The Distant Librarian

University of Calgary Funds Open Access Authors Fund

There was a great announcement yesterday here at the U of C.  The text below differs a little from the official press release.

Thomas Hickerson, Vice Provost for Libraries and Cultural Resources and University Librarian, announced today the establishment of an annual $100,000 Authors Fund to provide University of Calgary faculty and graduate students with financial support to cover Open Access author fees.

Open Access publishing is a rapidly expanding development in the exchange of research information.  An increasing number of academic journals make research literature openly available via the internet without the restrictions on authors and without the high costs to users imposed by traditional subscription-based publications.

This new publishing model does, however, often require that authors pay fees contributing to the costs of publication.  With the establishment of this new fund, the first of this magnitude in Canada, researchers at the University of Calgary will have the freedom to exercise their own choice in publishing decisions.

As concerns regarding copyright restrictions grow and subscription costs continue to rise, Open Access publishing is emerging as the best hope for a sustainable and responsible course of action for the future of scholarly communication.  As described by Calgary’s Vice President for Research, Dr. Rose Goldstein, “The Open Access movement is a significant initiative in bringing our research activity more quickly and broadly to the awareness of the scholarly community and to the public at large.  The establishment of this fund by Libraries and Cultural Resources is a crucial development for our faculty and graduate students.”

Open Access publishing allows authors to retain copyright control over their work and promotes broad educational use of the latest information.  Open Access is also a key means by which university research can serve the larger community, providing public access to the new findings in everything from cancer treatment to global warming.

In voicing his enthusiasm for this action, Thomas Hickerson explained that this initiative responds positively to concerns for scholarly communication internationally.  “I am proud that the University of Calgary is taking leadership in this movement to increase the worldwide accessibility of cutting-edge research.”

Yay us!  :-)

TeamViewer for Desktop Sharing

Haven't had a chance to try this, but TeamViewer, free for non-commercial use, offers desktop sharing for both Windows and Mac. They claim 10 million users - wonder if they were known as something else before?

That won't work for us - Jim Prentice ducks questions about Bill C-61

Wow, just finished listening to an interview with Industry Minister Jim Prentice on the CBC Search Engine podcast. Apparently Minister Prentice did stick around for his promised 10 whole minutes, but no longer, as he hung up on the host of the show rather than take any additional questions. During the interview Minister Prentice contradicted an awful lot of what's in the Bill, seeming to demonstrate either a lack of knowledge of what's in it, or a lack of respect for the intelligence of the listeners of the show. Or both. :-/ Give it a listen - the interview appears right at the beginning of the show. Then go read the Q&A with Intellectual Property expert Jeremy deBeer in last week's Globe & Mail. I need an antacid now.

This one's for Walt C. - Create PDFs from RSS feeds

As reported on Lifehacker, Feedbooks will create a nice PDF of an RSS feed. I found it a little convoluted once I signed up for an account, but figured out I needed to choose to create a newspaper, then click the RSS tab. I was then able to create a custom PDF with one of 9 different fonts, font sizes, and margins. Here's the PDF created for my feed: .

The PDF is quite nice, with a clickable Table of contents. Both a drawback and a nice feature is that each post is on its own page, so you'll waste some paper if there are lots of short posts. Doesn't appear to support images either, but at least Walt can print a nice copy of my Typepad blog, should he desire!.

If you don't want to sign up for an account you can still create a PDF, but won't be able to customize the font, etc. Not really a biggie. Neat tool.

Screencast.com v. 1.0

I'd forgotten that all this time Techsmith's screencast-hosting service, Screencast.com, has been a beta product. I just received the following email indicating that they're going official with version 1.0:

Say hello to Screencast.com 1.0!
Our hosting service is all grown up. And we're making it official by moving Screencast.com out of beta and into version 1.0. This means you get a totally redesigned, easy-to-use interface without losing any of your favorite features:

	Total Ownership Don't give up the rights to your intellectual property just because it lives on our servers. Anything you upload to Screencast.com still belongs to you.
	Original Quality No compression means that what you upload is exactly what your audience sees.
	So many ways to share...so many format options. Email your content, embed it in a blog, or give it a URL and link to it from anywhere you want.
	Decide who views your content. With public, private, hidden and authenticated options, you can share what you want and keep the rest just for yourself.

As a customer, you already know what Screencast.com is all about, but make sure you are not missing out on any of the possibilities by checking out our features tour. Prefer video? We've got one of those too! Watch it >>

Thank you for your continued support of Screencast.com. Many of these user interface improvements have been the result of your feedback. Let us know what else we can do to make Screencast.com work the best for you. We have a "send feedback" option right in Screencast.com, so please, use it!

Unfortunately this still isn't a free product, even for educators - pricing information can be found here. Oh, and they're now orange-themed instead of green. :-) Just popped in and the response of the servers seems quicker than before, but that could just be my imagination...

Canadian Library Association Disappointed with New Copyright Legislation

Press Release

(Ottawa, June 12, 2008) – Today, the Canadian Library Association (CLA) expressed disappointment with the government’s newly announced copyright legislation, Bill C-61.

Bill C-61 is a missed opportunity and demonstrates that the government did not consult adequately with the user community, and did not listen to the concerns of Canadians. Overall, the Bill is extremely complex and will need more detailed study, but there are many glaring problems. Fundamentally, the Bill circumvents user rights.

One example is the missed opportunity on perceptual disabilities, where the Bill allows users to circumvent digital rights management (DRM) software, but does not allow them to import the technology to do so.

Another example is desktop delivery of interlibrary loan. Bill C-61 ignores the fact that the 2004 CCH Supreme Court Judgment already allows Canadian libraries to do desktop delivery of interlibrary loan. The provisions in Bill C-61 require libraries to lock up interlibrary loan with DRM, something that most libraries would not have the resources to accomplish. This would force many libraries back to delivering interlibrary loan via paper copies.

There is also a clear problem with criminalizing the circumvention of DRM. For a teenager, the criminal risk involved in shoplifting a CD would be safer rather than circumventing DRM on a CD they purchased to put it on their IPod. “Bill C-61 attempts to provide balance, but misses the boat for ordinary Canadians and over 21 million library users,” stated Rob Tiessen, Chair of the CLA Copyright Committee.

You can read the full text of the bill here.

Michael Geist's initial impressions. Interesting reading in the comments...

Firefox 3 Coming Tuesday, June 17th

As noted at the Mozilla Developer Center, Firefox 3 will be officially released on Tuesday. They're hoping to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours - will you be helping? Here's a long list of what's new in this release.

Rex Libris - The Card Holder

Rex Libris
Originally uploaded by ppival

The other day as I was bent down changing my shoes I noticed that my business cards, held in a holder next to Rex, would probably fit under his leg. And Lo they did, and now I have a new, cooler, business card holder.

Canadian Copyright Amendment Bill coming tomorrow (Thursday)

Government of Canada to Table Bill to Amend the Copyright Act

OTTAWA, June 11, 2008 -- The Honourable Jim Prentice, Minister of Industry, and the Honourable Josée Verner, Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages, and Minister for La Francophonie, will deliver brief statements and answer media inquiries shortly after the tabling of a bill to amend the Copyright Act. Members of the media will also be able to attend a technical briefing and lock-up prior to the tabling of the bill to amend the Copyright Act.

Date: Thursday, June 12, 2008

Lock-up and technical briefing for media
Location:
Press Theatre
National Press Building
150 Wellington Street
Ottawa, Ontario

Time:
9:30 a.m. (media registration for lock-up and technical briefing)
9:45-10:40 a.m. (lock-up -- media only)
Ministerial statements
Time: 10:45 a.m.
Location:
Centre Block Foyer
Centre Block
Parliament Hill

A question and answer session with ministers will follow.

Once the media lock-up has begun, no one will be allowed to leave the room or contact his/her office until the embargo is lifted. Journalists will be required to sign an undertaking to respect the release arrangements.
Wireless communication devices such as cellular phones, BlackBerrys, personal digital assistants or any other removable wireless communication devices (including modems, air cards and wireless microphones) will not be allowed in the lock-up area.

I have no idea if that lock-up bit is standard (probably), but I guess there'll be no live info coming out.

Thanks for the tip, Rob.

Canadian Library Association Position Statement on Open Access for Canadian Libraries

My colleague Andrew Waller, co-convener (with Heather Morrison) of the CLA Open Access Task Force sent this out today: (from the CLA Website):

Whereas connecting users with the information they need is one of the library's most essential functions, and access to information is one of librarianship's most cherished values, therefore CLA recommends that Canadian libraries of all types strongly support and encourage open access.

CLA encourages Canadian libraries of all types to:

• support and encourage policies requiring open access to research supported by Canadian public funding, as defined above. If delay or embargo periods are permitted to accommodate publisher concerns, these should be considered temporary, to provide publishers with an opportunity to adjust, and a review period should be built in, with a view to decreasing or eliminating any delay or embargo period.
  
  
• raise awareness of library patrons and other key stakeholders about open access, both the concept and the many open access resources, through means appropriate to each library, such as education campaigns and promoting open access resources.
  
  
• support the development of open access in all of its varieties, including gold (OA publishing) and green (OA self-archiving). Libraries should consider providing economic and technical support for open access publishing, by supporting open access journals or by participating in the payment of article processing fees for open access. The latter could occur through redirection of funds that would otherwise support journal subscriptions, or through taking a leadership position in coordinating payments by other bodies, such as academic or government departments or funding agencies.
  
  
• support and encourage authors to retain their copyright, for example through the use of the CARL / SPARC Author's Addendum, or through the use of Creative Commons licensing.

Let's invite our International friends too!

Google's RSS-embedding tool

Here's a quick screencast I created to look at Google's (new?) tool that allows ordinary folks to embed RSS feeds on a website:

Pretty nifty!

Shrinking Books, Shrinking Fair Use

Peter Brantley has a really thought-provoking piece on his blog entitled Shrinking Books, Shrinking Fair Use, in which he wonders (via Scott Walker at UIUC) how Fair Use (and Fair Dealing) will work when content routinely becomes unbundled. The rule of thumb for a book, for instance, is that you can use 10% or a chapter under Fair Use. But what if there IS no "book"? What if the content is sold as a single paper? Can you only use 10% of that?

I almost responded that no, it'd be like in a journal, where you can use one of the articles no problem, but again, what if there was no journal issue in which the article was originally published? Good questions, and surprisingly, nobody chiming in on the comments...

Problem viewing MS Word through Firefox in OSX

Firefox and Word in OSX
Originally uploaded by ppival

There appears to be some sort of glitch when trying to view MS Word documents (Word 2008 12.1.0) via Firefox (2.0.0.14) on OSX.5.2 and 5.3. If you simply click a link to a Word document and tell Firefox to have Word open it, Word will open and show a blank page, but not the document. If you click and instruct Firefox to save the file, and then try to open it, same thing. Only way I've found is to RIGHT click on the file link, choose Save Link As... and then use Finder to browse to the save location and then click the file name to have Word open the file.

This doesn't happen in Safari, but it does seem to happen with Apple Mail, and in Thunderbird. I found several posts on the Interweb where people were reporting the same frustration, but it doesn't seem to be universal. Weird. Someone suggested it may get fixed in FF3 later this month (I'm not installing until it's a final). Maybe a plugin? I have too many extensions installed to troubleshoot that way.

So there's my workaround if you happen to be having the same problem. I'd be curious to know if you have the same setup but *aren't* having the problem...

E-Books in Research Libraries: Issues of Access and Use

"There is a danger that research libraries are adding e-books to their collections using agreements that significantly reduce users’ rights. There is some urgency to improve this situation before it becomes a de facto standard. The Task Group on E-Books makes two recommendations to the CARL Copyright Committee: to create or endorse a statement of principles for licensing e-books, and to create a model license for Canadian research libraries."

So concludes the Copyright Committee Task Group on E-Books of CARL (Canadian Association of Research Libraries) in a recently-released report titled, E-Books in Research Libraries: Issues of Access and Use (MS Word - 16 pages including bibliography). Since it's written by the Copyright Committee it does focus on issues of Fair Dealing, DRM, licensing and jurisdictional differences between Canada and the US. The literature review will prove useful to folks regardless of country though, as will the points made in the paper. It's a good document, give it a read.

Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication

From TL Infobits, news of a draft report from UC Berkeley called Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An In-depth Study of Faculty Needs and Ways of Meeting Them. (This is almost exactly the topic we asked candidates for a recent position here at the U of C to address!)

Some of the questions that the study seeks to answer include:

-- "What will scholars want to do in their research and with their research results, and what new forms of communication do or do not support those desires?"

-- "How will scholars want to disseminate and receive input on their work at various lifecycle stages?"

-- "How do institutions and other stakeholders support these faculty needs, if at all?"

There's a link to the PDF report at http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=300 - it's only 12 pages long - I'm printing it now.