Maximum Entropy: On Resolving one of the Greater Mysteries in Our Information Universe

July 8, 2011 Leave a Comment

So where is the CD-ROM for this Springer ebook title - Entropy and energy?

If you follow the link to SpringerLink  (or my MyiLibrary version) to the actual ebook you won’t find it there (or really any clear indication from the contents view that anything is missing (you’d need to get some indication or reference to that in the text and then you’d still need to ask the right people to connect with the material).

If you go to  http://extras.springer.com/2005/978-3-540-24281-9  – voila! Now our Springer rep had to point me to that site when I inquired about the missing CD-ROM material and how that could be accessed. She suggested that we could just create a link in the note field of our bibliographic record for now until they can do better in the future…a good deal of needless energy to expend on our end, I’d say (and still somewhat confusing for the user if they don’t see the note in the record).

So for those with Springer ebooks, you should look to http://extras.springer.com/ with the ISBN for the book if you need to find a CD-ROM or other ‘extra’ material to go with your Springer book in ebook format. This is at least until Springer integrates/articulates the extra material with the ebook (sometime in the future).

You’d think in a more digital universe it’d be easier to bring all electronic material together (after all, it seems like it is far more complicated to arrange the electronic data on a physical medium and then bring one physical medium (the CD) together with another physical medium (the book).

Hopefully the coincidence of humour in using this title (Entropy and Energy) is not lost here as it seems rather arbitrary (or perhaps not) for our electronic information universe to be arranged (or disarranged) so. It was one thing for there to be incongruity with physical and electronic mediums, but I’m sure we can all do better in a digital information universe than this and have everyone spend a good deal less energy in trying to bring it all together.

Don’t get me wrong with this post that this is just an issue with Springer. Springer has shown it is a progressive publisher, especially in terms of publishing one of the largest STM DRM-free ebook collections (see Springer Launches DRM-free E-book Repository) and I certainly enjoyed having someone from Springer speak on the ebook panel I moderated at the 2008 SLA/MLA PrariePartnerships Conference to raise awareness and set expectations very high in what we could expect for ebooks. However, I don’t think we are doing ourselves any favours by not integrating our systems and simplifying our interfaces. We need to start pulling this all together and start by doing it in the right places.

Filed under eBooks, Scholarly Communication, Scholarly Publishing, User Experience

Open Access and Author Fees

September 3, 2008 Leave a Comment

As some journals move from their subscription or pay-per-view model to the “gold” path of the Open Access movement, many have required a submission fee from authors to have an accepted article appear.  While some grants allow for actual grant funds to be used to cover these charges, not all authors have access to such funds.  Some universities, usually via the library, are paying submission fees for the authors from their institutions. In Canada, the first institution to set up such a program is the University of Calgary. The University of Calgary announced that their Open Access Authors Fund will cover submission fees for accepted articles that are slated to appear in fully open access journals and in “hybrid” open access journals that offer institutional subscription rebates based on the take up of their open access option. The University of Calgary is the sixth institution worldwide to create a submission fee support program.

It’s good to see some libraries are prepared to respond to these new publishing models that have been created with open access.  Open access, like open source software, doesn’t mean that there are no longer costs involved or that all costs have been completely eliminated.  Nothing is entirely free, but the model does create certain freedoms for the end user or consumer of information.  As many scholars and publishers know, there are still many very real costs involved in producing a journal — even an online journal.

Still, as we move to these new publishing models, where do such things as memberships fit in where a journal or publisher offers a discount to an institution who purchase a block of memberships ahead of time? BioMedCentral uses “prepay membership” and “postpay membership”.  Many new questions arise as these begin to seem a good deal like traditional subscriptions to journals, especially when libraries are involved with payments.  While many authors in an institution may often end up publishing in the same non-open access journal, is this likely to create more of a monoculture or bias towards publishing in certain journals with prepay membership arrangements?  While publishers and journal aggregators have been somewhat obligated to provide libraries with usage statistics with subscription journals, will such statistics be provided or even meaningful to individual libraries?  The question becomes now what  – there are still costs and we have shifted the emphasis of certain costs, but have gained any overall ground on this very slippery slope?

Filed under Open Access, Scholarly Communication, Scholarly Publishing Tagged with , , , ,

Supporting OCA (Open Content Alliance)

June 30, 2008 Leave a Comment

Brewster Kahle is one of the big people behind the Open Content Alliance (OCA – “Building a digital archive of global content for universal access).  The idea with this was initiative was to scan public domain books and have that content universally accessible by all.  Brewster is known for the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, but this blog is a good source for Open Access news, especially as it relates to happenings in the United States.

In a recent This Week in Tech (TWIT 144) podcast, Brewster (as a special guest) discusses some of the issues with relying on Google initiatives to digitize books (like Google wanting to lock down public domain so content that contributed to scanning is available only through the Google search engine).  Also, the fact that archive.org is actually the host of these digitized books and a better situated host for many reasons.  Many of the companies like HP, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google participated in OCA — Yahoo! funded some early scanning initiatives, Microsoft funded scanning for 300,000 books — but each company had its own motives for participating and Brewster comments that its quite Orwellian to rely on companies to host the public domain of knowledge.  Now fundind has ended from Microsoft and the likes and OCA will need to look MacArthur Foundation and Sloan Foundation and other similar public funding opportunities, but the project has moved from about thirteen initial libraries scanning to more than 80 libraries participating in OCA.

For digitized books, see the Internet Archive – Text Archive and The Open Library.

The big discussion right now is related to the “Orphan works” legislation now in the U.S. Congress. It could be really good or really bad depending on how the law is implemented.  Something to watch over the next few months.

Filed under Open Access, Scholarly Publishing, Trends Tagged with , ,

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