Group items tagged

Abstract from the Website: "Provides a practical guide to gaining copyright clearance for making electronic copies of journal articles based on experience gained on the eLib project, Project ACORN. Includes tips on identifying and contacting copyright owners, elements to include in letters of approach, chase tactics, and dealing with refusals and charges."

Abstract from the Website: "This paper is the second in a series of studies (see Gadd, E., C. Oppenheim, and S. Probets. RoMEO Studies 1: The impact of copyright ownership on author-self-archiving. Journal of Documentation. 59(3) 243-277) emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers the protection for research papers afforded by UK copyright law, and by e-journal licences. It compares this with the protection required by academic authors for open-access research papers as discovered by the RoMEO academic author survey. The survey used the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) as a framework for collecting views from 542 academics as to the permissions, restrictions, and conditions they wanted to assert over their works. Responses from self-archivers and non-archivers are compared. Concludes that most academic authors are primarily interested in preserving their moral rights, and that the protection offered research papers by copyright law is way in excess of that required by most academics. It also raises concerns about the level of protection enforced by e-journal licence agreements"

This lengthy New York Times Magazine article discusses mass scanning projects and their impacts in many areas: linking, tagging, and accessibility, among others. Ultimately, author Kevin Kelly imagines that all digitized books will be linked together as on universal book. He discusses the impact of copyright law on existing works and the inevitable out of print "orphans," and Google's plan to scan all the orphans and allow snippets to be accessed under the fair use doctrine. This assumption by Google that it can scan first and find copyright owners later results in a lawsuit that the author describes as a "clash of business models." Business models based on copies are obsolete as business models based on value and searchability take their places.

Quoted directly from the introductory paragraphs of the article, "This article offers some perspectives on GPLP in light of what is known about library print book collections in general, and those of the Google 5 in particular, from information in OCLC's WorldCat bibliographic database and holdings file. Questions addressed include: * Coverage: What proportion of the system-wide print book collection will GPLP potentially cover? What is the degree of holdings overlap across the print book collections of the five participating libraries? * Language: What is the distribution of languages associated with the print books held by the GPLP libraries? Which languages are predominant? * Copyright: What proportion of the GPLP libraries' print book holdings are out of copyright? * Works: How many distinct works are represented in the holdings of the GPLP libraries? How does a focus on works impact coverage and holdings overlap? * Convergence: What are the effects on coverage of using a different set of five libraries? What are the effects of adding the holdings of additional libraries to those of the GPLP libraries, and how do these effects vary by library type?"

This is the Website for the Universal Digital Library project at Carnegie Mellon University. The "Copyright Policy" page clearly spells out how the project adheres to the existing copyright law, and provides information for authors who either want to add their work to the project or have it removed. It is interesting that this project allows for self-publication.

How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online. The authors and publishers objected that digitizing constituted a violation of their copyrights. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future. What will that future be?

This is a lengthy 2005 article on Google's digital book preservation initiative. Google has undertaken an ambitious project, and the author details how exactly the books digitally preserved, how they are cataloged, and how ancient handwritten books are transformed into searchable text. At the time this article was written, it was still unknown as to what Google planned on doing with all the books it digitized and various options are discussed. Policy issues are touched on very lightly, other than the books added to the digital collection are largely those which are not protected by copyright law.

print on demand Espresso machine

This is an interesting twist on providing access to books: allowing patrons to print their own copy. This article describes a machine that prints and binds books on demand, allowing students and professors to make their own textbooks or study materials for far less than traditional textbooks. Texts must with within copyright regulations and must be in pdf format. While not technically a print-to-digital issue, the texts must be digitized before printing.

Blog entry by Georgia Harper about the implications of the Copyright Act and the inability to copy orphan works.

"The prospect of ubiquitous digitization will not change the fundamental relationships among scholarship, academic libraries, and publication. Collaboration across time and space, which is a principal mechanism of scholarship, ought to be enhanced. Reforms in copyright law will be required if the promise of digitization is to be realized; absent such reform, there is a serious risk that much academically valuable material will become invisible and unused. Ubiquitous digitization will change radically the economics that have supported university-based collections of published material. Scholars and scholarly institutions (including libraries and university presses) must assert vigorously claims of fair use and openness."

This is the final report of the JISC EI-ASPM Project, which was commissioned by JISC to explore whether there are new opportunities and new models for scholarly publishing that would better serve researchers and better communicate and disseminate research findings." />www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx

This is a summary of the problems presented in the development of digital libraries. it presents some examples of library conversions, and raises some questions that may be relevant to our study.

This is an in-depth study conducted by the Library of Congress over a period of years to discover and address the issues raised by conversion to digital media. Interestingly, this study is published as an e-book that is freely readable on the web, but must be purchased for download. I just tagged this with each of the main headers because there are chapters in this book that discuss all aspects of our project.

Key idea: "The historical narratives that future historians write may not actually look much different from those that are crafted today, but the methodologies they use may need to change radically. If we have, for example, a complete record of everything

This is a great article that looks at the preservation of the cultural and historical record from a historian's perspective. He tackles such questions as how do we establish trust in intangible "documents?" How do we preserve the historical record in such a way that future people can access the materials?

Scholarly Publishing The Electronic Frontier Robin P. Peek and Gregory B. Newby Scholarly publishing is changing and the changes will have an impact on all members of the academic community and on how they will go about creating and maintaining scholarship. Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier examines the critical issues facing universities, academics, libraries, and scholarly presses in the turbulent time when publishing is likely moving from a print to an electronic paradigm. The essays by all of the major participants in this "electronic revolution" explore the technical, social, and organizational impact of computer-mediated communication. They examine both ends of the continuum and everything in between-from how the system might be completely overhauled to a gradual retrenching where much remains the same but paper is no longer the communication medium. Some of the subjects, implicit in the various possible futures for scholarly publishing and covered here, include the role of the library with respect to electronic publications, protection of intellectual and economic property, and plagiarism.

The scholarly monograph has been compared to the Hapsburg monarchy in that it seems to have been in decline forever! Many publishers, university administrators and academic researchers are still largely wedded to historical and Balkanized Web 1.0 monograph settings. While the ramifications of the fall of the Hapsburg empire are still being felt today in geopolitical terms, university presses can rise phoenix-like through 21st century digital environments and the reworking of scholarly communication frameworks. New e-press developments will provide greater accessibility to scholarly monographic content. Peer-reviewed, digitally constructed monographs, available within open scholarship institutional frameworks, will increasingly be the 2.0 and 3.0 models for scholarly publishing.

Video of symposium held at Texas A&M in Feb. 2009. Excellent group of speakers!