MPC Publog

Times' Heavy-Handed Attack on Textbook Publishers

2007-05-01T13:02:00.000-05:00

I was taken aback to read this one-sided editorial in the New York Times applauding Washington state's proposed law that would require publishers to disclose prices to professors considering adopting textbooks and exhorting colleges and universities to become publishers themselves to save students from those money-grubbing textbook peddlers. (Well, the editorial didn't literally call them that, but the implication was there.)

I don't disagree with the wisdom of professors taking the cost of a textbook into consideration when they adopt it. I know when I taught college courses I was very aware of the cost of the materials I asked my students to buy, and I guess I assumed that other instructors and professors would do the same. Perhaps not. But whoa folks....Hold the venom.

This position is an odd one for the Times, a profitable publisher, to take. The editorial calls textbook revisions "constant issuing of lucrative but little changed new editions — publishing’s version of planned obsolescence." It also complains that new costly electronic resources that publishers provide (for no additional charge) are "marginally useful."

As I've said many times before and as I'll doubtless say many times again, when other organizations (like libraries and universities) become publishers, they start to smell and act like publishers. They start to have expenses like publishers. They start to charge like publishers. I say, let the competition begin. If somebody can provide high quality educational material for less money, have at it.

Maybe publishers can become more efficient. The market can decide what's useful (electronic materials) and what isn't. Bring it on. But let's stop villifying an industry that is providing valuable products and services and creating a more educated public.

The Plural of Anecdote is Data

2007-04-27T09:07:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the most memorable quote of the STM meeting was dropped by MIT Sloan School of Management Economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who directs the Center for Digital Business. (It turns out the quote is attributable to Berkeley Political Scientist Raymond Wolfinger, who apparently coined it in the 60s or 70s. Lots of people quote its opposite [The plural of anecdote is NOT data] and try to attribute the source of that quote...Isn't Google great for trivia questions?)

Of course, his talk had a lot more going for it: he presented an analysis of information flows in organizations and correlated individuals at the hub of information exchanges with higher revenue-producing employees. (Again somewhat counterintuitive, I suppose depending on the industry.) In the executive recruiter industry he presented, it makes sense that those who are at the center of communication may also be the biggest rainmakers or producers as the industry is by definition about networking.

Measuring productivity among knowledge workers was another main theme of the talk. He noted wryly that the simple equation productivity = output/input suffers only from the difficulty of measuring, well, inputs and outputs. (It did remind us, however, that working longer hours doesn't increase productivity, because you are increasing input...)

He summarized the best practices of digital firms, many of which seem to be common sense (e.g. "Hire the best people") but described more fully ways to implement them (Set up rigorous screening and extensive interview processes.)

The Bizarre Wisdom of Crowds

2007-04-27T09:02:00.000-05:00

At the spring STM meeting (that's the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers) in Cambridge, Massachusetts this week, University of Chicago Law School Professor Cass Sunstein explained the somewhat counterintutive results of the accuracy of group predictions. For example, where more than 50% of a group has some knowledge about a topic, as the group gets larger, the average of the individual's predictions will approach 100% accuracy. Where fewer than 50% have the necessary expertise or information, the average prediction will likely fail. Examples of successes in this area include Oscar winners, presidential elections, the number of jelly beans in a jar, and horse races. A notable failure was predicting Bush's Supreme Court candidates.

Perhaps even more interesting is that prediction markets are more accurate than surveys, perhaps because people have to "buy into" them, so a self-selected group of people who think they know something participate, increasing the chances of hitting the greater than 50% expertise level.

And surveys are more accurate than deliberative processes, because people, even if they are not informed, are making their own predictions and not being swayed by group dynamics.

One of the surprising side effects is that boards of directors tend to be most effective when they are contentious! In such cases, presumably, the board members continue to think for themselves, despite the strong opinions of others.

A caveat of these markets is that they only work where the outcome is ultimately measurable. Companies are beginning to use prediction markets internally for sales forecasting and validating product launch dates.

This one one of several examples from the meeting of a valuable talk outside the typical scope of scholarly publishing presentations.

Life in a Start-up

2007-04-20T10:35:00.001-05:00

Anne Orens, somebody I've known and respected for almost 15 years since we met at Little, Brown & Company, is the Chief Marketing Officer of a start-up company called Tizra, which is creating software to automate web publishing. Anne gave me a demo a few months ago, and from what I could see, the applications go far beyond scholarly publishing.

This Forbes article provides a glimpse into life at Tizra in the post-dot.com apocalypse world of start-ups. As an independent consultant with a home office, I can appreciate the perks and pitfalls of barking dogs, children doing homework, and the bathrobe dress code.

It looks like funding is on its way. Worth a look.

E-Journal Archiving Gets Real

2007-04-09T14:19:00.000-05:00

Portico, the electronical journal archiving organization associated with JSTOR, Mellon, and Ithaka, continues to sign new publishers, according to Publisher Relations Director Toni Tracy. Portico has agreements with some 30 publishers to archive all of their peer reviewed material and 340 participating libraries.

Portico's approach is to ingest and standardize the publisher. This approach is different from the CLOCKSS approach, which caches images from publishers' web pages. The fomer will preserve the content, but not the functionality or design. The latter will preserve the publisher's look and feel. Both organizations commit to migrate the technology and content over time to preserve access.

With both Portico and CLOCKSS, the archive is intended to remain dark until a "trigger event" opens it up. The event may be the discontinuation of a publication, a publisher going out of business, or, in certain cases, the cancellation of a subscription. Portico is now live and ingesting content. CLOCKS is operating a limite two-year trial, after which, the plans are to open the project up to wider participation.

It is good to see concrete progress in the field of archiving electronic journals. As Tim Berners-Lee admonished at CrossRef's annual meeting in November, publishers need to make a will. Nobody likes to think that their organization will not survive. But the prudent course is to plan for demise, and work to make sure the archive remains dark.

My Favorite Web Apps

2007-04-05T15:15:00.001-05:00

I've been spending a lot of time on web applications lately, and they are great. In my business, volunteer, and personal lives, I find the range and quality of the offerings to be impressive.

I love Constant Contact for email campaigns. I'm addicted to the reports that you can download. Wearing one of my other hats, as a volunteer for my local Girl Scout service team, I love the Patriot's Trail Girl Scout Council's eCouncil app. (Well, I don't love that it doesn't support Firefox. For that matter, neither does Sovereign Bank's online banking system. Boo). Both Constant Contact and eCouncil allow me to download data into Excel where I can analyze and slice & dice using pivot tables and such.

I also rely on yahoo groups to maintain email lists, links and file libraries for several organizations I help to manage. I also love uploading my photos to Snapfish, sharing them, and letting others pay for their own prints if they want them. I used to order double prints, painstaking label them all and send them off to my family. They probably didn't even want most of them.

The drawback to both of those apps is that the people I'm sharing with are not always web-savvy, or they don't want to have to sign up for something. I find myself doing technical support for them, or I lose them altogether.

Another app I've used but don't have that much use for is business networking site LinkedIn. I've spent my considerable career building up contacts. I'm not sure I want to just give them away. So I will not upload my Outlook contacts file to LinkedIn. I also hesitate to spam people with LinkedIn invitations, so I've taken the approach of only connecting to people who are already in the network.

Finally, I just happily signed up for a Mozy online backup account. Mozy now backs up my data whenever my computer is idle for 30 minutes or more. A few years ago I spent thousands of dollars saving data from a hard drive crash. I never want to go through that again, but setting up a local backup proved to be complicated. A backup that doesn't get run is no backup at all.

So hooray for web apps. Long may they thrive!

XML ebook

2007-04-03T10:01:00.001-05:00

AIP has released a free ebook entitled: XML: What's It Good For by Tim Ingoldsby. Based on a well-received talk Tim gave at the Council of Scientific and Engineering Societies Executives (CESSE), the ebook describes the benefits of XML to publishers including a number of examples, from reference linking to new product development.

Disclosure: I helped AIP put the ebook together.

Really Direct Mail

2007-04-02T10:44:00.000-05:00

I've decided I love email newsletters. As a recipient I appreciate that they don't clog up my mail table, they don't kill trees, they're easy to act on (or delete), share, and most importantly, unsubscribe from. I wish I could say the same for snail mail.

As a sender (I create newsletters for clients) I can track who opens them, forwards them, clicks on them, or contacts us. They are everything direct mail is supposed to be, but isn't--trackable. And, the response rates are generally MUCH better than printed mailings.

Of course, you have to do it right: use permissioned lists (opt-ins), provide something of value, write a good subject line, time the release properly, and, of course, comply with the CAN-SPAM and other applicable laws.

What's not to love? Accountability and higher reach at a lower cost. Count me in.

A New Appreciation for Archivists

2007-03-19T08:20:00.001-05:00

I spent the weekend wading through crumbling remnants of a life: photographs and letters from my Mom's trunk. It was a personal history lesson, and it was also overwhelming. She saved this stuff for 70 years; some seems like trash to me, but maybe it has some hidden significance. How to decide? An archivist would know.

Coincidentally, the New York Times today has an editorial by author David Kahn about the need to adequately fund the National Archives, which has a backlog, er "document surplus," and is struggling to process documents, answer information requests, and provide customer service to researchers. Seems like an activity worth funding.

What's Missing from Institutional Repositories

2007-03-14T11:34:00.000-05:00

Cornell PhD students Philip Davis and Matthew Connolly in their D-Lib article "Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace" describe a picture of faculty apathy towards the institutional repository (IR) at Cornell.

After a balanced description of the camps advocating IRs (not easy to do in this day and age), the authors describe some of the reasons faculty don't deposit research in the DSpace IR at Cornell:

1. Faculty prefer to be associated with their research field rather than their institution.

2. Faculty may be concerned about how the practice of depositing articles in an IR will affect their chances to be published in an archival journal, which is still very important to them.

3. Faculty may work in a field where early dissemination of results is not desirable, either for reasons of competition or of completenss, accuracy and quality.

4. Faculty may find the IR technology more difficult or less convenient than posting to a personal or departmental web page.

The authors found that the culture of researcher's discipline was an important component to the use of the IR. For example, the library collection is one area of Cornell's IR that is seeing steady growth. Presumably, the librarians are the most familiar and supportive of the IR, and so use it for their materials.

This study presents actual data (how refreshing) on how it's really going with IRs. Proponents can use the information here to make IRs more successful. Detractors can use it to say they are failing.

The authors don't talk about it, but I think what's really missing here is marketing. People (researchers included) will generally take advantage of a tool, service, or system that benefits them if they know about it. Until IRs have a sense of importance or imprimateur, or unless they provide a place to put stuff that has no other home (teaching materials, grey literature, datasets), it doesn't suprise me that they are underutilized.

Marketing? Isn't that something publishers are pretty good at? But it takes resources.

Once again, we see that as libraries take on the traditional roles of publishers, they need to become more like publishers in order to succeed.

Sue Google Over Copyright? Get In Line

2007-03-13T10:59:00.000-05:00

You've undoubtedly seen that Viacom is suing Google over widespread copyright infringement on Google's recent acquisition YouTube. YouTube has been happy to cooperate in removing infringing content once reported, but has aip.org/publishingservices/ebook/AIPXMLebook.pdfbeen unable (unwilling?) to take resonsibility for prohibiting users from posting infringing material.

Does this sound a little familiar? Like publishers suing Google over violating copyright by digitizing books, and Google responding that they'd be happy to exclude any works that they get requests to omit or remove? Except in Google Book Search, it's Google itself that will be doing the deed, not the clueless masses.

Another difference is that YouTube has reached licencing agreements with other content providers, but that talks with Viacom had recently broken down. Not the same approach as that taken with publishers.

Hmmmm....

Why Libraries Matter

2007-03-13T09:40:00.000-05:00

Just came across this piece, "Are Librarians Totally Obsolete? 33 Reasons Why Libraries and Librarians are Still Extremely Important"

Writer Will Sherman compares the role of librarians to good web moderators: "the role of the moderator very much parallels the role of the librarian: to safeguard an environment in which knowledge can be accessed and ideas can be shared."

My favorite reason is Number 23: "The internet is a mess." I used to tell my students that the internet was like a library where someone threw all the books on the floor. (I couldn't remember where I stole that from so, of course I Googled it, and according to this site [Check section 8.12] lots of other people have stolen it too.)

Sherman talks a LOT about Google Book Search and doesn't even mention open access ("Number 3: The internet isn’t free" would have been an appropriate place.) Still for librarians and those of us who value them, it's worth a read.

For parents who know the book Officer Buckle and Gloria by Peggy Rathman or the video performance, I can't get the idea out of my head of John Lithgow reading out the reasons in a sonorous voice ad infinitum. (In the story, Officer Buckle reads lists of safety rules....)

(Credit to j's scratchpad for leading me to the article.)

5 Tips for Creating Case Studies with Impact

2007-03-12T11:52:00.000-05:00

In my travels through trade shows and web sites, I have come across many case studies designed to make concrete the services an organization offers—some more effective than others. I'm a fan of thoughtfully and carefully prepared case studies. How can you make sure yours have the most impact? Here are five tips to great case studies:

1. Provide enough customer background to provide context for the project description and for prospects to be able to relate.

2. Describe the issues or problems the customer had before your solution was implemented.

3. Differentiate your solution from the customer's other options.

4. Prove how the customer benefited from the relationship.

5. Include descriptive comments from the customer, explaining the problem, the process, and the outcome.

If you've covered these basics, check out this article by Mark Levy at Marketing Profs for ways to emphasize your "insight" to the solution in your case study.

Social Networking: The Next Generation

2007-03-09T22:59:00.000-05:00

I forgot about this article from The Washington Post until today when my ridiculous hunt for a hard-to-find Webkinz for my niece's birthday took my dialing finger and half a tank of gas. You see, she lives across the country from my kids, and they want to be able to interact more. So I thought I'd see if they could play together in real time using the popular stuffed-animals-with-a-life. Unfortunately my search apparently coincided with a Canadian railroad strike which is keeping the popular virtual pets off store shelves in the Northeast, where they are all the rage.

If you have kids between 6 and 12, you probably already know what I'm talking about. If not, this article is the best explanation I've seen. (The Post web site includes a video demo by the article's author, Ylan Mui.)

The article was published early in February--coincidentally a few days after David Warlick's presentation of "Digital Natives" at the Publishing 2.0 pre-conference seminar of the American Association of Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division Conference (AAP/PSP). A digital native is a person who was "born digital". Warlick introduced us to the teenage cyborg with a laptop connected to the internet, a VOIP headset, a cell phone earpiece, and a gaming system all going simultaneously. His point was that this creature isn't going to respond the same way to traditional learning environments as we did, and that we had better adapt in order to reach him.

O brave new world, that has such people in't! The freakiest part is that two of them are mine...

PSP Joins STM in Position on Open Access

2007-03-08T08:51:00.000-05:00

In a not-too-surprising move, the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the American Association of Publishers (AAP/PSP) has endorsed the Brussels Declaration issued last month by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM).

The Brussels document supports the position that multiple business models are healthy and warns, "Open deposit of accepted manuscripts risks destabilising subscription revenues and undermining peer review."

Hotly debated on the listserves (see Liblicense, for example) the declaration is a the next reponse in a series of geographic pronouncements like the Budapest Initiative, the Bethesda Statement, and the Berlin Declaration. (There must be a Saturday Night Live sketch in here somewhere.)

In the meantime, publishers and librarians are experimenting with open access models, which are becoming an accepted part of the scholarly dissemination landscape. Everything in moderation.

Web 2.0 explained

2007-03-07T13:14:00.000-05:00

Check out this neat Youtube video entitled Web 2.0...The Machine is Us/ing Us—a description of the glories of Web 2.0 complete with a quick explanation of why separating format from content is a powerful thing. The video is by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. For more, see the Digital Ethnography blog.

Search Matters...especially on your own site

2007-02-26T17:18:00.000-05:00

In Information Today, Paula Hane summarized an IDC report by Sue Feldman summarized at a recent Fast conference (how's that for a tertiary reference?) about the untapped potential of the web. Apparently, Feldman claims that up to 70 percent of search traffic is actually not going through Google and friends. Rather, people are going directly to the portals they think will have the answers and searching on those sites. The opportunity or challenge is to make sure your site search doesn't stink, and, to monetize the searches by incorporating contextual ads. Fast just happens to have a product that you can use for that, if you decide to leave Googleville.

Closing EPA's Libraries

2006-12-08T09:18:00.000-05:00

American Library Association President and Princeton Library Director Leslie Burger calls out the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the New York Times today for closing its libraries. The administration's rationale for the move has been to control the agency's budget, and indeed the proposed 2007 budget cuts $2 million earmarked for the libraries. Since the planned closings were announced in February, many, including EPA scientists, the primary users of the libraries, have hinted that the move is an effort to gut the power of the agency by supressing environmental research. See, for example this press release from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

To add fuel to their argument, critics point out that the EPA began to shutter the libraries even before Congress acted on next year's budget.

And EPA libraries aren't the only ones being closed. In today's LA Times article on government library closings Tim Reiterman describes researchers upset about US National Air and Space Administartion (NASA) and Department of Energy (DOE) library closings as well.

Government officials have claimed that the physcial libraries are less important than online access, but critics respond by reporting many reports and documents are simply being boxed up and stored away, or worse, destroyed. (Reminds me of the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark).

This example of the caprices of government funding for research availability lends credence to those who fear open access funding models for journals that depend on government agencies may not be sustainable through changes in political administrations.

Wiley and Blackwell Acquisition Runs into Opposition from Library Community

2006-12-06T09:07:00.000-05:00

The Information Access Alliance has challenged John Wiley & Sons plans to buy Blackwell Publishing (see the November 17 news release announcing the acquisition). In a letter to the United States Department of Justice, the alliance has asked that the merger be subjected to close antitrust scrutiny. The Information Access Alliance is made up of heavy hitting library organizations: the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Medical Libraries Association (MLA), SPARC, and the Special Libraries Association (SLA).

The organizations fear price increases due to consolidation in the industry. The letter mentions that because Blackwell has been so identified with society publishers, its prices have been relatively modest. The authors contrast Blackwell's pricing with Wiley's, citing a Cornell study that found Wiley's prices represent the highest average cost per article of the six largest commercial publishers.

In its announcement, Wiley and Blackwell executives cited the "cultural compatibility" and "complementary strengths" of the two organizations. The combined company would publish over 1200 academic journals.

Todd Carpenter Appointed Managing Director of NISO

2006-08-24T08:35:00.000-05:00

Todd Carpenter, most recently Diretor of Business Development at BioOne, is taking over as the Managing Director Spot at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in the beginning of September.

Google Book Search: Those in Favor...

2006-08-23T10:23:00.000-05:00

Richard Ekman, President of the Council of Independent Colleges supports Google Book Search in an opinion piece in yesterday's Washington Post.

He makes relevant points about opening up access for the poor and downtrodden, to the geographically limited. He applauds the convenience to undergraduates and researchers. He maintains that it is a good thing for society for previously obscure works to see the light of day. He emphasizes that Google is only showing portions of the work. He predicts that book sales will increase for works that would otherwise have reached the end of their useful life.

Then he wonders why publishers and librarians are at odds when they have such a solid history of trust and collaboration, citing JSTOR and Project Muse as stellar examples of what the communities can do when they work together.

The thing is, JSTOR and Project Muse, and Highwire, and BioOne, (need I go on?) are all fabulous and successful libary/publisher collaborations that respect intellectual property rights. Each of these organizations has people whose job is publisher relations. These talented individuals make the arguments that Dr. Ekman is making, not to the whole world as a justification for copying another's material, but to the owners of the property. They convince publishers to participate. They make a business model available to the publishers for them to accept, reject, or modify through negotiation.

Of course, the scale of Google Book Search makes it hard to fathom individual agreements with publishers, which is basically why Google has an opt-out policy instead of a participation agreement.

It may be true, as Dr. Ekman argues, that publishers have a habit of standing in the way of technological progress. He sites sheet music publishers' fear of the player piano. He could just as easily talked about copy machines, VCRs, Napster, and open access. Publishers all fought these developments, and then eventually found or are finding ways to incorporate these technologies and business models into their own products and services. On their terms. With their own property. Because they have businesses to run, programs to fund, and yes, shareholders to please.

Maybe these factors make a person conservative sometimes. Maybe the free market works for publishing. Maybe there are some books for which there are only a few thousand possible interested readers. Maybe some books deserve to be obscure. Maybe successful publishing businesses can provide royalties to authors to encourage them to contribute to the world's knowledge. Maybe there is a place for Google Book Search. Maybe the owners of the property have right to decide for themselves if Google Book Search is the best option for disseminating their content.

Outsell Purchases EPS

2006-08-22T15:42:00.000-05:00

Outsell announced today its purchase of EPS, another high-end source of information and consulting to those in the information industry.

This should expand Outsell's international coverage.

Secondary Publishing Reinvented: Blog Carnivals

2006-08-04T13:19:00.000-05:00

Blog carnivals on particular topics are the blogosphere's attempt to provide authoritativeness and imprimateur (something publishers are always talking about) to blog posts. For those who haven't ridden yet, a blog carnival is a periodic "best of" collection in a certain subject area, that may have a home at a particular blog or may rotate among blogs. As you can see at indexer Blog Carnival, carnivals exist in many areas--science, education, media, politics--you name it. Many have a popular bent, but this post from Ben Vershbow at IF:Book, the blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book, lists a number of carnivals geared to scholarly communities.

To me, a carnival is a secondary publishing service, serving the same function that review journals and survey articles have for many years: making important information findable. The interesting parallel is that these are not automated selections based on number of hits or user-supplied tags like the social bookmarking sites. Posts to be included in a carnival are selected using old-fashioned editorial judgment.

Of course, they are free (or ad or donation-supported), and they have a distributed model of production, unlike the expensive operations such as Annual Reviews and the like. And so they are much less formal, and the inclusion criteria are uneven at best.

But isn't it interesting to see how new technologies keep spawning services that are so familiar?

In the blogosphere as in the traditional publishing world, there's too much out there to keep track of without finding aids. Blog Carnival itself is the Medline of the carnivals as Technorati is the PsychInfo of blogs.

Google Scans California?

2006-08-03T10:13:00.000-05:00

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the University of California is in talks to join Google's Book Search project.

The University of California announced in October its participation in the Open Content Alliance, which will scan out-of-copyright material, a big difference from Google Book Search. Microsoft announced in June that it will use material from the OCA in its Microsoft Live Books Search, as reported by ZDNET. Microsoft also has a way for publishers to opt-in to contribute in-copyright works to its program. With the Google program, publishers must opt out.

See these previous posts for background.
MPC Publog: Google Book Search--the Fair Use Debate
MPC Publog: More on Google Scanning

Transferring Journals from one Publisher to Another

2006-08-03T09:59:00.000-05:00

I've just finished a project for a client that showed, among other things, the weaknesses of publishers' procedures when a title moves from one publisher to another. Specifically, the digital object identifier (DOI) may break. This is a bad thing, of course, as DOIs were invented to solve the widespread problem of broken links. A DOI should be a persistent identifier, and a publisher using DOIs agrees to maintain a central repository of those links--that work.

Project Transfer, launched in April by the UK Serials Group (UKSG) and endorsed by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) and STM: International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), is attempting to address these issues. Project Transfer is currently recruiting an advisory board to review guidelines.

JAMA Editor as Cop?

2006-08-02T10:52:00.000-05:00

The New York Times yesterday ran a profile of Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) editor Catherine DeAngelis written by Donald McNeil.

The focus of the article is on Dr. DeAngelis's tough public stance for complete disclosure of all potential conflicts of interest by authors, and the discovery that some JAMA authors didn't disclose, and conflicts weren't discovered until after publication.

Her response: “I’m not the F.B.I.”

This rings a bell. In January, the Times ran an article about journal authors doctoring their graphics. Another highly respected journal editor, Emilie Marcus of Cell, echoed a similar sentiment when asked whether journal editors should test each graphic for possible manipulation: "Rather than having journal editors acting as enforcers, she said, it may be better to thrust responsibility back to scientists, requiring the senior author to sign off that the images conform to the journal's guidelines."

My opinion: both researchers and drug companies have work to do. They aren't bad guys, BUT the extent to which research and scholarlship on medical treatments is has been influenced is probably far beyond what is reasonable. Journal authors do need to take responsibility for their research and their data, and editors need to foster a culture that encourages it.

Full Disclosure: Cell Press is a former client of mine.

LibraryThing Obsession

2006-08-02T09:20:00.000-05:00

Anybody who has ever spent too many hours on Amazon or Netflix rating and browsing will love LibraryThing, a service where you can choose all the books you own from lists, rate them, tag them, review them (all optional) and then share them with other users or get recommendations based on what other users who share similar collections have in their libraries. Call it social networking for bibliophiles.

As others have wondered in discussing del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr, who would have thought that it would be cool to catalog and index your stuff? Sounds a little geeky to me, but it's actually fun (says something about me, I suppose), and easy since you just select your edition from existing metadata rather than having to type everything in.

Individuals can enter 200 books for free, and then you have to pay $10 a year or $25 lifetime for collections beyond that. The metadata comes from Amazon and from Z39.50 compliant library catalogs. You can even choose which edition of a book you have.

There are apps to import Amazon wish lists, and to export your data to Excel, and to do other cool things. You can put a window to your LibraryThing account on your blog to show what you're reading now, or random titles from your collection. (I'm not sure I would do that, as not everything I read is something to brag about...murder mysteries anyone?)

Iraqi Librarians

2006-08-01T14:40:00.000-05:00

This weekend I had a disturbing conversation with Will Wakeling, the Associate Dean for Collections & Tech Services, the Northeastern University Libraries, about a recent trip he took to the mid-East. Simmons, Harvard, and UCLA received an National Endowment for the Humanities grant to sponsor a conference to help 32 Iraqi library faculty rebuild their institutions. Probably for security reasons, the meeting was NOT held in Iraq, but in the United Arab Emirates.

Will reported that the situation in the Iraqi libraries is beyond bleak. Security is a grave concern, as you might imagine. They are lucky to have an hour of electricity a day. The collections have been decimated, the computers looted. A society with a strong tradition of learning and reading is going without the tools to educate its people.

If I understood him correctly, The United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain where the conference took place has brand new state of the art library, doubly underscoring the vast differences in resources between the two locations

Some donation programs that are trying to address the problems of lack of books in Iraq:
http://www.booksforbaghdad.org/
http://www.sabre.org/: The AAUP website reports Sabre is planning a program in Iraq, although the Sabre website doesn't mention it.
An important footnote about Sabre is that they are committed to supporting indigenous publishing. The deleterious effect of donated books on local publishing markets is a common complaint about book donation programs.

Newspapers Link Out

2006-07-31T08:12:00.000-05:00

Bob Tedeschi reported in The New York Times today that The New York Sun, The Washington Post, and The Daily Oklahoman have signed with news aggregator Inform to automatically add automatically generated and updated outbound links from stories on their online versions to other publications and blogs. The Times itself is also adding external links, although not through Informs.

The impetus, of course is advertising. The papers are losing print advertising and online ads aren't yet making up the difference. So, the papers are taking another step away from recreating print in the electronic world and taking advantage of the key advantage of the web.

All of the papers featured in the story started out with no external links. You've heard the rationale: you spend so much time creating your web site that you want to make sure it's sticky--not send people to a competitor.

But the way people use the web is as a, well, web. The links will open in new windows, so the papers won't necessarily lose the traffic. What people undoubtedly do when they want more information is to Google the story in another window anyway. Why not make the paper the hub of the information and capture that traffic?

I suppose the scholarly publishing equivalent is reference linking. There was certainly fear about linking to a competitive site before CrossRef made it possible and practically essential to link the references of one article to the others it cited. Of course, the reference section of scholarly papers are peer reviewed with the rest of the text. I wonder how dynamically generated links to contemporaneous articles would be received.

Carol's Nightstand 2: The Power of Snap Judgments

2006-07-23T12:31:00.000-05:00

I took Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking with me to the Cape, and it's amazing how this little, easy-to-read book has done a number on my consciousness.

Now, the SSP has been trying to get Gladwell to keynote at a meeting for at least 3 years, and it seems everyone has already read this book but me. Now I see why. With examples from art history to speed dating, from police work to food tasting, Gladwell uses scientific research to explore the way we make snap decisions, some of which are remarkably astute, and some of which are tragically wrong.

Next in the stack: Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.

Carol's Nightstand: A Great Read-Aloud

2006-07-23T11:07:00.000-05:00

It's summer and I'm finally making a dent in the stack of books on my nightstand.

I've got kids, and one of the things I do when we travel is try to buy children's books signed by local authors. On Cape Cod a few weeks ago, we stopped by the Brewster Bookstore, a wonderful little bookstore in Brewster, MA, where illustrator Timothy Basil Ering had just been that morning signing books. I picked up a copy of The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread which I have been meaning to read, and The Story of Frog Belly Rat Bone, which was new to me.

My five year old got a big kick out of Frog Belly, a picture book set in grey Cementland. Not to worry, though, things get better.

It wasn't until this week, however, that I finished Despereaux, which is truly a beautiful tale filled with light and dark. I was a little worried that it might be a bit too dark for my kids, but we started reading it aloud last night, and they wouldn't let me put it down until we were five chapters in. Everything about the experience was magical, including the mouse-chewed paper edges! If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it, kids or no.

Rebuilding Afghanistan

2006-07-22T19:31:00.000-05:00

Another non-publishing post about my high-school friend Dave Wylie, who is commanding a unit in the remote Farah province of Afghanistan. Dave specializes in civil reconstruction and is a Lt. Col. in the Army Reserves. As you can imagine, his talents have been in great demand, and he was called up for active duty last year.

And Speaking of Google: ACS settles trademark case against Google Scholar

2006-07-20T08:40:00.000-05:00

After a couple of years of flopping around, the American Chemical Society (ACS) and Google have settled a trademark infringement case. ACS alleged that Google Scholar infringed on ACS's SciFinder Scholar. The settlement apparently includes a gag clause, so nobody's talking about what it entailed.

More on Google Scanning

2006-07-12T16:12:00.000-05:00

So I missed this article from the New York Times Magazine in May, but it's a pretty well thought out description of the Google Book thing (which I first blogged about here: ).

Wired Magazine's Kevin Kelly concludes by accurately describing the conflict comes down to what he calls the clash of the business models. Makes sense. Does copyright law really fit the new technology of copying and search?

On Marshall Keys and Multiformats

2006-07-12T15:45:00.000-05:00

Leigh Dodds of Ingenta blogged a review of Marshall Key's SSP talk as well as a session I myself missed: Hanging Together in a Multi-Format Landscape, starring Geoff Bilder (also formerly of Ingenta and now with Scholarly Information Strategies, Roy Tennant, of the California Digital Library and Cindy Hill of Sun, and thoughtfully put together by EBook Library's Alix Vance.

I know from Alix's description of the planning for this session that the speakers believed that for the most part libraries and publishers should rely on technology vendors to solve the hard problems of making data integrable and not try to reinvent each wheel locally. But this review puts more meat on the bones and is worth a read.

AAUP's Katrina Relief Page

2006-07-12T15:15:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned at the SSP meeting in my introduction to Keith Seitter's wonderful talk on the American Meteorological Society's jaw-droppingly awesome programs to promote science literacy, publishers can and are helping the Gulf Region and other areas of the world heal after the devasting hurricanes and the tsunami.

The American Association of University Presses has put together a web page that provides great ideas for how to help--it has both library-specific needs and links to more general organizations, like Habitat for Humanity, which is helping to provide homes for the displaced.

While not front-page news any longer, the needs in these areas are still overwhelming.

Weaver Extraordinaire

2006-07-12T14:44:00.000-05:00

This has nothing to do with publishing, but a good friend of mine, Chriztine Foltz, was just profiled in the business section of her local newspaper. She's a textile artist, as you can read in the article. It's reassuring to know that artists can indeed make a living doing what they love.

Evolving Peer Review

2006-06-30T13:26:00.000-05:00

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, an associate professor of English and Media Studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California provided a thoughtful post on the evolution in peer review. In it, she describes what she refers to as Nature's conservative experiment with open review. Starting June 5, Nature is running both open review and traditional peer review simultaneously in an experiment to see what might be gained or lost. The Nature open review site can be found at http://blogs.nature.com/nature/peerreview/trial/

An important point Kathleen makes is that peer review walks and talks differently in the humanities than in the sciences. Most of what we read about focuses on scientific journal publishing, probably because that's where the money is.

ACRL's take on Social Networking

2006-06-29T17:45:00.000-05:00

Barbara Fister writes a very thoughtful post in the ACRL blog on social networking and scholarship, summarizing historian Roy Rosenzweig's article, Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past," and Nature's take on the evolution of peer review from their peer review debate pages. Barbara didn't mention that the Nature piece was written by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. Anderson is also the author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. (This book is getting a lot of buzz in the right places, so I'm putting it on my nightstand stack.)

Interesting that both of these articles appeared in highly respected peer reviewed journals. Because that makes them more credible, see? (Subtle, I am not). Actually, to be accurate, Anderson's comment was published in the web debate on peer review sponsored by Nature, NOT in the peer reviewed (I was going to say print) journal at all.

STM Innovations Workshop to be on Technologies & Community

2006-06-29T16:06:00.000-05:00

Geoff Bilder is organizing the STM Innovations Workshop to be held December 1 in London and is looking speakers on these same topics.

To quote from the program announcement, "We are looking for speakers with direct experience of how social software tools [Wikis, blogs, social bookmarking tools and recommender systems] can be effectively used in STM or analogous fields. We are also seeking speakers who have a clear vision of how new technologies are affecting user behavior and what implications this might have for scholarly publishing."

Community Building in Scholarly Communications

2006-06-29T01:46:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about social networking and community building lately. Spurred in part by Marshall Keyes' talk at SSP, and in part by my participation in numerous Yahoo Groups in an effort to share information and keep in touch.

One group consists of friends from my husband's high school. Another is a group of Girl Scout leaders. A third is a professional organization of women in the information industry. All of these groups share a need to communicate information, keep track of changes of job and contact information, calendars, and manage upcoming events and share files. Yahoo Groups does a reasonable job with this, (although the sign-in requirement for occasional users is daunting.)

Of course journals were the original technology for sharing and community building among scholars. We publishers pride ourselves on getting everything electronic, including some pretty impressive backfile digitization projects.

But we haven't yet used today's technology to change fundamentally the scholarly publishing models. Open Access is making some inroads, yes. Forward looking organizations like Nature, Science, and Highwire are experimenting with aspects of new technologies.

And more is coming. Parity Computing, who I've done some work for, has the ability to mine journal data (mostly references) to create author profiles that make interconnections between researchers and to construct virtual CVs. Technology such as this could be used to integrate society membership databases with journal data, enabling the kinds of networking that is built manually by users in systems like LinkedIn.

Speeding Up Outlook, Revisited

2006-06-29T01:09:00.000-05:00

Turns out that my massive Outlook pst file wasn't being archived correctly. I thought I had it set to sweep all emails older than 6 months to an archive folder. But, only the top level folders were being dumped.

And, I found Attachment Save, a great utility from Sperry Software that moves all my attachments into the file system in the same folder structure as my Outlook folders, eliminating oodles of space in my pst files. It even provides a link to the attachment in its new location, making it just as convenient to open files from emails as it ever was. AND, if you forward an email with an attachment, it's smart enough to go get the attachment from the file system and attach it to the outgoing mail. Snazzy.

Oh, and one more thing: I had a auto sync going on between my CardScan database and Outlook that was really hosing performance. Got rid of that process too.

And life was good again...

The reviews are in!

2006-06-21T08:22:00.000-05:00

Bette Brunelle of Outsell not only gave an excellent talk about advertisers moving online at the SSP meeting on June 9, but she also wrote a review of Marshall Keys stimulating keynote address for the June 16 issue of Outsell Now (available by subscription) . The general message was: yeah, you publishers have done a lot of work making everything electronic, but you're not done yet: tomorrow's researchers will be using portable devices for everything and will flock to technology that supports community.

In the meantime, EPS Insights newsletter ran a comprehensive report (available by subscription only) of the session on "New New Things" or innovative technologies: accurately summarizing the overview presentation by Richard Newman of the American Medical Association, the discussion of video delivery by Kent Anderson of the New England Journal of Medicine, and Nature's Joy Moore on incorporating social networks into scholarly publishing.

Keep an eye on SSP web site where the presentations from these and other sessions will be posted soon.

Spyware and registry entries and viruses, Oh My!

2006-06-20T10:45:00.000-05:00

I've just spent the last day and a half trying desparately to rid my 3 year old Windows XP IBM Thinkpad laptop of whatever processes are slowing it to a crawl, courtesy of Dave Taylor's web site.

I was surprised that by running freeware RegSeeker I was able to eliminate over 1000 unused entries from my register.

But, problem still not solved. I'm beginning to suspect that my huge Outlook pst file is the culprit, although I've been auto archiving old files. Still, I tend to keep everything in elaborate folder structures.

Could also be my Outlook addins, like search tool Looksmart, which I've come to rely on, or Alladins, which allows me to print labels, or Stamps.com, which I never use.

The joys of being your own IT department continue...

What of the Advertising Revenue?

2006-06-13T23:47:00.000-05:00

As I pointed out in my remarks during a panel at the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Annual meeting last week, scholary journals are the victims of their own success when it comes to advertising revenue. We've been so focused on putting our journals online, that we're lagging behind in getting the advertising in gear.

This talk points out the migration from awareness building as an advertising to lead generation for advertisers. The problem has been around for years, but now it's helped along by the digital environment, including competition for ad dollars that includes Google's advertising products.

Viral Marketing

2006-06-08T23:06:00.000-05:00

David Meerman Scott's entertaining and stimulating talk at the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) annual meeting today shamed me into updating my blog. His ideas on emphasizing viral marketing over big-bucks traditional marketing campaigns are probably no surprise to fans of the Guerilla Marketing books by Jay Conrad Levison.

Essentially, Scott advocates using web communities and segmentation strategies to create a self-generating buzz. Content begets search engine exposure, so the theory goes, and search engine exposure begets sales (at the appropriate point along the process.)

The idea is to shift marketing resources away from what he calls interuption marketing (TV and print ads) towards search engine marketing, where a combination of good content and smart optimization techniques give customers what they want when they are looking for it.

Sounds good to me.

World's Biggest Book Fair

2006-06-02T08:32:00.000-05:00

Project Gutenberg, which has been digitizing books in the public domain for over 30 years has announced an electronic book fair from July 4 to August 4. Over 300,000 titles, many on loan from e-book library sites that generally charge for access, will be available for free download. The organization plans to repeat the fair annually with an increasing number of titles.

Unfortunately, the site link published on Boston.com this morning (worldbookfair.com) was down when I checked it.

An innovative idea from an organization devoted to promoting literacy. Kudos!

SSP Annual Meeting Registration Open

2006-03-20T09:42:00.000-05:00

Registration for the SSP Annual Meeting to be held in Crystal City, Virginia (adjacent to National Airport) on June 7-9 is open. This year's theme is Beyond Borders and Bindings.

I've had the good fortune to work with the amazing and committed Sue Kesner and Terry Van Shaik and this year's hard working program committee to help organize the sessions this year. The number of people attending the meeting has been skyrocketing, so this year will include more sessions than ever. The keynote speaker is Marshall Keys (formerly of Nelinet) who by all accounts gave a fabulous talk at NASIG last year.

David Meerman Scott will talk about how to increase content sales by microsegmented marketing. Other session topics range from Open Access (you didn't think we could escape that, did you?) to promoting literacy, to a terrific search track.

Hope to you see you there!

Helping in New Orleans

2006-03-19T13:42:00.000-05:00

A group of 34 young people from the Winchester Unitarian Society Youth Group (WUSYG) spent their February vacation working with Common Ground in New Orleans trying to help people who have been devastated by Katrina.

You can read their stories on the WUSYG web site. What strikes me is the anger they feel about the lack of attention to the ongoing devastation, services for the survivors, and response from most of us.

Find out more about the grass roots organization Common Ground which is helping survivors of the Gulf coast hurricanes at their web site: www.commongroundrelief.org.

Another group of youth and adults from the society are finishing up a week there now.

Michael Mabe to Head STM

2006-03-09T08:45:00.000-05:00

The International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) has announced that Michael Mabe has been appointed as the new CEO effective May 2. Mabe, Elsevier's Director of Academic Relations, will replace Pieter Bolman, who is stepping down after two years in the position.

Copyright Awareness Week

2006-03-08T08:42:00.000-05:00

I was surfing government websites to plan an upcoming family trip to Washington DC, and I came across this press release announcing that this is Copyright Awareness Week.

Who knew?

Google CaseLaw

2006-03-03T09:47:00.000-05:00

Peter Suber in the Open Access New Blog reported a few weeks ago on a lawsuit that may provide precedent in the AAP/Authors Guild lawsuit against Google in the Google Book Search case. Apparently Perfect 10 won a copyright case against Google in which it was decided that the use of thumbnails of Perfect 10 images was not fair use.

This is going to be interesting to watch.

ACM Weighs in on Outsourcing

2006-03-01T09:57:00.000-05:00

According to a report released last week by ACM (a membership organization of 80K or so computer scientists and a former employer of mine) and noted in a New York Times editorial today, outsourcing IT jobs has not resulted in a net loss of jobs in countries where those jobs are historically strong, nor is a net loss of jobs necessarily a future outcome. The report has a more hopeful outlook about the effect of globalization on innovation, and actually calls for further elimination of barriers to global job diversification.

Science Rocks...Science Rolls

2006-02-27T11:20:00.000-05:00

Coutesy of Patra Frame, here's a cool website, iwaswondering.com highlighting the work of women scientists. The site is for girls and is published by the National Academy of Sciences, the same people who bring us PNAS.

I know I'm going to share it with my 8-year-old daughter and the Girl Scout leaders in town!

Google Book Search--the Fair Use Debate

2006-02-17T11:10:00.000-05:00

I was not the only member of the audience who gasped at Mary Sue Coleman's keynote address to the American Association of Publishers/Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division Annual Conference (AAP/PSP). Coleman, President of the University of Michigan, gave a spirited defense of Google Book Search. (You can see the text of her address here, courtesy of Battelle's Searchblog.)

She was articulate, passionate, and a staunch advocate of the University of Michigan's position of greatness in society, as you might expect. She was even persuasive about the business advantages to publishers of participating with Google in this "legal, ethical, and noble endeavor" that will save our society from the ruin of failing to preserve our intellectual history.

What the text of the speech doesn't convey, is the dialog following her talk. I'm particularly hung on up what I thought of as her naive understanding of fair use: President Coleman stated unequivacably that her lawyers (one of whom she pointed out in the front row) have assured her that any person can walk into any library, and legally, under fair use, make a copy of any book in the library for any purpose. So, by extension, Google can make copies of entire research libraries under fair use.

Shocked and apalled, I went to the web to see where this might be coming from. And, I found no less a luminary than Stanford University's Digital Copyright guru and open access advocate Larry Lessig's 30 minute presentation explaining why Google Book Search is protected under the fair use provisions of our copyright laws.

Larry's presentations are always interesting (do you remember his keynote at the SSP meeting in San Francisco a few years ago?), and this one is given in the same, style, complete with understated slides, bald, white courier type on black background, emphasizing key words of his arguments.

Now, I'm hesitant to take on Professor Lessig, with not even a law degree to my credit, but I feel compelled.

Lessig argues that the copying Google does to prepare the indexes and the short "snippets" of content that users will be able to see of copyrighted works, is not wholesale copying but transformative--just as making thumbnail copies of images for a catalog. (He sights relevant case law to back up this assertion.) I have to wonder if you might also think of it as a derivative work, which is protected by copyright.

More compelling, he walks through the 4-prong copyright test that alleged copyright infringers must pass in order to be found to be operating under fair use. Here's my inexpert summary of the prongs and some examples:

1. The nature of the work (for example, works of fiction and high creativity tend to have more protection than compilations of facts)

2. The nature of the use of the copyrighted material (so, for example, if I copied material and sold it for profit, I would be less likely to pass this test than if I used it to save my dying mother or to educate my students or to incorporate it into a work of satire or literary criticism)

3. The amount and substantiality of the use (so it might be OK for me to copy 400 words of a 400 page book, but it might not be OK to copy an entire haiku that is only 10 words)

4. The effect the copying will have on the market for the work (so it might be OK for me to make a copy of an article from a professional journal or trade magazine for a group of students if it wasn't a resource they would typically buy, but it might not be so good for me to make a copy of a chapter of a textbook and put it on a university e-reserve server or course web site so the students didn't have to buy the book).

The maddening thing about the fair use prongs is you have to pass all of the tests. Equally difficult is that only a court can determine if something is fair use or not. So, of course, people (OK, lawyers) write all sorts of guidelines to keep honest folk out of trouble, which makes everybody convinced they know whether or not a particular circumstance constitutes fair use. (Because fair use is a defense rather than a right, Larry has argued elsewhere--convincingly--that the threat of legal action is curtailing the boundaries of fair use and stifling creativity.)

Let's take a look at the prongs with regard to Google Book Search.

1. The nature of the work: The unfathomable breadth of the copying Google must do to digitize the whole collections of the participating libraries means that works of every nature will be copied--Test failed.

2. The nature of the use: Google's defenders say that the preservation of works that are crumbling to dust will save scholarship: that the ability to search inside once obscure titles will revive interest in the titles; that enhanced discoverability will promote book sales. Google's critics counter that Google is a commercial organization that will monetize or has the potential to monetize works created by other parties without compensating them or getting their permission.

Rather than just jump on the bandwagon in a knee jerk publisher kind of way, I checked out Google Book Search myself. My search for "Lessig" showed a first result for his book Free Culture. (See my review here.) The publisher, Penguin, allows Google to display the table of contents. In order to view the TOC, however, I had to sign in using my Google account. Don't have a Google account? Sign up here. Now Google has my name, which they can use to monetize their relationship with me by letting me know about their other products, which expose me to their advertisements. Why? Because I wanted to use Google to access another publisher's content.

Frustrated, and not knowing that the full text is available for free elsewhere on the web), I might choose to follow a link to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Penguin to purchase the book. Aha! the defenders chortle: you see, this is GOOD for publishers: you wouldn't have bought the book if it hadn't been for this search.

Perhaps. But Google has an opportunity (a tempting one) to forge affiliate or other relationships with the booksellers to get a piece of the sale, again, monetizing their relationship with me and their unpermissioned copying of the entire book, which allows them to offer the full text search feature.

We might believe President Coleman when she assures us that the University of Michigan will keep copyrighted works in the dark archive (inaccessible until they are in the public domain or otherwise need to be used legally), but without a license agreement or permissions, how do publishers know that big commerical Google won't decide to use this data for some other purpose that might not be transparent to the public or the copyright holders? Perhaps, if the University of Michigan itself had created a massive digitization project, and outsourced it to Google but maintained control over the files, then perhaps this test would pass. But, no.

Test failed?

3. The amount and substantiality of the work copied. Defenders argue that Google will only display a "snippet" of the work to users, so test passed.

Not so fast though. In order to provide the service at all, Google had to make a complete copy of the entire work and is storing and might use it in any way it sees fit. This is a dangerous precedent to set for other potential copiers of the work.

Larry also emphasized a number of times that less than 10 percent of the material being digitized by Google is in print and in copyright. If he was asserting that the small proportion of the total works being digitized being in copyright and in print indicates the amounts and substantiality test is passed, I must disagree. The test was designed to apply to individual works, and not to the aggregation.

Test failed?

4. The effect of the use on the market: As we have seen, Google and its supporters argue that publishers will sell more books and make more money by being discoverable in the gigantic index.

Publishers counter that that might be true, but they should have a choice of marketing and distribution strategies. Google Book Search could work for publishers, or it could compete with their other plans. For example, scholarly publishers, now that they have their journals online and available are building online ebook archives and the hosting systems to enable search and discovery and use. Google would probably augment that. But, shouldn't it be up to them to decide how to expose their content? Suppose a publisher wanted to transfer copyright or sign a license deal with Yahoo or another partner to digitize it's content, but the partner insisted on an exclusive license. The existance of the publisher content in Google Book Search could interfere with that use.

Larry's most elaborate argument, and one that (it seems to me) calls for the most activist judicial interpretation of the test, is that getting permissions from thousands of copyright holders is virtually impossible, the mark of a market failure of massive proportions. (Such permissions are particulary difficult because so much of the work in the libraries being digitized is in copyright but out of print, and many of the copyright publishers are difficult if not impossible to reach.) So, since the market has failed to enable scalable copyright permissioning, it is fair use for Google to disregard the requirement to get copyright holders' permission. And, Larry adds, Google has provided a simple way to opt out if publishers don't want to participate.

Publishers don't think they should have to opt out in a system that requires their permission.

He has definitely identified an important public policy issue. What about works that are out of print but in copyright? What about the public good? If this problem needs to be solved, perhaps legislation is in order. Perhaps the Copyright Clearance Center has a role to play. After all, it is their business to enable an efficient market in copyrights.

Because the permissions problem is a difficult one, does that mean we waive the copyright laws?

Test failed?

I for one will be very interested in the court's interpretation of the AAP and publishers case against Google.

But isn't it a shame that Google handled this project in such a high-handed way so that the publishers felt they had no choice but to sue in order to protect their rights? If indeed this project benefits EVERYBODY: society, researchers, authors, publishers, and yes, Google, wouldn't it have been easy to persuade publishers to agree to the project rather than saying: we're doing it anyway, come get us?

Watch Those Emails!

2006-02-16T09:16:00.000-05:00

How many of us have never sent a sharp e-mail message or one that off-handedly criticizes or derides a third person? Naturally, we never intend for anyone but the recipient to read it. We all get frustrated, even with those that we generally admire and respect.

The Boston Globe today describes an unfortunate case of a young lawyer who ungraciously rejected a job offer, and after a heated exchange, found her messages published widely in the world.

A more common experience, I think, is for inappropriate comments to become embedded in a thread that mistakenly gets forwarded to a wider community or an inappropriate reply to a listserv being sent to the entire list rather than a single intended recipient.

The Globe suggests thinking twice before committing something acid to an email. Good advice. I would add an exhortation to carefully review forwarded email threads for the sake of our own and our colleague's comfort. Judicious SNIPPING may save many a career!

Outsourcing Moves up the Food Chain

2006-02-16T08:55:00.000-05:00

According to the NY Times, a report to be delivered to the National Academies today predicts increased outsourcing of high level research jobs to China and India. The reason is apparently not, as it has been in so many other cases, cost control, but the desire of corporations to forge relationships with emerging economies.

Scholarly publishing has of course been by no means exempt from the trend of outsourcing. It started with data entry, and moved to data conversion to typesetting, editorial tasks, and now project management and programming. And of course, on the research side, journals are seeing increasing numbers of "off-shore" submissions from researchers.

My conversations with publishers in the last few years indicates that few have ethical problems with sending jobs overseas. They need to stay competitive and this is one way to do it. Publishers, unlike the corporations in this article, are primarily trying to control costs or to undertake huge legacy projects in a reasonable period of time.

Publishers have always outsourced the bulk of their production work: copyediting, proofreading, typesetting, printing, and now electronic hosting. It used to be mainly to local freelancers. With the improvement in the global communications systems, the natural evolution is to extend the reach beyond our local network. My background in economics tells me that this evolution makes sense.

Economics tells us (in a world of perfect information, anyway) that that salaries should evenutally equalize. Eventually, the outsourcing companies should have difficulty making a profit as the cost differential disappears, unless they offer sustainable competitive advantage. But we know the world is far from one of perfect information. In the meantime, my view is that increasing contact among people living on different points of the globe has got to be a good thing in the long term, although it is certainly difficult for those whose jobs are affected.

Figure Skating

2006-02-14T13:02:00.000-05:00

I confess--I'm obsessed by the Olympics. I was ready to drift off to sleep last night when I heard the spectacular crash of China's Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao attempting a quadruple salchow at the start of their long program. What courage to pick up the program and finish it out! And, to be rewarded with the silver medal! Unbelievable. It reminds me of Kerry Strug's brave vault after injurying her ankle in the 1996 Games, winning the US team a gold medal.

Still, is it SO important to win, that a serious injury should be ignored? These athletes, some of them not quite adults, are under extreme pressure from their sponsors and from their countries. It makes you wonder about our societal priorities.

Michele Kwan's gracious withdrawal after her injury to make room for teammate Emily Hughes impressed me a great deal more than Hughes' subsquent NBC interview. She was palpably excited about the chance to compete in the Olympics (and who could blame her after her years of sacrifice and training?), but would it have killed her to express sympathy and gratitude for Kwan's situation and decision?

Trust Models in Scholarly Publishing

2006-02-14T12:33:00.000-05:00

I just got an email this morning that the long defunct Journal of Electronic Publishing is back, complete with editor Judith Axel Turner.

I was delighted to see that one of articles in the relaunched issue is Geoff Bilder's "In Google we Trust". Geoff graciously agreed to talk about this issue at the last Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Annual Meeting (you can view the PDF from his talk on the web site). The article provides a worthwile further development of the ideas presented then.

He does a nice job of explaining how trust systems like those at Amazon, ebay, and Slashdot have evolved.

Of course the trust system in scholarly publishing that we all know and some love is peer review, a much less technologically driven system, even with the rapid adoption of peer review systems in the past few years. Peer review, of course, is getting its fair share of attention these days thanks to some, er...hmmm, creative data on cloning.

Brian Crawford of the American Chemical Society gave a nice summary of the issues with peer review at the American Association of Publishers Professional & Scholarly Publshing (AAP/PSP) Annual Conference last week. Although he focused on author misconduct and omitted discussions of reviewer bias, he provided a lot of food for thought.

Welcome

2006-02-14T11:45:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the MPC Publog. I am an independent consultant specializing in scholarly publshing--journal publishers and the companies that provide services to them. This blog is an experiment in resources and rants. I plan to focus on items of interest to scholarly publishers, although my other roles likely to surface on occasion. Please visit my web page for more information on my consulting practice. I welcome comments and criticisms. Let the games begin.