishering companies. The facility, provisionally called BookStore, will offer services ranging from a basic digital storage facility to branded "interfaces" for e-commerce. Publishers will then be able to sell their material in various digital formats to users, and will have the option of making content accessible to search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Germany based Holtzbrinck hopes it will appeal to trade publishers that are keen to exploit digital opportunities, but are loathe to invest heavily in proprietary systems or to surrender control of copyright material - a point of issue with Google....The plans were welcomed by Google Print . Senior product manager Adam Smith said: "We are pleased to see publishers moving more into the digital environment, and welcome all efforts to make more content digital and searchable."

Abstract: The Common Information Environment (CEI) recently released a report concerning the possibility of using Creative Commons licenses for information produced by public sector bodies (Barker et al. 2005). One of the issues that came up during the study was the compatibility of Creative Commons (CC) licenses and Digital Rights Management technologies (referred to here as Technical Protection Measures). Many public sector bodies felt that password protection schemes were a practical necessity and would not consider CC if they could not place materials behind a password. This article expands upon the conclusion in the report that CC licenses do allow password schemes and considers a broader scope of TPMs. Though any organization or individual looking to implement TPMs on CC licensed content must tread carefully, TPMs can be used to enhance the attractiveness of CC licenses.

The lawsuit is a setback to Google's library program, the case has broader implications: A ruling against Google could disrupt its aims to digitize and make searchable all kinds of media and information...."If Google were to lose this, it might hinder not just Google Print but all sorts of technologies," says Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Chances are next to nil that a negative ruling would jeopardize the Internet search business, since Google's practice of copying Web pages for search purposes is generally accepted by Web publishers. But a legal ruling forcing Google to gain explicit permission from all other copyright holders could hobble attempts to apply the same method to existing media, like books, film, or sound recordings in programs like Google Print and Google Video. "Web search would not exist today if you had to go door-to-door asking permission," says Google's intellectual-property counsel Alexander MacGillivray. The sheer volume of information is too vast to get permission on a case-by-case basis....In the summer negotiations, members of the AAP proposed that Google use the Bowker database, which assigns a specific number, called an ISBN, to every book published since 1967, for determining which books required permission. For all out-of-print copyrighted titles without ISBN numbers, the AAP would have a "more relaxed" agreement with Google, says Alan Adler, general counsel of the AAP. The AAP offer was untenable, Google's MacGillivray says. "If copyright law were such that if [a library] wanted to create a card catalog it had to find every single person who had the rights to these books...imagine how few books" would be accessible, he says. "It turns copyright law on its head."...Google says that, regardless of the suit, it plans to resume scanning copyrighted books on Nov. 1....Almost exactly a year ago, publishers showered praise on the search giant when it announced a slightly different program called Print for Publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. In that program, Google invited publishers to send it specific titles that it would scan so that it could make excerpts show up in search results, and publishers lauded the program as an innovative way to promote new and old titles alike. All of the companies involved in the litigation are partners with Google in that program, and say they plan to remain partners.

Jonathan Zittrain, holder of the chair in Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, said he's rooting for Google to win the lawsuit. But he added that from a legal perspective, the case is a tossup, with good arguments on both sides. "As a matter of legal doctrine, this is a case on which reasonable people can disagree," Zittrain said. But he believes that Google's project would provide substantial benefits to the public. At the Harvard University Library, director Sidney Verba said the lawsuit was unfortunate but might at least provide clear legal guidance on the digitizing of copyrighted books. "I'm sorry that it had to go to court," said Verba, "but I'd love to see some legal decision about it to clear things up, because it is right now terribly uncertain."

In their complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the [five publishers] charged that Google is infringing copyright to "further its own commercial purposes." The publishers asked the court to forbid Google to reproduce their works and to require Google to delete or destroy records already scanned. The only remuneration the publishers seek is that Google pay their legal fees....David Drummond, Google's vice president for corporate development, released a statement denouncing the lawsuit as "shortsighted." He said it "works counter to the interests of not just the world's readers, but also the world's authors and publishers." He said that Google's project falls under copyright law's fair-use provision, that it would make books easier to find and buy, and that it would inevitably "increase the awareness and sales of books directly benefiting copyright holders." Patricia S. Schroeder, president of the publishers' group, said that publishers had been taken aback when Google announced its library-scanning project late last year. She said the publishers had held meetings with Google, in the spring and through the summer, repeatedly asking the company not to scan books under copyright. For a while this summer, Google stopped scanning copyrighted books while the negotiations were going on. But then Google announced that it would resume scanning books under copyright [on November 1]. "We don't seem to be able to get their attention," Ms. Schroeder said. "Instead, we get, 'This is for the global good,' and, 'This will be good for you, but you just don't get it.' We seemed to be talking past each other." "The real fear is that if Google can do this, anyone can do this," she added. "The precedent is just terrifying." Asked why the publishers did not also sue any of the universities involved, many of which are discussed in the complaint, Ms. Schroeder said: "Google is clearly the instigator. They are the driving force behind this." James L. Hilton, interim university librarian and associate provost for academic-, information-, and instructional-technology affairs at the University of Michigan [one of libraries letting Google scan its books], said he was disappointed by the lawsuit. "We believe that this project has enormous benefit for humanity" in allowing people to search entire texts of obscure and long-out-of-print works through a computer, he said in a telephone interview Wednesday afternoon from the Educause conference, in Orlando, Fla...."From a public-policy standpoint," he added, "I think it would be very unfortunate if a judge decided to shut this down."

I really don't get this. I have been both a publisher and an author, and I have to tell you, these guys sue for one reason and one reason alone, from what I can tell: Their legacy business model is imperiled, and they fear change. Of course, if they can get out of their own way, they'll end up making more money. But that never stopped these guys - the MPAA, the RIAA, and now, the AAP.

"Our goal is to help with the expansion of human knowledge," said Dave Mandelbrot, Yahoo's vice president of search content. "What we'd like to see in two or three years is a major collaborative effort where libraries are contributing material and publishers are providing permission" to digitize their content....In fact, Mandelbrot said, the group's goal is to make the content available so that any search engine can index it and make it available. Digitizing the world's cultural archives, from television shows to classic books, has long been a burning ambition of Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. In fact, Kahle's Internet Archive has already launched an effort to digitize books called the Million Book Project, a collaboration with Indian and Chinese agencies and Carnegie Mellon University. "The real crime is that we have all these people using the Internet for research, but we don't have some of the best content on it,' Kahle said....In addition to working with libraries to scan older content whose copyright is expired, the consortium will collaborate with publishers and authors who want to make their works available on the Web. In some instances, the Open Content Alliance will give copyright-holders the option of releasing their material under a Creative Commons license, an alternative licensing scheme that encourages re-use and distribution of content.

Over the time we were discussing forming the alliance, Google did launch their program, and we looked at their program for ideas about what they were doing and things we might want to do differently. We do want to have copyrighted works available through the Open Content Alliance -- but only with the express permission of the copyright holder. Secondly, we mainly want the alliance to focus on this theme of openness. One of the things we've seen with other [digitization] programs is they tend to use proprietary technologies to host the content, so it's impossible for third-party search engines to crawl it. So we're using XML and PDF and making the content easily crawlable by search engines. It was important to make this project open so that entities that contribute know they're not just benefiting one search engine....When it comes to these digitization efforts, the publishers have primarily been speaking through the publisher's associations rather than individually, because they're concerned about any kind of retribution that could come from search engines if they're critical of any particular effort. But what we have heard from the publishers' associations is that they're very happy about the approach we're taking. The Association of Learned Professional Society Publishers, for instance, has been very positive about our program, because of the fact we are working with the copyright holders in advance....We're encouraging participation in the alliance by all entities that are engaged in digitization efforts. The Open Content Alliance has already had a very preliminary discussion with Google about its participation, and we encourage Google to contribute work that they digitize to this alliance. We don't see the alliance as offering a competing digitization effort, but rather as establishing a set of guidelines for the sharing of content.

I do not agree with the praise of Google Print e.g. in the weblog entries of Peter Suber's "Open Access News". Google is - unlike Yahoo's - definitively no advocate of the Public Domain. Google is blocking users outside of the US from viewing books which are Public Domain world wide (resp. in the US, the European Union, Canada, Australia etc.). From the items of the Google Library program one can see outside the US only items published before ca. 1865 freely....Google should give free access to all books published before 1923 (PD in the US) AND of which the author is 70 years dead (European copyright term). Google is claiming copyright for simple facsimile reprints of PD works made e.g. by the publisher Kessinger. This is clearly COPYFRAUD in the US! The cooperating libraries (including Oxford outside the US) should not support a project which is only serving US interests not serving the enrichment of world wide knowledge and Public Domain. I would like to read from Open Access advocates like Suber clear words against Google's discriminating practice.

(PS: I've praised Google Print for the access it provides, not for the access it denies. I'm as puzzled and unhappy as Klaus that Google blocks European access while supporting US access to scanned books in the public domain, and I've written about it twice --here and here. I've also praised Brewster Kahle's book-scanning projects, which are now part of the Open Content Alliance, for surpassing Google Print in providing true open access.)

High-resolution satellite images of Kashmir, which was hit hard by a magnitude-7.6 earthquake on 8 October, have begun to reappear on public websites, much to the relief of aid workers. The pictures were removed last week from all public-access websites belonging to the United Nations (UN) and its relief partners, including the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters (see 'Quake aid hampered by ban on web shots'). A senior official at the charter, who asked not to be named, told Nature that the UN decided to ban public dissemination of photos of the area after a meeting on 10 October. The official told Nature that the meeting discussed an official reminder from Pakistan about the political sensitivity of the area, which was issued after the earthquake. Pakistan and India have long fought over Kashmir, and there were concerns that pictures could compromise security in the region. Tasnim Aslam, a spokeswoman for Pakistan's foreign ministry, told Associated Press in Islamabad yesterday that "No one in the Pakistan government has made a request that such maps be removed." Nature's sources emphasize that the UN decision was a precaution against a deterioration in relations with Pakistan. After pressure from relief groups seeking wider access to the images, the UN met again on 17 October, and reversed its decision. It sent a memo to all involved parties on the morning of Tuesday 18 October advising them that the ban on photos had been lifted....Since the ban has been lifted, AlertNet has published detailed maps of the region based on satellite-images, showing, for example, which roads are blocked.

PPAR Research is a multidisciplinary journal devoted to the publication of original high-quality, peer-reviewed research articles on advances in basic research, as well as preclinical and clinical trials, involving Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptors (PPARs)....Published research encompasses, but is not limited to, the following areas: [1] Molecular features of PPARs and their obligatory heterodimer partners RXRs, [2] Biological processes involving PPARs and/or their obligatory heterodimer partners RXRs, [3] Discoveries of natural substances and synthetic agents that act as PPAR or RXR modulators, and [4] Preclinical studies and clinical trials involving modulators of PPARs and/or RXRs.

Students combing the stacks at Van Pelt Library may notice they have a little extra breathing room. The library has cut 2,255 journal subscriptions from its 2004-05 holdings, as journal prices have increased faster than the library's budget. But the size of the materials budget -- $13.1 million allotted for books, journals, magazines, periodicals, films and electronic resources -- is not to blame, library officials said. Rather, officials blame big publishing companies, which they say have raised prices as the companies have bought up academic journals over the last two decades. In 1993, journals accounted for 64 percent of the materials budget. This number has increased to almost 70 percent in the 2005 materials budget. Publishing giant Reed Elsevier claims 18 percent of the market in science, technology and medical journals. An annual subscription to the chemistry journal Tetrahedron, published by Elsevier, costs the library $31,600. The Brown University library system has also criticized price increases. However, it has not had to cancel subscriptions since the early 1990s, as its materials budget has kept pace with journals' price increases. The 2005 Brown materials budget stands at $5 million, of which 66 percent is devoted to journals. As research libraries across the nation decry price increases, Penn's library system is calling for reform through its Winning Independence Web site. Linked to the library system's Web site this September, the site encourages professors to be active on journals' editorial boards and to push for fair pricing policies. At the heart of the uproar over pricing is frustration -- on the part of the library and some professors -- with publishers' restrictive copy agreements. Many journal publishers require faculty members to sign over their copyright as a condition for publication. This prevents professors from submitting published journal articles to online archives such as Penn's [OA repository] Scholarly Commons, which is one way the library can increase its holdings in the face of a limited budget.

Gene: How is authority related to findability?

Peter: My authority article stirred up a fascinating discussion on Web4Lib centered around this question. Historically, librarians have been comfortable with the notion that the most frequently cited academic papers (and their authors) are also the most popular, findable, and authoritative. But many are horrified by the migration of this concept to the public web. In truth, the comparison is not totally fair. Scholars invest more thought and structure into their citations than we invest in our links. But the revolution in authority is real. In a world where we can select our sources and choose our news, we must increasingly make our own decisions about what to believe and who to trust. And thanks to the well-documented anchoring bias, we’re highly influenced by the first information we find. In this sense, Google’s algorithms are as much about authority as relevance. And this is why the subtitle of Ambient Findability is “What We Find Changes Who We Become.”

Gene: I know many people who don’t get tagging. Do you think tagging is a novelty? Or can you see some persistent value in it that will keep tags around?

Peter: I hate tagging. It’s too much work. It’s so much easier to drag and drop an email message into a folder than it is to construct keywords that define its aboutness. And with respect to refindability, using Google Desktop’s full text search is infinitely better than relying on the semantic poverty of tags. On the other hand, as one element of Google’s multi-algorithmic search solution, tags in the form of links are a wonderful source of collective intelligence. Also, as ubiquitous computing yields an Internet of (non-textual) objects, user-defined tags will be important alongside the manufacturer-supplied metadata.

(PS: My FAQ, which focuses on answering publisher objections, has not moved.)

[L]ibraries have know-how not only in managing, making accessible, and preserving scholarly resources but also in forming federations and collaborations to share published scholarly work. But the nature of scholarly communication is changing, with researchers wanting access to primary research data, often in digital form. No longer is scholarly communication a final discrete publication that is to be managed, made accessible, and preserved.10 Libraries may even risk fading from existence if they don’t respond effectively to the changing environment. In e-research, it is the primary research data that must often be managed, made accessible, and curated. Clifford Lynch argues that the role of libraries will shift from primarily acquiring published scholarship to managing scholarship in collaboration with researchers who develop and use this data. Currently in the majority of existing eresearch projects, the researchers, having the domain-specific knowledge, have sought to perform these tasks of managing and making accessible the research data. This data may be generated across multiple countries and across multiple research projects. Many are now realizing that this data is valuable beyond their initial research, which has a limited life. But who will take responsibility for the longer-term curation of and access to this data? Unlike their recognition of the need for IT know-how, those in the research community have not often recognized the role that librarians could play in providing specialist know-how in managing, preserving, and making accessible the research data. Research is changing dramatically. It is becoming more multidisciplinary, more collaborative, more global, and more dependent on the capabilities offered through advanced networks and large data storage.