STM submission on European Commission Reflection Document

"Creative Content in a European Digital Single Market: Challenges for the Future"

On 5 January 2010 STM submitted comments on the Communication "Creative Content in a European Digital Single Market Challenges for the Future". STM's key concerns were on the one hand the preservation of the actual balance in copyright which includes inter alia the facilitation of the tried and tested system of "property rights cum moral rights" and on the other hand the focus on fighting piracy.

STM outlined in detail the following suggestions to the European Commission (EC):

• Maintaining the current equilibrium in copyright, which for the text-based publishing sector already enables a single digital market place. In this sector, no additional layer of rights is required to serve any market demand beyond territoriality, but greater enforceability of rights is needed.

• Rather providing for a co-ordination than a harmonisation: firstly regarding the concerted fight against internet piracy by all participants and intermediaries acting on the digital market place; secondly concerning national solutions for orphan works and out-of-print licensing; and thirdly with respect to efforts by stakeholders to increase access for the visually impaired through practical and responsible measures.

• Letting the market develop for territorial and multi-territorial licences by fostering experimentation with rights clearance mechanisms and assisting in the setting up of rights discovery tools, such as ARROW.

• Supporting the tried and tested copyright/droit d'auteur system of "property rights cum moral rights": i.e. giving authors the freedom to determine if, when and in what form they wish to publish; and publishers the freedom to engage in rights clearance and licensing, stating on their own discretion formats and pricing. The Commission should not be tempted by simplistic solutions: a flat tax on culture would not offer adequate incentives for innovation and creativity.

• Focusing strongly on piracy, because illegal uses and a lack of respect for copyrights are the biggest obstacles for the ongoing development of a single digital market. Therefore the fight against internet piracy should be the primary activity target for the EC's co-ordination efforts.

• Promoting a zero-rating of VAT on electronic books and journals in the whole of the EU. At least applying the same reduced VAT rates to electronic books and journals as currently are adapted by EU Member States for printed publications.

See the full submission from the STM website

GALACTIC GOOGLE NEWS

 

A.       Google Book Settlement: Court approves Supplemental Notice

The STM December 2009 / January 2010 Newsletter presented the changes to the Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA). In the meanwhile, on 15 December 2009, the US District Court issued a supplemental notice regarding the Google Book Settlement. This document details the amendments to the original Settlement, Class member rights, and forthcoming deadlines.  We note the timetable below, but importantly, publishers (and authors) of books published in the US, UK, Australia or Canada, or of works registered with the US Copyright Office, have until 28 January 2010 to opt out of the Settlement class (or they will be in as a default).

The new key dates and timetable are as follows:

5 January 2009	Cut-off date by which Books and Inserts must have been published to be included in the ASA
5 May 2009	Books scanned by this date are entitled for one-off payment for past usage
28 January 2010	Opt-out / opt-back-in deadline // deadline for filing objections
4 February 2010	Notice to the court if wished to appear at the Fairness Hearing
18 February 2010	Fairness Hearing to approve and/or modify ASA. This may lead to potential changes and a future timeline
31 March 2011	Deadline to submit a claim to receive cash payment for past usage
9 March 2012	Removal deadline - thereafter removal requests will only be followed if the Book is not digitised

The final Supplemental Notice might be downloaded from:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/r/view_settlement_agreement

 

B.  Google loses litigation in France

A Paris court has convicted Google Inc. in a copyright infringement case over online publication of French books. A judge ruled on 18 December 2009 that the U.S. Internet search giant has to pay € 300,000 in damages and interest to the French publisher "La Martinière". Google was also ordered to pay € 10,000 per day until it removes "snippets" of the French books from its online database.  The court found that, under French law, Google's actions are a copyright violation and not justifiable under the French exception covering so-called "short quotations".

What the worldwide implications of this judgement are at this stage is not clear, as Google may appeal the judgment. Nevertheless, for Europe the judgment signals that the US class action cannot be per se exported and made applicable in Europe. French publishers have always lined out that making a digital copy remains making a copy and hence must not be free of charge.

Google's plan to scan millions of books to make them available online has drawn criticism from publishers and libraries in both the United States and Europe.  See above for the discussion on the US class action settlement. 

 

C.      Google apologises to Chinese authors

We have previously reported about the lawsuit filed by Chinese authors against Google for the library scanning project.  Now on the 11^th of January, Google formally apologised for any misunderstandings its library scanning project might have generated, and a Google representative is quoted as saying "due to different starting notions and different understandings of the copyright law systems in China and the U.S., our behavior has caused discontent among Chinese writers".  Google has indicated it has stopped scanning Chinese works (though it is interesting to speculate about how it can clearly differentiate such works) but hopes to reach some broad industry agreement with Chinese authors and publishers.

 

D.      German Minister of Justice urges closer legal monitoring of Google

Mrs. Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, minister of Justice of Germany harshly criticised Google's strategy. She said in an interview with the "Spiegel" that the search engine giant is becoming a huge monopolist, largely unnoticed. Offering the service "Street View", where complete streetscape were photographed, as well as the ongoing scanning of millions of books for Google's book search would need a diligent legal expertise. She postulated from Google more transparency. Otherwise, the legislator might be challenged, she underlined.

Source: www.heise.de

Article in German: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger-droht-Google-900142.html

 

WIPO: 19^th Session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Right (SCCR) held on 14-18 December 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland

The SCCR has agreed to move forward with discussions that could lead to better access to copyright-protected works by blind, visually impaired and other reading-disabled persons. In concluding remarks, the Chairman of the SCCR, Mr. Jukka Liedes, said that the SCCR accepted the initiation of focused, open-ended consultations in Geneva with the target to work out exceptions and limitations for print-disabled persons.

 

The final text on the objectives of negotiations on access for persons with print disabilities, called "international consensus regarding copyright limitations and exceptions for persons with print disabilities" was proposed by the US after the EU objected to the previous proposal that had been agreed with Brazil. The EU will hold its own stakeholder consultations commencing on 26 January 2010 which could result in a "mini-treaty" for the EU.

 

Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, India, Egypt, Chile, Malaysia and others will hold on to a treaty as their target. The US considers a treaty as a possible ultimate outcome (c.f. the US position paper). The EU, so far, objects to a treaty, but not a "Legal Instrument" such as a model law, declaration or recommendation. Also the Swedish Presidency and Japan are opposed to a treaty. The African group strongly advocates a "holistic approach" on limitations and exceptions whereby access for persons with print disabilities would be considered together with other limitations and exceptions, especially for educational activities.

All signs are that there will be a normative outcome (i.e. a recommendation or a treaty) on access for persons with print disabilities. It will be crucial for rightsholders to engage on both the definition of the enabling legal environment as well as the WIPO stakeholders' platform.

 

The SCCR's agreement to develop a work programme on limitations and exceptions beyond access for persons with print disabilities is a further win for those promoting a broader access to knowledge agenda and it confirms that access for persons with print disabilities will be considered by a majority of developing countries as a mere first step. The broad-based IP industries, therefore, have a clear interest in ensuring a reasonable outcome on access for persons with print disabilities.

 

But as developing countries push for international harmonisation of limitations and exceptions, they will have to make concessions in order to reach international consensus.

 

The US position reflects strong internal lobbying by the visually impaired. This comes from a strong commitment of the Obama administration to assist those who hold the moral high-ground domestically and, internationally, for the US being seen to be listening to the world at large. The diplomatic and moral imperatives seem to control the US even where a community, deserving of real solutions, is merely used by certain governments and persons to launch much broader and anti-IP agendas.

 

The end result, is that there will be exceptions for the visually impaired, but a final outcome on access for persons with print disabilities may take a year or two.

 

Besides these subjects, the SCCR discussed as well the protection of audiovisual performances and the protection of broadcasting organisations. With a view to the protection of audiovisual performances the Committee assured to continue the efforts towards working out a possible recommendation to the General Assembly based on a previous provisional agreement on 19 articles. Concerning the broadcasting issue the Committee reaffirmed its readiness to proceed with its activity to protect broadcasters pursuant to the mandate of the 2007 General Assembly.

The next SCCR will be held on 21-25 June 2010 in Geneva.

C.f. the WIPO press release:

Read the final conclusions:

Read also the article concerning this topic in IP-Watch

 

Does ACTA force a fast restart of EU Harmonisation of Criminal Enforcement in the field of Intellectual Property?

According to Annette Kur, a law expert from the Max Planck Institute of Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law, the EU seems to be preparing for the adoption of the "gold standard" of enforcement, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

At a conference of the Swedish EU Presidency on "Enforcement of Intellectual Property with a Special Focus on Trademarks and Patents" on 15-16 December 2009 in Stockholm, representatives from EU bodies, member states and industry supported a prompt enforcement of ACTA, according to participants. A representative of the Justice, Freedom and Security Directorate General of the European Commission, enrolled a plan for an expeditious restart of a legislative process in the EU to harmonise criminal law sanctions.

 

Read the full article from IP Watch.

 

The December 2009 / January 2010 Newsletter reported about queries concerning the transparency of ACTA negotiations. Now, the EU provides a summary of key elements under discussion in the ongoing ACTA negotiations: http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2009/november/tradoc_145271.pdf

 

EU and its Member States ratify WIPO treaties

On 14 December 2009 the EU and its member states ratified the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, together the so-called "Internet Treaties". These Treaties were concluded to harmonise the world's copyright laws with the needs of the Internet.

With the ratification of these Treaties, the EU and its member states hope to stimulate the ongoing work of WIPO and facilitate the progress on a high level of protection for creators and creative industries.

See the full press release.

 

Argentinean judgement regarding copyright infringement

An Argentinean judge's recent decision to cease charges against a philosophy professor for blamed copyright infringement is, according to local attorneys, being regarded as a stepping stone to focusing attention to copyright issues in Latin America.

Professor Horacio Potel created open source websites to upload foreign philosophers' work in Spanish. The websites were called "Nietzsche in Spanish," "Heidegger in Spanish," and "Derrida in Spanish."

On 13 November 2009, the Argentinean justice ruled that Potel's behaviour did not justify criminal prosecution.

Read more at Intellectual Property Watch

 

Higher appeal court of Frankfurt a.M. rules in favour of rightholders

Libraries are permitted to make accessible its digitised content to customers, but via read-only terminals solely. This is the judgement of the higher appeal court of Frankfurt a.M., pronounced on 24 November 2009, in the case between the University and State Library of Darmstadt and the publishing house Eugen Ulmer KG regarding the recently implemented § 52b UrhG (German Copyright Act). Libraries have to assure that measures are taken to prevent dissemination trough copying and printing the documents publicly made available through libraries' terminals.

 

Alexander Skipis, CEO of the Börsenverein welcomed the decision in saying that this judgement strengthens the right of copyrights. "The court stressed that limitations of copyright must not lead to excessive usage" commented Matthias Ulmer, CEO of Eugen Ulmer KG.

 

Subject of the decision was the interpretation of § 52b UrhG which allows in principle the communication of digitised content to library customers. The court did not follow the interpretation of the involved library saying that copying of the accessible content e.g. on USB flash drives would constitute permitted private use. The court ruled that making accessible content to customers statues an infringement of § 52b UrhG, because the exception only grants the right for customers to read but not to copy or print the content.

Link to the full judgement (in German).

 

Spain has proposed new anti-piracy-law

According to a recent article in theregister.com, Spain seeks to fast track pirate site shutdowns. The new law would authorise judges to act on a complaint filed by the (to be built up) intellectual property commission at Spain's ministry of culture by locking websites accused of fostering piracy.

Critical voices argue that the foreseen mechanism could be used as mean of censorship and even services such as Google might be closed.

Read the full article from theregister.com

 

Torrent network found liable for secondary infringement in California case

In a federal trial court decision in California, the movie company Columbia Pictures asserted that a network site was liable for copyright infringement on the site (allegedly occurring on a massive scale), in the case Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. v. Fung, C.D. Cal., No. 06-5578, 12/21/09).  The court agreed that the site design and operator comments indicated that the site was designed to encourage obviously illegal downloads (relying on the Grokster case).  These were considered to be "purposeful steps" to encourage infringement and resulted in a finding by the court of secondary copyright infringement against the site operator.   The operator's plea for the DMCA "safe harbor" was unavailing due to the fact that they were a knowing infringer.

 

Facebook and privacy concerns

Facebook sent out a new series of messages to its users on privacy in December 2009, presenting a new pop-up menu with suggested default privacy settings.  Privacy advocates have suggested that the new Facebook policy is an attempt to make public certain user information that was under prior company policy kept private.  The notion of retroactive changes in policy has been much criticized, including in a complaint filed with the US Federal Trade Commission on 17 December 2009.  Useful guidance from this is that communications about a company's privacy policies should always be unbiased and transparent, and if a policy change is to lessen privacy protection this should be clarified up-front (and under EU rules would of course require opt-in permissions from profiled users).

 

Mark Seeley, Carlo Scollo Lavizzari and Damian Schai

 

 

News from the US

December 9^th, 2009, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched a public consultation on Public Access Policy

On Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2009, OSTP launched a public consultation on "...approaches that would enhance the public's access to scholarly publications resulting...from research funded by a Federal agency." Currently, the National Institutes of Health require that publications resulting from research funded by its grants be made available to the public online at no charge within 12 months of publication. With this Request for Information (RFI), OSTP is effectively seeking views as to whether this policy should be extended to other science agencies and, if so, how it should be modified and implemented.

Congress established OSTP in 1976 with a broad mandate to advise the President and others within the Executive Office of the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. The 1976 Act also authorizes OSTP to lead interagency efforts to develop and implement sound science and technology policies and budgets, and to work with the private sector, state and local governments, the science and higher education communities, and other nations toward this end.

STM prepared a submission to the RFI addressing the specific questions raised in the request for information document and including a section with general comments outlining the added value that STM publishing creates during the publishing process for scholarly communication and describing the initiatives and efforts enhancing access to scientific information to a broad audience.  In STM´s view it remains instrumental to reiterate that STM publishers add value during the publishing process while constantly and heavily investing in innovative solutions and services and actively experimenting in the development of new sustainable business models.

Full details of the Request for information can be found in the Federal Register notice under: http://www.ostp.gov/galleries/default-file/RFI%20Final%20for%20FR.pdf

 

The STM submission is available from the Document Library on the STM website

 

 

January 12, 2010 - House Committee on Science Scholarly Publishing Roundtable issues Recommendations on providing free public access to articles describing federally funded research.

In June, 2009, the Committee on Science and Technology of the United States House of Representatives, in coordination with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), convened a Scholarly Publishing Roundtable to examine the current state of scholarly publishing and develop consensus recommendations for expanding public access to the journal articles arising from research funded by agencies of the United States government.  The Committee convened a diverse set of Roundtable participants drawn from the key stakeholders in this debate, and asked them to develop a consensus regarding access to and preservation of the results of federally funded research that addresses the needs of all parties.

 

Members of the Roundtable included persons drawn from academic administration (three provosts and an association executive), from academic libraries (three librarians), publishers of scientific journals (two from learned societies, one from an established commercial house offering a range of business models, and one from an innovative and successful open access start-up), and three researchers in the domains of library and information science.  Roundtable members were asked to participate as knowledgeable individuals, rather than as representatives of their organizations, and to maintain confidentiality of their deliberations to promote open and candid exchange.

The Roundtable began its work by identifying a set of principles, shared across the full range of member perspectives, which should continue to inhere in scholarly publishing as it evolves.  Those principles were: 

1. Peer review must continue its critical role in maintaining high quality and editorial integrity. 
2. Adaptable business models will be necessary to sustain the enterprise in an evolving landscape. 
3. Scholarly and scientific publications can and should be more broadly accessible with improve functionality to a wider public and the research community. 
4. Sustained archiving and preservation are essential complements to reliable publishing methods.
5. The results of research need to be published and maintained in ways that maximize the      possibilities for creative reuse and interoperation among sites that host them. 

 

Based on these principles, Roundtable members sought to develop a set of consensus recommendations about scholarly publishing. Although consensus was not achieved, 12 of the 14 members of the Roundtable agreed to the following set of recommendations:

 

Core Recommendation: Each federal research funding agency should expeditiously but carefully develop and implement an explicit public access policy that brings about free public access to the results of the research that it funds as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer‐reviewed journal.

 

Additional Recommendations:

1. Agencies should work in full and open consultation with all stakeholders, as well as with OSTP, to develop their public access policies.
2. Agencies should establish specific embargo periods between publication and public access. An embargo period of between zero (for open access journals) and twelve months currently reflects such a balance for many science disciplines. For other fields a longer embargo period may be necessary.
3. Policies should be guided by the need to foster interoperability. OSTP should work with agencies to facilitate collaboration among them and between agencies and stakeholders to develop robust standards for the structure of full text and metadata, navigation tools, and other applications to achieve interoperability across the literature, taking international standards into account. OSTP should work with agencies that have cyberinfrastructure programs to develop a multiagency program supporting research and development to expand interoperability capability.
4. Every effort should be made to have the version of record (VoR) as the version to which free access is provided. If the VoR is not included in a public access database, the article version or reference that is included should contain links back to the VoR on the publisher's site.
5. Government agencies should extend the reach of their public access policies through voluntary collaborations with nongovernmental stakeholders. To achieve the full potential of publicly accessible, interoperable databases, the multiagency public access program recommended here should be extended through voluntary collaborations with publishers, universities, and other entities husbanding the results of research, within and beyond the U.S.
6. Policies should foster innovation in the research and educational use of scholarly publications.
7. Government public access policies should address the need to resolve the challenges of long‐term digital preservation.
8. OSTP should establish a public access advisory committee. To provide a mechanism for periodic assessment of the rapidly changing scholarly publishing landscape, and to provide a forum for discussion of adjustments to agency public access policies in the context of that changing landscape, OSTP should establish an advisory committee to provide a periodic, independent evaluation of agencies' public access policies and practices.

 

Link to the full report, press release, dissenting opinions, and list of roundtable members.

 

News from the European Commission/European Parliament

 3/ 4 December, 2982^nd Competitiveness Council meeting (Internal Market, Industry and Research) in Brussels - http://www.consilium.europa.eu/showPage.aspx?id=221&lang=EN

The last meeting for 2009 of the Competitiveness Council took place on 3^rd and 4^th December 2009 in Brussels and the Council adopted the following conclusions which are of interest to STM.

• Future for ICT research, innovation and infrastructures

          The Council continues its efforts to emphasize the topic of broadening access but no mention of Open Access appears in the document.  However, it should be noted that the Council is addressing the issue to the European Member States as well as to the European Commission simultaneously.  Therefore we should be prepared to observe     further activities in individual European Member States and also at the Commission level. The topic of "access to scientific information in the digital age" remains persistent also during the next European commission period.

• Enhanced Patent System for Europe

          The main features of the future patent systems are based on two pillars comprising:

(a)  the creation of unified patent litigation system that would have exclusive jurisdiction in the respect of civil litigation related to the infringements and validity of EU and European patents and could consist of a court of first instance, and a court of appeal and

(b)  the creation of an EU patent as a unitary legal instrument for granting patents valid in the EU as a whole. In a public session the Council agreed on a general approach on a draft regulation establishing the EU patent.

          Albeit this development only applies to patents, STM should follow the future deployment in order to avoid any disruption to other parts of the Intellectual Property Rights (e.g. copyright).

• Priorities for the Internal Market in the next decade - contribution by the

          Competitiveness Council to the post 2010 Lisbon agenda

          The Council conclusions comprise various "key areas" and for each of those separate statements are listed. With respect to Intellectual property rights the importance of the establishment of the European Community Patent is underlined and the enforcement of IPRs to strengthen the competitiveness of European Enterprises is mentioned.  The achievement to reach agreement in this area in order to contribute to the implementation of the free movement of knowledge and innovation - "the fifth freedom" is another major aspect. It is worth noting that no reference to Open Access is made in this document.

          The coordination and follow up measures ask for a need of "effective coordination between different policy areas, including between internal markets policies and trade policies"......which might indicate that a better inter-directorate exchange of information might occur.

• Guidance on future priorities for European Research and research based innovation in post 2010 Lisbon Agenda

          The implementation "of the "knowledge triangle" concept, developing synergies between education, research and activities at all levels and in all relevant activities, inter alia by enhancement of partnerships between universities and business stakeholders, including knowledge-building institutions and collaborative tools" is listed as an activity in this document. 

• Enhanced governance of the European Research Area (ERA)

          CREST - (Comité de la recherche scientifique et technique) is an advisory body to assist the European Commission and the European Council. Originally set up in the early nineteen-seventies, the role of CREST is being strengthened by the recent EU Council conclusions. CREST will play an important role in the strategic development in ERA and will for example "provide strategic advice in particular on broad orientations for possible future policies at international, European and national levels to contribute to the development of ERA".  In addition CREST "should develop interactions and coherence with other policy areas, in particular those related to the Knowledge Triangle".

 

The Competitiveness Council also received updates from the European Commission on the outcome of the ITER meeting (18/19 November) and Google Books (written report by the EU Commission on the draft settlement of the pending class action concerning the "Google Library" project). The Spanish delegation briefed the Council on the working programme in the field of competitiveness policies under its presidency in the first half of 2010 which is in line with the combined programme prepared by Spanish, Belgian and Hungarian presidencies covering the period January 2010 to June 2011. Included in the programme are issues of fighting internet piracy, strengthening IPR protection (usually, but not always, in the context of patents), EUROPEANA, enhanced governance of the European Research Area (ERA), and "the awaited Commission proposals in the field of copyright aimed at establishing a European framework which fosters digitisation of copyright-protected material while fully respecting authors' rights. In that context, the Presidencies are looking forward to commencing work on the announced Commission initiatives regarding protection of orphan works"."

 

27^th November, José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, announced the portfolios' responsibilities for the next Commission.

Assignment of publishing sensitive briefs remains within the existing portfolios of DG Internal Market (Michel Barnier; this DG will handle copyright); DG Digital Agenda (Neelie Kroes; this DG was formerly Information Society and Media); DG Research (Maire Geoghegan-Quinn). All the Commissioners of these areas are new.

 

The new Commission must gain approval from the European Parliament before it takes office for a term running until 31 October 2014. Commissioners-designate will appear in individual hearings before Parliamentary committees from 11-19 January.  The vote of consent on the new Commission as a whole is foreseen to take place on 26 January. On the basis of the vote of consent, the Commission shall be appointed by the European Council. Then it can start working.

 

24^th November, European Commission launches Consultation on the Future "EU 2020" strategy

EU 2020 is being designed as the successor to the current Lisbon Strategy and should build on the achievements as a partnership for growth and job creation, and renewing it to meet new challenges (i.e. economic, financial crisis).  EU 2020 should focus on key policy areas where collaboration between EU and EU Member States can deliver best results, and on improved delivery through better use of instruments at hand.

The EU Commission working document identifies 3 key drivers for EU 2020 of which the first one "Creating value by basing growth on knowledge" raised the particular interest of STM. Under this chapter three areas lead to a more detailed discussion in the STM submission document. The fifth freedom ("free movement of researchers, technology and knowledge"), the Intellectual property right system and digital economy are the main topics in our contribution.

The STM submission STM Submission EU 2020 Strategy Final (14 Jan 2010) can be found in the STM document library.

Link to the call for submissions.

 

Interesting projects and initiatives/conference reports

29^th December UNEP ties up with WHO to take OARE programme to Yemen[1]

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) recently took steps to provide its Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE) programme to Yemen. OARE is an international public-private consortium coordinated by UNEP, Yale University, and leading science and technology publishers, that enables developing countries to gain access to one of the world's largest collections of environmental science research. UNEP itself coordinates United Nations environmental activities, assisting developing countries in implementing environmentally sound policies and encourages sustainable development through sound environmental practices.

UNEP and Yemen's Environmental Protection Authority and Ministry of Water and Environment worked together this month with the WHO to train 30 Yemeni researchers, scientists, planers and lecturers in the use of OARE. The training, which took place in the capital of Sana'a, was one of UNEP's efforts to support the country as it faces increasing environmental challenges as a result of climate change, food crisis and water scarcity.

7^th December, Research Libraries UK (RLUK) Announces Appointment of new Executive Director

RLUK, a consortium of the research-led institutions in the UK and Ireland, announced that David Prosser has been appointed Executive Director. Dr. Prosser joins RLUK from SPARC Europe where he was previously Director.

Full Press Release can be found under: http://www.rluk.ac.uk/node/581

7^th December, Press Release Joint statement of 5 expert groups on research, development & innovation policy

A diverse set of five expert groups, some of officially appointed and some self-selected, but all working independently of one another called on the EU leaders to heed for a more-rapid change with respect to the research, development and innovation policy.

The group recommended five concepts for reform and stated that there is a need for inter-institutional system identifying long-term trends facing the EU, which would provide common analyses of probable outcomes on major issues for policy-makers linking the Council of Ministers, the European Commission and The European Parliament.

The five recommendations are:

1. Focus on greatest societal challenges
2. Encourage new networks, institutions and policies for open innovation
3. Spend more on research, education and innovation, in part through bolder co-investment schemes
4. Coordinate and plan RDI (research, development and innovation) programmes better -within Brussels and among the member states
5. Open competition should be shared in the EU programme

Each of the five recommendations is underlined by a statement from the each of the five expert groups. A few lines in those individual recommendations are of particular interest for STM and call for the development of an EU-wide market for trading and sharing Intellectual property. Another well-known term comes up also and this is "unleash the potential of the knowledge triangle".  Recommendation #4 talks about a universal code of scientific ethics, intellectual freedoms and communications which should be part of the "standard research training". 

Our colleague of FEP (Enrico Turrin) attended on December 7^th the press release meeting in the European Parliament which was co-hosted by MEP Maria da Graça Carvalho (European People Party, PT) and James Elles (European Conservatives and Reformists, UK). The speakers represented 4 out of the 5 expert panels and each of them had the opportunity to provide a short statement reflecting their input to the five recommendations.

 The full press release can be found here.

 

31^st December, Update on petition in the German Parliament (Deutscher Bundestag)

The petition finally closed with 23.631 registrants and is now under parliamentarian assessment. During this process the petition is being forwarded to the "mirror" department of the appropriate ministry (in this case the Federal Ministry of Justice) who will then compile a recommended position. Then two rapporteurs (one from the government; one from the opposition) will be nominated and depending on their decision the petition might be rejected.

 

2 - 4 December Paris, Berlin 7^th Conference

As in previous years presentations during the Berlin 7^th conference were focused on Open Access and related issues but this year there were a dedicated session to Open Access and economics. In this conference session John Houghton presented the outcome of the various studies that he executed for JISC and Knowledge Exchange during 2009.  Steven Hall from Hall Consulting representing the STM association prepared a presentation addressing the assertions of the Houghton report.

It is noteworthy to mention that this was the first time that we had some representatives from STM members present in the audience (Wiley Blackwell, Springer, Elsevier)  as well as representatives from publishers being invited presenting the publishers´ perspective during the panel discussion talking about "From Subscription to publication".

The Friday afternoon was dedicated to Open Access in France

All presentations and slides can be found under: http://www.berlin7.org/spip.php?article88

 

2 December, Launch of DataCite

A group of leading research libraries and technical information providers have established a partnership to improve access to research data on the internet.

The German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), the British Library, the Library of the ETH Zurich, the French Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (INIST), the Technical Information Center of Denmark, the Dutch TU Delft Library, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) and the California Digital Library (CDL) all signed a Memorandum of Understanding to this effect.

The goal of this cooperation is to establish a not-for-profit agency that enables organisations to register research datasets and assign persistent identifiers to them, so that research datasets can be handled as independent, citable, unique scientific objects.

As a first step, this agency will build on an approach developed by TIB and promote the use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) for datasets. A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is used to cite and link to electronic resources (text as well as research data and other types of content). The DOI differs from other reference systems commonly used on the Internet, such as the URL, since it is permanently linked to the object itself, not just to the place in which the object is located. Since 2005 TIB has registered around 600,000 research data sets with a DOI name to allow easy access and improve citability.

The long term vision of the partnership is to support researchers by providing methods for them to locate, identify, and cite research datasets with confidence. Further countries and organisations are encouraged to join the partnership.

Partnership contact:  Jan Brase, e-Mail: jan.brase@tib.uni-hannover.de

 

Upcoming Conferences:

October 2010, Beijing, China, Berlin 8, Open Access conference

The next "Berlin conference" will take place during October 2010 in Beijing and will be organized by the National Science Library which is part of the Chinese Academic of Sciences (CAS). The theme for this conference is:  "Berlin Declaration: Implementation, Progress, Best Practices, and Future Challenges".

Asian STM members and those maintaining subsidiaries in this area may wish to consider attending this conference which, in Europe, has attracted major figures in the academic research community.  A conference website has not yet been posted.

 

Barbara Kalumenos and Jack Ochs

 

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[1] News from Knowledge Speak

 

STM Innovation seminar 2009 video

We received many positive reactions to the seminar, with quotes ranging from 'Excellent', 'Very timely' to 'Best seminar I have been to in 2009 - thought provoking'

 

Join us at our Spring 2010 Events  

 

Selected STM Headlines

STM response to U. S. Office of Science & Technology on Public Access Policies

20 January 2010. STM responds to the U. S. Office of Science and Technology Policy Request for Information on Public Access Policies for Science and Technology Funding Agencies Across the Federal Government Here is STM's submission to the debate giving general comments and specific replies to the raised questions.

 

French Publishers Association wins court case against Google

On 18 December 2009, the Court of First Instance of Paris decided that the applicable law is the French one for books being digitised in order to be made accessible as snippets to French internet users on their territory. Press Release from Federation of European Publishers.

 

Consultation and Submission documents from STM

STM Submission on European Commission Reflection document

Defamation and the Internet document

 

STM Upcoming Events -Europe and the U. S.

STM Spring Conference 2010

Users, customers, practitioners & librarians talk - Publishers are you listening?

27^th to 29^th April 2010

Le Meridien Cambridge, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U. S.

 

Seminars

The London Book Fair - STM Seminar

Using e-books - in libraries, on handhelds and what's next

19 April 2010

16:00 - 17:30, The Cromwell Room, London, UK

Please visit STM at the London Book Fair - Stand 0525

Beyond Books: What STM & Social Science publishing should learn from each other

21^st April 2010

London Marriott Hotel/Kensington

 

20th Intensive  Course in Journal Publishing - Europe

The premier course for middle and junior managers in social science & STM publishing

9^th to 13^th May 2010

Heathrow Windsor Marriott Hotel, UK

 

2nd Master Class - United States

Developing Strategic Business Skills for STM and Social Science Publishers

6^th to 8^th June 2010

University of Maryland - University College, Marriott Conference Center

Adelphi, Maryland

 

STM 2010 Event Calendar

 

Related Events

22 - 23 February 2010

ASA Conference 2010 Final Programme Available

Royal College of Nursing, 20 Cavendish Square, London W1G 0RN, UK

Rates held from 2009!

Librarians and Early-Bird Discounts Available!

 

The Final Programme for the ASA Conference 2010 is now available on the ASA website at: http://www.subscription-agents.org/conferences/asa-conference-2010

 

Howard Ratner (Nature) chairs STM Future Lab Committee and joins STM Board

After two successful initial years for the STM Future Lab Committee and experiencing ever growing interest from the STM members, it was decided to lift the Future Lab Committee to the next level and embed this group in a more institutionalized way in the STM organization. From now on the Future Lab Committee will function as one of STM's standing committees, have a chairman from one of the STM member companies and an ex-officio seat on the STM Board.

Howard Ratner the CTO of Nature Publishing Group, has been very supportive and instrumental to get this group going from its very beginning. He has been asked to take on the role as Chairman of the Future Lab Committee and be the candidate for the ex-officio Standards and Technology Board seat. We are really happy to report that he has accepted the invitation and will attend the STM Board meeting of February 2 as his inaugural meeting.

Future Lab is a high level brainstorming group on 'Technology Trends'. Working on behalf of the STM membership, the remit of the Committee includes the monitoring of new technology trends and their impact on the STM publishing industry. The Committee discusses new developments during series of webinars and will alert the Board to key developments and trends in the area of standards and technology and will propose joint STM strategies wherever useful or necessary. It will also act as the Program Committee for the annual Innovations Seminar in London in December. The Committee counts 18 members representing STM's most advanced publishing companies.

See http://www.stm-assoc.org/standards_and_technology_committee.php

 

 

ORCID launched during London Online December 2009

New Collaboration among Stakeholders to disambiguate Author Names

 

A new collaborative initiative, backed by a broad coalition of stakeholders, including over 25 STM publishers, aims to develop an open, independent identification system for scholarly authors. Under the name ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) it addresses the critical problems of name disambiguation and attribution. In a world full of Smiths, Jones, Wangs and Parks this is a critical step towards a reliable e-Science environment.

 

After a Name Identifier Summit in November convened by Nature Publishing Group and Thomson Reuters, a first announcement on the new initiative was made in December during London Online.

Organisations backing the initiative include American Institute of Physics, American Psychological Association, Association for Computing Machinery, British Library, CrossRef, Elsevier, European Molecular Biology Organization, Hindawi, INSPIRE (project of CERN, DESY, Fermilab, SLAC), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, Nature Publishing Group, Public Library of Science, ProQuest, SAGE Publications Inc., Springer, Thomson Reuters, University College London, University of Manchester (JISC Names Project), University of Vienna, Wellcome Trust, and Wiley-Blackwell.

 

Accurate identification of researchers and their work is one of the pillars for the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literatures. A disambiguated set of authors will allow new services and benefits to be built for the research community by all stakeholders in scholarly communication: from commercial actors to non-profit organizations, from governments to universities.

 

The Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) would be an alphanumeric string that uniquely identifies an individual scientist in much the same way that a Digital Object Identifier uniquely identifies a paper, book or other scholarly publication. ORCID and DOI together would make a sound referencing system for the future.

 

The initiative builds on the notion that not many researchers would feel happy if a digital ID system would be owned and controlled by just one organisation or publisher. Open systems that provide some check on authentication and attribution and that can be fed from several sources alike, can expect much broader support and use. Stakeholders therefore include publishers, research organisations, libraries, funding agencies and any kind of intermediary. And not to forget researchers themselves who can use a system like this to build up digital CV's.

 

The scope of the system deliberately includes 'authors' and 'contributors' in order to support reliable attribution in both formally and informally published literature.

 

Says Howard Ratner, CTO of Nature Publishing Group and one of the first-day initiators behind the new collaboration: "The next step is for the ORCID group to turn the concept into a working prototype. That is scheduled to happen over the next six months. Several organizations have agreed to contribute data sources and technologies to aid the initial development of the ORCID prototype. These include the Researcher ID profile system from Thomson-Reuters, Author Resolver system from ProQuest, Scopus author profiles from Elsevier, and the CrossRef metadata database. In parallel, ORCID will be investigating and analyzing other contributor identification schemes and systems to determine how they can interoperate with this system. The group will be setting up an independent organization to run the system and assign ORCIDs to individual researchers."

Ratner adds that the first advantages of the system will demonstrate themselves in new ways for knowledge discovery, enabling scientists to find all publications but for instance also all datasets from an individual researcher. In a next phase there is also the area of authentication for access and security purposes where the existence of a central ID-system may be equally crucial, but what is now being regarded as a different nut to crack.

For more information see www.orcid.org

 

 

Audience enthusiastic about Mobile Themed Innovations Seminar 'The Best of 2009'

The Innovations Seminar of 2009, with the theme 'STM Moving to Mobile' was an overwhelming success. With over 110 participants and the institution of a parallel room, it was the very first in history to be sold out well before the date.

The Evaluation Forms express extremely positive reactions. Some highlights from the comments received on the evaluation forms include: 'Excellent', 'Very timely' and 'Best seminar I have been to in 2009 - thought provoking'

 

All presentations can be found on the seminar page on the STM website including video recordings from the talks in the main room.

 

The audience was very enthusiastic about the quality of the speakers at the 2009 Innovations Seminar.  In style with the mobile theme of the day, it was remarkable to note how immediate reactions on twitter already praised the opening keynote by Mike Bracken from The Guardian Media before he had even finished. Bracken explained how traditional publishing is changed by 'mutualisation' (using the user's input) and new business models. A whole set of examples from The Guardian website, including a preview on the mobile apps they were about to launch, illustrated this. His developers' teams are the real heroes of the present age, he said with reference to his own development team who work around the clock to get new stuff to their audience.

 

The morning session on recently launched mobile apps in STM was also well received. Evaluation forms rated this mainly as 'excellent' and 'above average'. Several publishers (New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, IEEE and River Valley Technologies) showed recently launched mobile apps or apps under development.

 

The afternoon had parallel sessions. Comments on this set-up range from:

'I prefer not paralleled', 'wanted to attend both - shouldn't have to choose', 'okay but not ideal', to : 'I like feeling that I missed something - means I will want to come back for more!' One of the sessions was extremely well attended and explained ORCID, the new collaboration initiative between over 25 STM stakeholders. See also www.orcid.org The other parallel session was dedicated to datasets and had the view of researchers (not always willing to share datasets), faculty (Harvard making available a software package Dataverse to share datasets), librarians (British Library eager to get access to well organised datasets) and publishers (Springer launched an image database, OECD launching a new publishing platform with actionable datasets).

 

The 2 closing keynotes were from i-Rex, on the wonders of digital paper and other e-reader innovations, and Microsoft on compatibility between and across (mobile) devices and their operating systems. Next year's Programme Committee will use the suggestions you made for improvements, especially on logistics for coffee and lunch.

 

 

EU-project Parse publishes survey report

96 % of journals have digital preservation in place but only 1 % also for datasets

 

EU project Parse.Insight, aimed at digital preservation aspects of an Scientific e-Infrastructure has now published the official survey report and invites comments from the community. The report is available and downloadable from www.parse-insight.eu/

 

The report includes the results of several surveys undertaken to assess the current state of affairs of digital preservation in research. It shows, among others, that 96 % of all approx 8000 journals covered in the survey have preservation measures in place, including disaster recovery measures for 92 % of them. But not even 1 % of these journals (around 75) have separate arrangements for the preservation of supplementary material such as datasets.

 

The surveys were targeted to three main stakeholders in science: researchers, data managers and publishers. These results are now wrapped up in a report and gives an in-depth view on preservation of research data. Furthermore, a cross analysis has been done amongst the stakeholders. The survey includes the responses from > 1200 researchers, > 100 datamanagers, and > 100 publishers (representing approximately 8000 journals).

 

These are some of the main conclusions:

• across all stakeholder groups, preservation issues are considered as very important, increasingly so with more and more digital data being available, while not much of a preservation infrastructure is in place yet, certainly not internationally;
• most scientists keep their research data on their own computers or hard disks and are reluctant to share (for many different reasons, from legal and privacy to competitive motivations);
• large publishers have good preservation policies in place (89 %), mostly outsourced to national libraries, Portico, etc, this represents approx 96 % of all journals covered by the survey;
• for 92 % of the journals covered in the survey there are also disaster recovery programmes in place
• small publishers (especially DOAJ) are far less active on preservation (only approx 55 %), but this represents a small number of journals as most DOAJ publishers have a few titles only.
• the preservation measures by the publishers are mostly for their own publications, NOT for submitted supplementary material (such as datasets, these are only for 22 % of journals preserved)
• the large majority of publishers do allow authors to submit such material, this covers 94 % of the journals covered in the survey
• 84 % of authors wishes datasets to be linked with the formal research publication, and more than 60% of authors state they find datasets via the formally published literature (with > 70 % finding it via colleagues)
• more than 45 % of authors say they would like to store their datasets with the publisher, but the publishers overwhelmingly (around 80 %) see the storage of datasets as a first responsibility of the research institute or a central archive.
• only 1 % of publishers (for 72 journal titles) has a special facility for the storage and preservation of datasets, another 22 % treats the preservation of datasets similar to the way the related journal publications are being preserved. This is likely to be insufficient, as preservation of data requires management of more diverse formats.

Next steps for project Parse.Insight, in which STM participates as a full partner, is the addition of the final reports of the  indepth case studies among physicists (Cern), linguistists (Max Planck), earth observationists (Esa) and book study researchers (DNB).

The project will be concluded in March/ April 2010 by a final workshop at Cern which is open to anybody interested. Announcements will be made in the STM Newsletter.

 

Copyright Infringement Portal

 

With the number of infringement notices rapidly approaching 4000 and an overall take-down percentage of over 61% to date, the Publishers Association's Copyright Infringement Portal is making an impact in the fight against piracy. With STM is working with the PA on this anti-piracy portal, we highlight the usefulness of the portal and how STM's own members can benefit.

 

Why is it needed?

Online criminals target the publishing industry in a number of ways. Offences range from:

• websites offering infringing copies of works to download
• peer-to-peer file sharing of infringing copies
• password bootlegging
• commercial sale of counterfeit publications

The Copyright Infringement Portal targets websites offering infringing copies for free download, and will soon evolve to also target peer-to-peer sharing via torrents.

 

What does the portal offer?

• It offers an easy and efficient way to generate take-down notices. Rather than each publisher correctly identifying the relevant internet service provider, drafting an appropriate legal notice, and issuing this to the correct address, the portal does each of these steps automatically.
• It offers an easy and efficient way to monitor responses to take-down notices. A quick glance will let you know whether the take-down has been achieved. A user-friendly 'traffic light' system of green, amber, and red icons is used throughout the portal.
• The portal provides industry-wide benefits by sharing information about infringement, take-down requests, and responses. The portal offers real-time intelligence to its users, which can enable a very rapid industry-wide response to piracy. The portal collates intelligence information to inform an array of industry responses including licencing, litigation, and lobbying.

The PA is also investigating - with a variety of service providers - potential ways of offering an automated detection service to publishers who use the Copyright Infringement Portal.

 

What are the benefits?

According to Mark Majurey, digital development director at Taylor & Francis Group, arranging for a take-down notice via the portal takes 5-10 minutes, compared with 30 minutes without it. In addition, since the portal tracks down the ISP's serving the infringing sites, not just the sites themselves, it is perhaps not surprising that Taylor & Francis Group have seen a much higher take-down success rate since using the portal.

 

With the dramatic growth in infringements, individual publishers would be challenged to manage the notices themselves, even when using the portal to generate notices. However, by building up a knowledgebase of offender information, the portal can offer automatic identification of repeat infringers. As Majurey comments 'Sharing information is the only way we can understand the scale and scope of the problem, and how we might tackle it in future'.

 

In the context of online piracy, it really is case of 'together we're stronger'.

 

What does it cost?

STM members can benefit from 50% discounted prices. The cost for using the portal depends on the publisher's annual revenue and the publisher must be a current member in good standing with STM. A full list of prices for STM members is available from the STM's portal interface.

 

But is it really effective?

The table below lists the top ten offending ISPs, the number of take-down notices issued and the results.

 

Top 10 ISPs

Name	WhoIsKeyName	Served Notice URLs	URLs Taken Down	URL  Take Down %
Scribd Inc	SCRIBD	1185	1171	99%
Rapidshare.com	RAPIDSHARE	1159	387	33%
UNKNOWN	WEBAZILLA	541	457	84%
UNKNOWN	DE-KEYWEB-III	322	238	74%
LeaseWeb AMSTERDAM	LEASEWEB	296	145	49%
FDCservers.net LLC	FDCSERVERS	213	41	19%
Advanced Hosters	ADVANCEDHOSTERS-NET	205	178	87%
Google (Blogger)	BLOGGER	156	120	77%
LeaseWeb B.V.	NL-LEASEWEB-20080724	152	18	12%
Fast Internet Web & Server Hosting	EXMASTERS2	120	47	39%

 

For further information, visit http://www.stm.copyrightinfringementportal.com/

 

"Fighting Online Book Piracy"

During 2009 STM's Enforcement Task Force (ETF) has devoted time and effort to create a collaborative strategy with fellow publisher associations to tackle the phenomenon of online book piracy in the most efficient matter. As first step, STM developed its 2009 Guidelines on how to fight Online Book Piracy, a concrete and practical guide to members to identify the nature of infringements occurring and to take protective steps. In addition, ETF has the function of a kind of "fighting fund" to tackle instances of piracy that are of international importance or high value as a precedent in the interest of STM's members. A number of cases are under consideration against various kinds of online infringements, eg BitTorrent sites, P2P file-sharing organisations, ISPs, search engines, chat-rooms, new illegal ways of sharing information, hosting providers etc. However, to avoid duplication, ETF works with other book publishing associations and steers help-seeking STM members to the anti-piracy programmes of, for instance, the AAP, the UK PA, the Börsneverein and others. Most recently, the UK PA has offered STM to collaborate on an automated "anti-piracy portal" developed by the UK PA: the  Anti-piracy portal of the UK Publishers Association (Information available at: http://www.stm.copyrightinfringementportal.com/ Participation in this effort not only allows easy tracking of individual take-down notices sent to offending sites and ISPs, it also allows the collection of statistics and a record of the quantity and nature of online book piracy. Therefore STM encourages its members to consider participating in this effort.

Carlo Scollo Lavizzari

 

 

Reproduced from Outsell's Market Intelligence Service Report: Scientific, Technical & Medical Information: 2008 Final Market Size and Share Report

http://www.outsellinc.com/all_segments/products/854

"The figure analyzes the relationship between size and growth of the six traditional STM companies with revenues exceeding $500 million."

1000 books - 9 million pirated copies in 90 days

In a study undertaken by the online monitoring and enforcement service Attributor, nine million downloads of 913 titles ascross 14 subject categories were documented during a ninety day period from October 2009. Titles within the Business and Investing, Professional and Technical and Science categories are potentially losing over $1 million per title to online book piracy

Source: Attributor.com U.S. Book Anti-Piracy Research Findings

 

New metrics available on Elsevier's Scopus

SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper), measures a journal's contextual citation impact and was developed by Centre for Science and Technology Studies. SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) was developed by the SCImago Research Group. It is a measure of the scientific prestige of scholarly sources. The metrics will be freely available at www.journalmetrics.com

Source: Elsevier Press Release

 

PSP Consulting rescues Scholarly Communications Report

The closure of SCR was announced in 2009, however as of January 2010, the newsletter will be published by PSP Consulting. SCR is a monthly newsletter providing a digest and analysis of news items that are affecting the scholarly publishing environment. In acquiring SCR, PSP Consulting 'hope to continue and grow its success into the future.' The newsletter will be written and edited by Pippa Smart.

Link to Scholarly Communications Report

 

UKSG and NISO release KBART Phase I Recommended Practice

This first report from the KBART (Knowledge Bases and Related Tools) Working Group, contains practical recommendations about the role of metadata within the OpenURL linking standard and recommends data formatting and exchange guidelines for content providers and knowledge base developers.

Link to the summary of recommendations and report  

 

RSC and Symyx announce collaboration

The partnership aims to enhance the usability and accessibility of public scientific databases. The first joint project links related chemical structures between two information sources, ChemSpider (from RSC) and DiscoveryGate (from Symyx), enabling scientists to quickly retrieve more complete and comprehensive information.

Source: Symyx Press Release

 

CRL certifies Portico as Trustworthy Digital Repository

Portico is the first digital preservation service to undergo this independent audit by the Center for Research Libraries and is understood to be the only digital repository service to be certified at this time.

Source: Portico Press Release

 

BioMed Central joins CLOCKSS to archive its open access articles

The partnership will ensure the preservation of over 60,000 articles in CLOCKSS's geographically and geopolitically distributed network of redundant archive nodes, located at 12 major research libraries around the world.
Source: CLOCKSS News item

 

NPG and AMDC launch a new online-only open access journal

The new journal titled Cell Death & Disease which explores the area of cell death from a translational medicine perspective is published by Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the "Associazione Differenziamento e Morte Cellulare"

Source: NPG Press Release

 

CUP launching ebooks platform

The launch of the new platform, Cambridge Books Online, is imminent with over 10,000 titles expected to be hosted on the platform by spring 2010.

Source: Cambridge University Press news announcement

 

Taylor & Francis Group to partner with Atypon Systems Inc.

The partnership will develop a next generation informaworld platform which will eventually provide access to content from Taylor & Francis Group's list of 1,500 journals, as well as providing access to encyclopaedias and abstracting and indexing databases.

Source: Atypon Press Release

 

Oxford University Press and CCC Provide University Customers With Expanded Reuse Rights

Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), has announced that Oxford University Press, Inc. signed an agreement to license the reuse of approximately 100,000 books and journals from the U.S. and Oxford University Press in the U.K., making these titles even more broadly available to higher education institutions subscribing to CCC's Annual Copyright License for Academic Institutions.

Source: Outsell Inc.* and OSIX News

 

Dr. Raymond Fabius named Chief Medical Officer of Thomson Reuters Healthcare & Science business

Information services provider Thomson Reuters, US, has announced the appointment of Dr. Raymond Fabius as Chief Medical Officer of the company's Healthcare & Science business. In his new position Dr. Fabius will develop and deepen relationships with customers, advise on product development, and provide counsel to Thomson Reuters on business strategy and medical issues.

Source: Outsell Inc.* & Thomson Reuters Press Release

 

Serials Solutions Releases New and Improved 360 Search

Serials Solutions announced the launch of the new and improved 360 Search federated search service. The new service combines the best features of the Serials Solutions 360 Search and WebFeat platforms with new and improved capabilities that give users the power to control their search and librarians the power to deliver the best results.

Source: Outsell Inc.* and OSIX News

 

British Library to showcase new web tools for UK PubMed Central

The British Library has announced that it will showcase a range of new search and data mining tools designed to unlock the scientific knowledge held by UK PubMed Central on January 12, 2010. Researchers will be able to access over 1.7 million full-text, peer reviewed biomedical research articles and over 19 million other life science research papers.

Source: Outsell Inc.* and Cancer Research UK News

 

Thieme Medical Publishers acquires Journal of Knee Surgery from Slack

Scientific and medical publisher Thieme Medical Publishers, Inc., US, acquired the Journal of Knee Surgery from healthcare information provider SLACK Inc, in late 2009. The first Thieme issue will be published in March 2010. Dr. Bernard Bach will continue as Editor-in-Chief of the journal.

Source: Outsell Inc.* , link to Thieme  

*Extracts from Outsell Headlines & Industry Statistics reproduced with kind permission of Outsell Inc. www.outsellinc.com

 

APE 2010 Opening remarks by Michael Mabe, CEO, STM

 

When I made the welcoming remarks at last year's conference, we were eagerly anticipating President Obama's Inauguration, while here in Berlin at Academic Publishing in Europe we were much exercised about the prospects of a green paper on copyright on the digital economy and other initiatives from the EU.

 

Much has happened in the intervening 12 months which will be reflected in the present programme.

 

In January last year we were still digesting the first round of reactions to the historic Google settlement. This afternoon we will have a session on Google and Friends, looking at the latest developments in the settlement and digital libraries. As I remarked last year, the consequences of the digital transition - infinite changeability of documents and their infinite reproducibility - continue to roll on. Borders UK has become the latest digital casualty on the High Street and ebooks are assuming ever greater role in all areas of publishing.

 

Technology, the handmaiden of the digital revolution, is present in many sessions, from the roll out of semantic tools and the future web to the article of the future.

 

During the past year my own organisation, STM, the voice of research publishing, celebrated its 40^th birthday at the Frankfurt Book Fair. This prompted a look at the issues that were all the rage in 1969 - principle were threats to copyright from the Xerox machine.

 

A different world, ...well perhaps not so different to digital issues as we think!

 

The ramifications of whether and how the value-added final published versions of papers published by publishers can co-exist with other versions (sometimes even the final version) on websites other than those of the publisher lie at the heart of current debates. One attempt to square this circle was published last week as the US Scholarly Publishing Roundtable set up by the US House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology issued its report and recommendations. An attempt to balance sustainable investment with the public good, one member of the Roundtable Fred Dylla of AIP (and a member of the STM Board) will reflect on its work in the closing session tomorrow.

 

How to make the Gold road to open access work better and the appropriate embargos for systematic Green self-archiving remain hot topics. STM's contribution to this debate has been to try to engender evidence-based approaches through its pioneering efforts with other stakeholders in the EC funded PEER project. PEER seeks to collect data on the effects of free availability of peer reviewed material under variable embargos on the journals from which they come. It is a major collaboration between publishers, research organisations and libraries and repositories. One year in we have established the infrastructure for the experiment and content from 242 journals is flowing into the repositories. All three research teams have been appointed and work on the behavioural, usage and economic research is underway. I hope some of the results may be highlighted at a future APE meeting.

 

Michael Mabe

 

 

  APE 2010 - ACADEMIC PUBLISHING IN EUROPE 19-20 January 2010

This is the fifth conference is what is now an established series organised by Arnoud de Kemp in Berlin. STM are active sponsors with Michael Mabe (Chief Executive) and Eefke Smit (Director for Standards and Technology) taking leading roles in the programme. The audience is scholarly publishers (In the majority), librarians and vendors, mainly (but not exclusively) from the continental Europe and the coverage follows from the APE mission - "to aim at better understanding of scholarly communication through value-added publishing".

 

This meeting is going to be well covered. A couple of rapporteurs will soon post a Short Report on the APE website, presentations will also appear in the same place and there will also be videos by courtesy of River Valley Technologies. Eventually there will be a publication in the journal Information Services & Use by courtesy of IOS Press Amsterdam. This report will concentrate on matters likely to be of interest to those who read STM News and will be selective.

 

Among the themes that were dominant were the misuse of bibliometrics, and the potential for new approaches to peer review but not (on the whole) open access as such. It was noted that there were fewer formal contributions from librarians than in previous years and also less emotion about the open access model as answering all problems.

 

"In the Interest of Science"

 

The keynote that was most challenging for the publishers came from Dr. Matthias Kleiner, the president of the German Research Foundation, speaking also on behalf of the Alliance of German Science Organisations. Entitled, 'In the Interest of Science - The Priority Initiative "Digital Information" of the Alliance Partner Organisations' , the theme was that scientists should be able to access whatever they need at once yet currently there are political and other difficulties. He picked out four examples of what the digital revolution has made possible. These were a digital humanities project to digitise a corpus of German literature,  open peer review drawing upon the intelligence of the community in a transparent manner and (in his view) due to become the norm as digital natives take over from the current cohort of digital immigrants, a national infrastructure for a data storage which must be acceptable to different disciplines with different needs, and finally a growing emphasis on bibliometrics, currently a matter for concern and needing a new approach.

 

For him the bottom line is that because changes impact on science itself, science organisations have to take a bigger role articulating the interests of science. The Alliance have defined six areas for initiative: national licensing, open access (including financial and legal frameworks), national permanent access of material, research data, virtual research environments and finally attention to copyright with a view of establishing "reasonable conditions" governing the rights of authors and publishers.  Questions revealed that changing the behaviour of scientists was also a major concern of the DFG. In addition, in the final session of the next day, Dr. Albrecht Hauff of Thieme Verlag revealed that DFG money for supporting open access publications is not going to articles placed in hybrid journals because it is best to go directly to the Gold route. It goes to say that not all publishers present were happy with the messages.

 

This opening keynote contrasted with the message of the concluding keynote from Dr. Fred Dylla of the American Institute of Physics. He introduced the report and recommendations from the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable released this month. The Roundtable was convened from representatives of library, university, academic and publishing interests by the science and technology committee of the US House of Representatives and the report was endorsed by twelve out of the fourteen members including Dr. Dylla but not including the PLOS and Elsevier representatives. The aim was "to balance the need for increased access to scholarly articles with the need to preserve the essential functions of the scholarly publishing enterprise".  Maintenance of essential functions included preservation of peer review and the version of record. Dr. Dylla, and Ann Okerson, the Yale librarian (also on the committee) whose letter to the conference was read out by him, both felt that what has been achieved marks a new era of co-operation.

 

Reporting on research

 

Other sessions included one on Research. There were presentations by Dr. Ingrid Wunning Tschol of the Robert Bosch Foundation, Dr. Michael Jubb of the Research Information Network (RIN) and Dr. Robin Batterham former Chief Scientist of Australia.

 

Dr. Wunning Tschol is a life scientist who now funds research but has an understanding of the role of the publisher and the need for reward for adding value. She does not see commercial publishers leaving the stage. Like others at the conference she was concerned by inappropriate use of bibiometric tools and also what she perceived as a lack of transparency in the peer review process. She would like funders and publishers to work together to peer review peer review. Indeed she felt that there are a range of issues where funders and publishers could mutually benefit from more structured interaction.

 

Dr. Jubb presented the bottom-up view of the researcher with particular reference to the recent RIN study of different groups of life scientists: this demonstrates the different use of information between teams and even within teams and the fact that big science is not the norm even where it may appear to be dominant. He emphasised that data is not the primary objective of researchers but a stage on the way to producing a research article. He drew attention to the belief among researchers that modes of peer review will change.

 

Dr. Batterham had come in at short notice. He was particularly interested in the progress of India and China, where quality (citations) are rapidly following quantity of accepted papers and showed some interesting graphs demonstrating that if you want to buy a citation these countries present the cheapest route to success with France very much at the bottom.

 

On the second day there were major panels on Content Innovation (chaired by Eefke Smit, Director of Standards and Technology at STM) and on Metrics (chaired by Mayur Amin of Elsevier). In both panels the common feature was that all the players were continuing with their experiments. Kidd described the process as - try it on and see what sticks.

 

Content Innovation

 

In the first panel IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg gave a riveting account of the Elsevier Article of the Future project. Since this project was launched Elsevier have made quite a few adjustments following generally positive feedback from the life sciences community. There was a lot of enthusiasm by the community for the function that presents highlights. They also liked a navigable results base (hot spots leading to other relevant work) which currently demands too much of the authors and also of the production systems to implement and they also appreciated the function that gave a filmstrip of images across the top of the article. There still did not seem to be much likelihood of multimedia components being routinely offered and it was clear too that there was sufficient demand for PDF for a version to be maintained.

 

Dan Pollock from Nature.com said that their method of discovering how they could harness web potential for scholarly communication was more Darwinian than the structured Elsevier approach. He concentrated on the making available of Nature on social networking sites and on mobile technology being rolled out over the next few months. There is a new project called Nature Network which is underpinned by a technology called Open Social.

 

Richard Kidd of the Royal Society of Chemistry reported on three years of Project Prospect which enabled chemists to discover, use and link to structures. There has been less use than they had expected, users still go to the PDF and have not yet changed their behaviour substantially.

 

Questions revealed the gap between library initiatives using repositories and what these and other publishers were doing and it was not clear that much could be done to archive and preserve anything more than the straight text. The final presentation was by Ed Pentz of CrossRef giving the audience a preview of CrossMark. His subtitle was "trust and the stewardship of scholarly content": the prototype was shown and the interim logo displayed. Clicking on the logo will not only confirm that this is the version of record or point to it but will also tell you whether it is currently being stewarded and whether this is the final version. There is more work to be done before release.

 

Metrics and more...

 

The Metrics panel covered presentations by Gregg Gordon of SSRN, Henk Moed of Leiden (soon to relocate to Elsevier), Mark Patterson of PLOS and Jan Velterop in his new incarnation at the Concept Web Alliance. These were technical presentations and only a few points are recorded here.

 

SSRN is a social sciences database. Downloads increase dramatically year on year and there is a good correlation between downloads and citations. Progress was slow in some ways: "new ideas progress forward funeral by funeral". Moed has devised a new indicator called SNIP. It will soon appear on SCOPUS. It is not an indicator for assessing individual papers but rather an alternative to the impact factor. Patterson described the impressive range of metrics and other information available for each PLOS ONE article: this is just a beginning and there is no reason why others (including commercial entities) should not build on this. Post-publication comments have not been numerous but PLOS see them as bound to come. Velterop had very little time: he is concerned primarily with helping scholars find the needle in the haystack.

 

The APE lecture

 

Dr. Stefan Gradmann of Humboldt University was honoured with the APE Lecture. His theme was paradigm shifts in the transfer of information in the digital environment. We are still emulating the linear document continuum of the Gutenberg Galaxy but this will not last and the impact of change will be felt particularly in the humanities where a unity of medium and content was a guarantee of integrity in the print context. The whole concept of the document will be deconstructed and he showed how but he also looked to a reconstruct based on notions of integrity and authenticity but not owing anything to print.

 

The Google panel

 

A centrepiece of the conference was the Google Panel, which was a follow on to one in 2009, taking into account the changes to the Settlement and in particular the breaking news of the ban on scanning further texts (in France) by the Tribunal de Grande Instance. The panellists were chaired by Jens Bammel, the Secretary-General of the International Publishers Association and comprised Dr. Gradmann again in his capacity as President of the German Society for Information Science (DGI) and an important player in the European Digitisation project - Europeana, Christine de Mazieres of the French publishers association (SNE), Dr. Christian Sprang the legal counsel of the German Association of Publishers and Booksellers (Borsenverein), Mark Seeley of Elsevier to explain the position of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) as needed and finally Santiago de la Mora, the director of print content partnerships for Google in Europe. It was a long session but the key message seems to be as follows.

 

Whereas in the USA and in other English speaking countries, the Settlement has been accepted by the publishing, author and library communities and most publishers are opting into the opportunities for income created, in France and Germany the concentration is still on the illegality of the Google policies, the taking of content still on copyright and transforming it by scanning without asking permission of the owners. The French government is also coming up with E140m for the digitisation of the French literary corpus.  The French judgement applied to books bought legally in the US which happened to be published originally in French and in France and both French and German speakers lent heavily on what they saw as their obligations under the moral rights legislation standard in continental jurisdictions. Publishers need to support the rights of their authors. Santiago de la Mora concentrated on attempting to demonstrate that Google was not a monopoly and arguing that Google had no ambition to be a publisher.

 

Anthony Watkinson

 

 

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