SciVee: Free and Multimedia Communication of Science
There is a new channel for multimedia scholarly communication, teaching, and learning. It is SciVee. From its About page:
SciVee is about the free and widespread dissemination and comprehension of science.
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SciVee allows scientists to communicate their work as a multimedia presentation incorporated with the content of their published article. Other scientists can freely view uploaded presentations and engage in virtual discussions with the author and other viewers. SciVee also facilitates the creation of communities around specific articles and keywords. Use this medium to meet peers and future collaborators that share your particular research interests.
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SciVee is operated in partnership with the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).
Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communication
The August 2007 issue of CTWatch Quarterly has the theme, Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications & Cyberinfrastructure. Among the published articles are:
- Reinventing scholarly communication for the electronic age
- Incentivizing the open access research Web
- Cyberinfrastructure for knowledge sharing
- Trends favoring open access
New Approaches to Textbooks
Two recent articles reported how technology had brought about new developments of the textbook. In "An evolutionary text book–Evolving by student activity," there is a discussion of how a textbook evolved on the basis of its author’s online interactions with students:
This paper describes a Swedish project that opens a channel allowing a teacher to systematically develop [knowledge of students’ understanding of the subject] while helping students. Teacher-student dialogues are conducted through a web page. As a result of the underlying goal, the project also extends the students’ role in their education to a more responsible one. The textbook author uses the students’ opinions and work at the web page to improve the book for the benefit of future students. Thus, the textbook evolves to be better adapted to the environment for which it is intended: studies by students.
Another article (Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom) describes how a professor uses a wiki to replace textbooks and to provide students with opportunities to accomplish collaborative learning:
In one Boston College professor’s classroom, however, wikis have become a primary learning tool, replacing textbooks and allowing improved collaboration among students. The wiki is even used to let students submit possible questions for examinations, many of which actually appear on tests.
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"[The wiki] has become a really robust tool and has changed the way I teach, primarily because it means I am more of a guide to them rather than a lecturer," [Dr. Gerald Kane] said. "My job is to teach them how to navigate this information on the Web. The wiki is now the basis and the platform on which my class is based."
Public Deserve Access to Research Outcomes
The Honolulu Advertiser has published an opinion piece (Public deserves access to NIH research work) that points out the significance of public access to the outcomes of federally funded research:
Taxpayers pay about $28 billion annually to finance valuable research at the National Institutes of Health, resulting in more than 60,000 published studies yearly.
The problem is most of us never see those reports. The studies typically wind up in published journals that, in turn, sell the information to subscribers, commanding high subscription rates. Doctors, patients and the public need to pony up for the data.
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The peer review system has value. But that doesn’t mean publishers should continue to cash in endlessly. The bill allows publishers to continue the review process and sell journals for the first 12 months — catering to those who need the information quickly.
Author Rights Addenda
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries have created an author addendum for Canadian researchers to retain certain rights to their published articles. From the press release:
Traditional publishing agreements often require that authors grant exclusive rights to the publisher. The new SPARC Canadian Author Addendum enables authors to secure a more balanced agreement by retaining select rights, such as the rights to reproduce, reuse, and publicly present the articles they publish for non-commercial purposes. It will help Canadian researchers to comply with granting council public access policies, such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Policy on Access to Research Outputs.
In the United States, Science Commons and SPARC have created the Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine to assist academic authors with retaining their rights:
[T]he Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine [is] an online tool created by Science Commons to simplify the process of choosing and implementing an addendum to retain scholarly rights. By selecting from among four addenda offered, any author can fill in a form to generate and print a completed amendment that can be attached to a publisher’s copyright assignment agreement to retain critical rights to reuse and offer their works online.
SPARC also maintains a Web page that provides various resources about author rights and copyright.
University Publishing in Digital Age
University Publishing in a Digital Age, a report recently published by Ithaka, highlights the needs for collaboration among the university administration, the university press, and the library. Here is part of the report’s recommendation:
Administrators, librarians and presses each have a role to play (as do scholars, though this report is not directed at them). Senior administrators must provide strong leadership and embrace the fact that in this digital era, publishing, broadly defined, is a centrally important activity of any university. They will have to manage university assets and resources strategically if universities are to continue to exert the appropriate level of influence on the assessment and dissemination of knowledge and scholarship. Press directors and librarians must work together to create the intellectual products of the future which increasingly will be created and distributed in electronic media. Their efforts should be closely and intelligently connected to their campuses’ academic programs and priorities in order to ensure their relevancy and institutional commitment. All three parties should work together to create a shared electronic publishing infrastructure that will save costs, build scale, leverage expertise, promote innovation, and integrate the productive resources of universities to maintain a robust, diverse and collaborative university publishing environment.
Appendix B of the report compares the strengths and weaknesses of the university press and the library. For commentaries on the report, see this page and this post on the Issues in Scholarly Communication blog.
Copyright Reform and Fair Use Practice
Two papers on copyright law are freely available through the Social Science Research Network. The first, written by Dr. Pamela Samuelson, is "Preliminary thoughts on copyright reform." It addresses the need to reform copyright law in the digital age:
The Copyright Act of 1976 is far too long, complex, and largely incomprehensible to non-copyright professionals. It is also the work product of pre-computer technology era. This law also lacks normative heft. That is, it does not embody a clear vision about what its normative purposes are.
This article offers the author’s preliminary thoughts about why copyright reform is needed, why it will be difficult to undertake, and why notwithstanding these difficulties, it may nonetheless be worth doing. It offers suggestions about how one might go about trimming the statute to a more managemable length, articulating more simply its core normative purposes, and spinning certain situation-specific provisions off into a rulemaking process.
Thirty years after enactment of the ‘76 Act, with the benefit of considerable experience with computer and other advanced technologies and the rise of amateur creators, it may finally be possible to think through in a more comprehensive way how to adapt copyright to digital networked environments as well as how to maintain its integrity as to existing industry products and services that do not exist outside of the digital realm.
The second paper (An empirical study of U.S. copyright fair use opinions, 1978-2005), written by Dr. Barton Beebe, provides an analysis of court opinions on fair use:
Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 establishes the affirmative defense to copyright infringement of "fair use," by far the most enigmatic doctrine in U.S. copyright law and by far the most important. Without it, much of our economic and communicative action would constitute copyright infringement. … This Article presents the results of the first empirical study of our fair use case law to show that much of our conventional wisdom about that case law is wrong. Working from a data set consisting of all reported federal opinions that made substantial use of the Section 107 four-factor test for fair use through 2005, the Article shows which factors and subfactors actually drive the outcome of the fair use test in practice, how the fair use factors interact, how courts inflect certain individual factors, and the extent to which judges stampede the factor outcomes to conform to the overall test outcome.
Thanks to Charles Bailey for pointing out these two papers.
Progress toward Public Access to NIH Research Findings
In the August issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN), Dr. Peter Suber discusses the progress toward public access to NIH-funded research findings:
Here’s the language approved by both Appropriations Committees and the full House:
The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
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Note what the language does *not* do. It does not shorten the permissible embargo and it does not shift from central to distributed archiving. In both respects it continues the present policy, which took effect in May 2005. Hence, in these respects its is neither an advance nor a retreat.
Nor does it change the target. Like the current policy, the new language applies only to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published edition. As publishers escalate the public-relations war, don’t forget that the bill gives them a 12 month embargo on the PMC edition of the author’s manuscript and a life-of-copyright (i.e. near-permanent) exclusivity on the published edition. Don’t forget either that many of the publishers critical of the proposed policy already provide free online access within 12 months of publication, and do so for the published edition of an article, not just the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript.
Dr. Suber also provides a round-up of what happened in the landscape of open access and scholarly publishing in the past month.
