Open Access News

Martin Frank, DCPRinciples' coordinator, told United Press International the offer was made because the NIH in February 2005 requested that all scientists supported by the agency's funding send their articles to an NIH archive after the articles were accepted for publication in a scientific journal, but before the journal had a chance to copy-edit the work....Frank said DCPRinciples is concerned that problems will result from edited and unedited versions of the same research existing at the same time; that copyright violations will occur, because the process to ensure articles are not published before their embargo date is not strict enough, and that creating an unnecessary archive will divert funds from needed research. All of the participating non-profit journals offer free access to their contents, from right away to 12 months after publication, and these datelines would not change, but if the NIH accepts the organization's offer, only copy-edited articles would be released and there would be no problem with copyright issues....Dr. David Lipman, director of the National Center for Biotechnology and Information of the National Library of Medicine, which runs the NIH's PubMed and PubMed Central, said he was thrilled by the DCPRinciples proposal. "I think it's wonderful," Lipman told UPI. "What could be bad about it? There's no other side. Of course, we'd rather have the copy-edited article. Our only concern is to make our archive as large as possible and crosslink it in every way we can. Lipman called this "such an exciting time in science." He said cross-linking information provides "amazing" capabilities. "We want to make sure that scientists can not only find what they're looking for, but find that extra thing they didn't know about that allows new connections to be forged and new discoveries to take place," he said. "To make that easier, we are trying to add sidebars to our databases like the ones in Google and Amazon that suggest similar books or products of interest. We hope to suggest related data that might interest scientific investigators." Lipman said PubMed, which contains article abstracts, and PubMed Central, which contains full-text articles from both national and international journals, are currently unique in the world. He added, however, that the NIH has been approached by the governments of Britain, Italy and South Africa, all of whom want to create archives of their own and coordinate them with the one at NIH. "PubMed and PubMed Central host 1.5 million users and distribute 2.25 terabytes of data every day," he said. "DCPRinciples' offer will increase both those figures considerably. We welcome these new journals."

(PS: If I'm reading the two positions correctly, the DC Principles Coalition wants links instead of copies at the NIH, and David Lipman wants links as well as copies at the NIH. They're not yet on the same side.)

Not to be outdone by its competitors, Microsoft announced plans this week to launch its own book search engine. The company's MSN Search, like Yahoo before it, has joined the Open Content Alliance to make publicly available print materials accessible on the Web....Analysts say that MSN is doing more than just tweaking Google's nose. The ability to archive, search, and retrieve information from offline content is in high demand among businesses and consumers, said Mukul Krishna, program manager for digital media at Frost & Sullivan. "It is a very valuable tool that is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have for enterprises and [it is] beginning to be a need for consumers." At the same time, however, Krishna suggested that Microsoft stepped into book searching in part because of the legal battle Google faces before it can get its Library Project up and running. "This is a market that [Microsoft] definitely wants to pursue and the cream is that they might get one-upmanship over Google," Krisha said.

I have a bit of a dilemma here actually as I vehemently disagree with the AAP’s position. This happens to be an issue I’ve studied very closely (we have a number of books under contract on the subject of intellectual property)...and it’s not even, unfortunately, something I can just keep quiet about disagreeing with either. But I don’t want to put you or the SIP Committee in a difficult situation --in part because I believe the AAP’s position on this is particularly harmful for small and independent publishers....Is it sufficient, when publicly declaiming and doing the things I do, to simply not refer to my membership of the committee? How does the AAP handle this kind of situation (I’m sure I’m hardly the only AAP member who has disagreed with the AAP’s position on a given topic)....Over the last year, I have made a substantial commitment of my company’s time and energy to fighting what I consider to be an intellectual property land grab more significant than the actual 19th century land grab (recognizing that the expansion of trademark protections are probably more egregious than those in copyright). Fair Use is withering and its defenders are relatively few and dramatically under-resourced --I am adding Soft Skull to their number, for what that’s worth. I have several books under contract dealing with different aspects of intellectual property rights, and they would largely be aimed at, inter alia, defending fair use, expanding the use of licenses such as the Creative Commons, and returning the copyright term to the original 28 years, a la the Founder’s Copyright movement. Given this, it would be impossible for me to remain silent when my peers are adopting an approach completely contrary to what our books will be advocating. It is incumbent on me to find whatever soapboxes I can find, and try to make as strong as possible a case as I can to persuade that majority to change their position. I’ve inveighed against both the music and film industry for their shortsightedness in interviews and panel discussions in the past—I would be justifiably branded a hypocrite for failing to do so in my very own industry....[T]he long-term future of American publishing depends fundamentally on the quality of the content that we produce and sell. An excessive focus on the ownership of that content, and on restricting how others might make alternative uses of that content will seriously impinge on the value of that content over decades. A hyperbolic but nevertheless accurate example: Shakespeare’s plays would be impossible to publish under the present conditions....The fundamental goal of copyright in the Constitution is not to confer an absolute property right but rather to stimulate cultural production: a limited property right being a means to that end, rather than an end in itself. Thus we are always intrinsically talking about relative values, trade-offs, balancing acts, etc. Having the world’s books available in searchable and granular format online is a tremendous boon to the culture, and will result in more and better books. Again and again, in comments issued by publishers and authors, by the AAP and the Authors Guild, there is a profound failure to perceive that such rights are not absolute property rights, but relative property rights, issued provisionally to achieve a larger social purpose....I’m not going to address the business issues here except to note that I would love to see empirical data that suggests that the value of our intellectual property would be diminished by its availability in the proposed Google Print for Libraries format...the Amazon Search Inside and Google Print for Publishers both seem to suggest the opposite....I accept that the AAP has to represent the expressed interest of a majority of its members, I do hope that it will not be represented to the public that the AAP is riding to the rescue of its smallest members—it would be just a little too over-the-top.

RLG, a not-for-profit organization of over 150 research libraries, archives, and museums announced today that it will be a contributor to and partner with the Open Content Alliance (OCA) (www.opencontentalliance.org), a consortium that is building a permanent archive of digitized text and multimedia content. Generally, textual material from the OCA will be free to read, and in most cases, available for saving or printing using formats such as PDF....RLG's immediate role in this initiative will be to supply the bibliographic information needed to aid in materials selection and description for these searches. RLG's Union Catalog is the premier source of bibliographic descriptions for use in research and research collections management. With records for over 48 million titles, it provides coverage across subjects and material types in almost 400 languages. Brewster Kahle, digital librarian for the Internet Archive, says, "RLG's help will bring critical expertise and relationships to this ambitious project. Using the RLG Union Catalog to keep track of what has been digitized, cataloging it well and then making it available to all will make sure that the joint efforts of many libraries are widely shared." James Michalko, president of RLG, adds, "We are committed to the OCA vision. RLG's member institutions want to build out the collective digital library to ensure that scholarship and research is innovative and productive in the future. RLG has a long history of working with its own members to further broad-based initiatives."...Says Michalko, "The OCA can be a rallying point and delivery focus for the long-term efforts of cultural institutions to create a resource that reflects the needs of scholars and students and honors the values of research."

First, let me assert once again that Google of 2025 most certainly will not resemble the Google of 2005. It might not even exist....Ok. I will go farther than Derek on one point: copyright holders would suffer absolutely no harm from Google Library. But that's not the point. Courts don't care about real harm. They care about potential harm to potential markets and they take the word of the plaintiff to be the last word on the question....Saying "where is the harm?" (the Google corporate refrain) reveals an unwillingness to recognize the extent to which real-world effects influence most federal judges in copyright cases: not at all. Congress has made it clear that it does not care about real-world effects. Courts have as well (see the 9th Circuit in Napster or the Supreme Court in Grokster). All Congress cares about is the trump cards it can deal out to copyright holders. And courts tend to respect that even if it makes no sense or harms the public (see Eldred). So just as the widespread worship of Google baffles me, the widespread faith in the reasonableness of courts (especially SDNY and the 2d Circuit) baffles me more. Have we not learned any hard lessons from the last few years? How often since Feist has a federal court shown that it "gets it?" Certainly, in Kelly. But Kelly is no longer settled law. Google Print/Library might kill Kelly....I can't believe I have to remind anyone of this: DRM, nondisclosure, and patents destroy competition. That's why we have them. They are what Google depends on to do its job. These are not trivial problems. These are not neutral technologies. There are great complications and problems here. We should not be blind to them. Again agreeing with Derek -- "a Google loss would choke off competition." Exactly. Before Google loses, there is a crowding-out effect. After it loses, there will be a chilling effect. Meanwhile, publishers fear that a market that Amazon created for them: "search inside the book" licensing, will evaporate. Worse, of course, is possible. A bad loss threatens everything we hold dear about the Internet. And I am still waiting for anyone (Derek, Michael, Larry?) to come to terms with the privacy problems here. As Julie Cohen and Sonia Katyal have shown us, digital copyright and surveillance are intricately linked. What is Google doing to prevent anyone from snooping on our reading habits?...So to review: a Google win (unlikely as it is) would choke off competition. A Google loss would choke off competition. And we are unlikely to get the really cool public library text-search index we deserve in any case. This remains a good dream and a bad deal all around.

to be honest: the open source & open access movements aren't happening because "the Internet wants to be free", nor because of any other flowery notion of transparency or other Web 2.0 buzzwords. rather, openness has power because competition & innovation happen faster & better with open access to structured data, which in turn leads to more desirable web applications & destinations for users to experience.

if you read Guns Germs & Steel, Jared Diamond's Pulitzer prize-winning book on human civilization over the past 10,000 years, you will learn that societies within easy access and latitude of each other exchanged technology, agriculture, animal husbandry techniques, as well as virulent microbes -- and subsequently became the richest, healthiest, and most advanced nations on the planet. meanwhile, those remaining walled off by longitude or geography (or that chose to wall themselves off for political or cultural reasons) became weaker, subject to disease from outsiders, and ultimately much poorer than their more gregarious neighbors. now the equivalent metaphors for evolution on the web aren't Guns, Germs & Steel; rather they are Data, Apps & XML. companies that take advantage of this online trinity and exchange information (via XML & RSS) and applications (as web services & APIs) with others will grow stronger & more relevant to users and partners. companies that isolate themselves (by choice or inaction) from other data partners & user access will become less rich, less relevant, and eventually less viable.

Google Inc.'s online book project will take an important step forward next week despite an increasingly nasty legal fight over the company's plans. On Tuesday, the Internet search giant will resume scanning into its database a large number of library books that subject to copyright laws. It stopped doing so in August, following threats by publishers and to give copyright holders ample time to remove the works if they saw fit. Google has also since changed its own policies to let copyright holders opt out any time....Google is serving notice of its intent to see its Google Print project through despite even legal obstacles, which has profound impact on other online library projects and the form of future copyright law. "We're so determined to pursue Google Print, even though it has drawn industry opposition in the form of two lawsuits," Google Vice President David Drummond recently wrote on Google's Weblog. "We're dedicated to helping the world find information, and there's too much information in books that cannot yet be found online. We think you should be able to search through every word of every book ever written, and come away with a list of relevant books to buy or find at your local library," he adds.

Microsoft has announced that they're going to launch MSN Book Search. It'll launch next year. In conjunction with that, MSN has announced its intention to join the Open Content Alliance, which would align them with Yahoo, etc. (You know this reminds me of? The beginning of a Risk game where you're deciding what countries you want and placing all your armies.)...There are so many other types of offline content that would benefit from this. Census and other genealogy-related records. Government publications and records. Out of copyright periodicals. Rankle: "MSN Book Search will help address the fact that over 50 percent of people's online queries go unanswered today on search engines, according to internal Microsoft(R) research." Peh. This statement presupposes that the questions that are going unanswered will be found in public domain books, which I'm not sure is true. (I'm not even sure that they're going to "help".) And if that is true, how come there still isn't anybody who's coming forward to work with the masses of old books which have already been digitized and made available online? Cornell alone has done massive amounts with mathematics and home economics books. Why are all the digitzation initiatives starting over and reinventing the wheel? WHY? I'm sure that these folks have the best intentions in mind. Even so these declarations and big plans remind me, uncomfortably, of 1998. And the questions they generate remind me of a soap opera. Can MSN and Yahoo work together within the Open Content Alliance? Will Google be isolated and marginalized over this one issue? (Seems unlikely.) Is Ask Jeeves destined to become the Switzerland of online content generation? Will the smaller search engines be swallowed up or will they take stances? The OCA's open to everybody, isn't it?

Last week, when giving testimony to the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee, you were asked for your opinion of the proposed position statement on open access from Research Councils UK, a document that expresses strong support for a move towards open access. In your response, you [suggested] that open access was in decline, saying: "I think we have seen a peak in the enthusiasm for open access publishing and a fall-off in people putting forward proposals for it because some of the difficulties and costs are now becoming clear." This suggestion of a decline in interest in open access publishing is not at all supported by the available evidence, and simply does not reflect what is happening in scientific publishing. BioMed Central Limited is the world's leading open access publisher. In the third quarter of 2005, BioMed Central's manuscript submissions were up 56% compared to the previous year, a growth rate far exceeding that of the science publishing industry as a whole. Public Library of Science, a leading US-based open access publisher, has experienced similarly rapid growth. Every month, new groups of scientists and societies approach BioMed Central to start open access journals, or to convert their existing journals to an open access model....Blackwell Publishing introduced Online Open, an open access experiment for 30 journals, in February 2005. Oxford University Press, which has already converted some journals to open access, launched Oxford Open in May this year. Springer, the world’s second largest STM publisher, has offered an open access option (Springer Open Choice) for its 1,450 journals since May 2004, and just two months ago hired Jan Velterop as its Director of Open Access....

In relation to your call for a "level playing field", BioMed Central strongly agrees that this is desirable. But the continued strong growth in open access has not occurred on a remotely level playing field. It is a testament to the strength of the open access model that its growth has occurred despite the playing field being anything but level. For example, many scientists have the perception that, when their funding is evaluated, they will be at a disadvantage if they have published in a new open access journal, rather than in a more established traditional journal, even though the quality of the research is identical. An over-reliance on Impact Factors, which are not available for many new journals due to the vagaries of the Institute for Scientific Information's decisions on journal tracking, can lead to a stifling of innovation in publishing. To create a level playing field, active steps are needed to ensure that scientists are confident that their research will be evaluated on its merits, whichever type of journal they choose to publish it in. Similarly, it not a level playing field when the government appears to ignore the impartial advice of the Science & Technology Committee and of major research funders such as Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust with respect to open access archiving, and instead appears to give more weight to representations from the traditional publishing industry, arguing against change. Open access archives of published research are strongly desirable from the point of view of funders and research institutions. Objections from traditional publishers should not be allowed to weaken the initiative from Research Councils UK to require deposit in such archives. Publishers ought to be the servants of the scientific community, not its masters....BioMed Central calls on the government to support the RCUK proposed position statement, and not to bow to lobbying from traditional publishers to water down the statement.

This will be the fifth presentation of the bioinformatics humanitarian award, which is given annually by the members of the Organization to an individual who has worked to promote open access to the materials and methods used in the field. The Award is named for Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), one of the most remarkable men of his time. Scientist, inventor, statesman, Franklin freely and openly shared his ideas and refused to patent his inventions. It is the opinion of the founders of Bioinformatics.Org that he embodied the best traits of a scientist, and we seek to honor those who share these virtues. The ceremony for the presentation of the Award will be held during the Sixth Annual Meeting of Bioinformatics.Org, to be held in conjunction with Bio-IT World's 2006 Life Sciences Conference + Expo in Boston, on April 3-5, 2006. It involves a short introduction, the presentation of the certificate, and the laureate seminar. Past laureates include Ewan Birney, Lincoln Stein, James Kent, and Michael Eisen. Nominations can be made by any member of the Bioinformatics Organization, and membership is free.

With a $5-million commitment, Microsoft's MSN Search division is joining universities and its online-search rival Yahoo in a consortium dedicated to scanning millions of public-domain books. The company's pledge will pay for the scanning of 150,000 volumes. The consortium, called the Open Content Alliance, was announced three weeks ago....Since then, 14 more universities have also joined, promising to contribute money, books, or services to the project. The original members of the alliance include the University of California, the University of Toronto, and several archives and technology companies....Danielle Tiedt, a general manager at MSN, said the company believed it was a good idea to join with rivals in the alliance to scan books, so that books would not be scanned repeatedly by competing companies and so that Microsoft could focus its energies on improving its search technology. The company also announced that it would create a new service, called MSN Book Search, that is scheduled to begin next year....The company has not yet decided which books it will scan, Ms. Tiedt said, adding that the books might belong to institutions that are not members of the alliance. "We're committed to 150,000, but we're completely free to choose where those books come from," she said. "We're not constricted to just working with people within the Open Content Alliance." That rival companies are joining the alliance is evidence that the project is "fundamentally a mechanism of sharing," said Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library that is coordinating the book scanning for the alliance. "An open library allows lots of people to participate," he added.

A2K is a project working to ensure healthcare staff in Wales have easy access to healthcare knowledge and evidence, and have the tools they require to retrieve such evidence. Healthcare staff in hospitals, GP surgeries and NHS Dental practices will be able to electronically access the latest and the best evidence to support them as they care for patients....The project is currently building up a picture of what health professionals need in terms of electronic databases, journals, guidelines and where there are gaps in this need. This will inform the procurement of new resources for a National e-library for Wales, building on the current HOWIS e-library. It has now been agreed that the e-library will be built incrementally in four cycles from Sept 2005 – to Sept 2006, and the project approach altered to meet this more immediate delivery cycle.

(PS: Good project, bad name. Informing Healthcare should understand that there is already an Access to Knowledge project and that it too uses the initials A2K. It's part of the Development Agenda at WIPO and includes a draft treaty that would require OA to publicly-funded research. It's facing enough obstacles without the new burden of having to explain just which A2K it is.)

UBC Professor and Distinguished Scholar John Willinsky spoke,among other things, about the importance and advantages of open access for the public. An engaging and entertaining speaker, and of course, a well-recognized authority and expert on this topic, John summarized open access as "your right to know, particularly about research." John said he hoped to instill in the audience a "sense of entitlement and expectation." When asked what he recommends as ways to convince authors to publish OA, he said we (librarians) can appeal to authors on these 4 grounds: [1] Economically -- with OA we can distribute information much more cheaply, [2] Legally -- copyright protects the author, [3] Ethically -- OA fits with the human right to know, [4] Vanity -- "It will make their mother prouder if more people know about their research!" If you have an opportunity to hear John Willinsky speak about open access, take it!

Nobel laureate Gary Becker and federal judge Richard Posner, both law professors, launched the high-profile Becker-Posner blog less than a year ago. With two such distinguished academics aboard the blog bandwagon, the question of whether blogging is legitimate academic work and outreach becomes unclear. Becker, who blogs about five hours a week, feels that if blogging takes a lot of time then it will surely interfere with scholarly academic achievements: “Blogs are at best good op-ed pieces,” Becker said. “They are not substitutes for scholarship and research.” His co-blogger, Posner, had similar sentiments. “I think it’s a professional mistake for an untenured academic to do a blog,” Posner said. “It is not academic writing, and it takes time away from academic writing, which should be the entire focus of the untenured in what is currently a highly competitive academic market.” Perhaps blogging is a luxury only for the tenured. Recently, the [U of Chicago] Law School launched its own faculty blog geared toward high-end legal and intellectual content, which is meant as an interactive page rather than a standard blog. “We are in the business of spreading new ideas, and provoking readers,” Saul Levmore, dean of the Law School, said. “A blog seems like an excellent means of advancing this mission.” The question of academic blogging really depends on what kind of blog you keep. “Our blog is not gossipy or informal,” Becker said. Rather, the Becker-Posner blog is an attempt at serious dialogue on important current issues.

Way back in 2006, Google -- irritated at those lawsuits from the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers -- set up Google Press. It then urged the authors of the world to check their publisher contracts, find the books that had gone out of print with publishing rights, come back to the authors and send copies of the books (or the ISBNs to match with Google library holdings) to Google Print. In return, Google would promise to delivery saleable e-books back to the authors and direct all interested users to them for sales -- no royalty percentage, ALL the money for the sale. Five years later (2011?), Google Press had become Google Full Court Press with imitator services available from the Open Content Alliance, Amazon, et al. Print-on-demand services and outsourced editorial staffs had made Google a major new avenue for book authors. All libraries received one free access seat for all books in the program, plus one free P-O-D copy on request. Book publishers were scrambling to hang on to their authors and re-negotiating royalty payments as all authors gained leverage from the developments.

When it comes to digitizing books, two stories appear to be unfolding: One is about open source, and the other, Google. Or so it seemed at a party held by the Internet Archive on Tuesday evening, when the nonprofit foundation and a parade of partners, including the Smithsonian Institution, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, rallied around a collective open-source initiative to digitize all the world's books and make them universally available. Google was noticeably absent from the cadre of partners, considering that the search behemoth has a high-profile project of its own to scan library books and add them to its searchable index...."We want to digitize all human knowledge...and we can't risk having it privatized," said Doron Weber, an executive of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic organization that has contributed more than $3 million to the Internet Archive since 2003. Citing the importance of an open library for educational purposes, he called on private companies to "rein in their impulses" while urging libraries to "embrace the future." Still, a Google executive in attendance downplayed the perceived rivalry. "I think (the project) is great," said Alexander Macgillivray, Google's senior product counsel, following a presentation on the book-scanning effort. "It's a shame it's being portrayed as a battle between the two projects because the efforts are complementary."...[T]o make the millions of books in the world available online is a Herculean task. Issues of publisher copyrights, data storage and backup, and labor costs must still be hashed out. It would take 6 petabytes to digitally store just 1 million books, according to the Internet Archive. By comparison, Google reportedly has stored nearly 10 million Web documents, requiring between 1.7 and 5 petabytes of storage....Though it has been working on the effort for years, the Internet Archive recently jump-started its effort by introducing the Open Content Alliance....Yahoo and MSN Search are also notable members, given their investments in Web search and driving traffic to their proprietary services. The two companies boasted the openness of the project Tuesday night, but their allegiance to the open-source project surely is a strategic counterbalance to Google's project....Last week, the Internet Archive launched Open Library, a Web site that will eventually house all the world's books, according to the nonprofit. It now demonstrates the project with 15 digitized works....For now, people can download 15 demonstration books from the Open Library site and print them for free at home. Visitors can also purchase bound copies from Lulu.com for $8 each. The service even lets people create their own book covers and art, and then have the books printed with them. Users can search inside the works and see tabs on pages where the terms occurred. With the move of a cursor, visitors can see which page they will turn to before clicking on it. Volunteers from LibriVox, an open-source effort trying to make books freely available in audio, have also made audio recordings of the books so that people can listen to them via the Open Library Web site....[Omitting interesting details on the book-scanning technology.] The Internet Archive currently has 10 scanning machines, but it is ramping up to build 10 more in the next year. "This is one of the great things we've ever done," said Kahle. "It's up there with the Library of Alexandria and putting a man on the moon."

Talk to virtually any student about the cost of textbooks and you will likely hear loud complaints about the expense associated with course texts. According to a recent General Accounting Office report: "... the average estimated cost of books and supplies per first-time, full-time student for academic year 2003-2004 was $898 at 4-year public institutions, or about 26 percent of the cost of tuition and fees. At 2-year public institutions, where low-income students are more likely to pursue a degree program and tuition and fees are lower, the average estimated cost of books and supplies per first-time, full-time student was $886 in academic year 2003-2004, representing almost three-quarters of the cost of tuition and fees." While there are explanations that attempt to justify textbook prices in the report, there are few suggestions to contain or reduce the cost to students....Inspired by [Ira] Fuchs's vision, it is possible to conceive of a similar approach to acquire and distribute high-quality creative commons content that could be used in any of the following combinations: (a) as the basis of an online course, (b) as an electronic textbook, or (c) as a customized printed textbook for use in a traditional college course. We call this approach OpenTextbook. OpenTextbook's business model would be simple: traditional colleges and universities would agree to pay membership dues to purchase content from one or more open universities, such as the British Open University (UKOU). OpenTextbook would not develop the content; it would purchase content in bulk. In this sense, OpenTextbook would be similar to consumer cooperatives and buying clubs that pool member resources to gain purchasing power in the market....If the OpenTextbook coalition distributed this cost evenly to each of its members, the annual membership would come to $75,000 a year per campus. For a school with an enrollment of 25,000 first-time, full-year students, this comes out to three dollars per student per year: a bargain compared to the current $898 per year cost of textbooks....In addition to saving money, OpenTextbook's objective would also be to give faculty the freedom to customize creative commons content, and use it as a substitute for mass-produced commercial textbooks. It is also possible for campuses to encourage instructors to use open textbook content by providing faculty stipends as well as paid student and staff support to help customize course content. Some schools might support these costs by establishing a course material customization fee that could be far less than the current cost of commercial textbooks. To the extent faculty choose to substitute OpenTextbook content, the cost savings for students could be substantial. Even when allowing for the extra expense of customized content, course materials could be substantially less expensive than the traditional textbook model....OpenTextbook has yet to take hold as a formal consortium. Rather, we are in an exploratory phase, introducing the concept to stimulate discussion of a number of different but interrelated cost savings issues, each representing a different lever that policy makers could move separately or together. Some schools, for example, may want to treat the open textbook content simply as a library resource. Others may want to provide faculty with financial incentives and resources to customize the coalition's content. Also, any specific policy proposal would need to address licensing issues governing how said customized content would be owned. And, finally, different means of distribution (electronic vs. print) would entail different costs that would have to be addressed. The main point, however, is that a creative commons textbook initiative may not only save students money, it could also give faculty more freedom to customize the content of their courses.

The OCA, unveiled earlier this month by a group of digital archivists and backed by Yahoo, H-P and Adobe, says it has also signed up Microsoft Corp. and more than a dozen major libraries in North America, Britain and Europe. Danielle Tiedt, general manager of Microsoft's MSN Search, said the world's largest software maker would fund the digital duplication of 150,000 old books over the next year. "This is just the start," Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and the organising force behind the OCA. "One hundred and fifty thousand books is just an initial test for Microsoft," he said...."It's interesting to see everyone jumping on the digital library bandwagon," said Doron Weber, a program director at the Sloan Foundation in New York, which provides funding for the Internet Archive, the original organisers of the OCA. Many university libraries have had separate projects to digitise out-of-print works, but progress has been slow. That changed when Web powerhouse Google unveiled plans last year to work with publishers and five major libraries on dual projects to make many of the world's great books searchable on the Web. "Google's push has galvanised everyone else," Doron said. At the OCA's first public meeting, Kahle spelled out his vision for joining libraries, publishers, printers and hi-tech suppliers to create a universally available digital library. "If we go and bring universal access to all human knowledge it will be remembered as one of the great things humankind has ever done," Kahle said, comparing the potential of the project to the Gutenberg printing press or putting a man on the moon...."This is really hard. There are reasons why people have never done it. It will take all of the energies of the companies assembled here and many more who have yet to join," said project supporter Gart Davis, president of Lulu Inc., a publisher of out-of-print books that is working with OCA....Backers of the Google Print project have expressed their disappointment that the two groups are not working together. But leaders on both sides say it is only a matter of time before the two library projects find common ground. "I think it's only a matter of time before we reach agreement," said Rick Prellinger, board president of the Internet Archive and the director of the newly formed OCA.

Update. I just found that the Librarian in Black has also blogged notes on the Googlebrary session.

Here are a few facts that I just learned via a news release and a call with Microsoft's GM of Search Content Acquisitions, Danielle Tiedt....MSN will launch MSN Book Search (MSNBS) sometime in first half of 2006. In the early stages, MSNBS will be found as a separate vertical on the MSN Search page (just like Image, News, etc.) but eventually MSN hopes to include book results in web results pages. The material that MSNBS will come from the Open Content Alliance (OCA) that Microsoft is formally joining today....According to Tiedt, Microsoft has currently committed to fund the scanning of 150K books. In the case of these books (public domain content), Microsoft is making deals on their own with libraries (we don't know which ones) who will provide the content. Then, some (but not all of this material, depending on the library and the actual content) will be available as part of the OCA database. Every library that provides a copy of the book for scanning will also recieve a file for local use....OK, that's the public domain OCA stuff but MSN's plans are wider ranging. As noted earlier, Microsoft also wants to scan the full text of in-copyright books (a list of participating libraries is not available) and make it available online. Sound familiar? Looks like some direct competition for Google Print. Btw, this initiative goes beyond books and MSN also has plans for content from academic publishers, periodicals, aggregators, etc. Of course, getting the right business model in place and getting players to agree will be a challenge. Yes, in this case it looks like some competition for Google Scholar and the Yahoo Subscriptions program. Making everyone happy and then keeping them happy is going to be a very tough job. Tiedt suggested that business models for access to in-copyright content that might be considered include pay-per-page, pay-per-chapter, monthly subscriptions, etc. We'll just have to wait and see. One thing I hope MSN does (that Google is already doing and doing well) is working with libraries (of all types), who are already paying (via institutional subscriptions) for access to massive amounts of articles, etc. and then make them available (for free via MSNBS) to anyone with access to that specific library usually using a library card.

Microsoft has committed to paying for the digitization of 150,000 books [for the OCA] in the first year, which will be about $5 million, assuming costs of about 10 cents a page and 300 pages, on average, per book, said [Danielle Tiedt, general manager of search content acquisition at MSN]. Yahoo has said it will pay for digitization of 18,000 books, according to Tiedt. Internet Archive, a nonprofit formed to offer access to historical collections that exist in digital format, will digitize the material. Microsoft's MSN Web site will launch its MSN Book Search service next year and will experiment with different business models, such as pay per page, monthly subscriptions, selling e-books and advertisements, Tiedt said. "The business model will change, depending on whether (the book) is out of copyright or in copyright," she said. MSN will offer more than the simple search of the books. For instance, the company may offer services such as allowing people to annotate works, create discussion groups and move text into productivity applications, Tiedt said. Microsoft and Yahoo may or may not share books with each other that have been digitized, she said. "We are working on global collections."

Microsoft announced Tuesday that it planned to join the online book-search movement with a new service called MSN Book Search. And in a nod to the growing influence of a recently formed group called the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft announced its plans to join it. The group is working to digitize the contents of millions of books and put them on the Internet, with full text accessible to anyone, while respecting the rights of copyright holders. Microsoft is making the largest contribution to the alliance to date - $5 million - which is enough to scan about 150,000 books. In aligning with the Open Content Alliance, MSN is joining forces with its archrival Yahoo, which announced its support of the project this month. Several universities, including the University of California, Columbia University and Rice University, as well as the Internet Archive and the National Archives of Britain, have joined the alliance. MSN Book Search will go online in test form early next year. Although the content of out-of-copyright books will be accessible at no charge from MSN Book Search, Microsoft is talking with publishers about how it might charge for books under copyright - perhaps per page, perhaps per chapter. "We're thinking through a whole host of business models for the in-copyright stuff," said Danielle Tiedt, general manager of search content acquisition at MSN...."We're rolling now, and very few institutions will say no," said Rick Prelinger, administrator of the Open Content Alliance. The alliance is the brainchild of Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that is building a vast digital library. Mr. Kahle has said repeatedly that one of his greatest hopes is to have Google join the project. Mr. Kahle said Tuesday that talks with Google seemed to be progressing toward an agreement. Nathan Tyler, a Google spokesman, confirmed Tuesday that Google was speaking with Mr. Kahle about joining the alliance, but there was nothing yet to announce.

When the OCA was first announced three weeks ago, it had 10 institutional members. Since then, 14 others have joined, including the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Columbia University, Emory University, Johns Hopkins University Libraries, and McMaster University, Rice University, York University, and the Universities of British Columbia, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, and Virginia.

Microsoft Network (MSN) has also joined the OCA and issued its own press release (October 25). Excerpt:

MSN Search today announced its intention to launch MSN Book Search, which will support MSN Search’s efforts to help people find exactly what they’re looking for on the Web, including the content from books, academic materials, periodicals and other print resources. MSN Search intends to launch an initial beta of this offering next year. MSN also intends to join the Open Content Alliance (OCA) and work with the organization to scan and digitize publicly available print materials, as well as work with copyright owners to legally scan protected materials.

Brewster Kahle announced that MSN is "committed to kick off their support by funding the digitization of 150,000 books in 2006!"

Fifty-seven of the nation’s leading medical and scientific nonprofit publishers today announced they have offered a proposal to Elias Zerhouni, M.D., director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that would allow the NIH to bring vast amounts of research findings to the public efficiently and at no cost. In a joint letter to Dr. Zerhouni [PS: probably this letter from October 17], the group detailed a plan that would allow the NIH to provide online access to articles on their journal websites using the existing system of links from abstracts that are indexed on NIH’s Medline. The transparent linking system would make it easier for the public to view more than 1 million research articles and would avert the need to create a new taxpayer-funded publishing infrastructure within the NIH.

(PS: This proposal, which has repeatedly been offered to the NIH and repeatedly rejected, would not let the NIH integrate the article texts with NIH's many OA databases, would undercut the NIH's ability to shorten embargoes and even let publishers lengthen them, and would not guarantee the public continuing free online access to the articles.)

SPARC, as well as many other organizations, encourages the development of open access journals, publications that make their articles available at no cost to users and that typically allow users at the very least to make copies in digital form and often confer a wider set of usage rights. Those efforts have had some notable success. For example, the Directory of Open Access Journals website (www.doaj.org) lists over 1600 open access journals containing over 62,000 searchable and downloadable articles. In addition, funders such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Welcome Trust in the United Kingdom are calling for research conducted through their funding to be openly available after some limited “hold back” period. There are many important obstacles for open access publishing to overcome to be a full-fledged market alternative to commercial publishing, including building sustainable economic models and changing the culture of academia to value open access and traditional publication credits equally when considering tenure and promotions. Nonetheless, open access scholarly publishing is already having an effect on the marketplace and, through market mechanisms, has already begun to expand the information commons....[T]he information commons movement has yet to take its place in the mainstream of political discourse. Instead, efforts to guarantee access to the information commons in the face of recent changes in law and technology continue to proceed through the different approaches outlined in this report: legislate, litigate, limit, create competing systems, legally reinterpret, and philosophize and mobilize. We still await the unifying framework that could place the intellectual environment of the information commons on a par with the physical environmental movement in matters of public debate and policy.

The CINF E-news is now an open access publication. In August the Executive Committee felt that the E-News would help the Division reach out to other chemical information professionals.

(PS: This is the shortest announcement I've seen by a journal or newsletter converting to OA. Nevertheless, kudos to the ACS, which publishes the newsletter, for recognizing that OA to chemical information is a good way to "reach out to...chemical professionals." That's why the NIH provides OA to PubChem.)

As part of its mission to support the learning, research, dissemination and preservation activities of the University, the Sheridan Libraries proposes to assist with an evaluation of the policies, and lead the development of the processes, software and systems to support electronic theses and dissertations (ETD). The Libraries already provide submission, dissemination and preservation services for the University’s print theses and dissertations. Many institutions have implemented ETD programs and noted that this has increased discovery and use of graduate students’ research. Additionally, ETDs offer an opportunity to include content such as datasets, simulations, hypertext links, audio, animations, and video. With approval from the Graduate Board, the Sheridan Libraries, in collaboration with academic departments, wishes to conduct a pilot program in ETDs in Fall 2005 and Spring 2006. By working with a diverse set of departments, it will be possible to explore the range of issues including the following: [1] How can such a program support dissemination of and access to students’ theses and dissertations? [2] What types of content, fonts, media, etc. will we need to support for ETDs? [3] What are the training needs for ETDs? [4] What software or systems, including the institutional repository, best support the students’ needs?

JHU faculty who would like to participate in the project should let the libraries know by November 28, 2005.

In a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary subcommittees overseeing intellectual property issues, the nation's oldest consumer advocacy group raised concerns about a forthcoming ambitious effort to catalogue the entire collections of four major American libraries. The letter, signed by National Consumers League President Linda Golodner, acknowledges the tremendous potential value in Google Inc.'s bold vision for the new initiative, in which the complete collection of works at the university libraries of Stanford, Michigan, and Harvard, and of the New York Public Library, would be scanned and made available electronically to the public. The Washington-based advocacy group warned, however, that the project, which will resume scanning on November 1, 2005 poses dramatic threats to the principle of copyrights; fairness to authors; and cultural selectivity, exclusion, and censorship....Due to the fact that a significant portion of the volumes in the collections remain under copyright, having been written after 1923 and not legally considered a matter of public domain, the advocacy group warned that clearly, Google should be required to obtain appropriate rights before reproducing the works of others. Google's current plan would require authors to "opt-out" of its program, which places and inappropriate burden on copyright holders...."We do not doubt Google's good intentions," wrote Golodner. "But any database which represents itself as being a 'full' or 'complete' record of American culture as reflected in the collections of four major research libraries must, in fact, be complete. The sheer scope and cumbersome nature of the project may force Google to cut corners at some point, raising inevitable questions. To the extent that Google finds itself drawing lines for inclusion or exclusion based even indirectly on content --style, political slant, format, author, and so on-- it makes itself a censor of our history and culture."

Comment. Two quick replies. (1) As I argued earlier this month, the simple critique of opt-out "is deceptive because it assumes without proof that the Google copying is not fair use. Hence it begs the question at the heart of the lawsuit. If the Google copying is fair use, then no prior permission is needed and the opt-out policy is justified." (2) Google never said that its book-scanning would be "a 'complete' record of American culture," though I'm sure it would be glad to approach that goal asymptotically. The NCL objection not only starts from a false premise, but would abort any project that cannot reach completeness in one step. Does the NCL object to libraries because they don't carry every book? If the NCL really cared about comprehensive coverage, then it would praise this gigantic step toward wider access and monitor the project to see that it doesn't rest on invidious criteria for inclusion. But by objecting to the project's incompleteness as such, without pointing to any evidence of "cultural selectivity, exclusion, and censorship", the NCL implies that no literature should be easy to access until all of it is.

[The University of Toronto] in very good company after recently joining the Open Content Alliance, a consortium of internet and software companies, national archives, and academic institutions dedicated to making digital content available and free online....The Open Content Alliance has positioned itself in contrast to a similar scheme to scan and post books online, the robust but controversial Google Print. Google, the closest thing we have to the collective consciousness of the human race, has caught hell from book publishers for scanning copyrighted material without their explicit permission....Copyright holders have pushed aggressively to extend their control over how their work may be used in the culture, and though it has made a lot of people rich, it has made us all culturally poorer....The Open Content Alliance is supposed to throw open the doors of human knowledge, but it apparently has no critique of how that knowledge is controlled and disseminated in the culture. By meekly agreeing to play by the copyright rules --no matter how idiotic and damaging those rules are-- the Alliance is neglecting an important part of its job as an advocate for, and protector of, the cultural heritage to which everyone is heir. U of T has noble goals in joining the Open Content Alliance, and its participation is a step in the right direction. But if it does not challenge the cultural monopolists who believe that every scrap of human knowledge has a price tag, it is failing in its mission as an educator and as a steward of the intellectual ecosystem on which all learning relies.

Comment. I agree with the praise for OCA, the praise for Toronto for participating in it, and the critique of copyright. So why do I think it's a cheap shot to criticize the OCA for not adding a valuable critique to its valuable action? First, because you don't have to talk the talk when you walk the walk. Second, because this particular critique isn't the only good reason for the OCA to do what it's doing. The OCA can build a larger and more effective coalition by welcoming everyone who agrees on the goal than by laying down a party line on the rationale. It's a strategy mistake to hobble a project that you admit is good just to see its leaders agree with you about why.

IBM's healthcare and education practices today announced a major initiative to improve interoperability and information-access through the development of open software standards. Under this initiative, IBM is pledging royalty-free access to its patent portfolio for the development and implementation of selected open healthcare and education software standards built around web services, electronic forms and open document formats. Industry growth and service delivery in healthcare and education currently are hampered by the proliferation of incompatible document formats and proprietary technology, making it difficult to find, retrieve and share data such as standardized medical records and educational resources. IBM believes its new initiative can help address the complex ecosystem across which information must be accurately, securely and efficiently shared and assist our clients in these two vital industries as they work to improve the quality and lower the costs of services they deliver to patients, physicians, students and teachers around the world. Standards can foster interoperability and dramatically improve the ability to communicate data and information among and between companies and throughout communities....IBM's work with the healthcare and education industries follows IBM's pledge of 500 software patents to the open source community earlier this year. Since then, other companies and organizations have made similar pledges helping to create an open source "patent commons."

Also see IBM's official statement of the new policy. Excerpt:

Each year, IBM generates more than a $1 billion of intellectual property income, and leads the world in U.S. patents issued. This income and pipeline are vitally important to our ability to continue to innovate. At the same time, opening access to our patents allows us to treat IP as intellectual capital that IBM invests in specific industries for them to improve services and reduce costs while helping them innovate and grow.

The computer is now the factory of the Information Age -- optimized not for automation but collaboration, and requiring a different legal framework. But key industries, most notably entertainment and software, have bamboozled Congress and much of the public into believing that their wares deserve the same protection that was awarded to say, a patent for blast furnaces in the mid 20th century. Foragers in the Information Age use computers as their implements. Unlike the Earth, there are no raw materials in the cyber world waiting to be picked at like veins of ore. The Industrial Age was about discovery. The Information Age is about invention....Digital product development is less about aggregation and ownership of raw materials and more about manipulation of facts and ideas, concepts and values, pictures, sounds, video, and numbers -- much of which must be borrowed from the work of others and transformed in some new and hopefully lucrative way. But without free and easy access to a wide variety of these intellectual resources, our information-based trade goods will be less competitive in the global marketplace because of increased time to market (compliance), fear of innovation (something new like file-sharing networks might be made illegal), and because our regulated goods will cost more -- like Californian cars requiring extra-emissions control gear....Digital factories need to be supplied with large quantities of license-free supplies to grow, just as manufacturing industries needed plentiful and cheap raw material.

[T]he biggest event for books during the [Frankfurt Book Fair] was the alignment of camps in the f