Here's an excerpt:

As for ACM's stand on the open-access issue, I'd describe it as "cloven," somewhere between open and closed. (In topology, a cloven set is one that is both open and closed.) ACM does charge a price for its publications, but this price is very reasonable. (If you do not believe me, ask your librarian.) ACM's modest publication revenues first go to cover ACM's publication costs that go beyond print costs to include the cost of online distribution and preservation, and then to support the rest of ACM activities. To me, this is a very important point. The "profits" do not go to some corporate owners; they are used to support the activities of the association, and the association is us, the readers, authors, reviewers, and editors of ACM publications. Furthermore, ACM operates as a democratic association. If you believe that ACM should change its publishing business model, then you should lobby for this position. . . .

Just remember, "free" is not a sound business model.

1. Open Access—What Are the Economic Benefits? A Comparison of the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Denmark
2. Costs and Benefits of Research Communication: The Dutch Situation
3. AAP/PSP Endorses IPA/IFLA “Enhancing the Debate on Open Access” Statement
4. “Enhancing the Debate on Open Access: A Joint Statement by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions and the International Publishers Association”
5. Gustavus Adolphus College Library Faculty Adopt Open Access Pledge

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Feeding into the EU's i2010 vision to significantly improve access to Europe's cultural heritage, the British Library and the University of Salford have teamed up with a group of 15 institutions from across the continent as part of the four-year IMPACT project—IMProving Access to Text—to remove the barriers that stand in the way of the mass digitisation of the European cultural heritage.

Led by the National Library of the Netherlands, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the IMPACT project aims to share expertise from across Europe and establish international best practice guidelines with a view to speeding up, standardising and enhancing the quality of mass digitisation through establishing a Centre of Competence for text based digitisation. As one of the main participants, the British Library has taken the lead on one of IMPACT's four sub-projects, establishing the operational context of the work carried out by contributors to the project.

Mass digitisation has become one of the most prominent issues in the library world over the last 5 years, with a number of experienced libraries in Europe already scanning millions of pages each year. To help establish some standardisation over the course of the project, the British Library's team will lead work on a set of 'Decision Support Tools' in an effort to focus on practical implementation support, providing guidance on digitisation workflow, the capturing of material and the organisation of metadata based on the real world experiences of project partners. These measures, announced at the first IMPACT conference in April will help ensure new material can be digitised successfully and feed into existing workflows. . . .

With extensive experience working with the digitisation of historic material, the British Library has also been working closely with technical experts at the internationally distinguished Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (PRImA) research group, University of Salford, exploring methods of improving Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for use in the digitisation of less standardised material. OCR technology was absolutely vital for the delivery of the Library's recent newspaper digitisation project of 19th Century UK newspapers (http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs), allowing the text to be fully searchable, but the current technology has it limitations. . . .

Through collaboration IMPACT has already established methods for overcoming issues with geometric correction, border removal and binarisation, and is looking at examples of best practice from around the world, such as the Australian Newspaper Digitisation project's cutting edge application of collaborative user generated corrections, to increase resource discovery success for historic mass digitisation.

1. Blog Report on Mass Digitization Mini-Symposium at Notre Dame, Plus Presentations
2. eIFL Case Studies on Low Cost Digitisation Projects: Final Report
3. Nevada Statewide Digital Planning 2008-2009: Final Report
4. Welsh Journals Online: Final Report
5. Cornell Lifts Use Restrictions on Reproductions of Public Domain Works, Including over 70,000 E-Books

Here's an excerpt:

Hokkaido University/Chiba University/Kanazawa University have organized Digital Repository Federation (DRF: 25 universities and 58 universities participated in 2006 and 2007, respectively) and worked on cooperation activities with support from CSI (Cyber Science Infrastructure)in order to form an IR community for IR promotion.

Main activities are:

1. Construction of mailing list for information exchange on IR/Open Access and Wiki.
2. Workshop for IR/Open Access
3. International symposium for IR/Open Access
4. International survey on cooperation model for IR
5. Discussion on ideal future IR community

1. “AAHSL Institutional Repositories (IR) Survey Summary and Analysis: 2008 Survey, 2005-2008 Comparison”
2. Digital Repository for the Arts: Kultur: Final Report
3. Japanese Institutional Repositories: IRDB Contents Analysis System Enhanced
4. DISC-UK DataShare Project: Final Report
5. Welsh Repository Network Final Report

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The University of Maryland has named as its new dean of university libraries, Patricia A. Steele—a national leader in the Google Project and other efforts to digitize collections creating wider access to universities' information resources. Steele, described as a visionary and dynamic leader, currently directs the libraries at Indiana University Bloomington. She begins at Maryland on Sept. 1.

"Librarians offer an important voice in this emerging technology environment and Maryland is an especially exciting place to work right now," says Steele. "The University has a dynamic vision for the future and appreciates the role libraries can play in achieving it. We'll be able to collaborate with top researchers on campus, and our enviable proximity to the nation's capital will give great access to the many leadership organizations." . . .

Among Steele's national leadership activities:

• Member of the top-level academic library team renegotiating with Google in the project to digitize and make freely available on the Web millions of books;
• As member of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), a group of academic libraries working to incorporate academic collections in the Google Project, leads the effort to digitize project's first "collection of distinction";
• Co-founded the HathiTrust, a shared digital library of leading research libraries;
• Founding board member of CLOCKSS—a joint venture between scholarly publishers and research libraries to preserve Web-based scholarly publications.

"Pat Steele is a major appointment for Maryland that will keep us at the leading edge of information," says University of Maryland president C.D. Mote, Jr. "Her name is magic among librarians because she has led academic libraries through the changing technological landscape. She's at the forefront while simultaneously honoring the essential role that keeps libraries at the center of the research enterprise."

Read more about it at "Dean Patricia Steele to Depart."

1. Stanford University Libraries Have Laid Off 32 Employees, Will Close Physics Library
2. What Progress Have the University of Houston Libraries Made in Achieving Their Scholarly Communication Goals During the Last Three Years?

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Responsibilities include:

• Providing technical expertise to all library operations including maintenance of the Library Website, all Innovative functions, electronic course reserves, and representing the Library in negotiations for electronic resources including information and instructional technology.
• Supervision of Technical Services Librarian, maintenance of Library Computer Lab.
• Liaison to campus units regarding technical issues and develop Library digitization program.

1. Library IT Jobs: Systems Librarian at National Library of Medicine
2. Library IT Jobs: Information Technology Director at Seattle Public Library
3. Library IT Jobs: Systems & Electronic Services Librarian at Genesee Community College
4. Library IT Jobs: Information Systems Librarian at Queen’s University Library
5. Library IT Jobs: Systems Librarian at San Jacinto College

1. ARL Publishes Author Addenda, SPEC Kit 310
2. ARL Statistics 2007-08 (Preliminary)
3. A Guide for the Perplexed Part II: The Amended Google-Michigan Agreement
4. ARL Board Passes Resolution against Nondisclosure or Confidentiality Clauses in Publisher/Vendor Agreements
5. ARL Developing Alternative to Library Investment Index

1. Public Perceptions of Copyright and the Creative Commons: Bunnyfoot User Testing Report: OPSI—Crown Copyright
2. EFF Launches Teaching Copyright Curriculum
3. Introducing Copyright: A Plain Language Guide to Copyright in the 21st Century
4. Podcast about Copyright Office Meeting on Copyright Exceptions for the Blind or Other Persons with Disabilities
5. Ed Felten Proposes “Three Strikes” Copyright Law for Print

Here's an excerpt:

This complete end to end process allows you to create Word templates, and to mark them up with required and optional fields. It also allows you to embed details of the SWORD deposit repository URL (so the users do not need to know what it is) within the template for easy deposit. This could be used for example for a journal editor to provide a template and a deposit location for new paper submissions all-in-one.

1. SWORD PHP Library Version 0.7
2. “Achieving the Full Potential of Repository Deposit Policies”
3. “Making the Case for an Institutional Repository to Your Provost”
4. DSpace and Fedora Commons Merge to Form DuraSpace
5. SWORD Named Most Innovative Project at JISC Repositories and Preservation Conference

The open access movement owes a huge debt of gratitude to Peter and to Gavin Baker (who joined OAN on February 03, 2008) for their incredible work on OAN, which passed 15,000 posts on September 29, 2008. Unless you have done it, it's difficult to appreciate how time-consuming doing this kind of high-volume news and commentary blogging is, which involves a considerable amount of effort to identify, filter, summarize, and comment on relevant and timely news items. OAN is not just an excellent current news source—it's an important advocacy platform and the best historical chronicle of the open access movement that exists.

Here's an excerpt from "Housekeeping":

Today I step back from systematic daily blogging in order to free up time for my new position at the Berkman Center. 

The blog itself will continue and Gavin will continue at something like his current pace.  I will continue my daily crawl for OA-related news.  I'll continue to tag what I find for the OA tracking project (OATP).  I'll continue to write the monthly SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN).  I'll continue to work full-time for OA. 

I'll even continue to blog, though only sporadically.  Open Access News (OAN) will be smaller and more selective than in the past.  I cannot assure you that the news it covers will be the most important subset.  (That presupposes that Gavin and I will be on top of all new developments and in a position to pick the most important.)  I'll blog what I notice, what moves me, and what I have time for, with the accent on the third criterion.  It should be a eclectic bunch.  I know that I'll notice a lot of important news, thanks to OATP, and I know that I'll be moved to blog a lot of it.  But because of my new projects, even the most important news will be important news that I only have time to tag, not to blog.

For a comprehensive source of OA news, subscribe to the OATP feed, which is available by RSS, email, and a blog-like web page with the most recent items displayed first.  The OATP feed has been more comprehensive than this blog since April and it grows more comprehensive and useful every day.  To help the cause, please join OATP as a tagger and help select new items for inclusion in the feed.  For more details, see the OATP home page or my SOAN article about it from May 2009. 

1. “Open Access Policy for University Of Kansas Scholarship”
2. Open Access Bill: Senators Cornyn and Lieberman Re-Introduce Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)
3. Harvard Graduate School of Education Faculty Adopt Open Access Policy
4. AAP/PSP Endorses IPA/IFLA “Enhancing the Debate on Open Access” Statement
5. “Enhancing the Debate on Open Access: A Joint Statement by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions and the International Publishers Association”

In conclusion. he states:

So we at Oxford University Press support the settlement, even as we recognize its imperfections and want it made better. As Voltaire said, "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien," the perfect is the enemy of the good. Let us not waste an opportunity to create so much good. Let us work together to solve the imperfections of the settlement. Let us work together to give students, scholars, and readers access to the written wisdom of previous generations. Let us keep those minds alive.

1. Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 4
2. Google Book Search Settlement: Interview with Michael Healy, Expected Executive Director of the Book Rights Registry
3. “Google Book Search Settlement: Foster Competition, Escrow the Scans”
4. Justice Department Sends Civil Investigative Demands to Google about Google Book Search Settlement
5. “Deal or No Deal: What If the Google Settlement Fails?”

Here's an excerpt:

Try the following thought experiment. Suppose a policy on faculty were established that granted to the university a license in faculty articles but did not explicitly provide for a waiver of the license. Now imagine that a faculty member has an article accepted by a highly prestigious journal that does not allow for author distribution and will not accept an amendment of its copyright transfer policy. Perhaps the author is a junior faculty member soon up for tenure, whose promotion case will be considerably weakened without the publication in question. The author might naturally want to have the license waived even though no waiver is explicitly provided for. The faculty member is likely to storm into the dean’s office, howling about the unconscionable practice of taking rights even when it harms the faculty member. Is the university going to distribute the article anyway against the express wishes of the faculty member? Be serious. The dean says "Fine, we won’t make use of the license for this article." Voilà, a waiver. So much for university rights retention mandates.

1. “Open Access Policy for University Of Kansas Scholarship”
2. University of Kansas Becomes First U.S. Public University to Pass University-Wide Open Access Policy
3. Harvard Graduate School of Education Faculty Adopt Open Access Policy
4. “Achieving the Full Potential of Repository Deposit Policies”
5. University of Oregon Department of Romance Languages Adopts Open Access Mandate

Here's an excerpt:

Earlier this year, the Georgia Regents adopted a new copyright policy after a select committee reviewed and entirely rewrote the older one. The new policy is shorter, more easily comprehended and more pragmatic. . . .

After this new policy was adopted, attorneys for GSU filed a motion for a "protective order" which would state that only information about electronic course content going forward, under the new policy, could be "discovered" by the plaintiffs. GSU argued that since they were a state institution, and therefore entitled to immunity from damages, the plaintiffs could only get prospective relief (an injunction) and therefore should be limited to information about practices related to the policy under which GSU would go forward. After some legal maneuvering, the Judge granted this request last week.

1. Oxford University Press Backs Google Book Search Settlement
2. Public Perceptions of Copyright and the Creative Commons: Bunnyfoot User Testing Report: OPSI—Crown Copyright
3. Introducing Copyright: A Plain Language Guide to Copyright in the 21st Century
4. Podcast about Copyright Office Meeting on Copyright Exceptions for the Blind or Other Persons with Disabilities
5. Ed Felten Proposes “Three Strikes” Copyright Law for Print

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This survey was distributed to the 123 ARL member libraries in February 2009. Respondents were asked to provide information on the use of author addenda at their institutions, which rights authors were encouraged to retain, and the methods by which libraries were conducting promotion and outreach efforts on the topic of author rights and addenda. Seventy libraries (57%) responded to the survey. Of those respondents, 35 (50%) indicated that authors at their institutions were using author addenda, and 33 libraries (47%) indicated that they “did not know.” Only two libraries indicated that authors at their institutions were not using author addenda.

The majority of respondents (77%) did not formally collect information on the use of author addenda on their campuses at the time of this survey. Evidence was gathered mostly in an informal way, either when an author contacted the library with a question related to copyright or an author addendum, or through anecdotal stories of success or failure in using an addendum. Fifty-two percent (36) of the responding libraries reported that an author addendum had been endorsed by administrators or a governing body at their institution or by their consortia, while 62% (43) responded that there had been no endorsements. There had been more endorsements at the consortial level than at the institutional level. Eight libraries (12%) reported that an institutional endorsement was under consideration at the time of the survey. A larger number of libraries (46 or 68%) reported that their institution or consortium had worked to promote the use of an author addendum by providing links to an author addendum and copyright information on library Web sites or making faculty presentations on author rights (particularly pertaining to the NIH Public Access Policy).

This SPEC Kit includes documentation from respondents in the form of sample addenda, brochures, handouts, and author rights Web sites and slides from presentations to faculty and library staff.

1. A Guide for the Perplexed Part II: The Amended Google-Michigan Agreement
2. Public Perceptions of Copyright and the Creative Commons: Bunnyfoot User Testing Report: OPSI—Crown Copyright
3. Google and University of Michigan Sign Expanded Digitization Agreement
4. Long Tail Author Chris Anderson Interviewed about Free Publishing
5. University of Washington Faculty Senate Passes Resolution Concerning Scholarly Publishing Alternatives and Authors’ Rights

Here's an excerpt from Enterprise-Wide Digital Repositories and Archives:

The result is a solution which is more than the sum of its parts. Drupal with Islandora provides an easy, powerful way to create customized Web sites with an organization's own unique content and branding and offers fine control over access to collections and individual data assets. Adding the Fedora Repository provides durability to the content while also enabling seamless sharing of content with other applications. The Sun Open Archive Framework’s Preservation Software layer adds robust storage protection and data handling combined with powerful management tools, while Sun Open Storage delivers the most cost effective and easily deployed storage available. Together these components get customers up and running fast with the assurance they will be able to grow and evolve the system gracefully, protecting investments.

Read more about it at "New Fedora-based Solution Offerings from Sun and its Partners."

1. Fedora Repository 3.2.1 Released
2. Sound Archives Film Image Repository Project: SAFIR Final Report
3. The University of Tennessee Launches Its Institutional Repository, Trace
4. DSpace and Fedora Commons Merge to Form DuraSpace
5. Fedora 3.2 Released

Here's an excerpt:

RKBExplorer (http://rkbexplorer.com/) is a system for publishing Linked Data to Semantic Web standards, also providing a browser that allows users to explore this interlinked Web of Data, primarily in the domain of scientific endeavour. As part of the activity, we have harvested the metadata from a number of the larger ePrints repositories into http://eprints.rkbexplorer.com, and republished it as Linked Data. This allows the RKBExplorer browser to present a unified view of these repositories and related data from other sources such as dblp and dbpedia (a Semantic Web version of Wikipedia). Users can thus investigate concepts related to the ePrints people and articles, such as related people, projects and institutions.

1. “Keynote: Remember Repositories? They Were All the Rage”
2. Blog Reports from Open Repositories 2009
3. Microsoft Releases Research-Output Repository Platform Version 1.0
4. Policy-making for Research Data in Repositories: A Guide
5. SWORD Named Most Innovative Project at JISC Repositories and Preservation Conference