Some Thoughts on Academic Publishing

Can I really educate the world

2010-04-20T09:22:00.001-04:00

In the middle of the night Diana told me I need to write or teach. I agree. I need more time.

lies in Fouteen40 press release

2008-04-11T10:16:00.002-04:00

I really hate when people lie. And I hate it even more when the press reproduces those lies.
For example Bryce Johnson of Fourteen40 in a press release about selling his company to Folletts is quoted as saying he came up with the idea about a year ago. Well they pitched my employer about a year ago so I did some research and discovered that they have been failing in the ebook space.
http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=41458

Many of the pages I found at that time seem to have disappeared, or are buried under the new stories about the acquisition.

But here is one. http://www.vcsmart.com/2006/02/fourteen40.html

Not that the product being over a year old makes it bad. But why lie.

Trip Report:Google and Libraries: An international Conference

2008-03-13T14:05:00.000-04:00

Trip Report: Google and Libraries: An international Conference

From
Timothy Murray

On March 10^th I attended Google and Libraries An international Conference Held at Columbia University in New York City.

The Key note was delivered by Yakov Shraiber of International Library Information and Analytical Center

http://www.iliac.org/ This talk highlighted the rapid growth of Google in Russia. Google has only been in Russia for two years and now is the second most used search in Russia and has 30% of all searches in the Russian language.

The national libraies of Russia are engaged in large scale digitization projects and are making content freely available online. These projects are complicated by Russia’s recent decision to conform their copyright law to those of the EU.

Jill Cirasella of Brooklyn College Library gave a presentation on the use of online tools in the library.

The presentation is available:

http://userhome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/cirasella/Presentations/ReferenceRetooled.html

A couple of key point from her presentation and the audience comments.

Librarians use Google often as their first resource.

Librarians teach end users to use Google.

Librarians have expertise at using a variety of research tools and are experts at using Google.

Patrons often bypass the reference librarian and conduct Google searches on their own. Which means that it is increasingly true that if it is not in Google it does not exist.

This community of expert searchers fundamentally believe that Google is a superior tool to the clunky databases of the past.

If there are complaints they are mostly about the fact that Google books points patrons to the Google books version rather than the libraries own version. Which is problematic for the libraries who are allowing Google to scan their books.

Many comments were made about the less than Prefect quality of the Scans.

Other Comments:

Ross Daly of the Metropolitan Museum Commented that Google has a very limited commitment to preservation.
Patricia Thurston of Yale Commented on the Web 2.0 tools being used at her institution to instruct students in new ways of gathering and disseminating information.
Hugh Truslow of Harvard’s Davis Center Commented that This may be the one and only time much of the information in libraries is ever digitized and that if it is done badly some information will be effectively permanently lost to posterity.
Siva Vaidhyanathan of the University of Virginia gave examples of how Faculty at the University of Virginia are using tools such as Google Docs and blogs to replace expensive course management systems.

There was excitement in general about the Google Links program for Google Scholar which allows libraries to tell Google what their holdings and IP ranges are and then in turn Google Scholar patron to the libraries link resolver which points them the library designated appropriate copy. The only concern here was that books are not included and users are instead directed to Google Books first.

Laura Quilter is a lawyer who has been using US laws which require state funded institutions to make contracts public (“Sunshine Laws”) to research and examine the details of the contracts Universities have signed with Google for the digitization of materials. What she reported was troubling to the audience. The contracts are restrictive and do not guarantee the delivery of usable files back to the libraries in some cases. The more recent agreements with California are an improvement.

Google is in control of the selection process. Which means that libraries that join the program later have a very fragmented collection returned to them.

They also found fault with Google Copyright policy. Google assumes that everything with a publication date after 1923 is copyrighted even though it may be public domain or government publications which can not be copyrighted.

In general the room felt that the best thing about Google book is that it stimulated other digitization projects.

http://lquilter.net/professional/prof-detail.php#talks

The Final Speaker, Siva Vaidhyanathan of the University of Virginia, and author of The Googlization of Everything.

http://www.googlizationofeverything.com/

Siva Spoke a length about the implications of Google for society at large, but many of the fascination points he made were not relevant either academic publishing or librarianship.

Features for electronic books

2008-03-07T14:19:00.002-05:00

Last week I was in the UK talking with a colleague about what the future of electronic books will be.

I believe that this paper is addressing in a more abstract way than my talk about an abstract page for books or book-parts, one of my key points.
The point is that scholarly works need to be citable and addressable. (I am hugely antagonistic of IRs which are mentioned and seem to be foundational to the ORE technology)

And I think this is in some ways on on the topic of what he thinks is important about updates to a book.

Metered Billing for online content

2008-03-06T10:54:00.002-05:00

I just read an interesting case study for metered access to online content in Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community
Pay-per-view article access: a viable replacement for subscriptions?

Apparently Trinity saved more money than they planned to save. Some people who I respect have for a number of years now held the belief that a shift to use based pricing for online journals. But the community of libraries and publishers know that the short term outcome of such a shift would need to be relatively revenue neutral. (As the shift from print to online was. And some publishers created insurance of this during the transition by basing online pricing on past print spend at least for the transition.)

The Trinity case shows an example where the total spend with Elsevier declined by even more than was intended. They attribute this in part to who at Trinity was authorized (students has to ask a librarian). This was not a revenue neutral transition. And it was also not access neutral. The students effectively lost access.

There really is a fixed pool of money available for serials. This can shift from publisher to publisher or bypass the library by going into open access fees but the academic market is not apt to grow much (in North America or Europe) and may well collapse (I may post about his in the future. ) So for the short term any transition to use based pricing needs to be modeled in an environment that has a relatively stable equilibrium. I do not believe metered billing can be introduced on a large scale in a way that will provide the kinds of guarantees that are needed to change the business model generally.

I have in the past been involved with efforts to implement metered billing and believe that as a business model it is an effective way for publishers to compete for a libraries last dollar but not its first.

The copyright police are all over the place

2007-12-06T09:33:00.001-05:00

First of all I can not believe how much attention goes to copyright as opposed to war mongering in Iran. It is all out of proportion.

So there is a house bill "The College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007" Which got some play in the tech-press here and here. But this was actually a sad sort of spin off of a different weird and totally wrong idea. Which was on the mp3 insider podcast in late summer 2007 as a rumor. The rumor was that the RIAA would get government to force the makers of mp3 players to pay a fee to the RIAA. (sort of like what the BBC does in the UK where everyone who owns a TV is supposed to pay some fee annually.)

The COAA even got on to some academic news with Digital Campus Episode 16 - Steal This E-Book. But there is a real war going on. Today Declan McCullagh writes about a second piece of legislation.

A couple of things about my media. I own and iPod and a Samsung Yepp 256mb mp3 player. I spent a month ripping CDs to the iPod format. But have listened to maybe 4 hours of music on these players ever. I use my players for playing free (but yes they are copyrighted) podcasts and material from iTunesU. With TV I don't watch commercials but with the iPod I do (hey HP the commercials for the Blackbird on Webb Alert really got my attention). Come to think of it I only watched about an hour of TV in the last two weeks. If I had to pay some fee when I bought these players to the RIAA or the MPAA it would have been extortion. I also Pay for some content as a full subscriber to Air America Premium and until recently a subscriber to TimesSelect A not on times select the most valuable feature was the podcasts but my wife and I had decided over the summer that we would not renew even before the cancellation of the service (why because the NY Times does such a lousy job).

Speaking of Webb Alert there was an item this morning about Nilsen selling some sort of files for use in digital fingerprinting. And then there was
Steve Jobs pitching "premium," iPod-loadable DVDs on Boing Boing.

None of this will of course compare to the attention devoted to the kindle. Or for that matter the faux format war between blu-ray and Hd-dvd.

And then there are the triumphalists who say that DRM will soon be gone. They are wrong. DRM will continue for many years to come and we will find that it invades more and more of what we do. If the technology gets better and interferes less with what they want us to do then it will expand and expand. Think about the Marlin initiative. They have a spec and some diagrams. I am doubtful that anyone will ever be able to make software that can talk to so many devices in such a complex way.

And there is the rub. There are so many legitimate uses of content, and so many devices to play/read content on, that DRM is always software blocking legitimate use. And then there is service to history. In my professional life my customers are librarians and archivists. And they know the importance and the challenges of being able to access digital content even when there is no DRM. Formats evolve media degrades. Software becomes incompatible and obsolete. Throw in DRM and their jobs are a nightmare.

Let's think about major league baseball for a moment.

2007-11-07T17:04:00.000-05:00

I know this post is a year old but I could not find a description of WOWIO on the WOWIO site Wowio: It All Ads Up

So a book with adds. I was thinking about this and all of the ad supported business models being floated lately (reminds me a bit of 1999 before the dot com crash) and I was thinking about the previous post I made today.

Advertising has no future. Machines will do what they do and they will chose what we buy and there will be no point in fighting for our attention because we will have no money because why pay people to do thing a machine can do.

There are manny among us who sense the arrival of the Borg

2007-11-07T15:47:00.000-05:00

I just read a post on the Oxford University Press Blog which is typically non-committal on privacy.Privacy in Peril?
Then I clicked to the author page for James B. Rule and saw that he also wrote �Bait and Switch� (on the alleged WMDs in Iraq), Dissent, Spring 2004.

So why the title of this post. Well, I am one of those who feel a connection and (maybe some are making it more intellectually than I) between the illegal warrantless wiretaps Ad networks and the credit rating agencies. TRW etc. As James Rule points out, it is not that any specific step in the tracking is so objectionable it is that the tracking is so pervasive and systematic.

I had this vision as I read of an 18 year old at the shoe store glancing at a screen on the cash register to find out a bit about me before coming to offer me help. And I though well that migh be good. Then I saw some things wrong with that picture. First the word 'Cash' attached machine for paying. Second training an 18 year old to be curious. Third, why have an employee at all. The machine probably knows my size already. Finally I thought for a moment about the screen on the register. When I worked retail the screen was a green dot matrix sort of display. I'm seeing the beginnings of real technology that eliminates the need for screens between people and information. Brain-computer interface for Second Life

My world is changing fast and I'm not sure that my imagination is sufficient to guess what the world will be like for two children.

Have you ever taken a survey and found that none of the possible answers to any of the questions make any sense

2007-11-07T13:45:00.002-05:00

http://www.marketintellnowstore.com/anebsurean.html

Now I have a reason to create a FaceBook page

2007-10-26T17:25:00.000-04:00

This article is a bit tongue in cheek, but it include some numbers from a real polling firm, and if the numbers are real then Colbert has lots of myspace friends.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003663830

registration required (every few months it seems)

2007-10-24T07:05:00.000-04:00

On election night 2004 I was following the results hopefully clicking from site to site. Seeing news about polls being kept open by a judge in Missouri and voting machine malfunctioning Ohio. The the signature experience of the evening (other than the deep morbidity that set in the next morning when the results sank in) was registration required newspaper websites. I kept following links from blogs to this or that story and many sites required registration. This was frustrating as my primary email was not webmail. My hard drive based emails were set up on different PCs all over the house. And the speed of these emails was a problem.

By election night 2006 I had a plan. and I had set up accounts with major regional papers. This helped, in addition I read a lot on the web about Intellectual property and technology, and have registered with countless sites. (meaning I stopped counting). I understand that these sites need to know a little about me before they give me the content for free. I respect their business model and feel that it is a fair exchange.

BUT why do they keep forgetting me?! I'm not talking about OpenID. I'm annoyed by these sites not recognizing my username/email/passwords anymore. Do they wipe their databases every 3 months? that is what it seems like. I have been involved with several website migration that included a great deal of effort put into migrating user credentials. And some where the leadership determined that migrating the users was not worth the effort.

I would imagine that the quarterly academic journal websites that I work on cause this same level of frustration.

I would like to say that 15 years after the creation of the world wide web we should do better! And the business leadership ought to recognize the impact to their marketing teams, customers and end users when they say that it is ok to replace the login credentials every two years along with a graphic redesign.

I someone is getting really good at target marketing

2007-09-30T23:05:00.000-04:00

Everything you’ve read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 1) by ZDNet's Ed Bott -- Self-described "professional paranoid" Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland has become the most widely quoted source of information on DRM and content protection in Windows Vista. The trouble is, Gutmann's work is riddled with factual errors, distortions, contradictions, and outright untruths, and his conclusions are equally wrong. In this three-part series, I'll show you why Gutmann's outrageous and inflamatory arguments don't stand up to close scrutiny.

Copyright / Columbia journalism review / Pew research

2007-09-06T16:33:00.000-04:00

Fair use is not a consumer right | Perspectives | CNET News.com

http://news.com.com/2010-1030-6205977.html?tag=tb

I'll Start with a quote from the article:
Still others, including some uses within the home, may not be specifically designated fair use by a court, and may or may not qualify if put to the test, but are generally not the subject of legal challenges by a copyright owner.
Mr. Ross is saying in this one sentence that:
1. Watch what you do in your home we are watching you!
2. There is no way to know if you have a right to anything unless you get sued. Because as he said earlier there is no affirmative right.
3. Just because people have not historically generally been sued for what they do int their homes doesn't mean we won't come after you now.

Wow! I make a living in the the publishing industry and believe strongly in copyright but this is absurd, belligerent and threatening. And Ok it is a response to a lawsuit so maybe that is why it is so bellicose in tone. But Ross is actually threatening that a copyright holder can come after you for what you do in your home and implying that since he denies there is any such right as fair use any use should be assumed by the authorities to be infringing use.

Ross is wrong! For exactly the reason he says the other side is wrong. Use is rarely infringing unless it interferes with a right holders ability to commercialize their rights.

On another note I disagree with may of the comm enters who object to CNET posting this. Intellectual Property and Copyright are issues fundamental to our society and there are very important dialogs underway regarding how (if at all) current technology change them. The lawsuit, Ross's bizarre assertions and many more points of view will make much more interesting water cooler conversation than what other media put out there.

What Kind of News do People Really Want?

Publishers librarians and google

2007-07-19T15:06:00.000-04:00

I once heard a C level executive at an international publishing company describe the platform hosting the online version of over 1800 of his journals as simply a fulfillment system. In fact it is but in the online world the publishers role is much larger. Librarians, publishers, and Google all claim as part of their mission organizing information.

When an end user goes to a university library and uses a z39.50 enable federated search gateway to find content the holdings knowledge base will direct them to the appropriate copy on some platform where the IP address is recognized as coming from a university and the user is given access to the content they have found. and in that content there are scholarly citations to other content and the platform builds an OpenURL link back to the Library's link resolver which again looks in the holdings database and directs the user to the appropriate copy of the second conten item.

I have spent a good part of the last ten years getting this system to the point where it sometimes works. But How many users really begin at the OPAC? And even if they do how do social bookmarking and tagging sites fit into the appropriate copy discussion? For journals it is rare for the same content to be hosted in more that three or four systems. and the vast majority of access controlled journals are hosted in fewer. And then there are books. As book content increasingly goes online and records for those same books are distributed in ONIX or Marc21 to hundreds of websites how is the appropriate copy issue ever to be addressed.

The answer is publishers. Publishers are not irrelevant. They have new and very important roles to play in the organization promotion and distribution of content. We have special standing with at least Google and microsoft and their respective academic and books sub-platforms. because as publishers we have engaged in special arrangements though cloaking and CrossRef and distribution of full text books to these entities. And are thus able to get first among equals treatment from these search engines.

These links come to the publisher controlled version of the landing page as do links in the references sections of other publishers articles through CrossRef. One interpretation is that the end user is at least as likely to come to the publishers page first as they are to go to the librarian hosted page. But the librarian is the customer and the publisher wants usage Final Report on the Investigation into the Feasibility of Developing and Implementing Journal Usage Factors . The publisher should recognize this and provide an OpenURL link back to the link resolver. And to do this the publisher will have to put access authentication on their catalog. But it would be silly to send then to the OPAC only to have the use sent right back to the publisher site to get the content so the catalog also needs an entitlements system.

We have a lot of work to do to get the knowledge bases and COUNTER reports for books in place but the Google mediated world makes the role of the publisher in provisioning content to a library and its patrons is as important as ever.

Death to Cell Phones long live the iPhone (or not)

2007-07-06T15:04:00.000-04:00

Firstly, even though this is the first post on this blog it is not the first post of my blog I seem to have misplaced the other blog.

So I have been doing some thinking lately, some about how unreliable my WiFi is and some about how unreliable my cable modem is (which makes my VoIP phone pretty unreliable).

And of course I have been like so many others lusting for an iPhone.

Then I saw this and it all came together:

The day the iPhone turned into a web surfin’ iPod
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/13362/1103/

And I thought about it some more and looked up links to some of what I have been reading listening to.

T-Mobile says hello to Wi-Fi calling service
http://news.com.com/T-Mobile+says+hello+to+Wi-Fi+calling+service/2100-1039_3-6193517.html?tag=item#talkback

Verizon technology chief talks fiber
http://news.com.com/Verizon+technology+chief+talks+fiber/2008-1033_3-6195106.html?tag=item

IPhone-Free Cellphone News
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/technology/circuits/05pogue.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

Mobile Malcontent
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/03/02/04

So if I can get a Fios highspeed from verizon that is more reliable than the Time Warner cable (I Use Direct TV for the TV and DVR) I could get an iPhone and have a nice little device (much more convenient for surfing in bed than a laptop. and it would still be a phone when hooked in to the WiFi.