Elsevier and the Streisand Effect

Nearly a year ago I wrote The Maginot Paywall about the rise of research into the peer-to-peer sharing of academic papers via mechanisms including Library Genesis, Sci-Hub and #icanhazpdf. Although these mechanisms had been in place for some time they hadn't received a lot of attention. Below the fold, a look at how and why this has recently changed.

National Hosting with LOCKSS Technology

For some years now the LOCKSS team has been working with countries to implement National Hosting of electronic resources, including subscription e-journals and e-books. JISC's SafeNet project in the UK is an example. Below the fold I look at the why, what and how of these systems.

Future of Research Libraries

Bryan Alexander reports on a talk by Xiaolin Zhang, the head of the National Science Library at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), on the future of research libraries.

Director Zhang began by surveying the digital landscape, emphasizing the ride of ebooks, digital journals, and machine reading. The CAS decided to embrace the digital-first approach, and canceled all print subscriptions for Chinese-language journals. Anything they don’t own they obtain through consortial relationships ...

This approach works well for a growing proportion of the CAS constituency, which Xiaolin referred to as “Generation Open” or “Generation Digital”. This group benefits from – indeed, expects – a transition from print to open access. For them, and for our presenter, “only ejournals are real journals. Only smartbooks are real books… Print-based communication is a mistake, based on historical practicality.” It’s not just consumers, but also funders who prefer open access.

Below the fold, some thoughts on Director Zhang's vision.

Talk at IIPC General Assembly

The International Internet Preservation Consortium's General Assembly brings together those involved in Web archiving from around the world. This year's was held at Stanford and the Internet Archive. I was asked to give a short talk outlining the LOCKSS Program, explaining how and why it differs from most Web archiving efforts, and how we plan to evolve it in the near future to align it more closely with the mainstream of Web archiving. Below the fold, an edited text with links to the sources.

Preserving Long-Form Digital Humanities

Carl Straumsheim at Inside Higher Ed reports on a sorely-needed new Mellon Foundation initiative supporting digital publishing in the humanities:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is aggressively funding efforts to support new forms of academic publishing, which researchers say could further legitimize digital scholarship.

The foundation in May sent university press directors a request for proposals to a new grant-making initiative for long-form digital publishing for the humanities. In the e-mail, the foundation noted the growing popularity of digital scholarship, which presented an “urgent and compelling” need for university presses to publish and make digital work available to readers.

Note in particular:

The foundation’s proposed solution is for groups of university presses to ... tackle any of the moving parts that task is comprised of, including “...(g) distribution; and (h) maintenance and preservation of digital content.”

Below the fold, some thoughts on this based on experience from the LOCKSS Program.

The Half-Empty Archive

Cliff Lynch invited me to give one of UC Berkeley iSchool's "Information Access Seminars" entitled The Half-Empty Archive. It was based on my brief introductory talk at ANADP II last November, an expanded version given as a staff talk at the British Library last January, and the discussions following both. An edited text with links to the sources is below the fold.

Cliff Lynch

Two quick plugs. The first for Mike Ashenfelder's profile of Cliff Lynch in the Library of Congress' Digital Preservation Pioneer series. Cliff has helped the LOCKSS Program in too many ways to count. Personally, I'm particularly grateful for his occasional invitations to speak to his class at UC Berkeley's School of Information. They have provided an essential spur to get me to pull my thoughts together in several important areas.

The second is Cliff's article on e-books for American Libraries recent e-book supplement. There is a lot to digest in it. I hope to return to some aspects in a later post, but his conclusion succinctly describes the threat to libraries:

If we have not come to reasonable terms about e-books both the access and preservation functions of our libraries will be gravely threatened, and as a society, we will face a profound public policy problem. It is in every-one's interest, I believe, to avoid this crisis.