An Overview of the Textbook Market and Strategies to Reduce Costs

An Overview of theTextbook Market and Strategies to Reduce Costs   

OmniTouch: Wearable Multitouch Interaction Everywhere

Today’s mobile computers provide omnipresent access to information, creation and communication facilities. It is undeniable that they have forever changed the way we work, play and interact. However, mobile interaction is far from solved. Diminutive screens and buttons mar the user experience, and otherwise prevent us from realizing their full potential.

Pick n Pay launches Kobo e reader

Pick n Pay launches Kobo e reader: Pick n Pay has announced that it is launching the Kobo e-reader in selected stores.

Supporting Digital Scholarship: Bibliographic Control, Library Cooperatives and Open Access Repositories

Calhoun, Karen (2012) Supporting Digital Scholarship: Bibliographic Control, Library Cooperatives and Open Access Repositories. Research libraries have entered an era of discontinuous change—a time when the cumulated assets of the past do not guarantee future success. Bibliographic control, cooperative cataloguing systems and library catalogues have been key assets in the research library service framework for supporting scholarship. This chapter examines these assets in the context of changing library collections, new metadata sources and methods, open access repositories, digital scholarship and the purposes of research libraries. Advocating a fundamental rethinking of the research library service framework, the chapter concludes with a call for research libraries to collectively consider new approaches that could strengthen their roles as essential contributors to emergent, network-level scholarly research infrastructures.

Hat Tip: Open Access Explained!

What is open access? Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen take us through the world of open access publishing and explain just what it's all about.

"One of the clearest, concise, and entertaining explanations of open access I have seen. Check-out this animated comic, Open Access Explained! narrated by open access advocates Nick Shockey, Director of Student Advocacy at SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and Jonathan Eisen, Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Ecology at University of California, Davis on the PHD Comics website.
The piece focuses on open access to publically-funded scientific research. I wished for more of a nod to Humanities scholarship and the unique challenges of our disciplines relating to open access. But the explanation still translates very well. For example, this excerpt—I believe it is Jonathan Eisen speaking—could just as easily be applied to Humanities scholarship:.:

The inexorable rise of open access scientific publishing

A new study shows that the rise of open access publishing of academic research is faster than anyone had previously realised

The impact of open access on librarians

"Open access (OA) is possibly one of the greatest (in a size sense) topics being discussed in academic publishing right now, and with just cause. It has a real chance to fundamentally change the research landscape and dissemination of its results, potentially facilitating greater productivity, collaboration and transparency in the research method.

The most vocal bodies or individuals to talk about this issue have generally been from either the researcher or the publisher side, which are the two groups it most affects. But what position should the library take in these discussions, and how will an increase in the volume of open access material (and a potentially exponential one) change the type and volume of work for the librarian?......

What it boils down to
So, to paraphrase this and run the risk of repeating in another short list what is said above a few times, the future of open access for libraries will involve:

1. More advanced discovery services
2. Communication, training and networking with own institutional community
3. Repository building and curation"

 see discussion on Swets Blog

Ditch the Monograph by Jennifer Howard

What if scholars, publishers, and tenure-and-promotion committees embraced short-form e-books as a respectable way to deliver serious scholarship?

Read more

Confronting the Crisis in Scientific Publishing: Latency, Licensing and Access

Confronting the Crisis in Scientific Publishing: Latency, Licensing and Access

".....research institutions would collectively develop and adopt publication agreements that do not transfer copyright ownership to publishers, but instead grant publishers a one-year exclusive period in which to publish a work. This limited period of exclusivity should enable the publisher to recoup its costs and a reasonable profit through subscription revenues, while restoring control of the article copyright to the author at the end of the exclusivity period. This balanced approach addresses the needs of both publishers and the scientific community, and would, I believe, avoid many of the challenges faced by existing open access models....."

SIERRA Blog page

Sierra Blog for useful info 

Rhodes Library in SA has just made the switch to Sierra

Looking back after 20 years

This is a really interesting (short) article about the development of journals - do try and read it.

"It has been approximately 20 years since distributing scholarly journals digitally became feasible. This
article discusses the broad implications of the transition to digital distributed scholarship from a
historical perspective and focuses on the development of open access (OA) and the various models for
funding OA in the context of the roles scholarly journals play in scientific communities.
..... It took hundreds of years to develop a finely honed paper journal system. In a mere 20 years, digitally
distributed journals are still evolving and have a long way to go in working out the format, conventions,
and economics that will allow the use of this new media to be as effective and as efficient as the paper
media that they are replacing...."

The entire print collection of the Library of Congress could fit on five to 10 discs!

Making computer data storage cheaper and easier

Case Western Reserve University researchers have developed technology aimed at making an optical disc that holds 1 to 2 terabytes of data -- the equivalent of 1,000 to 2,000 copies of Encyclopedia Britannica

Study of Unmediated Patron- Driven Acquisition of e-Books (thanks again to Brenda's Tweet!)

Give ’Em What They Want: A One-Year Study of Unmediated Patron-Driven Acquisition of e-Books
an ACRL article

Register Now

Register TODAY to start using award-winning research tools and resources—FREE until 31 October 2012. SAGE is proud to offer free access to our highly advanced online research tools and resources, including SAGE Journals, SAGE Research Methods, and SAGE Knowledge. Designed to offer extensive research features, comprehensive access to robust scholarly content, and customization tools that allow researchers to refine and focus their research, these must-have tools are now available FREE until 31 October 2012. Register* today and experience first-hand these award-winning tools and resources: SAGE Journals (SJ) is one of the largest and most powerful collections of social sciences, business, humanities, science, technical, and medical content in the world! Register here Register to get free access to more than 950,000 articles from more than 670 journals, including their backfiles! SAGE Knowledge (SK) is the ultimate social sciences digital library for students, researchers, and faculty. With more than 2,500 titles, it includes an expansive range of SAGE eBook and eReference content, including scholarly monographs, award-winning reference works, handbooks, professional development titles, and more. The platform allows researchers to cross-search and seamlessly access a wide breadth of must-have SAGE book & reference content from one source. Register here Register to start your search today! SAGE Research Methods (SRM) is an award-winning tool designed to help researchers, faculty, and students create research projects and understand the methods behind them. This invaluable tool links together more than 1,400 research methods terms from an unprecedented variety of content—including books, journals, and reference resources. Register here Register to discover how SRM can answer your research methods and research design questions! We are excited for you to experience the benefits of our valuable, advanced online research tools and resources! *Please register for each product individually.

Libraries, patrons, and e-books - Pew Report

Libraries, patrons, and e-books - Pew Report

Some comments from respondents:
"I am reading more because it is easy and accessible"
"...if I find myself with a free couple of minutes, I can read a couple of pages.”...:"
"I have always been a reader, but I’m reading more books now that I have an e-book reader, and I’m getting through them more quickly. … I find that my family members and I also spend more time discussing the books that we are reading..."
"I read a lot more with e-books. I’ve ventured out into new genres and authors that I would never have found in the print world..."
"“I read multiple books all the time. An audiobook for my car and commute. An e-book for ‘whenever’ and print books for relaxing at home...."
(librarian)  “I love the ecological benefit of not having the waste of needing to buy a lot of copies and then having to discard half of them two years later,” one library department head told us. “I love that we don’t have to hassle patrons to bring e-materials back. I love that there are no damages, no worn out items, no sticky stains.”

New Roles, New Responsibilities: Examining Training Needs of Repository Staff

This study reports on a survey of Australasian institutional repository staff to identify skills and knowledge sets.

The Disappearing Web: Decay is Eating our History

The Disappearing Web: Decay Is Eating Our History

By Mathew Ingram on September 20, 2012

Bottom of Form

One of the characteristics of the modern media age—at least for anyone who uses the Web and social media a lot—is that we are surrounded by vast clouds of rapidly changing information, whether it’s blog post,s or news stories, or Twitter and Facebook updates. That’s great if you like real-time content, but there is a not-so-hidden flaw—namely, that you can’t step into the same stream twice, as Heraclitus put it. In other words, much of that information may (and probably will) disappear as new information replaces it, and small pieces of history wind up getting lost.

According to a recent study, which looked at links shared through Twitter about news events such as the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East, this could be turning into a substantial problem. The study, which MIT’s Technology Review highlighted in a recent post by the Physics arXiv blog, was done by a pair of researchers in Virginia, Hany SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson. They took a number of recent major news events over the past three years—including the Egyptian revolution, Michael Jackson’s death, the elections and related protests in Iran, and the outbreak of the H1N1 virus—and tracked the links that were shared on Twitter about each. Following the links to their ultimate source showed that an alarming number of them had simply vanished.

In fact, the researchers said that within a year of these events, an average of 11 percent of the material that was linked to had disappeared completely (and another 20 percent had been archived), and after two-and-a-half years, close to 30 percent had been lost altogether and 41 percent had been archived. Based on this rate of information decay, the authors predicted that more than 10 percent of the information about a major news event will likely be gone within a year, and the remainder will continue to vanish at the rate of .02 percent per day.

It’s not clear from the research why the missing information disappeared, but it’s likely that in many cases blogs have simply shut down or moved, or news stories have been archived by providers who charge for access (something that many newspapers and other media outlets do to generate revenue). But as the Technology Review post points outhttp://www.technologyreview.com/view/429274/history-as-recorded-on-twitter-is-vanishing-from/?ref=rss, this kind of information can be extremely valuable in tracking how historical events developed, such as the Arab Spring revolutions—which the researchers note was the original impetus for their study, since they were trying to collect as much data as possible for the one-year anniversary of the uprisings.

Other scientists, and particularly librarians, have also raised red flags in the past about the rate at which digital data are disappearing. The National Library of Scotland, for example, recently warned that key elements of Scottish digital life were vanishing into a “black hole” and asked the government to fast-track legislation that would allow libraries to store copies of websites. Web pioneer Brewster Kahle is probably the best known digital archivist as a result of his Internet Archive project Open Library).

Although the Virginia researchers didn’t deal with it as part of their study, a related problem is that much of the content that gets distributed through Twitter—not just websites that are linked to in Twitter posts, but the content of the posts themselves—is difficult and/or expensive to get to. Twitter’s search is notoriously unreliable for anything older than about a week, and access to the complete archive of your tweets is provided only to those who can make a special case for needing it, such as Andy Carvin of National Public Radio (who is writing a book about the way he chronicled the Arab Spring revolutions).

As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in a recent post, an external service called Gnip now has access to the full archive of Twitter content [http://gigaom.com/2012/09/19/for-a-price-gnip-brings-you-access-to-all-public-tweets-ever-sent/], which it will provide to companies for a fee. And Twitter-based search-and-discovery engine Topsy also has an archive of most of the full “firehose” of tweets—although it focuses primarily on content that is retweeted a lot—and provides that to companies for analytical purposes. But neither can be easily linked to for research or historical archiving purposes. The Library of Congress also has an archive of Twitter’s content, but it isn’t easily accessible, and it’s not clear whether new content is being added.

Twitter has talked about providing a service that would let users download their tweets at some point, but it hasn’t said when such a thing would be available—and even if users did create their own archive in this way (or by using tools like Thinkup from former Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani) it would be difficult to link those in a way that would provide the kind of connected historical information the Virginia study is describing. And it’s not just Twitter: There is no easy way to get access to an archive of Facebook (FB) posts either, although users in Europe can request access to their own archive as a result of a legal ruling there.

For better or worse, much of the content flowing around us seems to be just as insubstantial as the clouds it’s hosted in, and the existing tools we have for trying to capture and make sense of it simply aren’t up to the task. The long-term social effects of this digital amnesia remain to be seen.

  http://www.businessweek.com/

Reading Diary: Open Access by Peter Suber -

Some really interesting comments on Open Access
"...For librarians reading this book****, it is definitely a plus that Suber doesn’t take the condescending route and proclaim libraries and librarians to be casualties of increased OA. On the other hand, libraries as institutions that passively pay exorbitant subscription bills tend to figure more in the text than librarians as active participants, leaders and allies in reforming scholarly communications. Although I’m sure it’s not intended to read this way (and there are a couple of good plugs for libraries & librarians in the last chapter), it’s not hard to imagine faculty members reading this book imagining that their libraries need rescuing rather than coming away with the idea that their libraries are full of librarians who would be happy joining them storming the barricades. Change will happen faster and better if we hang together.............................

Finally, who would I recommend this book to? First of all, this book is a must-have for any academic library. No question about that......"

****we have this book ON ORDER in the RUL

Thanks to Brenda for this interesting Twitter alert!

Articlefrom the Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: “…….. When I referee an article for a journal, it usually takes three to four hours of my time. Recently, two Taylor & Francis journals asked me to review article submissions for them. In each case, I was probably one of 20 to 30 people in the world with the expert knowledge to judge whether the articles cited the relevant literature, represented it accurately, addressed important issues in the field, and made an original contribution to knowledge.
If you wanted to know whether that spot on your lung in the X-ray required an operation, whether the deed to the house you were purchasing had been recorded properly, or whether the chimney on your house was in danger of collapsing, you would be willing to pay a hefty fee to specialists who had spent many years acquiring the relevant expertise. Taylor & Francis, however, thinks I should be paid nothing for my expert judgment and for four hours of my time.
So why not try this: If academic work is to be commodified and turned into a source of profit for shareholders and for the 1 percent of the publishing world, then we should give up our archaic notions of unpaid craft labor and insist on professional compensation for our expertise, just as doctors, lawyers, and accountants do.
This does not mean we would never referee articles free. Just as the lawyer who is my neighbor bills corporate clients a hefty fee but represents prisoners in Guantánamo pro bono, so academics could referee without charge for nonprofit presses but insist on professional rates of compensation from for-profit publishers that expect us to donate our labor while paying mansion salaries [over $US 1 million/annum] to their chief executives and top managers….”

Guidelines needed to prevent impact-factor abuse

Citations play a big part in assessing a journal's quality but what happens when many of those citations come from papers authored by that journal's editorial board? Paul Peters considers the need to establish guidelines for appropriate citation practices