Vatican, Oxford put ancient manuscripts online

Homer, Plato and Sophocles manuscripts among 1.5 million pages on the way

Access to the Gutenberg Bible and other rare, fragile ancient manuscripts has just gotten easier.

The Vatican Library and Oxford University's Bodleian Library put the first of 1.5 million pages of their precious manuscripts online Tuesday, bringing their collections to a global audience for the first time.

The two libraries in 2012 announced a four-year project to digitize some of the most important works in their collections of Hebrew manuscripts, Greek manuscripts and early printed books.

The 2 million pound ($3.3 million) project is being funded by the Polonsky Foundation, which aims to democratize access to information.

"We want everyone who can to see these manuscripts, these great works of humanity," Monsignor Cesare Pasini, the prefect of the Vatican Library, told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday inside the frescoed library. "And we want to conserve them."

Among the first works up on the site Tuesday, at http:/bav.bodleian.ox.ac.uk are the two-volume Gutenberg Bibles from each of the libraries, the first-ever books set on type-face in the mid-1400s by printer Johannes Gutenberg in Germany, heralding  the age of the printed book in the West.

The online collection also includes an illustrated 11th century Greek bible and a beautiful 15th-century German bible, hand-colored and illustrated by woodcuts.

Ancient Greek manuscripts by Plato, Homer and Sophocles are expected to go online soon.

The Vatican Library was founded in 1451 and is one of the most important research libraries in the world. It has 180,000 manuscripts, 1.6 million books and 150,000 prints, drawings and engravings. The Bodleian is the largest university library in Britain, with more than 11 million printed works.

Pasini said the Vatican was embarking on similar digitization projects with libraries in Azerbaijan and China, among others.

Source | http://www.cbc.ca

What the Open Access Button Means for the Future of Research and Publishing

The Open Access Button is designed to help researchers easily report when they hit a publisher paywall and are unable to access scholarly publications (because they lack a paid subscription to a particular journal or database or have not otherwise paid an access fee for the document). The button, an easy-to-use browser bookmarklet, searches for alternative access to the article, identifying open access versions of articles/research on the internet while mapping where obstacles are inhibiting research advances around the world. Researchers can complete an optional short form to add their experience to a map along with thousands of others located around the world. This visualization depicts the worldwide impact of paywalls on research, building a picture of where obstacles are placed in the way of research, inhibiting collaboration and possibly delaying innovations.

Launched on Nov. 18, 2013, at the Berlin 11 Student and Early Stage Researcher Satellite Conference of the Berlin 11 Open Access Conference, the Open Access Button “tracks how often readers are denied access to academic research, where in the world they were or their profession and why they were looking for that research,” aggregating the information in “one place, creating a real time, worldwide, interactive picture of the problem,” according to a blog post at the Public Library of Science. The button was developed in response to the frustrations of two medical students, David Carroll (Queens University Belfast) and Joseph McArthur (University College London), who repeatedly encountered difficulties in gaining access to academic research results they needed for their work.

Denial of access, which is largely invisible (hence, the map), has repercussions beyond each incident, slowing innovation, killing curiosity, and discouraging students from reading and reusing the research conducted by others. By tracking the impact of paywalls and helping users get access to the research they need by pointing them to OA repositories, Carroll and McArthur hope to improve the online experience of individuals and influence the field of academic research (and beyond) by shining a light on practices that inhibit progress: “Each time an individual hits a paywall is an isolated incident, this is unlikely to shake the ivory tower of academic publishing. But putting these moments together using the Open Access Button, we hope it will capture those individual moments of injustice and frustration and show them, on full view to the world. Only then, by making this problem impossible to ignore, will the button begin to make a difference.”

Carroll and McArthur hope that “[t]he use of the button will help more people to find research papers. But just as importantly, it will generate worldwide data on the extent of the paywall problem. By exposing the problem, the button should add to the push for change,” according to Stephen Curry. The music and film industry, as well as general publishers, have already experienced disruption by musicians, filmmakers, and authors taking control of their intellectual property through online businesses with direct contact with customers; open access repositories are taking root for academic researchers.

For students—who resent having to click more than once for access to a full-text article or inputting usernames or passwords in databases—linking to open access repositories is crucial. The upshot of hitting a paywall is ignored research, even when the article or document is precisely the item that could form the centerpiece of their term papers, supporting their theses on every level. However, as Bonnie Swoger noted in her Nov. 25 Scientific American blog, one of the goals of the Open Access Button is to “quickly and easily point users to freely available copies of the article online (via open access repositories such as PubMedCentral or the arxiv).” By not pointing users to institutional resources they may have access to, such as an academic library with access to JSTOR for older issues of Science or one that offers interlibrary loan services (recognizing that these cost money too), the Open Access Button stops short of the help it could offer researchers.

These paywalls go beyond students and academics. When doctors not affiliated with universities don’t get access to the latest treatments, patients suffer. Similarly, the work of lawyers, engineers, accountants, farmers, and others can be less than optimal when professionals have hoops to jump through to obtain access to quality research, including paywalls. With no university to turn to, fees for access to these articles by individuals can reach $40, in part because the expensive subscription-based journals are now bundled in databases whose vendors are also shifting strategies from purchase to licensing, adding costs for access when the print journal is not subscribed to along with the database. Individual publications may be embargoed for a time so that subscribers have access, but others do not. (See Marydee Ojala’s Nov. 21, 2013, NewsBreak concerning the Harvard Business Review.)

The Open Access Button tagline says it all: “Tearing down barriers to accessing research. one click at a time.” Follow the project on Twitter: @OA_Button and #oabuttonlaunch. The code behind the bookmarklet can be found at GitHub.

Source | https://www.openaccessbutton.org/

Library as Publisher: Your Feedback Needed

Submitted by Beverly Goldberg on Fri, 05/11/2012 - 09:31

As part of the work of ALA’s Digital Content and Libraries Working Group of ALA (which is tackling our many ebook-related issues), we are seeking some focused feedback before the 2012 ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim next month. If you are experimenting with the creation, publication, and preservation of digital content, we need to hear from you by June 1. Please read on for details, then respond to dcwg-input@ala.org.
Background
At this moment in our profession, an increasing number of libraries are engaged in content creation. This may represent an opportunity, or shift in our profession, moving us from the end of a publishing and distribution chain to somewhere closer to the source. The issue we’re investigating here is not generally library relations with existing publishers, but activities where the library takes a lead or key partnership role in getting the content into digital format and delivering it over the long term. That takes us into archiving and preservation. In addition to the processes of gathering, preparing, and posting such content, we are also grappling with the challenges of copyright, fair use, and licensing in the digital environment.
What we’re trying to find out
We’re NOT looking for a comprehensive list of every digitization effort in libraries. We ARE looking for experiments that can help ALA recommend policies, address issues, or promote information exchange about this emerging area.
What we want you to do
By June 1, 2012, email dcwg-input@ala.org:

• A brief description of your institution’s efforts to create digital content. For instance, this might include Open Access scholarship, the co-creation of ePub files featuring local authors, or the unique gathering of local history photographs and/or oral histories.
• Some key observations of important issues, roadblocks, and discoveries. For instance, what group of authors or publishers have you worked with directly? Which approaches do you believe to be important to your institution or our profession? At what point has your project moved from your own agency to a larger consortial environment, and why?
• Where do you think ALA could make a difference? Have your issues been legal (dealing with copyright, for instance), technical (defining file type standards), policy (guiding documents), political within your institution or region, and/or financial (you just need more money)? Or have you found new concerns worth noting?
• A contact email and phone if we have questions.

Our subgroup will then review the responses, meet to discuss them at the 2012 ALA Annual Conference, then select a few key studies and issues for further examination. It is our plan to share our findings and recommendations broadly, concluding our work by the 2013 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle.
Thank you for your assistance in this important investigation.
Jamie LaRue, chair
Digital Content Working Group #2
and director, Douglas County (Colo.) Libraries
jlarue@jlarue.com

Role of Libraries in Online Scholarly Communication

Mohamed Musthafa. K

Introducing the electronic publishing and briefly describes the growth and development of scholarly electronic publishing around the world. Further, defining the open access publishing, asserts that it is the best solution for libraries to overcome the ‘serial crisis’. Author argues that libraries are the most suitable place for co-ordinating and undertaking the scholarly publishing activities in the academic institutions like universities in an electronic environment. The paper present some examples of best practices of library based electronic publishing at various universities at different parts of the world.

Key words: E-Publishing, Scholarly Communication, Open Access Publishing, Academies

Library Based E-Publishing.

E-Publishing in Academia: Opportunities and Challenges for Library Professionals

 Mohamed Musthafa. K

& 

Dr. Naushad Ali. PM

Abstract

Electronic publishing is an opportunity for the libraries to undertake the responsibility of publishing the intellectual output of any academic institution. Library and information centers as the central point of intellectual activities in the academic environment and the librarians have experience of working with people from different subject areas in order to support their activities and to deliver services to them, and they also have professional skills associated with the management and dissemination of information, they are the most suitable professionals to play the role of publisher in the academic environment. This paper discusses the possibilities and opportunities of electronic publishing in this regard. At the same time there are challenges like publishing skills, technology skills, experience, copyright and preservation issues in electronic publishing.  This paper discusses some of the important issues which should be addressed when the librarians start to play the role of e-publisher.   A list of popular open sources e-publishing models which are downloadable at free of cost has also been given.

Keywords: e-Publishing, Libraries, Academia, e-Publishing models

MedKnow publications

A number of journals from India are published by the learned societies or their editors without the involvement of commercial publishers. MedKnow publications is a for-profit open access journal publisher providing services to more than 35 journals. Sahoo (2006) provide the features of MedKnow publications which maintains an independent website for each of its journals which provide full text of articles without any access restriction. The full text is available in HTML and PDF. The web site use open URL standard, making linking easier and Dublin Core Metadata. Websites provide interactive features such as ability to add comments on published articles, usage statistics and translation into eight foreign languages. Links are given to Pubmed and databases such as DSMZ and Species 2000. MedKnow has put in place an online manuscript submission and peer review system through which over 10,000 manuscripts have been processed by 2006. After becoming online the visibility and reach of the journals has increased greatly. The projected impact factor of JPGM has increased from 0.25 in the year 2000 to 0.99 in 2005 and a continuous growth has been seen in manuscript submission an article download also.   

Sahu, DK (2006). Journal publishing in the developing world: MedKnow publications as a model. INASP Newsletter, Spring, pp 7-8.

Open access to scientific publications

Bjork (2004) share the experience of last ten years in open access scholarly communication. Despite widespread agreement among academies that OA would be the optimal distribution mode for publicly financed research results; such channels still constitute only a marginal phenomenon in global scholarly communication system. There are many barriers which hindering a rapid proliferation of open access. The discussion is structured according to the main OA channels; peer reviewed journals for primary publishing, subject-specific and institutional repositories for secondary parallel publishing. It also discusses the types of barriers, which can be classified as consisting of the legal framework, the information technology infrastructure, business models, indexing services and standards, the academic reward system, marketing and critical mass.

Bjork, BC (2004). Open access to scientific publications- an analysis of the barriers to change?. Information Research, 9 (2). Retrieved on April 4, 2010 from http://inforamationr.net/ir/9-2/paper170.html.