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ICSTI: news items
- To: epc@iucr.org
- Subject: ICSTI: news items
- From: Pete Strickland <ps@iucr.org>
- Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 13:29:21 +0100
- Organization: IUCr
********************************************************** Subject: Latest issue of ICSTI Forum The latest issue of ICSTI Forum is now available from http://www.icsti.org/forum/45/index.html Below is content information on this issue. Introduction: ICSTI General Assembly and Public Conference By Martin Smith, Chairman of FORUM Editorial Board, Inspec, UK Serving Today's STM End Users By Martin Smith, Chairman of FORUM Editorial Board, Inspec, UK Open Access - Personal View By Peter Gregory, Director of Publishing, Royal Society of Chemistry, UK Open Access Publishing Takes Off - The Dream is Now Achievable By Tony Delamothe, Web Editor, BMJ.COM, and Richard Smith, Editor BMJ The Promise and Peril of Open Access By Lila Guterman *********************************************************** Subject: Proceedings from ICSTI's conference on Open Access IOS Press has made the proceedings from ICSTI's conference on Open Access available on the Web at http://www.icsti.org/icsti_reports.html *********************************************************** Subject: Studies of lost links >From Peter Suber's blog: "John Whitfield, Web links leave abstracts going nowhere, Nature 428, 592 (08 April 2004). (Access restricted to subscribers) Nature reports on recent studies documenting the impermanence of cited web resources. Jonathan Wren of Oklahoma showed that one-fifth of the web sites noted in Medline abstracts over a ten-year period had vanished. Robert Dellavalle's study of broken links in NEJM, JAMA and Science from 2003 is also mentioned (see earlier OAN posting,) with the author remarking: "Journals aren't doing anything to address the potential for electronic resources to disappear. ... It's amazing what doesn't exist ? one of my own articles on digital preservation isn't there any more!" Further, the article quotes arXiv's Paul Ginsparg, who maintains that external links in papers posted on the site are discouraged. Solutions are considered, including author's archiving web resources to which they link, perhaps through the Internet Archive. CrossRef is also suggested as a way to stabilize URLs" *********************************************************** Subject: CENDI Report: Persistent Identifier White Paper Below the Exective summary from CENDI's White Paper on Persistent Identifiers is given. CENDI is sending a copy of this paper to all of the working groups of the Interagency Committee on Government Information (ICGI), created in June 2003 to implement Section 207 of the EGovernment Act of 2002 http://www.cio.gov/archive/e_gov_act_2002.pdf (Public Law 107-347, 44 U.S.C. Ch 36). The ICGI has an extensive agenda to draft recommendations and share effective practices for: * Access to federal government information. * Dissemination of federal government information. * Retention of federal government information. The ultimate goal is to make it easier for all Americans to find and use the government information and services they need. There are currently three working groups: Categorization of Information Work Group, Electronic Records Policy Work Group, and the Web Content Management Work Group. If anyone would like a copy of the full white paper, please let me know. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY As more U.S. federal government information is generated in digital form, it is increasingly important to develop a digital information infrastructure to ensure effective management and access. A key component of this infrastructure is persistent identification of digital information resources. Currently, many government resources do not have any uniform type of identification; individual agencies instead devise their own methods for naming sources such as internal reports, presentations, and other documents. One exception is for information posted on agency World Wide Web sites. These sites make use of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) to identify specific Web pages and objects. Unfortunately, this approach directly associates the name of the digital object with a physical location. When the object is removed from its original location, the association between the name and the location of the object is “broken†and accessing the original name yields and error message. Broken links are a major barrier to expanding electronic government, since citizens require consistent, reliable, and accurate access to government information on the Web. Current methods ensuring the association between the object and the name require maintenance, and if this is not performed consistently the association remains broken. Addressing this problem requires incorporating methods for creating and maintaining persistent identification as a key component of the Federal Enterprise Architecture. Two primary persistent identifier applications have emerged: the Persistent URL (PURL) and the Handle System®. Both systems are in use in the government and private sectors to enable Web applications to redirect users from the “persistent URL†to the current location of the object. Handles and PURLs are globally unique and can support mechanisms such as OpenURL, which associates critical descriptive information (metadata) with identification to enable context-sensitive linking. Handles are also supportive of a federated implementation, are independent of any physical location, and can resolve to multiple locations or multiple versions of an object. The Handle System has been adopted by major publishers for persistent identification of commercially traded content through its implementation with the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) system. While most of today’s implementations of persistent identifiers use PURLs or Handles for document-like objects, there are a variety of other object types from events to agreements to data sets that could be managed using persistent identification schemes. Establishing methods for persistent identification of government resources requires extensive analysis of issues such as preferred identifier approaches, core metadata, identifier maintenance, and relationships with existing information management systems. Consideration must be given to all aspects of the government information life cycle from creation to long-term management and access to ultimate disposition, including permanent preservation. There is also potential impact on key federal information management requirements and directives such as A-130 and A-110. For these reasons, a logical next step is the formation of a group under the E-government Interagency Committee on Government Information representing a variety of stakeholder groups to study the implementation issues, analyze costs and present recommendations. *********************************************************** Subject: The (London, UK) Observer, Crispin Davis of Reed-Elsevier.... At this URL: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1194065,00.html You will find an article by Crispin Davis CEO of Reed-Elsevier. It is written in response to an article in the same newspaper earlier which had argued that "scientific publishers had long used their stranglehold on the market to push up prices at the expense of underfunded academics" Extracts from Davis' article: "A policy of universal access to scientific material for the general public allows people to use ScienceDirect on site at university libraries. Any UK citizen can obtain a copy of an Elsevier article through the inter-library loan network or the British Library" "In recent years, libraries have expressed concerns about the rising cost of journals, in part because university funding cuts have placed pressure on their budgets. In 2003, the top 100 US university libraries received 25 per cent less of their universities' budgets than in 1998. The situation is similar in the UK and elsewhere. At the same time, the cost of journal publishing increases each year, driven by the volume of research articles; the cost of investment in technology; higher archiving and usage costs; and inflation...... Since 1999, the list prices of Elsevier's journals have risen by around 6 per cent per year, which is well below the industry average. Over this period the volume of articles grew annually by 3-5 per cent, inflation increased by 1-2 per cent each year, and the number of articles downloaded doubled annually. Since 2001, the price of retrieving an Elsevier article in the UK has fallen 63 per cent from £4.70 to £1.70 and is expected to fall below £1 wi thin two years" "In the centuries-old STM publishing industry, open access is a new movement. Like most scientific experiments, its benefits are being tested. Established publishers like Elsevier will observe and, as always, be ready to adapt and invest accordingly. Meanwhile, we will continue investing in the kinds of innovations that have so dramatically increased the productivity of researchers and that will continue to deliver better value for money for the libraries that serve them" *********************************************************** -- 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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