Weekly Readings - 2 June 2006

Scholarly Publishing Practice: Academic journal publishers’ policies and practices in online publishing. John Cox, Laura Cox. Press Release. 2 June 2006.
This online study has a number of interesting findings, including:
- More journals are now available online: 90% of journals, compared with 75% in 2003.
- The number of journals continues to grow. 174 publishers have launched 1,048 new journal titles from 2000 to 2005, , while discontinuing 185 titles.
- The availability of back issues online has increased to 91% in 2005.
- Access to journal back volumes is becoming an integral part of the online product; 63% of publishers provide active subscribers with access at no extra cost.
- About a fifth of publishers are experimenting with open access journals.
- All categories of publishers are now extending usage rights to be ‘library friendly’.

Library Newspaper Cooperative. Managing Information. 30 May 2006.
NewsArchivePlus announced an initiative to provide online access to every historic (18th, 19th & early 20th Century UK national & regional) newspaper and library archive in the UK. They are asking members to provide digitized content that can be made available to all. Organizations can scan, archive and retrieve their material online which will increase the content available to them.

Microsoft shows off JPEG rival. Joris Evers. CNET News. May 24, 2006.
Microsoft intends to replace the JPEG image format with Windows Media Photo. The new image format will be made available with Vista, and will also be available for XP. Managing "digital memories" is one of the key features of Vista. The format should offer better pictures in half the size of JPEG images. The compression technology will make it possible to take part of a large image to display a smaller version. Images can be rotated without decoding and encoding. There is a different approach to color space and compression. Success will depend on how many use it, and Microsoft has not addressed the licensing issues.

Samsung Readies Hybrid Hard Drive. Martyn Williams. PC World. May 18, 2006.
Samsung plans to sell a hybrid hard drive which includes flash memory storage as well as a regular hard disk. The flash memory acts as a storage buffer to hold data until it is written to disk, which should extend disk life and increase performance.

Why OpenURL? Ann Apps and Ross MacIntyre. D-Lib Magazine. May 2006.
This article looks at the evolution of linking technologies, especially OpenURL, which is now a NISO standard. It looks at how OPENURL works, who will benefit from it, the current status or it and what is missing, and ways to use it. It has become a part of electronic publishing services provided by both libraries and publishers. It can provide access to more than just the full text article.