News and Events Issue 8

Upcoming Events

• CERN Workshop on OAI. The third workshop at CERN, Geneva, on the Open Archives Initiative is due to be announced shortly and will take place early in 2004. Watch out for news if you are interested in attending since last year's event was quickly oversubscribed.
• Many organizations are already preparing events for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) which will take place in Geneva, 10-12 December 2003.
  For the World Summit directly http://www.itu.int/wsis/basic/about.html
• CERN and UNESCO are organizing a workshop on The Role of Science in the Information Society to be held at CERN, Geneva, 8-9 December 2003 http://rsis.web.cern.ch/rsis/
• IFLA is promoting the role of libraries for the WSIS http://www.ifla.org/III/wsis1509.html and is organizing a Pre-World Summit Conference in Geneva, 3-4 November 2003: Libraries @ the Heart of the Information Society http://www.ifla.org/III/wsis/wsis_lath-inv.html

News

Document Delivery

Subito, the German Document Delivery service, has had to suspend services to non German speaking countries whilst discussions are ongoing concerning the legality of the service with regards to copyright. According to the PA web site: http://www.publishers.org.uk/paweb/paweb.nsf/0/aaa4f5418c5c755680256d1e0036f81f?OpenDocument

"A joint publishers working party comprising representatives from Borsenverein, STM, AAP, IPA and the PA, chaired by Mark Seeley of Elsevier, has been taking legal advice in Germany, the UK and the US. There have been two inconclusive meetings with Subito officials, and the publishers are considering how best to play our hand. The process is at present being funded by potential litigants in the US." The British Library have also been involved in discussions.

Subito http://www.subito-doc.com/ currently offers relatively cheap document delivery to any individual or library who registers and will supply articles and books electronically if possible. They reported receiving almost a million orders during 2002.

Meanwhile we hear that Elsevier and the BL are collaborating on an electronic document delivery system using Adobe's ebook Reader software. http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=3832&CategoryID=4

Crossref

CrossRef http://www.crossref.org/index.html has waived the $500 fee for library affiliates for the rest of this year and will eliminate the fee for 2004. Libraries will still have to have a CrossRef account to retrieve DOIs and metadata. It is hoped that this step will remove barriers to the use of CrossRef and DOIs.

National Library of Australia

The National Library of Australia's Safekeeping project has selected one of our articles for long-term archiving on its PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) website: http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/

Their project involves making copies of chosen articles so that if the original disappears, for whatever reason, then they will 'revive' their own copy so that it is available for the long term future. The article in question is at http://webzine.web.cern.ch/webzine/4/papers/3/

This is an honour for us and for Simeon, who wrote the article.

eBooks Corporation

"eBooks Corporation announced that it is collaborating with leading international university and research libraries to develop an academic and research ebook lending platform. Ebook Library or 'EBL' is scheduled for release in select university and research libraries in September 2003 and will officially be launched in January 2004.

EBL will feature Non-linear Lending^TM, a multiple-concurrent lending model which allows more than one person to check out the same book at the same time. Other features of EBL include digital interlibrary lending, unique ebook reserve functionality and lending by the chapter. Ebook titles will be able to be browsed online and then downloaded to a desktop, laptop, or hand-held device for use offline. The system will allow patrons to perform full text searches across their library's entire ebook collection.

EBL will offer an extensive academic catalogue with a particular focus on STM titles and will feature the most extensive listing of ebooks by Australian publishers."

For more information contact Kari Paulson, +61 (08) 9386 3112, kari.paulson@ebooks.com.
http://www.ebl.ebooks.com/

Grey Literature Service Network

The Grey Literature Network Service is now fully operational. We invite you to visit GreyNet's Website and to subscribe to the moderated Listserv.

http://www.greynet.org/

Lund University Libraries - Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

Lund University Libraries has launched the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ, http://www.doaj.org/http://www.doaj.org/), supported by the Information Program of the Open Society Institute (http://www.osi.hu/infoprogram/ ), along with SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, http://www.arl.org/sparc).

The directory contains information about 350 open access journals, i.e. quality controlled scientific and scholarly electronic journals that are freely available on the web. The service will continue to grow as new journals are identified. The goal of the Directory of Open Access Journals is to increase the visibility and accessibility of open access scholarly journals, thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. The directory aims to comprehensively cover all open access scholarly journals that use an appropriate quality control system. Journals in all languages and subject areas will be included in the DOAJ. The database records will be freely available for reuse in other services and can be harvested by using the OAI-PMH (http://www.openarchives.org/), thus further increasing the visibility of the journals. The further development of DOAJ will continue with version 2, which will offer the enhanced feature of allowing the journals to be searched at the article level, and is expected to be available in late fall 2003.

"'For the researcher DOAJ will mean simplified access to relevant information' said Lars Bjørnshauge, Director, Lund University Libraries. 'The directory will give open-access journals a simple method to register their existence, and a means to dramatically enhance their visibility. Moreover, by enabling searches of all journals in the database at the article level, the next stage of DOAJ development will save research time and increase readership of articles.'"

If you know a journal that should be included in the directory, use this form to report it to the directory: http://www.doaj.org/suggest

Information about how to obtain DOAJ records for use in a library catalogue or other service can be found at: http://www.doaj.org/articles/questions/#metadata

Elsevier's Scirus

For those who have not already read the 'How Scirus Works' paper, go to http://www.scirus.com/newsroom/#whitepaper

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