One Million CIC Books Scanned

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) recently announced that Google has now digitized 1,000,000 books from member libraries of the CIC.

Each of these volumes has been scanned, translated from image to text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and added to the Google Books index. Once digitized, the books are shipped back to our originating libraries to resume their journeys from bookshelves to backpacks.

While Google preserves library books in digital form, and makes them more accessible to more people as a result, it also sends participating libraries (at no cost to us) digital copies for our own archives or other non-commercial use. Accordingly, the CIC libraries are making hundreds of thousands of the recently digitized public domain volumes accessible through their partnership with the HathiTrust Digital Library.

We became Google's 16th Library Project partner in June 2007. Google Books has now partnered with more than 40 libraries and scanned more than 15 million books worldwide. Books that have only been available for use within the walls of our libraries have found new readers now that they are open to the world.. . .

While we are pausing to celebrate this moment with Google today, we're not resting on our library laurels. We have a long way to go to digitize all of our books. In fact, CIC libraries have agreed to provide as many as 10 million volumes to this ambitious project, out of total collections approaching 85 million volumes. -- so this is just the beginning.

Nature's OA offering

SPARC highlights a recent article about a new OA journal venture by the publishers of Nature, called Scientific Reports.

The article, published in Times Higher Education, begins:

The launch by Nature Publishing Group (NPG) of a high-volume open-access journal spanning the natural sciences is being tipped to accelerate the extinction of subscription fees in science publishing, and could also prompt the closure of many specialist journals.

Scientific Reports will launch this summer and will cover biology, chemistry, the earth sciences and physics.

Like the Public Library of Science's PLoS ONE journal, Scientific Reports will be entirely open access and will publish every submission deemed by a faster peer-review process to be technologically sound - including those reporting useful negative results.

RePEc Now Indexes Over One Million Works

The RePEc Blog recently announced that this important Economics (and related subjects) repository now contains over 1,000,00 works:

"RePEc has reached over the last week-end a historic mark: one million works in Economics and neighboring sciences are now indexed, of which 87.5% are available for download. The bibliographic database is comprised by 59.2% of journal articles, 38.5% of working papers, 1.3% of book chapters, 0.8% of books, and 0.2% of software components. . . . As RePEc bears no costs, all the data is made available for free. . . ."

OA Courses for Independent Scholars at MIT

According to MIT News, courses designed for independent learners are being introduced by MIT:

For the first time, MIT OpenCourseWare is introducing courses designed to serve the needs of independent learners, visitors to the site who have no affiliation with academic institutions. These "OCW Scholar" courses address a need the MIT faculty never envisioned in 2000 when the idea for OCW was first conceived. At that time, the expectation was that other educators would use the syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams from MIT courses to design their own courses. But in this first decade of MIT OpenCourseWare, independent learners have emerged as the primary users of these materials. . . .

While OCW Scholar courses represent a new approach to OCW publication, they complement the regular OCW publication but do not replace it. Because the OCW Scholar courses require faculty to create new content, they involve significantly more effort than the basic OCW approach. "We're still committed to publishing MIT's materials as we always have," says OCW Executive Director Cecilia d'Oliveira, "and our core publication continues to provide tremendous value to educators and students around the world. With OCW Scholar, we are enhancing our support for independent learners and building on what we've accomplished with the rest of the site."

The OCW team will continue to publish new and updated versions of materials drawn directly from MIT classrooms to support the broad international audience that already benefits from OCW. Last year alone, OCW received 17.5 million visits from 9.5 million individuals, and to date the site has been visited more than 75 million times by an estimated 45 million individuals. OCW content on affiliate and translation sites has been viewed by millions more. This dramatic success provides a solid foundation for innovations such as OCW Scholar. . . .

Click here for the full article.

In the 10 December, 2010 Research Library Issue report (a bimonthly report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC) Prudence S. Adler, Associate Executive Director, Federal Relations and Information Policy, ARL, considers three critical attributes shared by the research, teaching, and learning enterprise and the Internet. They are a) providing access to research resources; b) promoting free speech; c) and fostering openness, innovation, and transparency.

The conclusion of the report (entitled Three Key Public Policies for Research Libraries: Net Neutrality, Fair Use, Open and Public Access) :

The ARL Strategic Plan calls for ARL to influence “laws, public policies, regulations, and judicial decisions governing the use of copyrighted materials so that they better meet the needs of the educational and research communities” and to contribute “to reducing economic, legal, and technical barriers to access and use of the research results from publicly funded research projects, enabling rapid and inexpensive worldwide dissemination of facts and ideas.” To succeed, research libraries are dependent upon a non-discriminatory, robust, open, technological infrastructure that will permit effective use of resources under copyright, in the public domain, and under other legal regimes. Such an infrastructure must encourage emerging scholarly communication models that realize the benefits of networked-based technologies and reflect the interests of the academy and the public.

The full report.

Fabian Society Online Archive

A London School of Economics (LSE) website particularly useful to historians of British history is the open access Fabian Society Online Archive. The Fabian Society started publishing tracts in 1884, and included in this site are most tracts up to 1997. There are about 580 tracts. Among the authors are Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw, founders of the LSE. Other famous authors include Clement Attlee; Tony Benn; Tony Blair; Gordon Brown; G. D. H. Cole; Tony Crosland; R. H. S. Crossman; Denis Healey; Harold Laski; Kingsley Martin; Harold Wilson.

Topics treated in the tracts include:

* cultural matters
* economics
* electoral reform
* foreign policy (such as colonialism, the Cold War and relations with Europe)
* industrial relations
* the Labour Party
* local government
* politics (such as electoral and parliamentary reform)
* poverty
* social reform (such as education, health and pensions)
* socialism
* women's issues

December issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber's December issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter is now online. Particularly interesting is the section "The US elections and open access" where Suber considers at length the future of the FRPAA (Federal Research Public Access Act) bill which is presently before Congress. He believes that "because Congress is preoccupied with more urgent business, FRPAA has little chance as a stand-alone bill in the lame-duck session. If it expires without a vote at the end of this month, it or some variation of it will almost certainly be re-introduced in the new session. The new bill may be the same as the current FRPAA, which itself is the same as the version of FRPAA introduced in 2006, or may be revised to account for any executive action taken by President Obama in the meantime." Suber's prediction for the ultimate outcome of government mandated open access:

insofar as Republicans are inclined to work constructively for achievable progress, there will be some common ground with Democrats. That common ground will include creating jobs, stimulating the economy, opening government, showing fiscal responsibility with public funds, and mandating public access to publicly-funded research. That bodes well both for FRPAA and for an Obama executive order mandating OA from federal funding agencies. But insofar as Republicans are inclined to obstruct Democrats, reject their own party elders, or both, common ground will be a vanishing quantity. That plus Obama's tendency to seek compromise without reciprocation will mean defeat or dilution for OA policies.