We're pleased to announce the date and venue for the 2009 ALPSP International Conference!
When: 9-11 September 2009
Where: The Oxford Belfry, Oxfordshire, UK
Details are on the Conference website www.alpspconference.org.
In a credit-crunch busting move, we've held the registration fees to last year's level and we've managed to negotiate a special rate for the Conference overnight accommodation of just GBP 86 per night.
Online booking will open shortly.
The 2009 program proper will start late afternoon on Wednesday 9 September but we will be running a number of free pre-conference workshops throughout the afternoon.
We were delighted with the success of the 2008 Conference - next year's will be even better!
Ian
Welcome to the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers blog. It includes helpful posts to connect, inform, develop and represent the scholarly publishing community.
Monday, 1 December 2008
JISC Board
I've just heard that my application to join the Board of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has been successful! I'll join the Board from next year...
JISC is funded by the UK HE and FE funding bodies to provide leadership in the innovative use of ICT to support education and research. They fund national services like JANET (the joint academic network) and a range of programmes and projects.
Ian
JISC is funded by the UK HE and FE funding bodies to provide leadership in the innovative use of ICT to support education and research. They fund national services like JANET (the joint academic network) and a range of programmes and projects.
Ian
Friday, 7 November 2008
More on the Google settlement...
It was good to get some firsthand news of the Google settlement from Pat Schroeder (the first woman elected to Congress from Colorado and now President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers).
Pat explained that the settlement - which only covers material with US rights - will mean that Google will pay $60 per in-copyright book that it has digitized without permission (doesn't sound a lot does it!) to those rightsholders that choose to be party to the agreement and that rightsholders then have two choices:
(1) they can take the sixty bucks and then walk away (their books will then be removed from the Google Book Search service) or (2) they can agree to have some or all of their books included in Book Search and potentially earn revenue from sales of the books, from subscriptions to collections and from advertising appearing around the book...
Pat was at pains to point out that the content of books cannot be messed with (so there won't be any advertising or product placement inside the works...)
One thing I hadn't previously appreciated was that the settlement deal does not include rightsholders of images, photographs, etc and so these will be BLACKED OUT from the digitized content.
Pat also mentioned that rightsholders would be compensated for print copies made from content in Google Book Search and that Google would be helping libraries to collect and distribute payments - in the short-term Google will itself anti-up these fees to rightsholders...
Meanwhile, the Federation of European Publishers has issued a statement on its website outlining some areas of concern it has with the proposed settlement. Basically, these are:
(a) a concern that the Google programme will constitute a de facto monopoly on distribution
(b) that there are already better mechanisms to make available out of print books and orphan works (for example Libreka and the ARROW project)
(c) that Google cannot use a 'fair use' argument for content owned by EU rightsholders and that their activities are still violating the 2001 Copyright Directive and various national copyright laws, and
(d) it is unacceptable that Google continues to use an 'opt-out' arrangement for a programme that rightsholders have never agreed to be part of instead of an 'opt-in' where rightsholders participate if, and only if, they explicitly wish to.
Some of these points are mute since the proposed settlement does only cover the US, but the more general points - and particularly the opt-out arguments - are pertinent.
Pat made it pretty clear that there is still an awful lot of detail to work out so more on this, I am sure, in the future as things develop...
Pat explained that the settlement - which only covers material with US rights - will mean that Google will pay $60 per in-copyright book that it has digitized without permission (doesn't sound a lot does it!) to those rightsholders that choose to be party to the agreement and that rightsholders then have two choices:
(1) they can take the sixty bucks and then walk away (their books will then be removed from the Google Book Search service) or (2) they can agree to have some or all of their books included in Book Search and potentially earn revenue from sales of the books, from subscriptions to collections and from advertising appearing around the book...
Pat was at pains to point out that the content of books cannot be messed with (so there won't be any advertising or product placement inside the works...)
One thing I hadn't previously appreciated was that the settlement deal does not include rightsholders of images, photographs, etc and so these will be BLACKED OUT from the digitized content.
Pat also mentioned that rightsholders would be compensated for print copies made from content in Google Book Search and that Google would be helping libraries to collect and distribute payments - in the short-term Google will itself anti-up these fees to rightsholders...
Meanwhile, the Federation of European Publishers has issued a statement on its website outlining some areas of concern it has with the proposed settlement. Basically, these are:
(a) a concern that the Google programme will constitute a de facto monopoly on distribution
(b) that there are already better mechanisms to make available out of print books and orphan works (for example Libreka and the ARROW project)
(c) that Google cannot use a 'fair use' argument for content owned by EU rightsholders and that their activities are still violating the 2001 Copyright Directive and various national copyright laws, and
(d) it is unacceptable that Google continues to use an 'opt-out' arrangement for a programme that rightsholders have never agreed to be part of instead of an 'opt-in' where rightsholders participate if, and only if, they explicitly wish to.
Some of these points are mute since the proposed settlement does only cover the US, but the more general points - and particularly the opt-out arguments - are pertinent.
Pat made it pretty clear that there is still an awful lot of detail to work out so more on this, I am sure, in the future as things develop...
Blog from the Charleston Conference
The Charleston Conference opened on Thursday November 6 with a quite excellent keynote from Derek Law.
In a funny, articulate and engaging talk Derek examined the issues around collection development in today's world. One of his central messages was that there is too much focus on the formal research literature and not enough on all the other stuff out there.
Of particular note, Derek described 'digital crossover strategy' (also known as crossing your fingers!) but the serious message was that scholarship needs a robust mechanism by which to preserve and curate the rapidly expanding born digital outputs... and it doesn't have one.
As an aside, a takeaway sound bite was that King's college saved $1 million per year in heating bills alone by closing four floors of it's library. Golly.
In a funny, articulate and engaging talk Derek examined the issues around collection development in today's world. One of his central messages was that there is too much focus on the formal research literature and not enough on all the other stuff out there.
Of particular note, Derek described 'digital crossover strategy' (also known as crossing your fingers!) but the serious message was that scholarship needs a robust mechanism by which to preserve and curate the rapidly expanding born digital outputs... and it doesn't have one.
As an aside, a takeaway sound bite was that King's college saved $1 million per year in heating bills alone by closing four floors of it's library. Golly.
Tuesday, 7 October 2008
ALPSP International Conference
I'm pleased to say that the first ALPSP International Conference was a great success.
We exceeded our target number of delegates, we had more people than ever at the annual ALPSP Awards dinner and, though I say so myself, there was a real buzz around the conference venue.
It was pretty challenging to put together keynote, plenary and parallel sessions that were of interest to the breadth of the ALPSP membership and especially difficult given that, this being the first Conference, we had no real point of reference. But I am delighted to say that evaluation forms have been extremely positive with lots of praise for the program and for the decision to build in plenty of networking time.
The speakers' slides will be loaded on to the ALPSP website shortly and we'll also be adding audio of many of presentations; both will be available to members only for download.
The Conference is an important element of our strategy to connect and inform the scholarly and professional publishing community. We will therefore definitely be making it an annual event and the dates and venue for the 2009 Conference will be announced in due course.
Our sincere thanks again to all of the speakers and session chairs, to our sponsors, and to the program committee for making this such a successful event.
We exceeded our target number of delegates, we had more people than ever at the annual ALPSP Awards dinner and, though I say so myself, there was a real buzz around the conference venue.
It was pretty challenging to put together keynote, plenary and parallel sessions that were of interest to the breadth of the ALPSP membership and especially difficult given that, this being the first Conference, we had no real point of reference. But I am delighted to say that evaluation forms have been extremely positive with lots of praise for the program and for the decision to build in plenty of networking time.
The speakers' slides will be loaded on to the ALPSP website shortly and we'll also be adding audio of many of presentations; both will be available to members only for download.
The Conference is an important element of our strategy to connect and inform the scholarly and professional publishing community. We will therefore definitely be making it an annual event and the dates and venue for the 2009 Conference will be announced in due course.
Our sincere thanks again to all of the speakers and session chairs, to our sponsors, and to the program committee for making this such a successful event.
Friday, 3 October 2008
Isabel Czech joins ALPSP in North America
It's taken me a while to get this on the blog, but...
We were absolutely thrilled to announce last month that Isabel Czech has joined ALPSP as our North American Executive Director.
Many of you will know Isabel; she spent more that 30 years working in publisher relations at ISI / Thomson Scientific (now Thomson Reuters).
Isabel will be a huge asset to the ALPSP team. She will help us to develop our US educational program and ensure that we are in closer contact with our North American members and thus that our benefits and services are in keeping with the needs of those based in the States and Canada...
Isabel is already earning her corn and we have received applications for membership from a number of new North American members!
Your can read more in the press release...
We were absolutely thrilled to announce last month that Isabel Czech has joined ALPSP as our North American Executive Director.
Many of you will know Isabel; she spent more that 30 years working in publisher relations at ISI / Thomson Scientific (now Thomson Reuters).
Isabel will be a huge asset to the ALPSP team. She will help us to develop our US educational program and ensure that we are in closer contact with our North American members and thus that our benefits and services are in keeping with the needs of those based in the States and Canada...
Isabel is already earning her corn and we have received applications for membership from a number of new North American members!
Your can read more in the press release...
CrossRef and search engine crawlers...
I've just received the latest resolution report from CrossRef for Learned Publishing (these are the reports that detail the number of link-throughs to articles via the DOI...)
Across all their members CrossRef resolved more than 26.2 million accesses in September 2008. This figure is after they have filtered out known search engine crawlers which in the same month added up to more than 22.6 million accesses.
Golly!
Across all their members CrossRef resolved more than 26.2 million accesses in September 2008. This figure is after they have filtered out known search engine crawlers which in the same month added up to more than 22.6 million accesses.
Golly!
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