SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION ISSUES
A NEWSLETTER FOR THE UIUC COMMUNITY
Issue 4/05
February 24, 2005
Paula Kaufman, University Librarian, Editor
HERE COME THE PODCASTERS
It's called "podcasting," and it has the potential of changing the dynamics of broadcasting the same way blogs have changed the dynamics of print and TV journalism. Podcasting allows anyone with a PC to become a broadcaster—at virtually no cost. Programs distributed with this technology can be received anywhere, anytime (without requiring the listener to be near a PC), and they can be paused, rewound or fast-forwarded. The number of regular podcasts is now more than 800, with many focusing on gadgets, technology, new bands and music, or developments in politics, movies and sports. One podcaster says, "It would be great if I made a fortune doing it, but I don't see how that could possibly happen. I'm not really trying for it, either. I'm hoping to meet some interesting people and establish some good communications with people on weird topics." (AP/USA Today 7 Feb 2005) NewsScan Daily, 7 February 2005 http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-02-07-podcasting_x.htm
ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN PUBLISHERS DEFENDS RIP-OFF CLAIMS
The Association of American Publishers has arranged a meeting with the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) for February 14 to discuss allegations leveled by PIRG that U.S. publishers are inflating the price of college textbooks. In a statement, Patricia Schroeder, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, says: "We understand that the increase in tuition and student fees, along with the cost of textbooks, is putting a great deal of pressure on students and parents. And I know that paying cash for college textbooks has been an emotional issue for as long as I can remember. It was for me and my children. Still, that doesn't justify all of the misinformation and misunderstanding we've seen over the last few days.” In a recent report, PIRG accuses publishers of driving up students’ costs by revising textbooks too often, bundling textbooks with expensive and unnecessary supplementary products and raising prices at rates well ahead of inflation. The latest report reiterates the accusations in another PIRG study released a year ago. While AAP has sought to refute the allegations—even commissioning a Zogby poll to bolster its side—PIRG’s claims have sparked negative media coverage of educational publishers. Schroeder says she hopes the meeting next week will lead to better communication between the two groups and refocus the discussion on educating students. Book Standard 2/7/05 http://www.thebookstandard.com/bookstandard/news/publisher/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000790364
ACCESS TO GOVERNMENT GEOSPATIAL DATA IN JEOPARDY
Frank Tiboni, A publishing dilemma: Geospatial agency considers restricting access to its maps, Federal Computer Week, February 7, 2005. Excerpt: 'Officials at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency want to bar the public from viewing the agency's aeronautical and navigational data and publications, a decision that has upset many who use that information. Some librarians, commercial mapmakers and public-interest group members say they will launch a campaign to retain access. Without seeking public comment, NGA officials announced plans in November 2004 to stop selling and distributing the aeronautical and navigational data because of copyright concerns and worries about terrorist attacks. Last December, however, they said they would seek comments before making a final decision.' Open Access News 2/7/05 http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2005/0207/pol-nga-02-07-05.asp
SMITHSONIAN AND HARPERCOLLINS DO DEAL
As expected,
the Smithsonian Institution and HarperCollins have announced their co-publishing
agreement. The unexpected part is the agreement launches a much more ambitious
and trade-focused publishing program under the Smithsonian's banner, or what
Smithsonian Business Ventures ceo Gary Beer calls "a major expansion of our
content and brand in the marketplace." The new line aims to issue 100
Smithsonian-branded titles a year, drawing on the collections, resources, and
relationships of the Institution. Collins president Joe Tessitore notes, "We're
working with the curators of every museum in the Smithsonian." In contrast to
previous efforts from the Smithsonian's own publishing division, Tessitore says,
"We're very interested in a trade reference approach to the line." Publishers
Lunch 2/11/05
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050210/105725_1.html
PENGUIN US
GOES UPSCALE WITH NEW PAPER FORMAT
Faced with sluggish mass market sales, Penguin Group
(USA) is experimenting with a new paperback format intended to appeal to readers
who may be price-conscious but who may also be willing to pay a slight "premium"
for a step up from the traditional pulp-worthy spin-the-rack mass markets.
"Penguin Premium" books, priced at $9.99 (a two-dollar jump over the average
mass market, but significantly less than trade paper), have a larger trim size
and higher-quality paper stock on which the margins are wider and the lines of
text are separated by more space. BookTrade.info
2/14/05
http://www.thebookstandard.com/bookstandard/news/publisher/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000799461
ACRL COMMENTS ON NIH POLICY
The Association of College and Research Libraries has issued a press release on the NIH public-access policy. Excerpt: 'In letters to Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt and NIH Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni, ACRL congratulated NIH for having "taken a significant step to improve public access to NIH-funded research." The new NIH policy will make a large portion of NIH research openly available to the public in PubMed Central within a 12-month timeframe, following publication in peer-reviewed journals. The policy also gives researchers a clear opportunity to make their work openly accessible as soon after publication as they choose, without seeking publisher permission. Frances Maloy, ACRL President, and Ray English, chair of the ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee, expressed concern, however, that the NIH policy is voluntary on the part of researchers, in contrast to an earlier Congressional recommendation. They also noted that the policy would make all research deposited into PubMed Central openly accessible 12 months after publication - far longer than the six months called for in NIH's original draft proposal. "We believe that delays of up to 12 months, especially in biomedical fields, serve neither the interests of science nor the public," the letters state.' Open Access News 2/14/05 http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=News&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=87232
SUPPORTING CREATIVE COMMONS FOR SCIENCE
An editorial in Scientific American supports Creative Commons for Science. Excerpt: '[T]he framers of the Constitution always intended to provide owners of creative works with only limited monopolies, ensuring that the public gets the right to fashion new works from old. Over the years, however, Congress, sometimes at the behest of media companies, has erected immense barriers to derivative works by extending repeatedly both the length and the scope of copyright protection....Copyright in its current form fails to strike a balance between the extremes of allowing total control over every work—"all rights reserved"—and an anarchic system in which pirates steal wantonly without recompense to owners. Overly strong property rights can threaten the Internet as a medium capable of fostering dynamic interchange of ideas. In 2001 Stanford University legal scholar Lawrence Lessig set about righting this imbalance by becoming the leading force behind Creative Commons, a nonprofit group that furnishes a much needed middle ground that lets owners give up some but not all of their rights....The Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploits the licenses to give free access to excellent online course materials. Creative Commons has started a Science Commons effort that will even explore the open licensing of technology contained in some patents. The Public Library of Science already takes advantage of one of the licenses to specify the conditions under which scientific journal articles are made available free of charge. The Internet, as a universal publisher of sorts, needs to be more than an outlet for commercial interests. Nascent communities of artists, scientists and nonprofits want some way to share and rework one another's intellectual output without the enormous legal burdens that come with increasingly draconian rights management. The entertainment industry has been largely silent on this issue—its idea of innovation having been the launching of lawsuits against 10-year-olds to punish music pirating. In this environment, the introduction of Creative Commons's middle path of "some rights reserved" is surely a welcome arrival.' Open Access News 2/14/05 http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=000D3F62-378C-11E7-B78C83414B7F0000
Senator Russell Feingold introduced the Library, Bookseller, and Personal Records Privacy Act, S. 317 last week, identical to S. 1507 from last term. It would return a higher legal standard ("specific and articulable standard") to requests for business records (including library and bookstore records, medical records etc.) that the low "relevance" standard that the Patriot Act put in place. S. 317 is cosponsored by Senators Akaka, Bingaman, Cantwell, Corzine, Dayton, Durbin, Jeffords, Kennedy, Leahy and Wyden. Senator Feingold introduced other bills, including S. 318, the Computer Trespass Clarification Act (virtually identical to S. 2783 from last term). This would better define the computer hacker provision which was written so broadly that nonhackers could be swept in (including library patrons, according to Sen. Feingold). See also Feb. 8 Congressional record transcript of the introduction and text of these bills. For updates see thomas.loc.gov and type in the bill number. Or read on for S. 317 text.. LibraryLawBlog 2/13/05 http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/
SENATE CONFIRMS NARA BOSS
BY Aliya Sternstein, Published on Feb. 15, 2005
The Senate has confirmed historian Allen Weinstein as the next leader of the National Archives and Records Administration. Weinstein, a former historian and, most recently, president of the Center for Democracy, replaces John Carlin. The nomination was not without some controversy. Members of the Society of American Archivists applauded Carlin's appointment last week but also repeated previously stated objections to the nomination process. The archivists group has suggested that Bush administration officials chose Weinstein for partisan reasons and said the public was not consulted on the matter. "Someone in the White House was pushing Carlin out the door at the same time they were trying to get Weinstein nominated," said Randall Jimerson, president of the archivists society. Members of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee heard from outside groups last year, including the National Coalition for History and ARMA International, before approving Weinstein for a vote by the full Senate. "We worked extensively with a number of organizations leading up to professor Weinstein's nomination," said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of the committee. "The groups we heard from were supportive of professor Weinstein's nomination to be archivist." The president can remove the archivist, but the law mandates that he must provide Congress with an explanation of his reasons, according to the Society of American Archivists. The group is concerned that Carlin, a Democrat and former Kansas governor, resigned without reason and that the new archivist was appointed to toe a party line, Jimerson said. Weinstein has made formal contact with Jimerson's organization and expressed a desire to collaborate on initiatives. "We see that as a hopeful sign of partnership and collaboration," Jimerson said, but added that "SAA never did endorse the nomination, nor did we oppose it. We wanted to highlight the fact that the nomination process was flawed." J. Timothy Sprehe, an information resources management consultant to federal agencies, initially decried Weinstein's nomination as a political move. "I'm less vocal now," Sprehe said today. If Weinstein can enforce his own agenda and remain autonomous of the Bush administration, he might be more qualified for the position than Carlin was, Sprehe added. "One key question will be what happens to the records of the 9-11 Commission? What happens to the public access of those records?" asked Sprehe, who writes a column for Federal Computer Week. Sprehe and Jimerson agreed that Weinstein's confirmation will not affect NARA's ambitious Electronic Records Archives program, which is in its infancy. "That's pretty much on track," Sprehe said. "It has widespread bipartisan support." Jimerson said, "I think that he has expressed commitment to the initiatives…and will continue to see the importance of the ERA efforts." FCW.com 2/16/05
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2005/0214/web-weinstein-02-15-05.asp
REED
ELSEVIER’S PROFIT CLIMBS
Anglo-Dutch publisher Reed Elsevier has posted a 1.7%
increase in full-year profits. The company, the world's largest publisher of
science journals, said on Thursday, adjusted pre-tax profit was £1.03 billion,
up from £1.01 billion a year earlier. Analysts on average expected an adjusted
pre-tax profit of £1.02 billion, with estimates ranging from £998 million to
£1.05 billion, according to a poll of 16 brokerages by Reuters Research.
Turnover slipped to £4.81 billion from £4.93 billion due in part to the weak
U.S. dollar, but was up 5% at constant currencies. BookTrade.info
2/17/05 Reuters
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050217/325/fco91.html
Senators John Cornyn and Patrick Leahy have introduced legislation that would close many loopholes left open by the current Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and take advantage of the Internet to more efficiently disseminate public information. The Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government (OPEN Government) Act aims to include Internet publications as part of fee waiver review, create an online tracking system for FOIA requests, and require reports from the Comptroller General on implementation of the Critical Information Infrastructure Act. February 16, 2005 Center for Democracy and Technology 2/16/05 http://www.cdt.org/ Text of S.394, The OPEN Government Act of 2005 [PDF]
EMERALD: LIBRARIES CAN GET CASH OR CREDIT
Following up on a recent statement from Emerald CEO Keith Howard, a company spokesperson said Emerald has devised a mechanism to compensate libraries with claims due to the publisher's duplication of articles. "If they are a subscriber, it will be a credit against current subscriptions," explained Emerald spokesperson Gillian Crawford. "If the claim is from someone who is not a current subscriber, cash compensation will be offered." Emerald recently conceded that it had republished 560 articles without proper attribution. However, Crawford also echoed Emerald CEO Keith Howard's defiant claims that the company, while perhaps making mistakes, did nothing wrong. Crawford also reiterated to the LJ Academic Newswire that "dual publication" took place as a method to "distribute articles of particular merit more widely" and as "an aid to recently acquired journals which were experiencing copy flow problems." Crawford explained that Emerald, previously known as MCB University Press, had acquired over 24 new titles between 1996 and 1999. That led to a spike in republication activity during that period, and confirmed Howard's statement that, prior to Cornell librarian Phil Davis's research, no customer had complained about the practice. Had Emerald received a complaint, she added, the practice would have stopped. Nevertheless, despite the lack of complaints, the publisher largely ended the practice by 1999. Library Journal Academic News Wire: February 17, 2005
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS CUTS POSITIONS TO CLOSE BUDGET GAP
Citing sagging book sales, the University of Nebraska Press has laid off six full-time employees and will move to smaller offices as part of a $500,000 budget cut officials say is needed to keep the press healthy. However, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Chancellor Harvey Perlman said the press's publishing program would not be affected. "This is not a crisis state," Perlman told the local JOURNAL-STAR. "But we needed to do something now rather than get into real difficulty." The layoffs came from business and marketing operations, not editorial staff. Perlman and press director Gary Dunham noted that that the press was not in the red but that, given sagging sales of academic books, the press preferred to head off potential losses. The layoffs, Dunham told reporters, would successfully make up most of the $500,000 the press will slash from its $6.5 million operating budget. About another $100,000 would be saved in the move to new offices; also, the press will eliminate some student positions and trim travel and advertising budgets. Library Journal Academic News Wire: February 17, 2005
PRESERVING THE EPHEMERAL
Works of digital and Internet art, and performance, conceptual and other ephemeral artistic expressions represent some of the most significant obstacles to accurate documentation, access and preservation. Long-term strategies for such works requires collaborative effort, which is the goal of the Archiving the Avant Garde project involving the University of California, Berkeley, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Guggenheim Museum, Cleveland Performance Art Festival and Archive, the Franklin Furnace Archive, and Rhizome.org. Project partners were chosen to represent a wide swath of expertise and experience, as well as diversity in location and scale. The final outcome will be a comprehensive strategy and model for documenting and preserving variable media works, based on case studies to illustrate "best practices." The group plans to develop new metadata standards to support preservation of such works, while at the same time ensuring the standards are consistent with other metadata standards in the arts and cultural heritage communities. (Archiving the Avant Garde, U. of California, Berkeley) ShelfLife, No. 194 (February 17, 2005) http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about_bampfa/avantgarde.html
BARRIERS TO DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP
Summarizing the conclusions of a panel convened by the Digital Library Federation (DLF) last summer to identify emerging needs in digital scholarship, David Seaman notes that one of the major barriers faced by scholars is the lack of persistent identifiers—permanent and trusted Internet addresses—for online objects: "How can you invest in rich, hyperlinked scholarly writing or scholar-driven archives if the material keeps moving to a new Web address, or disappearing altogether?" Other barriers: insufficient tools for gathering information from multiple sources, along with related metadata; searching images; visualizing patterns, trends and search results; annotating text, image and multimedia files; and writing the new scholarship authoring tools for the digital scholar. Scholars also voiced concern about ownership rights to their work, and said they want to be able to capture and reuse collections of digital objects in their own local contexts. (CLIR Issues Jan/Feb 2005) ShelfLife, No. 194 (February 17, 2005) http://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/issues43.html#panel
META SEARCH ENGINE FACTORS IN CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS
Watson, a new meta desktop search engine released by Intellext, forms contextually based queries that are designed to produce more relevant search results. "It understands the overall gist of what you're working on and selects terms of the query that you use over and over. It tempers that with what slide or paragraph you're on at that moment," says Intellext founder Jay Budzik. Once Watson figures out what the user is looking for, it goes out and rummages through indices created by other applications to offer additional suggestions. The advantage of the index-free approach is that it doesn't hog resources by creating filing systems that other applications have already produced, says Intellext CEO Al Wasserberger: "We don't want to index the Internet—or your desktop. There are lots of people that know how to do that. We leverage all third parties; we don't do it ourselves." Watson can gather results from Web sites, desktop search applications, online news sites, as well as subscriber services and search engines. In a corporate setting, the meta search engine also culls information from a company's corporate knowledge management system, databases and intranet. (InternetNews 4 Feb 2005) ShelfLife, No. 194 (February 17, 2005 http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3468611
SEEKING BETTER WEB SEARCHES
Deluged with superfluous responses to online queries, users will soon benefit from improved search engines that deliver customized results. Scientific American 2/05 http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=0006304A-37F4-11E8-B7F483414B7F0000
CIA SEIZES SENATOR JACKSON PAPERS
Five federal government officials, including three from the CIA, have removed several documents from the archival papers of the late Sen. Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson housed at the University of Washington. Last week the federal document security team spent three days in the special collections division of the UW Suzzallo-Allen library. The officials, which also included people from the Department of Defense and Department of Energy, combed through 1,200 boxes of material using a five-binder index to find the targeted papers. Carla Rickerson, head of special collections, said the team removed up to 10 documents. She would not disclose the exact number or subject matter of the documents because of the university's privacy policies. Rickerson said the papers, now considered classified, are being held in a secure location on campus until federal authorities declassify them. The majority of the Jackson papers span his years in Congress, the period of 1940 to 1983. A portion are drawn from his pre-congressional years when he worked as a private attorney in Everett and as the Snohomish County Prosecuting Attorney. Jackson was born in Everett and earned his lifelong nickname "Scoop" as a paper boy for The Everett Daily Herald. Jackson's widow, Helen, donated the collection to the university following the senator's death in 1983. At that time, a team of UW library staff removed classified information before making the files accessible. The massive collection includes Post-It notes, constituent letters, personal correspondence, official reports and photos. They cover a range of policy matters with a significant amount in Jackson's areas of expertise: national defense, foreign policy and the environment. Since the documents were made available to the public, hundreds of researchers have reviewed them to gain insight about Jackson's role as a public servant. HeraldNet 2/15/05 http://www.heraldnet.com/stories/05/02/15/100loc_jackson001.cfm
CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE TECHNOLOGY WATCH
The Cyberinfrastructure Partnership (CIP), a joint, NSF-funded effort of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), this week launched Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (CTWatch, http://www.ctwatch.org/). CTWatch is an online source of news, analysis, and commentary that aims to keep the national science and engineering research communities informed on, and involved in, the latest developments in shared cyberinfrastructure. Developed at the Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, under the leadership of ICL Director Jack Dongarra, CTWatch will offer its first quarterly issue on February 18. A companion blog, designed as a community forum for breaking news, provocative ideas, and interactive discussion, is slated for March. Each issue of CTWatch will center on a topic with currency and importance for the broad collection of communities and groups who are interested in cyberinfrastructure. The inaugural issue focuses on "Trends in High Performance Computing." In the first issue, Susan Graham, computer science professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mark Snir, head of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's computer science department, summarize and highlight the key elements of the recent report of the National Research Council on the future of supercomputing. In addition, the leaders of the Top500 team offer incisive analysis of the results of their latest survey. Dan Reed, director of the University of North Carolina's Renaissance Computing Institute, provides a community update on the influential work of the Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC); and Microsoft's Jim Gray and his colleagues argue for a new paradigm for data-intensive computational science. CTWatch is part of a coordinated endeavor by SDSC and NCSA to help define, create, and deploy a national cyberinfrastructure for science and engineering research. The need for an infrastructure to support next-generation research has never been greater. As the NSF Blue Ribbon Panel on Cyberinfrastructure concluded in 2003, emerging multi-disciplinary research environments and advanced science and engineering applications require a massive assemblage of hardware, software, and people. Moreover, organizations will need to work together to coordinate the shared use of computers, storage, networking, instruments, and visualization technologies serving a wide variety of communities. CNI Announce 2/20/05
ELSEVIER CEO: SCIENCE BOOKS VANISHING FROM REACH
Sir Crispin Davis, CEO OF Elsevier, writing in The Guardian: “University libraries represent the intellectual bedrock of Britain's academic institutions. They are an essential support to scholarly research and teaching. The last quarter century has seen exponential growth in academic productivity, especially in the sciences, and this has been accompanied by increases in the number and size of scientific, technical and medical journals, such as those published by Reed Elsevier. But with reduced funding for university libraries, their purchasing power has fallen in relative and absolute terms. Although university budgets have kept in step with inflation since the 1970s, and in many cases outpaced it, the proportion of the budgets allocated to libraries has fallen by about a quarter, from 4% to 3% of total spent. This is happening at a time when the vital role of science in our economy and culture is beginning to gain the recognition it deserves… The House of Commons science and technology select committee recently recommended that the government should commission a study to assess library funding levels and needs. We support this proposal. It could be that the government needs to lay down guidelines on the proportion of university funds that should be set aside for the acquisition of books and journals, or even increase funding to ensure that universities can buy all the material they need. After all, books and journals are the lifeblood of academic research. The strength of feeling on this issue among Britain's student population was revealed in a recent opinion poll conducted by Mori for this newspaper. When students were asked how universities should allocate the £3,000 in tuition fees they will receive from them next year, 31% of them, the largest group, suggested that the funds should be spent on libraries, ahead of security and access to technology. Britain's universities and colleges spend £82m a year on subscriptions to journals. This is less than 1% of their annual research budget, but it makes scientific articles available to more than 99% of researchers. But if the shortfall in funding is not addressed soon, access to the scientific literature is likely to begin rapidly to shrink. Reducing opportunities for scientists to access research would result in worse-informed scholarship, making it less likely that work will get published in prestige journals - or indeed be published at all. The chancellor's comments on the importance of science have been well publicised. His ambition is to make Britain the "home of scientific discovery in the industrial revolution, the country where scientific invention is fully valued and celebrated and, as we break with the short termism of the past, the best place for scientific inquiry and for research and development". If we are to continue to excel in science and maintain our leading role in this area, we must provide the resources the scientific community needs to foster its dynamic growth. Funding for libraries must not be left to lag behind the needs of researchers.” The Guardian 2/19/05 http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,9865,1418097,00.html
VANISHING INFORMATION RESOURCES
With almost every passing day, public access to yet another government information resource is extinguished. Like an exotic species or a nearly forgotten language that suddenly becomes extinct, its disappearance excites little attention or protest. But the cumulative effect of many such losses is bound to be significant. The latest official resource to vanish from the public domain is the U.S. Air Force "orbital element" database. These orbital elements, which characterize the orbits of satellites in Earth’s orbit, have been freely available to the public through NASA for nearly twenty years. Now they won't be. Secrecy News 2/22/05 http://www.agi.com/resources/tle/
Related background, updated February 18, is here:
http://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/notice.asp
ARIZONA STUDENT SENTENCED FOR COPYRIGHT VIOLATIONS
A student at the University of Arizona who pleaded guilty to unauthorized possession of copyrighted movies and music has been sentenced to three months in prison, three years' probation, and 200 hours of community service. The 18-year-old student, Parvin Dhaliwal, was also fined $5,400. Andrew Thomas, attorney for Maricopa County, noted that illegal possession of intellectual property is a felony. Thomas said some of the movies Dhaliwal had copies of were, at the time, only being shown in theaters. Dhaliwal was also ordered to take a copyright course at the University of Arizona and not to use file-sharing programs. Associated Press, 17 February 2005 Edupage, February 23, 2005 http://kvoa.com/Global/story.asp?S=2934754
The article "Quand Google défie l'Europe" (When Google challenges Europe) by Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the President of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in the 23 January Le Monde has been getting a lot of play recently in the Western press. (Just do a search for Jeanneney in your favorite news search engine.) Jeanneney complains that the Google's plans to digitize books from five libraries will necessarily reflect an Anglo-American view of the world, to the detriment of European culture and viewpoints. Jeanneney doesn't mention it, but I find it ironic that a copyright law that was supposed to protect European works may actually end up contributing to the problem and diminishing European cultural influence. We know that as many as 90% of the books published in the US between 1923 and 1963 are in the public domain, and in theory could be made freely available by Google. But thanks to the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, all books published in France during this period are protected by copyright in the US, and Google wouldn't be able to make them freely available even if they wanted to. Any national bias in the Google database is more likely to result from international treaties than from Western commercial interests. Mary Minow Law Library Blog 2/23/05
GOOGLE SCHOLAR PLAYS CATCH UP WITH PUBMED
Google Scholar is almost a full year behind in indexing PubMed records, writes Rita Vine, professional librarian, Web search trainer and Web site evaluator. "No serious researcher interested in current medical information or practice excellence should rely on Google Scholar for up to date information," says Vine. The problem is that many medical students and their faculty do, and academic librarians have been hard put to explain the deep limitations of these "quick, one-box tools like Google Scholar and other search engines." Vine says that while it's widely believed that Google Scholar searches current PubMed Medline records, its search capability tends to peter out after February-March 2004. In fact, in a test on the 2004-2005 period, Google delivered 29,500 records compared with PubMed's 658,000 over the same time period. "Google Scholar does not search Medline," says Vine. "It searches whatever Medline records NLM happened to give Google. We have no idea when NLM gave Google the records. We can't anticipate when the next batch will be delivered and the Google Scholar database updated. Remember, Google Scholar is just BETA. PubMed is… well, decidedly NOT beta, and full of the important checks and balances that make it so special." (SiteLines 8 Feb 2005) ShelfLife, No. 195 (February 24, 2005) http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_02.html#00282
The scholarly communications are also on line at TUhttp://www.library.uiuc.edu/administration/scholarly_communication/UT