Elsevier Acquires bepress

Elsevier Acquires bepress. Roger C. Schonfeld.  Society for Scholarly Publishing; The Scholarly Kitchen. Aug 2, 2017.
     Elsevier announces its acquisition of bepress. In a move entirely consistent with its strategy to pivot beyond content licensing to preprints, analytics, workflow, and decision-support, Elsevier is probably the foremost single player in the institutional repository area. There is some concern this acquisition will allow them to co-opt open access. The bepress product, Digital Commons, has more than 500 participating institutions, predominantly US colleges and universities.


bepress Joins Elsevier, with Exciting Potential for Growth. Press release. bepress. Aug 2, 2017.
bepress has joined Elsevier, the largest content provider in the world. The management is "confident that this is the right choice for bepress and for our community. Both parties are committed to sustaining the elements that make bepress bepress, and supporting your open access initiatives."

Digital Preservation Matters.

New policy recommendations on open access to research data

New policy recommendations on open access to research data. Angus Whyte. DCC News. 19 January, 2015.
Some of the recommendations of the RECODE case studies concerning open access to research data:

• Develop policies for open access to research data
• Ensure appropriate funding for open access to research data 
• Develop policies and initiatives for researchers for open access to high quality data
• Identify key stakeholders and relevant networks 
• Foster a sustainable ecosystem for open access to research data
• Plan for the long-term, sustainable curation and preservation of open access data
• Develop comprehensive and collaborative technical and infrastructure solutions that afford open access to and long-term preservation of high-quality research data
• Develop technical and scientific quality standards for research data
• Address legal and ethical issues arising from open access to research data
• Support the transition to open research data through curriculum-development and training 

Two things needed with open access to research data:

1. coherent open data ecosystem
2. attention to research practice, processes and data collections
   
    
   Digital Preservation Matters.

ZENODO. Research. Shared.

ZENODO. Research. Shared. Website. May 12, 2013.
ZENODO is a new open digital repository repository service that enables researchers, scientists, projects and institutions to share and showcase multidisciplinary research results (data and publications) that are not part of existing institutional or subject-based repositories. The repository is created by OpenAIRE and CERN, and supported by the European Commission.  It promotes peer-reviewed openly accessible research;  all items have a DOI, so they are citable. All formats are allowed. There is a 1GB per file size constraint.  Data files are versioned, but records are not. Files may be deposited under closed, open, embargoed or restricted access.
It is named after  Zenodotus, the first librarian of the Ancient Library of Alexandria and father of the first recorded use of metadata, a landmark in library history. ZENODO is provided free of charge for educational and informational use.

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Copyright Rule We Need to Repeal If We Want to Preserve Our Cultural Heritage

The Copyright Rule We Need to Repeal If We Want to Preserve Our Cultural Heritage. Benj Edwards. The Atlantic. Mar 15 2013.
The anti-circumvention section (1201) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act needs to be repealed. The law threatens consumer control over the electronic devices we buy, but if the DMCA remains unaltered, cultural scholarship will soon be conducted only at the behest of corporations, and public libraries may disappear entirely. The DMCA prevents sharing information and sharing is vital to  preserve information. To properly preserve digital works, libraries and archives must be able to copy and media-shift them without fear of legal problems. The provisions in the DCMA are unacceptable and must change, or as a society we must be willing to say goodbye to libraries and the concept of universal public access to knowledge.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Chemists.

Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Chemists.  February 25, 2013. Matthew P. Long, Roger C. Schonfeld. Ithaka S+R. February 26, 2013. [PDF]

This report, intended for those who support chemists, including librarians, is about the latest research methods, practices, and information services needs of academics chemists. Chemists need services to make their lives easier and their research groups more productive; this includes minimizing paperwork and administrative tasks. They value academic libraries primarily for the access that they provide to electronic journals and other online resources. Researchers are often frustrated by an inability to share large amounts of data with a collaborator. Few chemists visit the physical library, but they use the library digital collections heavily.

In the survey, fewer than 10% reported a research consultation with a librarian, asked for help with a data management, or asked for assistance on an issue related to publishing in the past year; they rarely reach out to the library to discuss issues or request support. The main search sites for chemists are Web of Knowledge/Web of  Science, SciFinder, and PubMed. It would be helpful to have tools to help process all of this information,  a pre-scan of announcements from journals, and organize their materials. Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) make it easy to share, archive, and search through past lab notes, but are at risk in the lab. Labs generally do not have good data management infrastructure or proper external support for developing it, especially in sharing and preserving files.

It is difficult for academic chemists to coordinate the recording and preservation of data after the completion of a project. When data are saved, they are often held in unstable or at-risk formats  or in formats where no one else can access or interpret them. Sometimes a large amount of potentially useful data is not shared or preserved in any durable way. One chemist invited the library to come and speak to the department about preservation and access. Chemists have a general lack of awareness of  effective data curation and preservation. Data management and preservation is time-consuming and rarely straightforward; it requires expert advice and constant monitoring.

The findings:

1. Chemists need better support in data management, sharing and preservation.
2.  Many researchers remain anxious about keeping up with the newest literature.
3. They need new tools to stay aware of new research and also serendipitous discovery.
4. Chemists  require greater support in disseminating their research, including articles, data, and other materials.

Other areas of concern for academic chemists : laboratory management, gaining access to industrial funding, and teaching support.

We see some real potential for the academic library to stretch the definition of the services it offers to the academic chemist. The library may also have a role in working with other service providers and ensuring that academics are aware of the latest research tools. It is clear from this project that libraries must think strategically about whether and how to invest in services for chemists.
 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter.

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter. May 2012. [PDF]
Items from the Newsletter include:

• Key outcomes of the NDIIPP program are to identify priorities for born digital collections and engage organizations committed to preserving digital content.
• Viewshare  is being used for the collections
• Floppy Disks are Dead, Long Live Floppy Disks
• Floppy disks are fragile constructions that were never designed for permanence.
• Difficult to determine what is on the floppy and to recover
• A floppy disk controller called Catweasel allows computers to access a wide variety of older disk formats (must have the floppy drive).
• Web archiving.  
• Because of the scope of the web sites, consider partnering with other institutions.
•  Preservation of and Access to Federally Funded Scientific Data
• Research data produced by federally funded scientific projects should be freely available to the wider research community and the public
• Public data should be a public resource, and data sharing supports core scientific values like openness, transparency, and replication. 
• Lack of resources for curating scientific data and a lingering tradition of data hoarding create resistance to open access to research data.

 Digital Preservation Matters.

Research Archive Widens Its Public Access—a Bit

Research Archive Widens Its Public Access—a Bit. Editorial. Technology Review.  7 September 2011.
JStor, an organization which maintains link to 1,400 journals for subscribing institutions, is providing free public access to articles published prior to 1923 in the United States or before 1870 in other countries, about 6 percent of its content. In a letter to publishers and libraries, JStor refers to plans for "further access to individuals in the future."

Hawaiian Heritage sites set to launch on CyArk website.

Hawaiian Heritage sites set to launch on CyArk website. Press release. Hawaii 24/7. August 10, 2011.   
CyArk, with the help of its partners, conducted the field work for the Digital Preservation of three culturally significant Hawaiian sites, which include site animations, photography, panoramas, perspectives, and drawings. This information will showcase oft-overlooked heritage sites and highlight the need for cultural resource preservation.

CyArk is a non profit organization with the mission of digitally preserving cultural heritage sites through collecting, archiving and providing open access to data created by laser scanning, digital modeling, and other state-of-the-art technologies.

Economics and Digital Preservation: Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access

Economics and Digital Preservation: Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access.  Fran Berman and Brian Lavoie. Library of Congress. July 21, 2011. PDF. [Old link has disappeared. To read, use the 2015 link]
Digital Preservation is both a technical and economic problem. There must be solutions to both for there to be success.  Even the most elegant technical solution is no solution at all if it is not economically sustainable.  Some of the challenges they list:

• “One‐time” funding models are inadequate to address persistent long‐term access and preservation needs
• Poor alignment between stakeholders in the digital preservation and access world and their roles, responsibilities and support models
• Lack of institutional, enterprise, and/or community incentives to support the collaboration needed to enforce sustainable economic models
• Complacency that current practices are “good enough” and / or the problem is not urgent.
• Fear that digital access and preservation is too big to take on

Stakeholders are:

• Those who benefit from use of a preserved asset
• Those who select what to preserve
• Those who own or have rights to an asset
• Those who preserve the asset
• Those who pay

There is no magic bullet, and there is no "free" solution.

Recommendations:

1.        Create Sustainability‐friendly policies and mandates

2.        Invest in preservation infrastructure

3.        Create preservation‐aware communities

a.        Create public public‐private partnerships to align distinct stakeholder groups

b.        Convene expert communities to address the selection and preservation needs of valuable materials for which there is no stewardship

4.        Raise awareness

a.        Provide leadership in training and education For 21st century digital preservation,

b.        Promote digital preservation skills and awareness

5.        Take individual responsibility

a.        Provide nonexclusive rights to preserve and distribute created content

b.        Partner with preservation experts throughout the data lifecycle to ensure your data will be maintained in a form that will be useful over the long term

c.        Pro‐actively participate in professional organizations to create best practices and selection priorities.

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter.

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter. Library of Congress.  August 2011. [PDF]

The newsletter includes information on:

•  “Make it Work: Improvisations on the Stewardship of Digital Information,” 
• All About Archiving the Web 
• Possible uniform law on the authentication of online legal materials
• Exploring Cultural Heritage Collections With Recollection
• Recollection is a free and open source platform that lets archivists, librarians, scholars and curators create easy to navigate web interfaces (like maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) to their digital, cultural heritage collections.
• Finding digital preservation training.  The training calendar.
• Digital Time Capsules and our "Digital Afterlife"
• Creating and organizing personal digital content for future access.
• The Signal: Library of Congress blog to discuss digital stewardship in a way that is informative and appealing.
• Tending the machines
• What skills does a digital archivist or librarian need?  Skills students need to compete in the archives and libraries job market.  Expertise with programming, formats and standards is, of course, very important.  But other talents have a greater bearing on success in today’s workplace. Such as:
• an ability to understand and adapt to new ways of using technology
• eagerness to help refine how things are done
• a basic understanding of how the different system parts contribute to doing the job at hand
• ability to bridge two distinct social camps: the highly technical and the highly not-technical
• how choose among these tools and software options to meet the needs of users
• communication skills, including presentation, writing, speaking and persuading
• ability to social media and to integrate photographs, graphics and video with text to get the right message out to as many people as possible

Digital Preservation Matters - April 16, 2010

State Of America's Libraries Report 2010. American Library Association. April 11, 2010.

Interesting report about libraries. As the recession continues, Americans turn to libraries in ever larger numbers for access to resources for employment, continuing education, and government services. The local library has become a lifeline of resources, training and workshops. Even in the age of Google, academic libraries are being used more than ever. During a typical week in fiscal 2008, academic libraries in the United States had more than 20.3 million visits, answered more than 1.1 million reference questions, and made more than 498,000 presentations to groups attended by more than 8.9 million students and faculty, increases over the previous years. Over 43% of libraries provide access to locally produced digitized collections.

---

A National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information. Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access. April 1, 2010. [Silverlight video.]

This page has the agenda and video presentations from A National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information, a recent meeting hosted by the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access.

BRTF's Featured Agenda and Presentations:

• Research Data, Daniel E. Atkins, Wayne Clough,
• Scholarly Discourse, Derek Law, Brian Schottlaender,
• Economics of Collectively-Created Content, George Oates, Timo Hannay
• Commercially-owned Cultural Content, Chris Lacinak, Jon Landau
• Economics of Digital Information, William G. Bowen, Hal R. Varian, Dan Rubinfeld
• Summary by Clifford Lynch.

---

How Tweet It Is!: Library Acquires Entire Twitter Archive. Matt Raymond. Blog. Library of Congress. April 14, 2010.

The Library of Congress is digitally archiving every public tweet made since Twitter started in 2006. "Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition." Amazing to think what we can "learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data. And I'm certain we'll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive." The Library of Congress has been archiving information from the web since 2000. It now has more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs and political websites.

---

Library of Congress: We're archiving every tweet ever made. Nate Anderson. Ars Technica. April 16, 2010.

Comments about the Library of Congress archiving tweets:

• There's been a turn toward historicism in academic circles over the last few decades, a turn that emphasizes not just official histories and novels but the diaries of women who never wrote for publication, or the oral histories of soldiers from the Civil War, or the letters written by a sawmill owner. The idea is to better understand the context of a time and place, to understand the way that all kinds of people thought and lived, and to get away from an older scholarship that privileged the productions of (usually) elite males."
• Digital technologies pose a problem for the Library and other archival institutions, though. By making data so easy to generate and then record, they push archives to think hard about their missions and adapt to new technical challenges."

---

Aligning Investments with the Digital Evolution: Results of 2009 Faculty Survey Released. Roger C. Schonfeld, Ross Housewright. Ithaka. April 07, 2010. [37p. PDF]

An excellent report for academic libraries especially, Faculty Survey 2009: Strategic Insights for Librarians, Publishers, and Societies, that looks at faculty attitudes towards the academic library, information resources, and the scholarly communications system. A few quotes from the report:

• Faculty most often turn to network-level services, including both general purpose search engines and services targeted specifically to academia.
• Of all disciplines, scientists remain the least likely to utilize library-specific starting points;
• Network-level services are increasingly important for discovery, not only of monographs and journals but archival resources and other primary source collections.
• The library must evolve to meet these changing needs.
• 90% of faculty members view the library buyer role as very important, 71% and 59% now view the archive and gateway roles as very important, respectively. Archiving is the 2^nd highest role.
• Despite the reported declines in importance of all the library's roles other than as a buyer, the 2009 study saw a slight rise in perceived dependence on the library
• The declining visibility and importance of traditional roles for the library and the librarian may lead to faculty primarily perceiving the library as a budget line, rather than as an active intellectual partner.
• Faculty members most strongly support and appreciate the library's infrastructural roles, in which it acquires and maintains collections of materials on their behalf.
• Faculty members sense of the significance of long-term preservation of electronic journals has steadily increased over time
• Effective and sustainable models for the preservation of electronic journals must be developed
• Scholars, regardless of field, indicate a general preference that digital materials be preserved.
• Less than 30% of faculty members have deposited any scholarly material into a repository; nearly 50% have not deposited but hope to do so in the future
• Faculty attitudes and practices are at the strategic core. Greater engagement with and support of trailblazing faculty disciplines may help develop the roles and services to serve faculty needs into the future. The institutions that serve faculty must also anticipate them, both to ensure that the 21st century information needs of faculty are met and to secure their own relevance for the future.

Digital Preservation Matters - March 26, 2010

Archiving Britain's web: The legal nightmare explored. Katie Scott. Wired. 05 March 2010.

Websites are increasing recognized as being culturally valuable. But there are concerns about the ability to preserve them because of current copyright requirements. The British Library over the past 6 years has archived over 6,000 culturally significant websites. Currently they must contact every copyright holders of these sites, and only have a 24% response rate. Some feel there is a "'digital black hole' in the nation's memory" because of the difficulty in archiving the web sites. There is a proposal to change the law to allow the copy deposit act to include websites. Some look at an opt out option. The BBC has a "no take-down" rule.

---

Canterbury Tales manuscript to be digitized. Medieval news. March 22, 2010.

The University of Manchester Library is planning to digitize the Canterbury Tales manuscript. This is part of a JISC funded project. The Centre of Digital Excellence supports universities, colleges, libraries and museums which lack the resources to digitize important works. In addition to the digitizing work, “they will also be exploring business models for the long term viability of digitisation.”

---

ISO Releases Archival Standards. eContent. Mar 23, 2010.

Two documents from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) aim to provide guidelines for archiving patient information. "Health informatics-Security requirements for archiving of electronic health records-Principles" and "Health informatics-Security requirements for archiving of electronic health records-Guidelines" look at topics of records maintenance, retention, disclosure, and eventual destruction. Electronic medical data must be stored for the life of the patient; there are legal, ethical, and privacy concerns.

---

Elsevier and PANGAEA Data Archive Linking Agreement. Neil Beagrie. Blog. 03 Mar 2010.

Elsevier and the data library PANGAEA (Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data) have agreed to reciprocal linking of their content in earth system research. Research data sets deposited at PANGAEA are now automatically linked to the corresponding articles in Elsevier journals on ScienceDirect. Science is better supported through the cooperation and the flow of data into trusted archives. “This is the beginning of a new way of managing, preserving and sharing data from earth system research.”

---

Duplicating Federal Videos for an Online Archive. Brian Stelter. The New York Times. March 14, 2010.

The International Amateur Scanning League plans to upload the National Archives’ collection of 3,000 DVDs in an “experiment in crowd-sourced digitization” using a DVD duplicator and a YouTube account. This is a small demonstration that volunteers can sometimes achieve what bureaucracies can’t or won’t. the DVDs are all technically available to the public, they are hard to see unless a person visits the archive or pays for a copy. The volunteers duplicate the DVDs then upload them to YouTube, the Internet Archive Web site and an independent server.

---

Uncompressed Audio File Formats. JISC Digital Media. 10 February 2010.

This looks at the main features of uncompressed audio file types, including WAV, AIFF and Broadcast WAV (BWF). “Uncompressed audio files are the most accurate digital representation of a soundwave” but they also take the most resources. Digital audio recording measures the level of a sound wave at regular intervals and records that value as a number. “This bitstream is the ‘raw’ audio data, expressing the sound wave in its closest digital analogue. “ These uncompressed audio file types are ‘wrapper’ formats that take the original data and combine it with additional data to make it compatible with other systems.

The most common is the Waveform Audio File Format (WAV), which is limited to a 4 Gb file size. The European Broadcasting Union created the Broadcast Wave Format (BWF) which is functionally identical to the WAV file except it has an extra header file for metadata. This is a recommended archive format and also has a 4 Gb file size. The European Broadcasting Union has recently added the Multichannel Broadcast Wave Format (MBWF)which combines the RF64 audio format (surround sound, MP3, AAC, etc) with a 64 bit address header and has a file size limit of 18 billion Gb. It is backwardly compatible with WAV and BWF. The Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is the native format for audio on Mac OSX.

“The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) recommend Broadcast WAV as a suitable archival format, for reasons of its wide compatibility and support, and its embedded metadata capability. For surround-sound or multichannel audio the MBWF format should be used. For archive PCM audio, bit depth should be a minimum of 24-bit, and sample rate a minimum of 48kHz to comply with IASA standards.” If compression is needed, lossless compression, which requires an additional encoding/decoding stage – codec) is the least destructive alternative. Some open-source lossless compression codecs are available, such as FLACC.

---

Court Orders Producing Party to "Unlock" PDF Since Not in a "Reasonably Usable" Form. Michael Arkfeld . Electronic Discovery and Evidence - blog. February 15, 2010.

In this contractual action, the defendants disclosed 11,757-page summary in a PDF "locked" format precluding the plaintiff from being able to edit and or manage the summary without retyping it. The Court found that the defendants' locked format made it "completely impractical for use" and ordered that the defendants "unlock" the files.

---

Digital Preservation Matters - March 2, 2010

A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation. Katherine Skinner, Matt Schultz. Educopia Institute. February 2010. [156 p. PDF]

Excellent guide created by MetaArchive, who developed the first private LOCKSS network in 2004. This work examines distributed digital preservation, successful strategies and new models . It will help others to join or establish a private LOCKSS network. It discusses the network architecture, technical and organization considerations, content selection and ingest, administration and copyright practices in the network. A distributed digital preservation system must preserve, not just back-up. The preservation process of contributing, preserving, and retrieving content depends upon the institution’s diligence. Ingested content is preserved not just through replication, but by the caches through a set of polling, voting, and repairing processes. Distributed digital preservation, by definition, requires communication and collaboration across multiple locations and between numerous staff.

The software provides bit-level preservation for digital objects of any file type or format, but it can also provide a set of services to make the preserved files usable in the future, such as normalizing and migrating. The MetaArchive network is a dark archive with no public interface; communication between caches is secure. Organizations collaborating on preserving digital content must examine the roles and responsibilities of members, address essential management, policy, and staffing questions, develop standards, and define the network’s sphere of activity. Ingest, monitoring, and recovery of content are critical steps for preserving the content.

Some interesting quotes from the guide:

• Paradoxically, there is simultaneously far greater potential risk and far greater potential security for digital collections
• many cultural memory organizations are today seeking third parties to take on the responsibility for acquiring and managing their digital collections. The same institutions would never consider outsourcing management and custodianship of their print and artifact collections;
• A great deal of content is in fact routinely lost by cultural memory organizations as they struggle with the enormous spectrum of issues required to preserve digital collections,
• A true digital preservation program will require multi-institutional collaboration and at least some ongoing investment to realistically address the issues involved in preserving information over time.
• One of the greatest risks we run in not preserving our own digital assets for ourselves is that we simultaneously cease to preserve our own viability as institutions.

---

Encouraging Open Access. Steve Kolowich. Inside Higher Ed. March 2, 2010.

Conversations about open access to journal articles currently revolve around policy, not technology; about if the content should be made available, not how. “Without content, an IR is just a set of empty shelves.” A new model of repository focuses on giving researchers an online “workspace” within the repository where they can upload and preserve different versions of an article they are working on. The idea is to make publishing articles to the open repository a natural extension of the creative process. This is based on a survey where professors wanted:

• to be able to work with co-authors easily,
• to keep track of different versions of the same document, and
• to make their work more visible
• all while doing as little extra work as possible.

---

In the digital age, librarians are pioneers. Judy Bolton-Fasman. The Boston Globe. February 10, 2010.

Book review of This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All By Marilyn Johnson.

• Among information professionals, Johnson notes there are librarians and archivists: “Librarians were finders [of information]. Archivists were keepers.’’ But the information revolution is affecting both.
• The digital age is making possible the creation of searchable databases of archives, but it’s also making information, especially on the Internet, more ephemeral and harder to collect.
• Information archivists “capturing history before it disappears because of a broken link or outdated software.”
• in a world where technology moves life at a breathtaking pace, “where information itself is a free-for-all, with traditional news sources going bankrupt and publishers in trouble, we need librarians more than ever’’ to help point the way to the best, most reliable sources.

---

Installing OAIS Software: Archivematica. Chris Prom. Practical E-Records. February 1, 2010.

One of several reports on open source tools the blog author is evaluating to help with ingest, storage, and access processes in archives. This post looks at Archivematica, and he likes the supportable model for facilitating archival work with electronic records. It is a Ubuntu-based virtual appliance which can exist alongside preservation tools on other systems. It can be installed locally and in a variety of ways. Worth looking in to.

---

IBM announces massive NAS array for the cloud. Lucas Mearian. Computerworld. February 11, 2010.

IBM has announced SONAS, an enterprise-class network-attached storage array capable of scaling from 27TB to 14 petabytes under a single name space. It is designed to provide access to data anywhere any time. The policy-driven automation storage software allows an institution to predefine where data is placed, when it is created, where and when it moves to in the storage hierarchy, where it's copied for disaster recovery, and when it will be eventually deleted.