From All Things Considered:
People who use the Internet to talk to friends, set up free e-mail accounts or buy concert tickets are often unknowingly helping to digitize vast libraries of old books and newspapers.That's because more than 40,000 Web sites — including popular ones such as Ticketmaster, Facebook and Craigslist — are using a new kind of security program called reCAPTCHA.
From SLA's Public Policy Connections blog:
On 20 June 2008, SLA received a letter from Elias A. Zerhouni, Director, National Institutes of Health (NIH), expressing appreciation for SLA's support of open and timely Internet access to NIH research articles.
From the SLA Public Policy Connections blog:
SLA provided comments to Elias Zerhouni, M.D. at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) expressing general support of the NIH Public Access Policy. SLA recommended shortening the embargo period and producing a list of publishers whose author publishing agreements provide for deposit with PubMed Central in a manner that is consistent with copyright law. The letter also strongly opposed the possibility of NIH acting as a dark archive and providing links to publishers’ Web sites.
From WCSH Portland:
State prison officials have decided to allow a publisher of legal self-help books to distribute its materials in Massachusetts prisons.The decision comes after mail-order publisher Prison Legal News sued Department of Correction Commissioner Harold Clarke. The Seattle-based publisher claimed Clarke was banning its publications in state prisons by refusing to add it to a list of approved vendors who can send books to prisoners.
From Harvard Law School:
In a move that will disseminate faculty research and scholarship as broadly as possible, the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously voted last week to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the first law school to commit to a mandatory open access policy.
From Ars Technica:
China is refusing to guarantee that it won't censor the Internet during this summer's Olympic Games, but insists that the international media will still be able to function normally. Officials from China's Technology Ministry took a somewhat odd opportunity to speak about its censorship plans during a press conference after the Olympic torch relay crossed Mount Everest. They said that while the government would be able to "guarantee as much [access] as possible," there's no way that China would turn off the Great Firewall entirely during the Games.
From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:
Iran's culture minister has shared some eyebrow-raising advice with authors seeking to see their work published in Iran: "Censor pages which are likely to create a dispute."Minister Mohammad Hossein Safar Harandi made his remarks about book publishing in the Islamic republic at a news conference on Monday, according to a report in Agence France-Presse.
Saying that publishers and writers "are aware of the vetting code" in Iran, Safar Harandi urged self-censorship.
From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
A publisher that distributes books on the legal rights of prisoners sued the chief of the state's prison system Wednesday, claiming he is banning its publications in Massachusetts prisons.Prison Legal News, a nonprofit publisher, alleges that Department of Correction Commissioner Harold Clarke and other prison officials refuse to add it to a list of approved vendors who can send books to prisoners.
From Scientific American:
The first generation of World Wide Web capabilities rapidly transformed retailing and information search. More recent attributes such as blogging, tagging and social networking, dubbed Web 2.0, have just as quickly expanded people’s ability not just to consume online information but to publish it, edit it and collaborate about it—forcing such old-line institutions as journalism, marketing and even politicking to adopt whole new ways of thinking and operating.Science could be next. A small but growing number of researchers (and not just the younger ones) have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open tools of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement—yet—their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based “Science 2.0” is not only more collegial than traditional science but considerably more productive.
Note - "Science 2.0 generally refers to new practices of scientists who post raw experimental results, nascent theories, claims of discovery and draft papers on the Web for others to see and comment on."
From the American Booksellers Association:
In response to strong opposition by booksellers and other supporters of First Amendment rights, the Colorado legislature has killed a bill banning the sale to minors of works that are "harmful" to minors because of their sexual content.
Have folks seen this one yet?
I received a couple of e-mails today from various listserv subscriptions that POPLINE has recently decided to make the term "abortion" a stop word in their database.
POPLINE, "the world's largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues", is funded by USAID.
* Please understand, I know this can be a hot button issue, but this is a message about access to information and political interference in scientific research, not about abortion.*
A medical librarian at UCSF was having trouble replicating a search she performed in January on POPLINE and asked for assistance as to why her results were incomplete. This is the reply she received from POPLINE:
"Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now. In addition to the terms you're already using, you could try using "Fertility Control, Postconception". This is the broader term to our "Abortion" terms and most records have both in the keyword fields. Also, adding "unwanted w2 pregnancy" in place of aborti*. We have a keyword Pregnancy, Unwanted and there are 2517 records with aborti* & unwanted w2 pregnancy."
You can still pull up results by selecting "abortion" from the controlled vocabulary list, but no results are retrieved via a simple keyword search. I wonder at what point the abortion-related records will simply be purged from the database.
At this point it is unknown if they were getting pressure from above to make this change or if they made it, as they say, preemptively.
From the Indianapolis Star:
A new state law that requires sellers of adult material to register with the state has Hoosier bookstore owners fuming about government censorship and threatening a legal challenge."This lumps us in with businesses that sell things that you can't even mention in a family newspaper," said Ernie Ford, owner of Fine Print Book Store in Greencastle.
Ford was talking about HEA 1042, which Gov. Mitch Daniels signed into law last week. He was one of 15 independent Indiana booksellers who signed a letter last week urging Daniels to veto the legislation.
The new law that takes effect July 1 requires businesses that sell sexually explicit material to pay a $250 fee and register with the secretary of state, which would then pass the information to municipal or county officials so they can monitor the businesses for potential violations of local ordinances.
From WTVQ:
Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.
Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.
From North Carolina State University Libraries News:
Members of the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) have announced that they are joining the Open Content Alliance (OCA) and other major research libraries in contributing to the freely accessible digital library hosted by the OCA. TRLN is a collaborative organization of the research libraries at Duke University, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.By partnering with the OCA, the TRLN libraries are ensuring that their online collections will remain open to scholars and all other members of the global community. Administered by the non-profit Internet Archive, the OCA represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that are helping to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.
From the American Booksellers Association:
On Wednesday, February 13, the Colorado Senate Judiciary Committee ignored the pleas of booksellers and voted 4 - 2 to approve a bill that bans the sale to minors of books and magazines that are "harmful to minors." Matthew Miller, general manager of the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver and Highlands Ranch, Colorado, and Lisa Knudsen, executive director of the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association, addressed the committee before the vote to express concerns that the bill would have a chilling effect on the sale of material that is protected by the First Amendment for adults and older minors. The legislation was also opposed by the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) and other members of the Media Coalition, which submitted a memo detailing their objections.
From ResourceShelf.com:
The ARL guide, “The NIH Public Access Policy: Guide for Research Universities,” includes the following sections:• Policy Overview
• Institutional Responses
• Retaining Rights
• How to Deposit
• ResourcesThe guide focuses on the implications of the NIH policy for institutions as grantees, although some information for individual investigators is included and links to further details are provided. The guide is helpful to a range of campus constituencies that may be involved in implementing the new policy, including research administrators, legal counsel, and librarians.
From Inside Higher Ed:
Harvard University’s arts and sciences faculty approved a plan on Tuesday that will post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program. While other institutions have similar repositories for their faculty’s work, Harvard’s is unique for making online publication the default option.
From the New York Times:
Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.
From TechCrunch:
Google is said to be preparing to launch a massive repository of science data at research.google.com.The project, known internally as “Palimpsest” will become a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets built on the data visualization technology from Trendalyzer.
According to a Wired report, the storage will be free to all scientists, access to the data will be free for all and the new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.
Two planned datasets are 120 terabytes of data from the Hubble Space Telescope and images from the Archimedes Palimpsest.
We thought Google knew everything, now it will know even more.
The Wired article:
Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data
Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.
From the European Research Council Scientific Council:
The Scientific Council of the European Research Council has released its Guidelines for Open Access.
From Information World Review:
Nature Publishing Group has introduced a Creative Commons licence for articles in scientific journal Nature that publish the primary sequence of an organism’s genome.Nature already makes reports on genome sequences freely available for use by other researchers. The new licence formalises that arrangement, according to David Hoole, head of content licensing for Nature.
From the Association of American Publishers:
The Association of American Publishers today criticized a controversial new NIH research publication policy that was enacted as part of the omnibus appropriations package for 2008, and reaffirmed that journal publishers who have opposed the policy will continue to pursue their concerns with Congress regarding the policy’s negative impact on science publishing and the protection of related intellectual property rights. Publishers will also urge NIH to conduct a rulemaking proceeding, with opportunity for public comment, before implementing the new policy.
From Information Today:
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS; www.aaas.org) announced it has reversed its earlier decision to pull its flagship publication, Science, from JSTOR (www.jstor.org), the scholarly electronic journals archive. Officials issued this very brief statement: "AAAS and JSTOR are pleased to announce that we have concluded an ongoing discussion and have been able to reach an agreement to continue what has been a very productive relationship between JSTOR and the journal Science."
From the Alliance for Taxpayer Access:
President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.
From Library Journal Academic Newswire:
Librarians today are set to ring in the New Year with the nation's first ever public access mandate. Both the House of Representatives and Senate this week approved the revised Labor Health and Human Services (LHHS) appropriations bill which leaves intact a directive for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) requiring investigators to deposit their final papers in PubMed Central. Papers will then be available within a year after publication. All that's left is the president's signature, which is expected, and could come this week. The approval caps a several years-long fight spearheaded by SPARC, to make public access a requirement for NIH grantees.
Somehow I don't think this is what the ALA had in mind for the use of its lists. . .
From The News & Observer:
After banning a popular coming-of-age tale, Johnston County school officials are scouring library shelves for other potentially offensive books to remove.The district review was prompted by a parent challenge to "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents," which was removed from school libraries and classrooms this fall. The novel by Julia Alvarez has faced challenges in at least four districts nationwide for its sexual content and profane language, though national observers knew of no other district where parents succeeded in having it banned. . .
. . . In the wake of the Johnston challenge, the school board asked administrators to check all of the books in high school libraries and classrooms against lists of commonly challenged books to weed out other offensive material. Several organizations compile these lists, including the American Library Association. The review is likely to last months.
From Inside Higher Ed:
The various and competing efforts to digitize university libraries’ vast holdings have no lack of ambition, but access to documents and copyright issues have been two factors slowing the development of online scholarly repositories. Now, an effort at George Mason University seeks to bypass libraries entirely and delve into scholars’ file cabinets instead.Or at least, their hard drives. If many researchers have had to scan rare documents or books for their own perusal, there’s a potential treasure trove of material that exists among their combined efforts. Rather than let all that scholarship rot, or waste away in data files, the university’s Center for History and New Media sees an opportunity to create an open archive of scholarly resources in the public domain.
From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Federal prosecutors have withdrawn a subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc., newly unsealed court records show.The withdrawal came after a judge ruled the customers have a First Amendment right to keep their reading habits from the government.
From the Washington Post:
A long-simmering debate over whether the results of government-funded research should be made freely available to the public could take a big step toward resolution as members of a House and Senate conference committee meet today to finalize the 2008 Department of Health and Human Services appropriations bill.At issue is whether scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health should be required to publish the results of their research solely in journals that promise to make the articles available free within a year after publication.
From The National Academies:
To strengthen the essential role that science and technology play in maintaining national and economic security, the United States should ensure the open exchange of unclassified research despite the small risk that it could be misused for harm by terrorists or rogue nations, says a new report by the National Research Council. Because science and technology are truly global pursuits, U.S. universities and research institutions must continue to welcome foreign-born science and engineering students, said the committee of former national security leaders and senior university researchers and administrators that wrote the report.While concerns about certain types of research findings falling into the wrong hands are legitimate and safeguards are needed, the gains in science and technology that flow from the free exchange of information far outweigh the slight risks, the report says. Extreme measures to curtail the flow of essential information or people would significantly disrupt advances that are critical to U.S. military and economic security. Meeting the challenges of future technological or biological threats depends upon developments that can only come from long-term academic research.
Alliance for Taxpayer Access Press Release:
The U.S. Senate last night approved the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Bill (S.1710), including a provision that directs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to strengthen its Public Access Policy by requiring rather than requesting participation by researchers. The bill will now be reconciled with the House Appropriations Bill, which contains a similar provision, in another step toward support for public access to publicly funded research becoming United States law.
From Heise Online:
Following several fruitless rounds of talks the Max Planck Society (MPG) has, effective January 1, 2008, terminated the online contract with the Springer publishing house which for eight years now has given all institutes electronic access to some 1,200 scientific journals. The analysis of user statistics and comparisons with other important publishing houses had shown that Springer was charging twice the amount the MPG still considered justifiable for access to the journals, the Society declared. "And that 'justifiable' rate is still higher than comparable offers of other major publishing houses," a spokesman of the Max Planck Digital Library told heise online.
From the New York Times:
Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.
From PLoS Biology:
Since 2003, when PLoS Biology was launched, there has been a spectacular growth in “open-access” journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/), hosted by Lund University Libraries, lists 2,816 open-access journals as this article goes to press (and probably more by the time you read this). Authors also have various “open-access” options within existing subscription journals offered by traditional publishers (e.g., Blackwell, Springer, Oxford University Press, and many others). In return for a fee to the publisher, an author's individual article is made freely available and (sometimes) deposited in PubMed Central (PMC). But, as open access grows in prominence, so too has confusion about what open access means, particularly with regard to unrestricted use of content—which true open access allows. This confusion is being promulgated by journal publishers at the expense of authors and funding agencies wanting to support open access.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Fifty years ago today, a San Francisco Municipal Court judge ruled that Allen Ginsberg's Beat-era poem "Howl" was not obscene. Yet today, a New York public broadcasting station decided not to air the poem, fearing that the Federal Communications Commission will find it indecent and crush the network with crippling fines.Free-speech advocates see tremendous irony in how Ginsberg's epic poem - which lambastes the consumerism and conformism of the 1950s and heralds a budding American counterculture - is, half a century later, chilled by a federal government crackdown on the broadcasting of provocative language.
Listen to the entire unaired show: "Howl Against Censorship".
From Information World Review:
Angry researchers, scientists and editors have called for action against the Association of American Publishers (AAP), one of the prime movers behind the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine.Announced last month, PRISM is a campaign group that has denounced open access (OA) publishing as “junk science” that is destroying the foundations of peer review. “Their claim that OA threatens the peer review process is nothing less than the ‘big lie’ – the propaganda techniques of Dr Goebbels,” said the founder of the International Journal of Information Management, Tom Wilson, in a resignation letter.
Further expanding public access to its intellectual riches through the most popular Web destinations, the University of California, Berkeley, announced today (Wednesday, Oct. 3) that it is making entire course lectures and special events available, free of charge, on YouTube.UC Berkeley is the first university to make videos of full courses available through YouTube. Visitors to the site at youtube.com/ucberkeley can view more than 300 hours of videotaped courses and events. Topics range from bioengineering, to peace and conflict studies, to "Physics for Future Presidents," the title of a popular campus course. Building on its initial offerings, UC Berkeley will continue to expand the catalog of videos available on YouTube.
From The Michigan Daily:
To save money, the University's libraries are canceling some of their journal subscriptions because of budget cuts and the increasing costs of the subscriptions.Many of the cuts are to print subscriptions only, while the University continues to subscribe to the journals online.
From Wired:
Nonetheless, it's a textbook example of so-called publication bias, where science gets skewed because only positive correlations see the light of day. After all, the surprising findings are what makes the news (and careers).So what happens to all the research that doesn't yield a dramatic outcome — or, worse, the opposite of what researchers had hoped? It ends up stuffed in some lab drawer. The result is a vast body of squandered knowledge that represents a waste of resources and a drag on scientific progress. This information — call it dark data — must be set free.
For the past couple of years, there's been much talk about open access, the idea that more scientific publications should be freely available — not locked behind firewalls and subscriptions. Thanks to the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and other organizations, that notion is making headway. Liberating dark data takes this ethos one step further. It also makes many scientists deeply uncomfortable, because it calls for them to reveal their "failures." But in this data-intensive age, those apparent dead ends could be more important than the breakthroughs. After all, some of today's most compelling research efforts aren't one-off studies that eke out statistically significant results, they're meta-studies — studies of studies — that crunch data from dozens of sources, producing results that are much more likely to be true. What's more, your dead end may be another scientist's missing link, the elusive chunk of data they needed. Freeing up dark data could represent one of the biggest boons to research in decades, fueling advances in genetics, neuroscience, and biotech.
From Emory Libraries:
Are publishers getting rich publishing your research? A Bear-Stearns evaluation of Reed-Elsevier (one of the world's largest publishers of scholarly journals) recently rated the company, which earns profits of almost 40% annually, "a stockholder's dream." Should private publishers be getting rich selling information generated by research that is funded by academic institutions and the public? What's happening and how does it affect scholars at Emory?
From the New York Times:
Facing pressure from religious groups, civil libertarians and members of Congress, the federal Bureau of Prisons has decided to return religious materials that had been purged from prison chapel libraries because they were not on the bureau's lists of approved resources.
From ALA's District Dispatch:
As the U.S. Senate considers Appropriations measures this fall for fiscal year (FY) 2008, please take a moment to remind your Senators of your strong support for public access to publicly funded research and, specifically, ensuring the success of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy by making deposit mandatory for researchers.Please fax a letter expressing your support to your Senator no later than Friday, September 28, 2007. Use the Legislative Action Center to get your Senator's contact information, as well as to send emails and faxes to Congress.
From Information World Review:
Scientist Peter Murray-Rust has blasted publishers for “a systemic failure to embrace open access”. He warns that anyone who purchases author-pays Open Access content may end up paying a lot of money for something not labelled as Open Access.In an emotive posting on his blog he resigned from one journal after finding that Springer had retained the copyright after authors had paid $3000 to make their papers Open Access.
From Information World Review:
“There is a concerted disinformation campaign now underway on the part of some (but not all) members of the AAP [Association of American Publishers], faithfully following the high-priced pit-bull script the AAP purchased from corporate trouble-shooter Eric Dezenhall.” Said Open Access (OA) proponent; Stevan Harnard, Canada Research Chair, Institute of Cognitive Sciences at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal.
From Information Today:
The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM) is a coalition launched with developmental support from the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers to alert Congress to the unintended consequences of government interference in scientific and scholarly publishing. The group has launched a Web site at www.prismcoalition.org, where it articulates the PRISM Principles, an affirmation of publishers’ contributions to science, research, and peer review, and an expression of support for continued private sector efforts to expand access to scientific information.The coalition was formed in response to legislative efforts to mandate that peer-reviewed articles resulting from government-funded research be made available at no cost.
From the International Herald Tribune:
Two New York inmates challenging a ban on some religious books in chapel libraries at U.S. prisons are trying to take the fight nationwide, asking that their lawsuit be given class action status so it can benefit thousands of others behind bars.
From the Yale Science Libraries blog:
After careful consideration, the Cushing/Whitney Medical and K