Newsline March 2019

Statement on Flawed Theory of Controlled Digital Lending

Press Release, Association of American Publishers (AAP), Feb 4, 2019

In late September 2018, there appeared a white paper on LawArXiv, pertaining to the controlled digital lending (CDL) of library books. Authored by David Hansen of Duke University and Kyle Courtney of Harvard, the white paper put forward a legal basis for electronic loans of licensed ebook content. This statement from AAP opposing CDL notes, "the White Paper emerged after copyright owners repeatedly questioned the Internet Archive about its legal basis for making and distributing unauthorized copies of copyrighted books, including by offering copies of both new and backlist titles for download under an 'Open Library" project.' AAP opposes the practice of CDL on the basis that it "denigrates the incentives that copyright law provides to authors and publishers to document, write, invest in, and disseminate literary works for the benefit of the public ecosystem." Specifically AAP deems it "highly unlikely under current law that CDL-sanctioned practices would be shielded by either the first sale doctrine under 17 U.S.C. §109(a) or the fair use doctrine under §107, because such practices involve making and transmitting new digital copies of print books."

Microsoft Acquires DataSense Management from BrightBytes to step up its education play in Azure

Ingrid Lunden, TechCrunch, Feb 4, 2019

Microsoft announced its acquisition of DataSense, a data management platform that can be used to collect, integrate, and report information from across a range of online education applications and services. The news story notes that "education has become a very big data business, but one with a huge amount of legacy infrastructure and fragmentation."  Microsoft's Azure a suite of cloud-based services and K-12 education has been one of the key targets for those services. 

Amazon Alexa and the Search for the One Perfect Answer

James Vladhs, Wired Magazine, Feb 18, 2019

What are the long-term implications if users turn to a voice-driven interface to obtain answers? Vladhs' article notes, "For now, there is no paid discovery for voice search. But when it inevitably arrives, the internet's ad economy will be turned upside down. Because voice oracles dispense answers one at a time, they offer less real estate for advertisers."  The result is that such a shift increases competition between well-established, web-based sites, such as ESPN, in satisfying casual "look-up" information requirements  and smaller, less-well known sites. It also raises concern about single-response answers to questions requiring more nuance, a serious issue for information professionals trying to train good habits in information literacy. The article closes with the following quote, "If online oracles one day get good enough to make a place like the Cambridge University Library obsolete, he imagines that he would feel nostalgic. But only up to a certain point. "I might miss it,' Tunstall-­Pedoe says, 'but I'm not sure that I would go back there if I didn't need to.'

Digitization and the Demand for Physical Works: Evidence from the Google Books Project

Nagaraj, Abhishek and Reimers, Imke, (February 21, 2019). Available at SSRN

The research captured here is based on the data and experiences of Harvard University in the use of physical book content held in its collection versus the use of the same book content following digitization by Google for its Books project. The preprint's abstract notes "digitization hurt loans within Harvard but increased sales of physical editions by about 35%, especially for less popular works. Rather than cannibalizing demand, digitization might benefit copyright holders through increased discovery of less popular works." The researchers are respectively from from UC-Berkeley - Haas and Northeastern Universities. 

Improving the Discoverability and Web Impact of Open Repositories: Techniques and Evaluation

George Macgregor, Code4Lib Journal, Issue 43, Feb 14, 2019

The author, the Institutional Repository Manager at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, "experimented with a suite of repository adjustments and improvements performed on an EPrints powered repository. These adjustments were designed to support improved repository web visibility and user engagement thereby improving usage and should be considered within the wider context of the COAR Next Generation Repositories agenda."  Published in the Code4Lib Journal, his research "provides persuasive evidence that specific enhancements to technical aspects of a repository can result in significant improvements to repository visibility, resulting in a greater web impact and consequent increases in content usage. COUNTER usage grew by 33% and traffic to Strathprints from Google and Google Scholar was found to increase by 63% and 99% respectively."

The Joy of Standards

Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, New York Times, Feb 16, 2019

This opinion piece focuses largely on the importance of standards as being foundational to a technological society and the resulting influence wielded by those creating those standards. Authors Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel acknowledge the challenges of the consensus-driven approach in developing standards but cite the benefits of collaborative efforts driven by both public and private sectors. Closing paragraphs quote a motto "Standardization is dynamic, not static; it means not to stand still, but to move forward together." Note: NISO is a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which is heavily referenced in the NYTimes piece. 

Moving Metadata from How to Why

Thad McIlroy, Publishers Weekly, Feb 15, 2019

McIlroy draws attention to a change for publishers participating in the Book Industry Study Group (BISG). Early in 2018, the BISG Board approved a new charter for its Metadata Committee, "changing the focus toward exploring the value of metadata in book discovery and marketing: identifying ways to better manage metadata across the supply chain; helping the industry provide timely, high-quality metadata; and marketing applications for book metadata." McIlroy quotes the rationale provided from the BISG website, "The new charter moves the focus of the metadata committee from 'how' metadata works to 'why' it is important: discovery, marketing, and sales." 

The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub: How does a new generation of researchers perceive Sci-Hub?

David Nicholas, LSE Impact Blog, Feb 19, 2019

David Nicholas, a director of CIBER Research Ltd, blogs here about early career researchers (ECRs) and their willingness to adopt Sci-Hub, the controversial access point to the scientific literature.He notes the particular embrace of Sci-Hub by the French ECRs in his study. Their perception is that it is benign, "a way of providing open access to the scientific literature: part and parcel of the OA movement, which is to be supported by whatever means necessary"and somewhat akin to Robin Hood. One key quote is this: "Sci-Hub...seems to have a greater potential for disrupting the current order of things and poses a significant threat to publishers and librarians, who cling to the mistaken belief that the key to Sci-Hub's success is its alleged seamlessness (a single sign-on), which if they can replicate will go away." 

The Plan S footprint: Implications for the Scholarly Publishing Landscape,

Nandita Quaderi, James Hardcastle, Christos Petrou, Martin Szomszor; Global Research Reports, ISI, February 2019

From the report: "Plan S funded outputs make up less than 7% of global papers but they are well cited, published in high impact journals and, often, in journals from major publishing houses. They will influence the publishing landscape. Some 90,000 Plan S papers published as part of Hybrid or Subscription journals will need to be 'rehoused' if the journals do not change to fully OA. There are few Hybrid journals with a medium to high percentage of OA that might readily change. This implies challenging business decisions."

"Some leading multidisciplinary journals contain as much as one-third Plan S content but are not Plan S compliant. Learned society journals have a central communication role in their research field but are not always OA. The relocation of content to OA titles would represent a 29% overall movement in the volume of well-cited papers to existing compliant venues, could be disruptive in some subjects, and suitable compliant venues are not always available."

With regard to resources, one of the final conclusions in the report reads, "The cost of publishing will shift, ex post, from the reader or their library, typically via a subscription charge, to an ex ante obligation on the author or their institutional proxy to pay via an APC. This would require a redirection of around €150 million. Meeting these costs will fall on research funders. It is not evident whether marginal resources are available to support all affected authors."

ISO 3901:2019 Information and documentation -- International Standard Recording Code (ISRC)

Technical Committee: ISO/TC 46/SC 9 Identification and description

"This document specifies the International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) for the unique identification of recordings. The ISRC is applicable to the identification of audio recordings and music video recordings whether they are in analogue or digital form. The ISRC is not applicable to the numbering of audio or audiovisual products or carriers. Neither is it applicable to the numbering of packages of audio recordings or music video recordings with other media items. The ISRC is applicable to music video recordings even if they have been assigned an International Standard Audiovisual Number (ISAN) in accordance with ISO 15706 (all parts), or a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) in accordance with ISO 26324, but it is not applicable to other forms of audiovisual recording."

ISO 8601-1:2019 Date and time -- Representations for information interchange -- Part 1: Basic rules

Technical Committee: ISO/TC 154 Processes, data elements and documents in commerce, industry and administration

"This document specifies representations of dates of the Gregorian calendar and times based on the 24-hour clock, as well as composite elements of them, as character strings for use in information interchange. It is also applicable for representing times and time shifts based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This document excludes the representation of date elements from non-Gregorian calendars or times not from the 24-hour clock. This document does not address character encoding of representations specified in this document."

ISO 8601-2:2019 Date and time -- Representations for information interchange -- Part 2: Extensions

Technical Committee: ISO/TC 154 Processes, data elements and documents in commerce, industry and administration

"This document specifies rules and code structures associated with the data constructs for RFID for item management. In particular, it defines the application family identifier (AFI), including the range of code values that are available to use for RFID for item management; defines the data format, including the range of code values that are available to use for RFID for item management; describes the Object Identifier structure used for RFID for item management; specifies the function of the Object Identifier for the Unique Item Identifier (UII); specifies the function of the Object Identifier for other item attendant data."

SO/IEC 15961-3:2019 Information technology -- Data protocol for radio frequency identification (RFID) for item management -- Part 3: RFID data constructs

Technical Committee:ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 31 Automatic identification and data capture techniques

"This document specifies rules and code structures associated with the data constructs for RFID for item management. In particular, it defines the application family identifier (AFI), including the range of code values that are available to use for RFID for item management; defines the data format, including the range of code values that are available to use for RFID for item management; describes the Object Identifier structure used for RFID for item management; specifies the function of the Object Identifier for the Unique Item Identifier (UII); specifies the function of the Object Identifier for other item attendant data."