The Role of Libraries in the iPad Age

The National Library of Australia ran an excellent Innovative Ideas Forum 2010. For next year I suggest allowing for more audience input. The NLA provides time for questions and has excellent wireless microphones so you can hear the person asking the question. Also the NLA encourages blogging (tag: iif2010) and twittering (#iif2010) , providing power points and WiFi for laptops. However, what is blogged or twittered does not appear to the speaker or the non-twittering audience. The room is full of talent which could be tapped. Perhaps there could be some breakout session, where we fan out across different pars of the NLA building and discuss the issues, then come back and report.

In any case there is still clearly a role for the library in the iPad age. Being in this building at this event I felt I the "flow" which Ben Swift described in his seminar on mobile music making yesterday. This is helped by the NLA building being in the shape of a Greek temple and having stained glass windows like a medieval scriptorium. Things got a little historically weird when one of the library staff appeared, dressed like a character from a Jane Austin novel.

Food-Scanner needed for Austrlaia

At the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010,one of the speakers asked for a gadget which would tell you the nutritional content of food in the supermarket. So I did a web search and found a iPhone App for US$0.99 called "Foodscanner". This scans the Universal Product Code (UPC) barcodes on packaged food and displays ingredients, nutrition and calorie information. So I mentioned this but the audience said "yes we know Tom, but it doesn't work in Australia and its database is limited".

Cell phone download from iTunes: FoodScanner

The Future is Catered For

Greeting from the reading room of the National Library of Australia, in Canberra. I have taken half an hour off from the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010, which is happening down stairs. The morning session was interesting, exciting, but also hard work. There was an excellent lunch provided in the foyer by the NLA and the chance to chat with participants. I took up what proved to be a strategic position on the couch outside the cafe (corner seat is the best). I then helped a colleague from the University of Canberra design a social networking course for next semester, from the people who wandered over and what they chatted about. That might sound a random process but these were people like Intel Fellow, Genevieve Bell, who I had the pleasure of sitting behind at the "Realising Our Broadband Future" forum in Sydney (where she was carrying out an impromptu anthropological study of the politicians use of mobile devices around her her). Also there are people from the communications department, who work on the digital economy while suffering from the acronym of "dbcde". ;-)

Over the last few weeks I have attended events on e-teaching, innovation, e-publishing and reading a history of Cam,bridge University. It may just be the excellent coffee and the fresh air at the outdoor cafe at the NLA making me light headed, but I think I can see a way to combine these together.

The Library of Alexandria was Destroyed

Brianna Laugher, President Wikimedia Australia is talking on "Is Wikipedia a one-off? Is mass collaboration all it's cracked up to be?"
at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 success was a one off, short term at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. The issue addressed was if the Wikipedia'sphenomena. The Wikipedia might come and go quickly, even the Library of Alexandria, which must have seemed for ever, was destroyed.

An ebook is a standalone website

Mark Pesce at Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 seems to be using a very complex and wordy analysis for some very simple ideas of what an ebook is. He seems to think that paper books are a linear form starting from page one and going to the last page. This is not the case, most obviously for non-fiction books and less so for fiction.

Books have non-liner features such as tables of contents indexes and footnotes. In teaching web design I explain to the students how to design a web site by analogy to a book. I suggest that designed have one default linear path through the web site, like the format of a book. In the extreme case a book can be converted to a book, by converting the components to their book equivalent.

Recently I took a set of web pages and turned them into a book, including ebook versions (the paper version is in the NLA and the web version in Trove). Obviously the paper and ebook versions have different features. The ebook versions differ depending on the ebook device used and if it is online or not. As an example, the citations cannot be clicked on in the paper version of the book. In the PDF and Kindle versions they can be clicked on, but if the book is not online external links will still not work.

Whatever happened to plain English?

Greeting from the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. The second speaker is Mark Pesce, of Future St Consulting. His topic is "Whatever Happened to the Book?". So far he seems to have said that commercial content providers do not like to hyperlink outside their own web site, that the web encourages brief easily understood items and e-books are different to paper books. Perhaps he has some other non-obvious point he is trying to make, but I am having difficulty understanding what he is saying due to all the big words being used and convoluted sentences. He seems to be reading out a paper for a university paper (or something for Fibreculture). Perhaps it is just that I am so used to brief simple online expression and can't cope with old fashioned substantive expression and am too used to short, clear, easy to understand online expression.

The Future is Messy

Greeting from the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. The first speaker is Dr Genevieve Bell , Intel Fellow, Digital Home Group Director, User Experience Group, Intel Corporation, talking about technology and the ways people use it in their everyday lives.

Genevieve is originally from Canberra and gave an entertaining insight as to how culture and technology interact. One insight was that the people in the growth areas for Internet use in Asia live much more densely and that English was not longer the dominant language of the Internet. Western, and particularly American, ideas of how information is organised, meaning is expressed will not necessarily continue to dominate the Internet.

Genevieve argued that old forms of media, such as television, will live on. Rather than television being subsumed as a VOD service, TV is influencing the design of computers and the Internet. It would be interesting to see how this apply to the book.

The room is packed with about 400 people, about one quarter of who I know by sight from other e-events. The organisers encourage live blogging (tag: iif2010) and twittering (#iif2010) from the event, making for a lively discussion. You can read my notes from last year .

Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 in Canberra

The National Library of Australia will host the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010, in Canberra, 16 April 2010. This excellent annual event is free, but you need to register.

The organisers encourage live blogging (tag: iif2010) and twittering (#iif2010) from the event, making for a lively discussion. Last year I took Mark Scott, Managing Director, ABC, to task for problems with the accessibility of the ABC mobile web site, grumbled about Marcus Gillezeau's "Scorched", and contemplated what Dr Anne Summers had to say about serious writing and the Internet.

Innovative Ideas Forum 2010: Program

Chair: Warwick Cathro, Assistant Director-General, Resource Sharing & Innovation, NLA
9.30am	Welcome: Jan Fullerton, Director-General, NLA
9.40am	Dr Genevieve Bell , Intel Fellow, Digital Home Group Director, User Experience Group, Intel Corporation, talking about technology and the ways people use it in their everyday lives
10.30am	Mark Pesce, FutureSt Consulting "Whatever Happened to the Book?"
11.15am	Morning Tea
11.45am	Brianna Laugher, President Wikimedia Australia, "Is Wikipedia a one-off? Is mass collaboration all it's cracked up to be?"
12.30pm	Kent Fitch, Programmer, IT Division, NLA " Resistance is futile: how libraries must serve society by embracing cloud culture, the end of the information age, and inevitable technological and social trends"
1.15	Lunch
Chair: Mark Corbould, Assistant Director-General, Information Technology, NLA
2.30pm	Dr Nicholas Gruen, CEO. Lateral Economics "Information and content: the new public good of the 21st Century"
3.15pm	Rob Manson, Managing Director, MOB, "Collections are Leaking into the Real World". A look at how mobile phones, iPhones, iPads and augmented reality are changing our use of collections and their place in the world.
4.00pm	Closing remarks: Jan Fullerton

Publishing round table National Library of Australia

Greetings from the National Library of Australia. Colin Steele organised a round table with Richard Charkin, Executive Director of Bloomsbury Publishing, London. There were 26 people present, about one third from the library, a third from the ANU and the rest from federal government agencies and universities.

Richard, who I met in the library's cafe on the way in, is talking at forums in Melbourne and Sydney. Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research talked at the forum yesterday. In his speech "THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION: PUBLISHING IN THE 21ST CENTURY". He announced a book industry support group. The group has not been set up and its composition and role is unclear. Richard commented that the Minister seemed to be making it up as he was speaking.

Richard talked about Bloomsbury's role in publishing educational and scientific materials with "Bloomsbury Academic". He talked about the tradition business model of publishing, with the separate roles of publishers and book stores. Publishers became more specialised an online delivery became available twenty years ago with Dialog and the like. There were also early CD-ROM books, such as the BBC Domesday Project. The point of this was that e-publishing is not new. One example was the spell check program based on a traditional paper dictionary. One large e-publishing effort was the Oxford English Dictionary.

Large digital scholarly publishing started around 1993 and was largely complete in five years. Scientific journals were traditionally published as a record: to be written, not read. Computer based systems allow the material to be easily searched. The science publisher's staff were scientifically trained and so comfortable with computers. Because the publisher had rights to re-purpose the material allowed for new databases, which Richard argued was a good thing (although in other ways publishers may have too much power). The last link in the chain were the university librarians, who were comfortable with digital materials.

Richard commented that scientific publishing has been very profitable for hundreds of years. The profit was an enabler for digitising publishing. Also university library budgets for subscriptions is a source of funds. He claimed that scientific publishing is now 99% digital. For leading journals, such as "Nature" all submissions are now digital. The print journal is now a sideline.

Book publishers are now being sucked into the maelstrom of electronic publishing. Book publishing is incredibly complicated (something I discovered recently with my new book "Green Technology Strategies").

Unlike scientific papers, format matters for scholarly books and there are many different complex formats. The rights to books are very complex, with rights for different territories and in different languages. Some of the rights are unclear, as for example, is Hong Kong an "Open Market". A publisher might have the paper rights, but not digital rights, or may have the rights, but have agreed a royalty. This makes the metadata for the rights difficult to encode. Calculating royalties can be difficult when the book is available in different formats and modes, such as subscription.

Richard commented that the fear of book piracy may be more of an issue than piracy itself. There is also a fear of e-book sales cannibalising paper book sales. He also commented on the Macmillan verses Amazon.com pricing issue. With Amazon Kindle e-books, he commented that the commercial arrangements were confidential (I see this as similar to software licences).

Richard said that many Kindle book sales are to regional areas and less developed nations. He speculated this was a new market of people who previously had difficulty getting access to books. There is a large market for English language books outside English speaking countries. I assume this is particularly the case for technical and scientific works, where English is the language of the discipline (such as Computer Science).

There are frustrations and delays with e-publishing still. This will require new systems and clarification of rights. Richard used the example of the Kindle edition of my book of what is possible, which took only 12 hours to be distributed.
There is needed a new emphasis on marketing of material. Also global agreements on copyright is needed. Richard argued copyright is workable and Creative Commons is an example of how it can be adapted to new needs.

He suggested that academic publishers need to de-specialise, so they find a new wider market.

Post Harry Potter, Richard decided to build Bloomsbury's academic publishing, with Bloomsbury Academic. He commented that a fiction book goes through 25 intermediaries before publishing, making it difficult to make a profit. The academic publishing process has many fewer steps.

Bloomsbury set up " Bloomsbury Academic" which has adopted the Creative Commons licence, with "vanilla text" versions online for free, as well as selling e-book and print editions. I was surprised that a credible publisher had taken this innovative step and more surprised that I had not heard about it. I had a quick browse and found at least one book of interest ("Net Neutrality" by Christopher Marsden). But Bloomsbury need to improve their web site, as I could not find a web page about the book. He aims to publish a few hundred titles in five years, an at least break even. He accepts that this new initiative will not appeal to academic authors as much as prestige publishers, but will be attractive as the books will be much widely read and have the potential to become popular. The production process has traditional editors and quality controls.

The floor was then open for questions.

The first question was about Print On Demand (POD), such as the Espresso Book Machine at University Bookshop and Melbourne University Library. Like me, Richard has doubts about the current machines, but they have potential for the near future (next year or so). Someone then commented that US publishers don't allow POD outside the US, because the US market is so large in itself and they do not have to try too hard. Richard also commented that due to the "thirty day rule" many books are now printed in Australia (unfortunately I could not find a web pages explaining the 30 day rule).

The next question was about markets and demographics. Ricahrd commented there was little science in trade publishing and it as more a matter of passion and reading the book. It occurred to me that the sort of data you get from web sites using tools like Google Analytics could be of use.

The next question was about the ability to produce large print books on demand. It was commented that this was very useful, but expensive from Amazon POD (but an exclusive arrangement will not be used). I produced a large print edition of my latest book, simply by increasing the paper size. he Apple iPad also got a positive mention.

The next question was composite textbooks, made from chapters out of different works. Richard responded that US style textbooks are an outdated "Oldsmobile 1996" style of working, with a long production time and large costs. He doesn't think "chunking" (taking chapters from different works) is an interesting approach. The lecturer's notes are more interesting. Textbooks are bought by students in shops, whereas digital materials are bought by libraries. He suggested university libraries might buy a e-textbook site licence and then obtain reimbursement from students. Last year at ANU I selected an e-textbook available through the library for COMP2410 and this worked fine (we aren't charging the students extra for this).

The next question was why English and Dutch academic paper publishers think they can make money, but others can't. Richard's reply was that if you subsidise the publishing it will never make money. He argued that academic publishing can make money and university should not subsidise their presses.

One question was why aren't students demanding e-textbooks? One comment was that the text is no integrated into the course and students may never read the text, electronic or on paper. Richard replied that teaching English was producing the most sophisticated e-learning systems. Another comment was that the Australian Government's new publishing intuitive did not include educational institutions, who are a large source of the content, as well as consumers. It occurred to me that the e-learning initiatives funded by the federal education department for universities (Education Network Australia: edna ) and TAFEs (Australian Flexible Learning Framework) could be usefully combined with the publishing initiative.

Richard commented that "printers" were not now seen as a significant part of the publishing business, but with POD this could become important again: "desperate industries tend to be ahead of the curve".

Another comment was about "Learn on Demand" rather than "Print on Demand". Students want to be able to select components of courses and texts in different formats as required. It seems a shame that the publishing people in this room did not know about all the excellent work being done on exactly this by people who probly a few doors down the corridor from them.

Richard expressed doubts that Google Books would earn significant advertising revenue and was likely done out of idealism. I am trying it out, by making my book avialable on Google Books.

One person commented that academic publishing online was still largely in the format of traditional books. Also better measures than citation index was needed. It occurs to me that some of the sophisticated measures available to web publishers could be applied.

Richard commented that the business model for Apple iPad was still not clear. He also amusingly commented that the market for e-books did not seem to be mobile younger business people as expected, but actually older people who wanted to read in bed without disturbing their partner. He also commented that the limiting factor in selling books was bookshelf space at home and there may be more shelf space in India (haing seen the book store at Bandglore airport and the public library in Panjim, Goa, I can agree). There were also comments about the iPad and Knidle being too big. In 1996 I predicted a passport size (b7) PADD device, much like the Apple iPad.

There was then a discussion of the disposable nature of mass market paperbacks, particuarly romance novels.

Richard said how he saw no books in the canteen of the British Library, only laptops. He also said how good the canteen is. This I found surprising, as on my one and only visit as a reader at the BL, I found the food at the cafe very poor (along with the poor state of maintenace of the technology in the BL, poor customer relations and poor building design).

There was then a discussion of how quickly books go out of print and general agreement that e-publishing would eliminate this.

Richard asked if books could be e-published in 12 hours, why couldn't peer review be made faster. In fact with electronic support for publishing, this can be done. The systems automatically track how ling reviewers are taking, send them reminders and monitor their performance.

One comment was that books only count slightly more than journal articles for the Australian research ranking system. So a smart academic will chop their book into about five papers to maximise their ranking.

I commented that my e-learning course ended up being a printed book as well. Richard replied that several initiatives at Nature which started out purely electronic later produced print versions which were popular.

One audience member asked that if the academic author does all the production work, then what is the publisher for? Richard responded that authors always feel there publishers are not doing enough, but they do provide production, marketing and distribution services, as well as "love". One of the audience commented that the film industry has a different arrangement. It occurred to me that the modern publisher is more like a holywood studio, which actually does little of the film production.

Bloomsbury created qfinance.com for the Qatar government. Also is creating Bloomsbury Qatar Publishing Foundation for publishing educational materials and Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals (couldn't find their web site) to do institutional repository with open access for Education City's research output. These are non profit actives established by Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned (موزة بنت ناصر المسند‎), chairperson of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development.

Wragge's identity finder

Wragge's identity finder is a simple little web service shown at BarCamp Canberra 2010. It lets you search a database of well known Australians maintained by the National Library of Australia and produces some HTML code you can paste into a web page. The idea is to create a semantic web in an easy way. I was flattered to find "Tom Worthington" (that is me) is listed in the system.

Green Technology Strategies in National Library Archive

The web version of my book "Green Technology Strategies" has been selected by the National Library of Australia for long-term preservation in the PANDORA Archive of online publications by Australian authors. Unfortunately they used the e-book ISBN which is for the PDF version (this has been removed). I didn't have an ISB issued for the web version.

Also the catalogue entry says "Only available online" which is misleading as the book is also avialable hardcover, paperback and PDF e-Book. The NLA have still not catalogued the printed version of the book after a month.

What is a Bath Book?

It is a little frustrating getting my book "Green Technology Strategies" into the catalogue of the National Library of Australia. First I tried sending the details, then I tried an electronic copy, a preprint and finally a few weeks ago an actual published copy handed in at the library. So far the book has not appeared in the catalog. I found it in Trove, which indicates the details came from Libraries Australia, which is run by the NLA. Also I am curious as to why it is described as a "Bath Book".

Social networking for local government

Bernard de Broglio, Internet Coordinator at Mosman Council, will give a free talk on "Dr Strangelove or: How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love The Gov", at the National Library of Australia Digital Culture talk 25 September 2009 in Canberra. He will talk about new forms of participation online for local government. My view is that local government is the most important but least resourced when it comes to Government 2.0. These techniques could also be applied to the fourth level of government in Australia (cluster housing).

Digital Culture talk

Dr Strangelove or: How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love The Gov
You can credit Barack Obama for bringing sexy back to government - it's 2.0! - but the change has largely been driven by self-organised communities collaborating across disciplines and borders. Who are these people? Well, us. Citizen activists, ethical hackers, open source public servants, digital library and museum workers. The web has allowed collaboration between people (and their machines) on a scale never possible before. Customers, constituents and people within the public sector are all beginning to feel a new sense of agency. It's not e-gov, it's we-gov. But let's not be a tease. How does it work, now? Bernard de Broglio, Internet Coordinator at Mosman Council, will share some of his stories of internet life at the local level.
Bernard studied English at university but ended up writing HTML and CSS. He has been working at Mosman Council since 2002, pushing more acronyms (okay, abbreviations) like API, XML and RSS. His interest in the social aspect of network communications was sparked by FidoNet and the Sydney BBS (Bulletin Board System) scene of the late 80s and early 90s. That early promise – of new forms of participation online – is now being realised. Based in Mosman Library, he has been fortunate to be surrounded by information professionals who understand the benefit of the open web and the need to take Council's web presence beyond its website. The cakes are good too.

Australian Research Online

The Arrow Discovery Service has been renamed Australian Research Online. It provides an index to Australian university, non-government and government research repositories. This includes items from the Australian National University and The Australian Computer Society, as well as more than 30,000 Digital Theses.

Future of Scholarly Communication

Greetings from the National Library of Australia in Canberra, where Dr David Prosser, Director of SPARC Europe is speaking on "Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Dissemination, Prestige, and Impact". He started by talking about the political imperative for access to information, both as a right and as a way to drive the economy. Governments which fund research are demanding measures of results, which provides an impetus for open access to increase use of research output, with e-science and e-research.

Dr Prosser pointed out that the revolution of the Internet is real, with 90% of scholarly journals online. The problem is that the new technology is matched with an old business model of subscription access. In some cases, access to one paper might cost several thousand dollars, even when the author of the paper gave away their copyright for free. He talked about how the traditional paper journal is a bundle of services which can be unbundled in the online environment. He jokingly congratulated Australia for no signing the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities", as those who sign tend to feel they need to do no more. Examples of successful open access polices were the Welcome Trust and US NIH (Professor Larry Clarke from NIH is a keynote speaker next week at HIC09 in Canberra).

Dr Prosser criticised the Australian Research Council for not requiring open access to funded research. That policy followed a submission to the ARC by Professor Arthur Sale FACS, which I signed on behalf of the ACS (along with other organisations).

Dr Prosser speculated on new forms of scholarly publishing online, with institutional repositories being used as a source and forum, more closely integrated to research. He used NanoHub as an example. He used the analogy where academic libraries have now integrated teaching spaces (learning commons).

For the future Dr Prosser asked if papers should be designed to be machine readable, rather than human readable. He asked if they should be static, or can they be updated as new results become avialable. He asked if wikis and blogs have any long term academic value.

There is a paper "Institutional repositories and Open Access: The future of scholarly communication" (Journal of Information Services and Use, 2003) and a copy of an older presentation by Daid available online, covering many of the topics in his current Australian presentation "Open Access and the Evolving Scholarly Communication Environment":

www.sparceurope.org

SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING & ACADEMIC RESOURCES COALITION – SPARC Europe

Open Access and the Evolving Scholarly Communication Environment

David Prosser • SPARC Europe Director

(david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk)

www.sparceurope.org

SPARC Europe

Scholarly Publishing &
Academic Resources Coalition

• Formed in 2002 following the success of SPARC (launched in 1998 by the US Association of Research Libraries)
• Encourages partnership between libraries, academics, societies and responsible publishers
• Originally focused on STM, but coverage expanding
• Has over 110 members in 14 countries
• By acting together the members can influence the future of scholarly publishing

www.sparceurope.org

The Effect of the Internet

• Opportunities for expanded access and new uses offered by
• ever-expanding networking
• evolving digital publishing technologies and business models
• New dissemination methods
• Better ways to handle increasing volume of research generated
• 90% of journals now online

www.sparceurope.org

The Situation Today – Dissatisfaction at Many Levels

• Authors
• Their work is not seen by all their peers – they do not get the recognition they desire
• Despite the fact they often have to pay page charges, colour figure charges, reprint charges, etc.
• Often the rights they have given up in exchange for publication mean there are things that they cannot do with their own work
• Readers
• They cannot view all the research literature they need – they are less effective
• Libraries
• Even libraries at the wealthiest institutions cannot satisfy the information needs of their users
• Funders
• Want to see greater returns on their research investment
• Society
• We all lose out if the communication channels are not optimal.

www.sparceurope.org

Open Access

What is it?

Call for free, unrestricted access on the public internet to the literature that scholars give to the world without expectation of payment.

Why?

Widen dissemination, accelerate research, enrich education, share learning among rich & poor nations, enhance return on taxpayer investment in research.

How?

Use existing funds to pay for dissemination, not access.

www.sparceurope.org

Budapest Open Access Initiative

Two complementary strategies:

• Self-Archiving: Scholars should be able to deposit their refereed journal articles in open electronic archives which conform to Open Archives Initiative standards
• Open-Access Journals: Journals will not charge subscriptions or fees for online access. Instead, they should look to other sources to fund peer-review and publication (e.g., publication charges)

http://www.soros.org/openaccess/

www.sparceurope.org

What are Institutional Repositories (Open Archives)?

Essential elements

• Institutionally defined: Content generated by institutional community
• Scholarly content: preprints and working papers, published articles, enduring teaching materials, student theses, data-sets, etc.
• Cumulative & perpetual: preserve ongoing access to material
• Interoperable & open access: free, online, global

www.sparceurope.org

The Benefits of Institutional Repositories

• For the Individual
• Provide a central archive of their work
• Improved discovery and retrieval
• Increase the dissemination and impact of their research
• Acts as a full CV
• For the Institution
• Increases visibility and prestige
• Acts as an advertisement to funding sources, potential new faculty and students, etc.
• Helps in administration, e.g., Research assessment and evaluation
• For Society
• Provide access to the world’s research
• Ensures long-term preservation of institutes’ academic output

www.sparceurope.org

What is a Journal?

Scholarly publishing comprises four functions:

Current model:

• Integrates these functions in journals
• This made sense in print environment

ARCHIVING

Preserving

research

for future use

AWARENESS

Assuring

accessibility

of research

CERTIFICATION

Certifying the

quality/validity

of the research

REGISTRATION

Establishing

intellectual

priority

www.sparceurope.org

The Four Functions - Repositories

ARCHIVING

Preserving

research

for future use

AWARENESS

Assuring

accessibility

of research

CERTIFICATION

Certifying the

quality/validity

of the research

REGISTRATION

Establishing

intellectual

priority

Institutional

Repositories

www.sparceurope.org

Certification

• Certification gives:
• Authors – Validation of their work (important for promotion and grant applications)
• Readers – Quality filter
• Journals provide peer review and give a ‘quality stamp’ to research and authors
• Journals should be open access

www.sparceurope.org

The Four Functions of a Journal

ARCHIVING

Preserving

research

for future use

AWARENESS

Assuring

accessibility

of research

CERTIFICATION

Certifying the

quality/validity

of the research

REGISTRATION

Establishing

intellectual

priority

Institutional

Repositories

Open Access

Journals

www.sparceurope.org

How the pieces work together

Author

Content

Services

Reader

Institutional

Repositories

Disciplinary

Repositories

Interoperability Standards

Registration

e.g.: by

institutions

Certification

e.g.: peer review

Awareness

e.g.: search tools, linking

Archiving

e.g.: by library

www.sparceurope.org

Theory Into Practice
- Institutional Repositories

• GNU EPrints – Southampton
• D-Space – MIT
• CDSWare – CERN
• ARNO – Tilburg, Amsterdam, Twente
• Fedora – Cornell University / University of Virginia

• SHERPA – UK
• DARE – The Netherlands
• DRIVER – EC

www.sparceurope.org

Theory Into Practice
- Institutional Repositories

OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories)

• An authoritative directory of academic open access repositories
• List of over 1425 repositories
• Can be used to search across content in all listed repositories
• Gives information on repository polices (copyright, re-used of material, preservation, etc.)

http://www.opendoar.org/

www.sparceurope.org

www.sparceurope.org

Theory Into Practice
- Open Access Journals

• Lund Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/) – lists over 4250 peer-reviewed open access journals
• PLoS Biology (launched 2003), PLoS Medicine (2004), PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, PLoS Pathogens (2005)
• BioMed Central (published over 54,000 papers)
• Documenta Mathematica (Ranked 24^th of 214 mathematics journals listed by ISI)
• SPARC Europe has helped to launch the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA - http://www.oaspa.org/) to represent the interests of open access publishers

www.sparceurope.org

Open Access – Making the Transition

• Give Authors the choice:
• If they pay a publication charge the paper is made open access on publication.
• If they do not pay the publication charge the paper is only made available to subscribers.
• Over time, as proportion of authors who pay increases subscription prices can fall
• Eventually, entire journal is open access

http://www.sparceurope.org/Open%20Access/From%20Here%20to%20There.doc

www.sparceurope.org

Open Access – Making the Transition

• A number of ‘traditional’ publishers are transforming their closed access journals into open access journals:
• Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS)
• Oxford University Press
• American Institute of Physics
• Company of Biologists
• American Physiological Society
• American Society of Limnology and Oceanography
• Springer
• Blackwell’s

www.sparceurope.org

The Power of Open Access – Self Archiving

• For 72% of papers published in the Astrophysical Journal free versions of the paper are available (mainly through ArXiv)
• These 72% of papers are, on average, cited twice as often as the remaining 28% that do not have free versions.

Figures from Greg Schwarz

• Tim Brody from Southampton has shown that papers for which there is also a free version available have, on average, greater citations than those that are only available through subscriptions

http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study

www.sparceurope.org

The Power of Open Access – Journals

• Open access PNAS papers have 50% more full-text downloads than non-open access papers

http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0505/msg01580.html

• …and are on average twice as likely to be cited

http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157

www.sparceurope.org

What Institutions Are Doing

Self-archiving:

• Set-up and maintain institutional repository.
• Help faculty deposit their research papers, new & old, digitizing if necessary.
• Implement open-access policies

Open-access journals:

• Help promote open access journals launched at their institution become known externally.
• Ensure scholars at their institution know how to find open access journals and archives in their fields.
• Support open access journal ‘institutional memberships’ (e.g. BioMedCentral, PLoS)
• Engage with politicians and funding bodies to raise the issue of open access http://www.createchange.org/

www.sparceurope.org

Open Access – Appealing to All the Major Stakeholders

• To the funders of researcher – both as a public service and as an increased return on their investment in research
• To the authors – as it gives wider dissemination and impact
• To readers – as it gives them access to all primary literature, making the most important ‘research tool’ more powerful
• To editors and reviewers – as they feel their work is more valued

www.sparceurope.org

Open Access – Appealing to All the Major Stakeholders

• To the libraries – as it allows them to meet the information needs of their users
• To the institutions – as it increases their presence and prestige
• To small and society publishers – as it gives them a survival strategy and fits with their central remit

www.sparceurope.org

A Changing Environment

“It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures--but far and wide. ”

Daniel Coit Gilman, First President, Johns Hopkins University, 1878 (on the university press)

“ An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. ”

Budapest Open Access Initiative, Feb. 14, 2002

Kogan Agora Netbook Pro Battery Time

Greetings from the main reading room of the National Library of Australia. The Kogan Agora Netbook Pro is reporting that its fully charged six cell battery will last for 3.5 hours. The Agora is in its natural environment here, every second person seems to have some sort of small laptop to research the great Australian novel. I was able to quickly connect to the NLA's free, but slow, WiFi service. I had a few problems with the service asking me to reconnect each time I opened a window in Firefox and not allowing spell checking in Google Blogger, but leaving the first window I opened at the NAL home page seems to fix this.

Future of Scholarly Communication in Europe

Dr David Prosser, Director of SPARC Europe will speak on "Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Dissemination, Prestige, and Impact", at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, 14 August 2009.

ANU Division of Information and the National Library of Australia Present:

ANU PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES 2009
Open Access and the Future of Schollarly Communcation: Dissemination, Prestige, and Impact

Dr David Prosser
Director, SPARC Europe

Friday 14 August, 12.30-1.30pm
Conference Room, 4th Floor, National Library of Australia
Parkes Place, Canberra, ACT

This lecture is free and open to the public.

Enquiries: T: 02 6125 2981 E: moyra.mcnamara@anu.edu.au

The internet is having a profound impact on the 300-year-old model of scholarly communication. New technologies allow for new modes of interaction between researchers, and a wider audience of administrators, funders, governments and the general public. The lines between formal and informal communication are becoming increasingly blurred and
publishers and librarians find themselves playing new roles in the scholarly communication chain. One of the most powerful new ideas to emerge with the development of the internet is open access – the notion that the scholarly research literature should be made available
to readers free of charge. This presentation describes current developments within the scholarly communications landscape and provides an indicator of possible future directions.

David Prosser was appointed the first director of SPARC Europe in October 2002. Previously, he spent ten years in science, technical, and medical journal publishing for both Oxford University Press and Elsevier Science. During this time he was involved in all aspects of publishing from production through to editorial and financial management of journals.

Before becoming a publisher he received a PhD and BSc in Physics from Leeds University,UK.

SPARC Europe is an alliance of European research libraries, library organizations and research institutions, providing a voice for the community and the support and tools it needs in order to bring about positive change to the system of scholarly communications.

Its members represent over 100 leading academic and research institutions in over 14 European countries. ...

From: Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Dissemination, Prestige, and Impact, ANU, 2009

Building location aware websites

Paul Hagon from the National Library of Australia will talk on "Where am I? Building location aware websites" at the July Canberra WSG meeting, 24 July 2009 at the NLA in Canberra.

Mobile devices with inbuilt GPS, such as the iPhone, are leading to the development of location aware applications. This trend isn't just limited to the mobile arena. Advances are being made to bring this technology to desktop and laptop browsers. Services exist to allow you to share your location to a variety of applications. How can we incorporate this technology into our websites and what are the technical and social implications of doing so? ...

From July Canberra WSG meeting, Web Standards Group, 2009

National Library of Australia Cybercafe

The National Library of Australia's bookplate cafe will close from 4 May to mid-June 2009 for renovations. In the interim the Paperplate cafe will operate from new lounge area on the lower floor of the library. This will have free wifi and power, as well food and coffee. The bookplate is the best library cafe I have experienced (easily beating the poor quality and high prices of the cafe in the British Library for example). In some ways the Paperplate will be better, as the Bookplate discourages WiFi use (the NLA has free WiFi in the public areas of the building).

ABC Mobile Web site continuing problems

During Mark Scott, Managing Director, ABC, talk at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2009, I did a quick check and the ABC's new mobile web site which showed accessibility and HTML validation problems. Mr. Scott said he thought the accessibility problems had been fixed and he would go back to the office and check. To assist, here are some details on the test results.

I ran a TAW (Web Accessibility Test) based on the W3C - Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0). This reported 0 Priority 1, 14 Priority 2 and 1 Priority 3 automated test problems. While there were no Priority 1 automated errors, manual inspection requests were flagged, such as:

• Suspicious text equivalent for image, can not be file name or file size or placeholder text (1)
• • Line 32:

In this case the alternate text for someone who can't see images is the word "image". This is not useful text and appears to have been inserted so as to trick the automated test process. Other inappropriate ALT text appears to be honest mistakes by an inadequately trained web designer:

alt='White Space'

The W3C Markup Validator reported 79 errors. Many of these errors were due to unencoded ampersands and are not serious problems and easily fixed. More serious is that no "Doctype" is specified so it is not clear which particular HTML standard is intended. The document seems to be a mix of different pieces of HTML pasted from different sources. The validation assumed XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but I was unable to find any setting for which the code passed validation.

Most desktop web browsers will accept invalid code most of the time. However, mobile phone browsers tend to be more sensitive and may produce no useful display. Adaptive technology used by people with a disability will tend to be more sensitive and so may not work. Also it is not a good idea to hope the web pages will display correctly when communicating emergency information.

The ABC should be using tools to check the web pages are technically correct. They should also ensure the staff using the tools are trained in how to design web pages.

Connecting with Audiences in the Digital Age

Mark Scott, Managing Director, ABC, talked at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2009. This was a thoughtful presentation on how the ABC is investing in digital delviery, despite limited resources. He used the example of how Twitter was used during the Victorian bushfires. Mr Scott said "The ABC is the emergency broadcaster". So at question time I asked if the ABC ws investing sufficient in the mobile service for he community to rely on it. I did a quick check and the ABC's new mobile web site appears to still not meet with accessibility guidelines and has dozens of validation errors. Mr. Scott said he thought the accessibility problems had been fixed and he would go back to the office and check. If the ABC uses the web and mobile phones as an integral part of its service it then I suggest it has an obligation to provide that service to the wide community and in emergencies. That requires funding, planning and testing by the ABC.

Dr Summers on blogging

Dr Anne Summers, gave a thoughtful and entertaining talk at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2009, on the implications for serious writing of the Internet. She expressed concern about the loss of historical information as paper is replaced by ephemeral digital media. Dr Summers showed us her facebook page live, which was impressive. As an author, her business model appears to be to use the web to promote books for sale. As with the previous speaker I asked if there might come a time when the writing would be supported from online advertising. Dr Summers replied that she had signed up for online ads, but the revenue was minimal. She also comfortable she was comfortable with online books but hers may not suit that medium. I jokingly suggested she sign up for my ANU course on how to do it.

Web advertising to support Austrlaian TV production

As soon as Marcus Gillezeau, stopped showing bits of the "Scorched" telemovie and started to talk off the cuff at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2009, he started to become interesting and more credible. I asked him about flipping the business model for his production from funding from TV advertising supported by Internet promotion to Internet web based advertising supported by TV. He argued passionately that as the creative person, this is not an issue for him, but for his promotional partners. He seemed to think it necessary for him to go to companies to sell the advertising, the idea that the ads would find the content automatically (as Google Adwords does) does not seem to be something he is aware of.

Are hoax web sites ethical and legal?

The more Marcus Gillezeau, talks about "Scorched", a Channel 9 telemove, at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2009, the less I like it. The TV show created a character "Cassy Hoffman" inspired by the Lonelygirl15 hoax. While a creative person might decide that such a hoax is okay as a work of art, it is worrying that this was funded by a government body, the Australian Film Commission. While it is one thing for someone to spend their own money creating hoaxes for commercial gain, it is not acceptable for my taxes to pay for it. Marcus was also proud of having carried a "faux" (that is hoax) news service. About the only saving grace of this material is that is is of the poor quality of the script, acting and production should make the more than casual viewer that this is a hoax.

Back the book

In her welcome to the Innovative Ideas Forum 2009, Jan Fullerton, Director-General, NLA, emphasised that the library has embraced new digital technology while not forgetting the book. There are about a dozen people in the audience blogging (tagged "iif2009") and twitering (hashtag #iif2009). Unfortunately Marcus Gillezeau, Producer/Director, Firelight Productions' keynote is disappointing so far. This is about "Scorched", a Channel 9 telemove. Marcus talked about how the movie was supported by online extensions. Unfortunately the video he played made it clear that this is just old fashioned soap TV dressed up with some minimal web base content. Perhaps this will help Channel 9 sell more TV advertising, but does not do much for genuine use of the technology or Australian culture. However it is a useful warning of how old media will try to hijack the new media to cynically exploit it.

How high the lectern

It is organised chaos at the National Library of Australia, with last minute preparations for the Innovative Ideas Forum 2009 . My bus was cancelled (the ACTION Canberra bus service changed the timetable) but the alternative bus which arrived turned out to be quicker (shame it was dangerously overloaded with public servants). I turned up at the reception desk for the forum gave my name, got a strange look and was asked to go down and help with the IT for the event. There were a half dozen A/V people, speakers and Warwick Cathro, the MC organising flash drives with presentations on them. I decided there were enough people and my help would not help. The biggest issue seemed to be if the lectern could be raised high enough for Mark Scott, Managing Director, ABC. I decided to retreat to the Bookplate cafe in the library foyer, where I could watch the passing parade of people and blog in comfort.