Beyond Books and Journals Conference - UCL 25/26 June

There is still time to sign up for the third Bloomsbury Conference on e-publishing and e-publications at UCL on 25/26 June. The theme is the nature of formal scholarly communication (our business). The journal article in particular has not changed even though the way scholars communicate in their presentations to one another is very different in the digital environment.

Anthony Wattkinson who is the conference organiser says the difference between this conference and most others is that the speakers are researchers and publishers who have done the research or who have the experience and the value added by publishers is a given not something that has to be argued for.

For further information including a complete programme and registration see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/e-publishing/. The cost is modest and there is a day rate.

Nick

Rowecom - the cheque's in the post!

I am pleased to say that I understand cheques for the final distribution from the Rowecom settlement are in the mail and should be arriving very shortly.

I suspect many of you will have written off this money some time ago and so this will be some welcome extra cash!

Ian

Government advisers: online piracy costing the UK GBP 12 billion a year

Research commissioned by the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP) - a body that offers advice on IPR issues to the UK government - has reported that around 7 million people in Britain are involved in illegal file-sharing and are downloading material worth £12 billion each year.

As many ALPSP members will know, illegal file sharing is not restricted to Hollywood movies and the music industry; increasing amounts of scholarly material are being found on both general file-sharing websites and sites aimed specifically at our industry.

Ian

Science Blogs Connect

Quick posting from the SSP Annual Meeting in Baltimore:

Science Blogs Connect announced as new free service for publishers to connect the peer-review research literature with research blogs...

ALPSP members PLoS and The Royal Society are the first publishers to participate...

More on this later!

Ian

Should Rightslink introduce a new service for ALPSP members?

Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) and ALPSP have been discussing the possibility of introducing a new service tailored specifically for use by small and medium sized scholarly publishers based on their popular Rightslink service. It is expected that if a new service is developed that members will be able to receive it in late 2009.

CCC’s Rightslink service automates the entire content licensing and delivery process. Today, Rightslink is used by several publishers such as Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and many more. This online survey is being conducted to establish whether such a service will offer particular value to ALPSP members, and we hope therefore that you will be able to participate. Thank you very much for your help in completing this study.
To access the survey go to: http://www.tidewatchsurveys.com/STS/3323/cgi-bin/ciwweb.pl?studyname=3323&scr1=1&src=2

This online survey takes about 12 minutes to complete. In the survey they will be asking you about how your business grants licenses and permissions to customers who want to reuse content that your organization manages.

Please be assured that the information you provide will be used solely for this survey and will not be sold, shared, or used for any other purpose.

Nick Evans

WolframAlpha - set to topple Google?

Wolfram Research - the outfit behind Mathematica - have launched a new service that they call 'a computational knowledge engine'. WolframAlpha aims to 'collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything'.

Golly! Quite a mission statement and every bit as ambitious as that of a certain Mountain View-based search engine, i.e. 'to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful'.

According to their website: 'WolframAlpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and WolframAlpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.'

So what has this got to do with a challenge to Google? Well the 'new kind of knowledge-based computing' that WolframAlpha uses could be the next step to a semantic web search engine that might - just might - topple Google's supremacy in search in the way that Google's own pagerank algorithm blew everything else out of the water in the late 1990's.

At the very least it looks like it will be of huge interest to the STM publishers out there - especially those in mathematics, physics and engineering...

Online Communities - learn from the best of the rest

I suppose it's pretty appropriate that I'm using our Blog and other social network groups to send you news about an interesting ALPSP one-day seminar which is being held on the 7th of July in London entitled Online Communities: what can scholarly publishing learn from other industries?'

I hope that the meeting will appeal for a number of different reasons:

1) the speakers are all experts not from scholarly publishing but from related industries who use communities as part of their mainstream business (magazines, mobile devices, computer games, specialist newspapers, general books);
2) we're flying in an expert from the States who has published a major report on social networking;
3) you won't have heard of any of the speakers before as none of them are the "usual suspects" from scholarly publishing;
4) the "back it or bin it" format adds spice to the day by letting you choose who has made the biggest impression by allowing you to spend your specially printed "ALPSP pounds" on who you personally favour. So it'll be fun as well as educational.
5) Pam Sutherland from OUP will be Chairing the meeting, and that's a reason to come all on its own.

But most important of all it has a serious purpose: to lift the lid on how online communities need to be part of your core business.

See you there.

Yours,

Nick