• The revised Google Book Settlement gained preliminary court approval. The deadline for comments is January 28, 2010, with the final fairness hearing scheduled for February 18.
• A grant from the National Science Foundation will help enhance arXiv.
• The Saarland University and State Library is conducting a questionnaire on "the desirability of various features which can be implemented in repository systems".
• HathiTrust launched its search tool for Google-digitized books.
• The British Library added the 500,000th item to its digital library -- but don't expect to see it for free.
• Cameron Neylon takes a closer look at Nature Communications, the announced Nature-branded hybrid OA journal.
• LinuxInsider looks at open source science.
• T. Scott Plutchak says that everybody likes the idea of OA, but not everybody is sure that mandates for publicly-funded research are "the best way to get there".
• Wikimedia picks up plaudits: the Webby Awards named Wikipedia one of the ten most influential projects of the decade, and the Huffington Post named Wikimedia's executive director Sue Gardner the year's top "game changer" in media.

Oberlin College Faculty Unanimously Endorses Open Access, press release, November 20, 2009.

The Oberlin College General Faculty unanimously endorsed on November 18 a resolution to make their scholarly articles openly accessible on the Internet. As a result of the measure, the rich scholarly output of the Oberlin faculty will become available to a much broader national and international audience. The Oberlin resolution is similar to policies passed at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Kansas, and Trinity University. ...

Under the new policy, Oberlin faculty and professional staff will make their peer-reviewed, scholarly articles openly accessible in a digital archive managed by the Oberlin College Library as part of the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons. Oberlin authors may opt out of the policy for a specific article if they are not in a position to sign journal publishing agreements that are compatible with the policy, or for other reasons. The resolution also creates an institutional license that gives Oberlin College the legal right to make the articles accessible on the Internet through the digital archive. The resolution further encourages, but does not require, authors to submit publications other than peer-reviewed articles in the same manner. ...

Adopted at the recommendation of the General Faculty Library Committee, the policy calls for the committee, in consultation with a faculty council, to establish procedures for carrying out the policy and to monitor its implementation. Policy implementation will be coordinated by a scholarly communications officer, a member of the library staff designated by the director of libraries. ...

The Oberlin College Student Senate recently endorsed the national “Student Statement on the Right to Research,” which expresses a similar commitment to making scholarly research information openly accessible.

• Sharing data, editorial, Nature Cell Biology, November 2009 (not OA, at least so far).
• Johan Weigelt, The case for open-access chemical biology, EMBO Reports, November 2009 (not OA, at least so far).
• Christina Chandras, et al., Models for financial sustainability of biological databases and resources, Database, October 23, 2009.
• Thinh Nguyen, Remembering Babel: Open Data Sharing & Integration, Science Commons, November 19, 2009.
• Shadi S. Saleh, et al., The case for developing publicly-accessible datasets for health services research in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, BMC Health Services Research, October 29, 2009.
• Group on Earth Observations Meets in Washington to Strengthen Access to Data and Information on Biodiversity, Forest Carbon and Other Global Issues, press release, November 17, 2009.
• University of California, DataONE to deal with data deluge, press release, November 18, 2009.
• Vishwas S. Chavan and Peter Ingwersen, Towards a data publishing framework for primary biodiversity data: challenges and potentials for the biodiversity informatics community, BMC Bioinformatics, November 10, 2009.
  • Also see: Dorothea Salo, The basic carrot: usage statistics, The Book of Trogool, November 16, 2009 .
• Vincent S. Smith, et al., Scratchpads: a data-publishing framework to build, share and manage information on the diversity of life, BMC Bioinformatics, November 10, 2009.

Primary Research Group has published The Survey of Higher Education Faculty: Use of Digital Repositories and Views on Open Access, press release, November 2009.

The Survey of Higher Education Faculty: Use of Digital Repositories and Views on Open Access (ISBN 1-57440-137-8) presents data on how higher education faculty in the United States and Canada view the growing digital repository/open access movement. The report helps to answer questions such as: Who cooperates with requests from librarians and who does not? Who gives their articles to repositories? Who among faculty sympathizes with the aims of open access? How many scholars have had a publication fee paid for them by their library or academic department?

The report presents the results of a survey of more than 550 higher education faculty in the United States and Canada. Data is presented in the aggregate and for 12 criteria including academic field, size of college, type of college, academic title and other factors.

Just a few of the report's many findings are that:

• 13% of the faculty in the sample had ever used a college's institutional digital repository for scholarly research purposes.
• Use was greatest by faculty at specialized colleges, of whom 40% had used a digital repository at some time for research purposes
• About 28% said that they sympathize and try to help out by providing open access to their research materials as much as they possibly can.
• Although the tenured are less likely than the untenured to have heard of digital repositories, they are roughly twice as likely to have actually contributed an article to one of them.
• 74.62% of the faculty of the sample understood the meaning of the term 'open access'. Individuals on the left wing of the political spectrum were more likely than those on the right wing to understand this term.
• Older faculty were more likely than younger faculty to be mystified by open access and digital repositories. Almost 43% of faculty between the ages of 50 and 59 did not know what digital repositories or open access really were. ...

US District Court Judge Denny Chin has granted preliminary approval of the amended Google Book Search Settlement.

Here's the order.

Read more about it at "Judge Gives Preliminary Approval to Google Deal, Sets Feb. 18 for Final Hearing" and "Judge Sets February Hearing for New Google Books Deal."

Related Posts

1. Google Book Search Settlement Amended
2. Google Books Settlement Status Conference Reports
3. Google Book Settlement Fairness Hearing Postponed
4. Publishers Weekly Surveys on the Google Book Search Settlement
5. “The Google Book Search Settlement: A New Orphan-Works Monopoly?”

Benjamin J. Keele has self-archived "Examining Law Journal Publication Agreements for Copyright Transfers and Self-Archiving Rights" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

This study examines 78 law journal publication agreements and finds that a minority of journals ask authors to transfer copyright. Most journals also permit author to self-archive articles with some conditions. The study recommends journals make their agreements publicly available and use licenses instead of copyright transfers.

Related Posts

1. "Shrinking the Commons: Termination of Copyright Licenses and Transfers for the Benefit of the Public"
2. University of Washington Faculty Senate Passes Resolution Concerning Scholarly Publishing Alternatives and Authors’ Rights
3. “Self-Archiving Journal Articles: A Case Study of Faculty Practice and Missed Opportunity”
4. New Report Says Less Than 50% of Publishers Permit Self-Archiving in Disciplinary Archives
5. SHERPA's RoMEO Service Tops 500 Publisher Self-Archiving Policies

The Research and Enterprise Office of the University of Essex is recruiting an Institutional Repository Manager.

Here's an excerpt from the ad (Ref# SS948):

The postholder will be accountable for delivering an institutional repository (IR) for the University’s research outputs, to schedule and on budget, and for managing the IR once implemented. This will involve working closely with other members of the University, both in academic departments/schools and in professional services, to identify a suitable system, to implement it, and to maintain it in the future so as to provide a quality service for those within and outside the University.

Related Posts

1. Manager, GALILEO Knowledge Repository at Georgia Tech
2. Institutional Repository Manager and Institutional Repository Administrator at University of the Arts London
3. Office of Scholarly Communication Program Manager at Harvard
4. Digital Library Jobs: Project Manager for the Integrated Workflow for Institutional Repository Enhancement Project
5. Digital Library Jobs: Institutional Repository and Digital Collections Librarian at Missouri University of Science and Technology

The Yale University Library is recruiting a Systems Programmer 2.

Here's an excerpt from the ad (STARS# 8624BR):

Purpose In a dynamic 24×7x365 production data center environment, working independently and collaboratively as a senior member of an interdepartmental team, provides Unix and Windows system administration, storage and backup administration, and application administration for Yale University Library, consortia, and development partner’s servers and web services. Plays a leadership role in the acquisition and deployment of new hardware.

Related Posts

1. Head of Library Systems at Johns Hopkins
2. Library Systems Department Head at West Virginia University Libraries
3. Programmer Analyst 2 at Yale
4. ILS and Discovery Systems Specialist at New York University
5. Library IT Jobs: Director of Information Technology at Rutgers

OCLC has released CONTENTdm version 5.2.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

With the new release, the CONTENTdm Project Client now supports auto updates, enabling users to get updates as quickly as they are available. It automatically checks for software updates in the background, so work is not interrupted. If updates are available, they are downloaded but not installed until the organization is ready.

To better support text-based collections, PDF print quality can now be specified in the Project Client, enabling users to select a quality level when generating optional print versions of their compound objects. For users with large, full-text collections, several enhancements improve performance and reduce indexing times. Other enhancements include the addition of a new thesaurus, Canadian Subject Headings (CSH), and configuration options to filter hits in Usage Reports.

Related Posts

1. CONTENTdm Image Viewer: dmMonocle 1.0 Released
2. OCLC Releases WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway
3. Open Source Biological Specimen Database System for Museums: Specify 6 Released
4. Conference Notes on “Using CONTENTdm in a Consortium”
5. Digital Collection/Repository Software: OCLC Releases CONTENTdm 5

Herbert Van de Sompel, Michael L. Nelson, Robert Sanderson, Lyudmila L. Balakireva, Scott Ainsworth, and Harihar Shankar have self-archived "Memento: Time Travel for the Web" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

The Web is ephemeral. Many resources have representations that change over time, and many of those representations are lost forever. A lucky few manage to reappear as archived resources that carry their own URIs. For example, some content management systems maintain version pages that reflect a frozen prior state of their changing resources. Archives recurrently crawl the web to obtain the actual representation of resources, and subsequently make those available via special-purpose archived resources. In both cases, the archival copies have URIs that are protocol-wise disconnected from the URI of the resource of which they represent a prior state. Indeed, the lack of temporal capabilities in the most common Web protocol, HTTP, prevents getting to an archived resource on the basis of the URI of its original. This turns accessing archived resources into a significant discovery challenge for both human and software agents, which typically involves following a multitude of links from the original to the archival resource, or of searching archives for the original URI. This paper proposes the protocol-based Memento solution to address this problem, and describes a proof-of-concept experiment that includes major servers of archival content, including Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. The Memento solution is based on existing HTTP capabilities applied in a novel way to add the temporal dimension. The result is a framework in which archived resources can seamlessly be reached via the URI of their original: protocol-based time travel for the Web.

Read more about it at "Time-Travelling Browsers Navigate the Web's Past" and the Memento project website.

Related Posts

1. SHERPA DP2: Developing Services for Archiving and Preservation in a Distributed Environment—Final Report
2. California Digital Library's Web Archiving Service
3. Digital Preservation: Two-Year Pilot Project Evaluation
4. Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Draft for Review
5. Digital Curation Centre Releases "Archiving Web Resources"

OA journal announcements, launches, and conversions spotted in the past week or so:

• New OA backfiles:
  • Jamaica Journal (1967-2007), via the the Digital Library of the Caribbean (announcement)
  • Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society (1958-1968), via BiblicalStudies.org.uk (announcement)
  • Vox Evangelica (1962-1997), via BiblicalStudies.org.uk (announcement)
  • Reformation & Revival (1992-2005), via BiblicalStudies.org.uk (announcement)
  • Theological Students Fellowship Bulletin (1951-1975), via BiblicalStudies.org.uk (announcement)
• Converted to delayed OA:
  • L’Orientation scolaire et professionnelle (3 year delay), via Revues.org (announcement)
• New on PubMedCentral:
  • Clinics in Orthopedic Surgery (immediate OA)
  • Korean Journal of Physiology & Pharmacology (immediate OA)
  • Advances in Bioinformatics (immediate OA) (announcement)
  • Current Cardiology Reviews (12 month embargo) (announcement)

Cornelius Puschmann, Why Open Access means Open Research: lessons from the German Open Access petition, Cornelius Puschmann’s Blog, November 18, 2009.

... A few weeks ago, science blogger Lars Fischer started an e-petition on the website of the Bundestag (German parliament) calling for Open Access to publications based on research that is publicly funded. To date, the petition has been signed by over 11,000 people, making it the most-endorsed open petition currently in the system (the vote ends on November 22nd has apparently been extended to December 22nd). ...

The striking thing about the petition is not that it gives precise policy recommendations (it doesn’t) or contains meticulous explanations of what Open Access is (it doesn’t), but that is has attracted popular support extending well beyond the “usual suspects” from the OA scene.

How did that happen?

While I can’t provide absolute proof, I think the short answer is the Social Web. Fisher’s petition was scooped up by people who ordinarily have little to do with the Open Access community, which consists mostly of librarians and academics, but who are very much invested into the idea of Openness in other contexts: open (government) data, no censorship of the Internet, digital privacy rights etc. There is a budding political movement in Germany and elsewhere and the petition was interpreted as congruent with the goals of this movement and therefore spread with according speed. It was featured on Netzpolitik.org, which is frequently ranked as Germany’s most popular blog, and one prolific supporter is social media personality Sascha Lobo, who placed a banner on his website calling for support of the petition. ...

Lars makes this point in the interview with Richard Poynder:

As far as I see it, Open Access has always been treated — even by its supporters — as a niche topic for experts. But that is wrong. It is an issue that in the long run concerns everyone, and many people understand that.

My opinion (and not just mine) is that Open Access should be treated as the broad societal issue it really is, not just as a nifty way for libraries to save money or researchers to communicate more effectively. ...

If you get the Internet, Open Access is a no-brainer – in a sense the success of the petition has already proven that point. Social media appeals to people who use the Net as their primary source of information and who accordingly believe that information should be free. In other words, they believe in Open Access, even without knowing Peter Suber or having read the Berlin Declaration.

Maybe we should start talking to these people.

Access denied?, editorial, Nature, November 19, 2009.

Every weekday, thousands of researchers around the world access the Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR), which contains the most reliable and up-to-date genomic information available on the most widely used model organism in the plant kingdom. But now, to those users' horror, TAIR faces collapse: the US National Science Foundation (NSF) is phasing out funding after 10 years as the data resource's sole supporter.

TAIR's plight is emblematic of a broader crisis facing many of the world's biological databases and repositories. Research funding agencies recognize that such infrastructures are crucial to the ongoing conduct of science, yet few are willing to finance them indefinitely. ...

Advertising and sponsorship are unlikely to bring in enough money to pay the experts needed to maintain such resources. And the superficially plausible idea of charging subscription fees is effectively unworkable for facilities such as TAIR, because the producers and consumers of data are essentially the same community. Scientists provide data and resources for free, because sharing benefits everyone. However, they would be considerably less likely to deposit the fruits of their labour if this synergy was removed from the equation. ...

The problem is acute even for modest resources. Two examples are the kidney database EuReGene and the mouse-embryo database EURExpress, both of which were launched with funds from the European Commission that have run out in recent months. The databases are currently being maintained on a hand-to-mouth basis, and the scientists who built them don't know where to turn for maintenance money. Yet the European Commission's investment will have been wasted if the databases disappear.

It is time for a whole new approach. Front-line biology cannot function without these resources, so solutions must be found at both national and international levels.

Governments must ensure that at least one of their national funding agencies has money specifically set aside for the long-term support of bioresource infrastructures. ...

But action is also needed on the international front. ... What is required is an international cost-sharing organization that could fund competitively selected infrastructures, large and small. ...

• The OA Shakespeare Quartos Archive, funded by the UK's JISC and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, launched.
• The German SHERPA/RoMEO database of journal policies got an upgrade.
• The BioMed Central journals Journal of Hematology & Oncology and Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine have been accepted for inclusion in MEDLINE.
• The no-fee OA journal Herpetological Conservation and Biology published its 100th article, and will expand from two issues per year to three.
• D-Lib Magazine profiles the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, an OA journal hosted on Google Sites.
• And a letter in D-Lib imagines a dialogue with an author, explaining self-archiving.
• David Wiley tries to define "open" and concludes the most important freedoms for content are reuse, revision, remix, and redistribution.
• The arts and humanities faculty of the University of Buenos Aires passed a resolution condemning the criminal prosecution of an Argentine philosophy professor for allegedly violating copyright by posting the works of Derrida and Heidegger on his Web site.
• American publishers praised a plan by the Chinese government "to begin inspections of libraries, to determine whether unauthorized duplication, communication or electronic dissemination of copyrighted [academic and medical] works is occurring".

Lisa A. Gregory's Master's theses, "The Practice and Perception of Web Archiving in Academic Libraries and Archives," is available from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Here's an excerpt:

In order to dig deeper into possible reasons behind archivists’ and librarians’ reluctance to archive Web sites, the study described here asks professionals to reveal their Web archiving experiences as well as the information sources they consult regarding archiving Web sites. Specifically, the following two research questions are addressed: Are librarians and archivists at institutions of higher education currently engaged in or considering archiving Web sites? What sources do these professionals consult for information about Web archiving?

Related Posts

1. California Digital Library's Web Archiving Service
2. Foundation Grants for Preservation in Libraries, Archives, and Museums, 2009 Edition
3. Controlling Access to and Use of Online Cultural Collections: A Survey of U.S. Archives, Libraries and Museums for IMLS
4. Copyright and Related Issues Relevant to Digital Preservation and Dissemination of Unpublished Pre-1972 Sound Recordings by Libraries and Archives
5. DCC Releases "Database Archiving"

The Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University are recruiting a Head of Library Systems.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Responsibilities include technology analysis and strategic planning; overseeing implementation of central and distributed hardware, software, networking, desktop support, and help desk services; coordinating computing and telecommunication support for various library and university activities; supervising staff; recommending operating budgets required to support, enhance and expand the Libraries’ digital resources.

Works closely with other library departments in developing and maintaining library services; collaborates variously with the Digital Research and Curation Center; coordinates and collaborates with Information Technology @ Johns Hopkins and the other university libraries, as appropriate, to facilitate use and development of the Libraries’ electronic resources, as well as other electronic resources on campus; maintains strong partnerships with IT staff throughout the University in the ongoing assessment of and planning for the robustness of Hopkins’ network infrastructure; coordinates computing and telecommunication support for the shared library management system, the library’s Web site, and other Web-based services; collaborates with Libraries’ Human Resources Manager on technology training.

Manages and implements of special projects, as appropriate. The Libraries’ budget is approximately $27 million with a staff of 150. Library systems manages and supports: staff desktop workstations and application software at six sites; Windows servers; paid printing services; network hardware and infrastructure for six library sites; wired and wireless public access networks; Unix servers running Solaris and Linux; SirsiDynix Horizon integrated library system and HIP; library Web site; and library-specific applications, such as SFX. The Head of Library Systems reports to the Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs and serves as a member of the Libraries’ Management Team.

Related Posts

1. Library Systems Department Head at West Virginia University Libraries
2. Head of Library Systems at Mercer University
3. Library IT Jobs: Systems Librarian at the University of Michigan-Dearborn
4. Library IT Jobs: Head, Library Systems Support Department at University of Delaware
5. Library IT Jobs: Systems Librarian at Wake Forest

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $20 million grant to the DataONE (Observation Network for Earth) Project, which reports to both the Office of the Vice President of Research and the University Libraries at the University of New Mexico. William Michener, professor and director of e-science initiatives at University Libraries, is directing the project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Researchers at UNM have partnered with dozens of other universities and agencies to create DataONE, a global data access and preservation network for earth and environmental scientists that will support breakthroughs in environmental research.

DataONE is designed to provide universal access to data about life on Earth and the environment that sustains it. The underlying technologies will provide open, persistent, robust, and secure access to well-described and easily discovered Earth observational data.

Expected users include scientists, educators, librarians, resource managers, and the public. By providing easy and open access to a broad range of science data, as well as tools for managing, analyzing, and visualizing data, DataONE will be transformative in the speed with which researchers will be able to assemble and analyze data sets and in the types of problems they will be able to address. . . .

DataONE is one of two $20 million awards made this year as part of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) DataNet program. The collaboration of universities and government agencies coalesced to address the mounting need for organizing and serving up vast amounts of highly diverse and inter-related but often-incompatible scientific data. Resulting studies will range from research that illuminates fundamental environmental processes to identifying environmental problems and potential solutions. . . .

The DataONE team will study how a vast digital data network can provide secure and permanent access into the future, and also encourage scientists to share their information. The team will help determine data citation standards, as well as create the tools for organizing, managing, and publishing data.

The resulting computing and processing "cyberinfrastructure" will be made permanently available for use by the broader national and international science communities. DataONE is led by the University of New Mexico, and includes additional partner organizations across the United States as well as from Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, and Australia.

This grant is important nationally, and locally especially for our research community. University Libraries Dean Martha Bedard said, "The University Libraries are key partners in UNM research initiatives, and are excited and committed to supporting the emerging area of data curation, which this grant seeks to support in sophisticated ways."

DataONE will build a set of geographically distributed Coordinating Nodes that play an important role in facilitating all of the activities of the global network, as well as a network of Member Nodes that host relevant data and tools. The initial three Coordinating Nodes will be at the University of New Mexico, UC Santa Barbara (housed at the Davidson Library), and at the University of Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Member Nodes will be located in association with universities, libraries, research networks, and agencies worldwide.

Related Posts

1. Duke, NC State, and UNC Data Sharing Cloud Computing Project Launched
2. NIH Awards $12.2 Million Grant for VIVOweb, Social Networking Software for Scientists
3. Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries' Data Conservancy Project Funded by $20 Million NSF Grant
4. Dryad Repository Gets $2.18 Million Grant from the National Science Foundation
5. NSF Awards about $5 Million to 14 Universities to Participate in the IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative

Brenda Johnson has been named as the Ruth Lilly Dean of the Indiana University Libraries. Johnson is currently the University Librarian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a position that she has held since January 1, 2008.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"I am delighted to have been selected to serve as the next Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries at IU," Johnson said. "I believe a library is the greatest metaphor for a university. It provides essential resources for academic research, is a repository for scholarly achievement, a source of intellectual inspiration, a stage for public discourse, a center of cultural life, an incubator for new ideas, and is, in and of itself, a 'community'."

"I'm delighted to see the IU Libraries already stand very strong in embodying those values and concepts," Johnson continued. "I look forward to leading a library that is already recognized as one of the top libraries in the country as we engage with faculty, students and staff to achieve even-greater excellence and to create innovative and emergent services for a changing academic environment."

Major initiatives coordinated by Johnson at the University of California, Santa Barbara, include planning for a $62 million library addition and renovation, the UCSB Reads program (a program that engages the campus and community in conversations about a key topic while reading the same book), increased emphasis on outreach to students and faculty, and a rejuvenation of fundraising efforts for the UCSB libraries.

Prior to assuming the role of University Librarian at UCSB, Johnson served as interim co-university librarian of the University of Michigan Libraries. She served the University of Michigan Libraries in various roles for more than 20 years. From 1997-2007, she served as associate university librarian for public services. . . .

"Brenda Johnson's background and experience with the Big Ten and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation have prepared her well for the IU Libraries deanship," said [Debora] Shaw [professor in the School of Library and Information Science]. "We on the search committee were especially impressed with her breadth of understanding and her sense of how to help the libraries continue to build on their strengths and partnerships."

"I am delighted that Brenda Johnson will be joining IU as Dean of Libraries," said [Bobby] Schnabel [dean of the School of Informatics and Computing and interim vice president for research]. "Her vision for the future directions of libraries, enthusiastic personality, and vast experience and proven leadership abilities at both the University of Michigan and at UC, Santa Barbara, make her an outstanding choice." . . .

The dean of University Libraries provides administrative leadership for a system of libraries on eight campuses. On the Bloomington campus, the dean provides strategic planning and policy direction in the areas of collection development, public and technical services, facilities planning and personnel policies.

Related Posts

1. Columbia University Libraries and Cornell University Library Awarded Grant for 2CUL Partnership
2. Dean of University Libraries Candidates Interview at Indiana University
3. Ann Thornton Named as Interim Director of the New York Public Library
4. Carolyn Walters Named Interim Dean of Indiana University Libraries
5. David W. Lewis Named Assistant Vice President for Digital Scholarly Communications at Indiana

WIPO Launches Enhanced Patent Information Service, press release, November 17, 2009.

[The World Intellectual Property Organization] has launched an enhanced online patent information service that will improve public access to information on patents filed and granted around the world. WIPO’s PATENTSCOPE®, which currently hosts data on more than 1.6 million international patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), has been extended to include several collections of national and regional patent information.

In this first phase, WIPO’s PATENTSCOPE® includes the patent data collections of eight patent offices: African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO), Cuba, Israel, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa and Vietnam. WIPO has been working closely with these patent offices to ensure the data collections are fully searchable.

The expansion of WIPO’s PATENTSCOPE® data collection makes it possible to conduct high-quality, detailed and free-of-charge searches of the patent information of the participating offices. Many of these collections had previously not been digitized and were not easily searchable. ...

Gavin Baker, Nitpicking the Google Books Settlement 2.0, A Journal of Insignificant Inquiry, November 18, 2009. ... Speaking of orphan works, the Unclaimed Works Fiduciary is a trustee with one hand tied. As I reported for OAN, the UWF — an independent agent entrusted to manage the works of rightsholders who haven’t claimed their works under the settlement — doesn’t have all the powers of an actual rightsholder. Whereas a rightsholder is guaranteed under the settlement the options to, e.g., set a zero price for her work, to apply a Creative Commons license, or to remove DRM, the UWF isn’t guaranteed those same options. In fact, the UWF can only exercise those options with the approval of the Book Rights Registry, which is run by publisher and author representatives. So if the UWF came to the conclusion that the best fiduciary interest of its absentee rightsholders was represented by making their works freely available, it would not necessarily be able to do so. Given the growing suggestions that making a book freely available often has no discernible negative consequence on sales revenues for that book, and in some cases may even increase sales, the settlement should not exclude that option. On the topic of access generally, also see: Fred von Lohmann, Google Books Settlement 2.0: Evaluating Access, Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 17, 2009.