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ICSTI: news items
- To: epc@iucr.org
- Subject: ICSTI: news items
- From: Pete Strickland <ps@iucr.org>
- Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004 09:48:52 +0000
- Organization: IUCr
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Subject: Site licenses, new article, surprising conclusion.... >From Peter Subers blog: NOTE THE "SURPRISING ANSWER" to the study...... Carl T. Bergstrom and Theodore C. Bergstrom, The costs and benefits of library site licenses to academic journals, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online, January 8, 2004. Abstract: "Scientific publishing is rapidly shifting from a paper-based system to one of predominantly electronic distribution, in which universities purchase site licenses for online access to journal contents. Will these changes necessarily benefit the scientific community? By using basic microeconomics and elementary statistical theory, we address this question and find a surprising answer. If a journal is priced to maximize the publisher's profits, scholars on average are likely to be worse off when universities purchase site licenses than they would be if access were by individual subscriptions only. However, site licenses are not always disadvantageous. Journals issued by professional societies and university presses are often priced so as to maximize subscriptions while recovering average costs. When such journals are sustained by institutional site licenses, the net benefits to the scientific community are larger than if these journals are sold only by individual subscriptions." The paper is at: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0305628101v1 BTW, you will need a subscription to read more than the abstract - you can purchase the article 'for two days' for $10 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Subject: A criticism .... of Karen Hunter >From Peter Suber's blog Karen Hunter, Scholarly Publishing: 12 Observations on the Current Situation and Challenges for the Future, Library Connect, December 2003, pp. 2-3. Observation #3: "The current preoccupation with 'free access' rests on false assumptions." Her reason: "Education is not free to students and information in support of education is not free either --any more than food, computers or football stadiums...." (PS: Wow. I haven't heard this misunderstanding in years, and never expected to hear it again, let alone from the Senior VP for Strategy at Elsevier. From the start, proponents of OA acknowledged that OA literature costs money to produce and merely argued that there are better ways to cover these expenses than by charging readers or their libraries for access. I don't know anyone who defends OA literature on the ground that it costs nothing to produce. Most defenses are explicit in disclaiming this canard. Here, for example, is an entry from the BOAI FAQ, now almost two years old: "[Question] Isn't this wishful thinking? Do you really believe that online archives and journals are free? [Answer] 'Free' is ambiguous. We mean free for readers, not free for producers. We know that open-access literature is not free (without cost) to produce. But that does not foreclose the possibility of making it free of charge (without price) for readers and users....") (Thanks to the NFAIS Information Community News.) Karen's article is at: http://www.elsevier.com/inca/publications/misc/libraryconnectvol4pdf +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Subject: Open Access and Abstract/Indexing Services This is Stevan Harnad's reply to a question about OA and locating the items....note the references to CAS, NIH, .... Thread: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2645.html On Tue, 20 Jan 2004, [identity deleted] wrote: I feel a little uneasy about complete espousal of open-access publications and the phenomenon of self-archiving from one's institution: I'd like to ask you about the process of abstracting and/or locating and/or retrieving such articles. Would we rely on some sort of super-Google, with a consequent poor signal/noise ratio? No, you can rely on something infinitely better, thanks to OAI tagging: OAI search engines like OAIster http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ and citebase http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search targeted exclusively on the annual 2,500,000 articles in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals (once each article has been made OA by either publishing it in an OA journal or self-archiving it in an OA archive). Here's a list of OAI service providers that exist already, even for the little OA content so far: http://www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0049.gif And last, even google could in principle be aimed exclusively at the OAI subset of the literature if the search included an OAI search-limiter. Published chemical research has a VERY efficient tracking mechanism for retrieval of peer-reviewed articles. The Chemical Abstracts Service [CAS] database has about 25 million abstracts of papers, searchable conveniently for many keywords and chemical structures and chemical properties. I bet that most or all of that functionality can easily be duplicated on an OA version of that literature, once it exists. But here is the right question to ask: Those who would-be users whose institutions can afford CAS can continue to enjoy it. An OA version of this literature is for those who would-be users whose institutions cannot afford CAS: I am sure they will be happier having the OA functionality even if it is not 100% than having the 0% functionality they have now! CAS information would be defined as toll-access, and the American Chemical Society obtains annual revenue of over $300 million from its use, BUT charges for access by academic institutions are 10-20% those of "commercial" users [for- profits, governments]. Their coverage is essentially complete back to 1907. Those charges are fine for the minority of institutions that can afford them. OA is for the majority that cannot. Self-archiving provides a *supplement* to toll-access, not a substitute for it. Analogously the US National Library of Medicine's MedLine database [aka PubMed] covers all peer-reviewed articles in biomedical science with over 10 million abstracts, and provides free access to all Americans [pace Donna Shalala] and to everyone else. Of course the "free" access is paid for by the U. S. taxpayer. PubMed is a splendid indexing service, subsidized by NIH and free to all users. But it does not and cannot provide full-text access (only the abstracts) apart from the tiny portion of the full-text biomedical literature that is OA and available through PubMed Central. Let us not mix apples and oranges. The overwhelming need is to provide OA to the full-texts of all 2,500,000 annual articles in all 24,000 peer-reviewed journals. The search/indexing services on that literature will come with the territory, as noted above. First, we need the OA territory! It makes no sense to delay providing it because the secondary OAI services on the not-yet-existent territory are not-yet-in-place! Maybe the for-profit sector should have to pay the freight when they use the open-access resources, thus lowering expenses for the non-profit institutions who are paying up front when articles are submitted for publication. The non-profit institutions are currently paying for access to one another's peer-reviewed output (which they always give away free: both to the publisher and to every would-be user). First, the toll-access has to be supplemented by each institution's self-archived versions versions of its own output, at virtually no cost per article (about $10 annual archiving cost per article). That is already the solution for OA. If is causes journal cancellations, TA journals can cut costs by downsizing to the essentials only (probably just peer review) and convert to OA upfront cost-recovery, which the institutions will by then have more than enough to pay for out of their annual windfall toll-savings. It is unlikely that the institutions will want to restrict access to their open-access output by requiring OAI service-providers -- even for-profit ones -- to pay for access in order to provide their enhancements. More likely, they will stay out of it and let the market decide whether users want to pay for for-profit OAI service-providers or are happy enough with non-profit or free OAI service-providers such as OAIster. Stevan Harnad ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Subject: The Launch of INFO URI from NISO The following press release announces the launch of the INFO URI. This is an important development as the INFO URI has the potential to expose our community's resources on the Web. The INFO Registry at <http://info-uri.info/> is up and running and ready to accept new registrations. Please go to that site for further information on the INFO URI. ------------- NISO-Sponsored INFO URI Scheme is Information Gateway to the Web Publishing and Library Communities Join Forces to Facilitate and Expedite Representation of Standard Identifiers such as Library of Congress Control Numbers on the Web Bethesda, MD - January 14, 2004 - Working under the auspices of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), a joint task force of the publishing and library communities has developed and published a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme aimed at the identification of information assets. Information assets should be interpreted rather broadly to include, for example, documents and terms from classification schemes. The INFO URI scheme is a consistent and reliable way to represent and reference such standard identifiers as Dewey Decimal Classifications on the Web so that these identifiers can be "read" and understood by Web applications. Led by four NISO members and associates-Los Alamos National Laboratory, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), Elsevier, and Manifest Solutions-the initiative builds on earlier consultations with representatives from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An Internet-Draft for the INFO URI scheme was first published Sept. 25th, 2003 and a revision published Dec. 5th, 2003 (see <http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-vandesompel-info-uri-01.txt>) .* Herbert Van de Sompel, Digital Library Research & Prototyping at the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Research Library, stated, "A good example of the problem that the INFO URI scheme solves involves PubMed identifiers: unique numbers assigned to records in the PubMed database maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the National Library of Medicine. PubMed identifiers originated prior to the Web, so they are not URIs. As such they do not exist naturally in the Web infrastructure because the Web only recognizes URIs as a means to identify information resources. So Web applications cannot use PubMed identifiers, and hence cannot reference PubMed records that are identified by them. The solution is to turn PubMed identifiers into URIs. The INFO Registry enables the registration of public namespaces of standard identifiers; NCBI registered its PubMed identifier namespace under the INFO Registry-their namespace is pmid-so we can now talk about the record with the PubMed identifier '12376099' in URI terms as <info:pmid/12376099>." "The goal of INFO is to act as a bridging mechanism to the Web by providing a lightweight means for registering public namespaces used for the identification of information assets," said Tony Hammond, Advanced Technology Group at Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. "We see INFO as an enabling technology for the library, publishing and media communities-a way to facilitate and speed the growth of the Web as a truly global information place beyond a basic document repository. The Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and NASA are among those organizations that have already registered public namespaces with the INFO Registry." "There are different ways to represent these identifiers on the Web," explained Pat Harris, NISO's Executive Director, "but the INFO URI scheme really simplifies matters. As a Web user, you aren't likely to see the scheme in action on your screen-for example, <info:lccn/2002022641>, because it's an under-the-hood way of communicating the identity of an information asset to a Web application." The INFO Registry is now available online at <http://info-uri.info/> for receiving new registrations. This Registry contains all the information needed by Web applications to make use of INFO namespaces. Each Registry entry defines the namespace, the syntax, and normalization rules for the representing INFO identifiers as URIs, and gives full contact information for the namespace authority for that entry. Moreover, the INFO Registry is readable by both humans and machines alike. For more information about the INFO URI scheme, see the FAQ at < http://info-uri.info/registry/docs/misc/faq.html >. ----------- About NISO NISO, a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), identifies, develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to manage information in our changing and ever-more digital environment. NISO standards apply both traditional and new technologies to the full range of information-related needs, including retrieval, re-purposing, storage, metadata, and preservation. www.niso.org Press Contact: Maryann Karinch (pr@karinch.com), T: 970-577-8500 * Both Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and Uniform Resource Names (URNs) are types of URIs. While URLs are locators, or addresses, on the Web, URNs are names on the Web. The INFO URI scheme is a special type of URN which complements regular URNs but is designed to be simpler and more convenient both to manage and to use. Jill O'Neill ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ -- Best wishes Peter Strickland Managing Editor IUCr Journals ---------------------------------------------------------------------- IUCr Editorial Office, 5 Abbey Square, Chester CH1 2HU, England Phone: 44 1244 342878 Fax: 44 1244 314888 Email: ps@iucr.org Ftp: ftp.iucr.org WWW: http://journals.iucr.org/ NEWSFLASH: Complete text of all IUCr journals back to 1948 now online! Visit Crystallography Journals Online for more details _______________________________________________ Epc mailing list Epc@iucr.org http://scripts.iucr.org/mailman/listinfo/epc
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