031408

E-lert / Cyberavis is a weekly alerting service commissioned for CARL Directors. Coverage is principally: research, innovation, scholarly publishing, scholarly communication, scholarly journals, electronic journals, copyright and access to published government information.

E-lert / Cyberavis est un service de signalement hebdomadaire à l'intention des membres de l'ABRC. Il porte principalement sur les domaines suivants: recherche, innovation, édition savante, communication savante, périodiques savants, périodiques électroniques, droit d’auteur et accès aux informations gouvernementales rendues publiques.

Please note that there will not be an E-lert on Friday March 21. The next E-lert will be posted on Friday March 28. / Veuillez noter qu’il n’y aura pas de Cyberavis le vendredi 21 mars. La prochaine édition du Cyberavis sera affichée le vendredi 28 mars.

CARL COMMUNIQUE / COMMUNIQUÉ DE L’ABRC

The minutes of the CARL Copyright Committee meeting held January 17-18, 2008, are now available on the Members Only section of the CARL website. (Members only)

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Le procès-verbal de la réunion du Comité sur le droit d'auteur de l’ABRC qui a eu lieu le 17-18 janvier 2008 est disponible sur le site web de l’ABRC. (En anglais, accès réservé aux membres)

NEWS / NOUVELLES

Canadian MP: Don't use WIPO as excuse for Canadian DMCA

Nate Anderson

Ars Technica, March 11, 2008

As Canada considers a new copyright bill with some apparent similarities to the US DMCA, one MP is trying to clear up misconceptions. New Democratic Party MP Charlie Angus has written an open letter to Industry Minister Jim Prentice, arguing that Canada can ratify a key WIPO treaty without passing draconian DRM legislation. Here's a taste: "Parliament must also stay away from the more hysterical claims that we need to start banning circumvention devices. This is like saying we need to ban axes because they could be used to break down a door."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080311-canadian-mp-dont-use-wipo-as-excuse-for-canadian-dmca.html

Arthur Carty critical of government decision to eliminate national science advisor position

RE$EARCH MONEY, Volume 22, Number 4, March 11, 2008

Outgoing national science advisor Dr Arthur Carty says Canada won't have the full range of science policy advice required by an advanced, knowledge-based nation if the decision to close the Office of the National Science Advisor (ONSA) is allowed to stand. But he fell short of calling for its reinstatement during an appearance before a specially convened Parliamentary committee March 6th to articulate his views on the government's decision to phase out the office. Carty says Canada needs both a chief science advisor and a science advisory council like the recently created Science, Technology and Innovation Council (STIC) to provide a full suite of S&T advice to government, arguing that the combination is both important and powerful and has worked well in other countries.

Laval University employs unique approach to fund 100 new research chairs within five years

RE$EARCH MONEY, Volume 22, Number 4, March 11, 2008

Laval University has launched a novel research fundraising program that it hopes will bolster its already formidable research capacity by recruiting new talent and doubling the number of research chairs at the institution. The Program for the Advancement of Innovation and Research (PAIR) aims to establish 100 new $1-million chairs over the next five years by securing funding from government organizations, business and regional socioeconomic organizations. PAIR was conceived by Dr Edwin Bourget, Laval's vice-rector of research and innovation, shortly after arriving at the university from Sherbrooke University last August. He has engaged François Sauvé — most recently director of the Canada Research Chairs program secretariat — to serve as the director of PAIR. Funding for the first 10 chairs has already been committed with announcements slated over the next few weeks.

Book Ends? Turning the Page into the 21st Century

Andrew Aziz et al

Capital News Online, Volume 22, Number 3, March 7, 2008

Technology has changed almost every aspect of our lives, including books. While books won't be purged from the shelves any time soon, they're now being created using computers and published, sold and read online. Where the book ends … the screen begins. In the section entitled Book Bytes, Abigail Bimman and Belinda Shen interview Bruce Walton (Library and Archives Canada) and Maggie McDonald (also of LAC). In the first video, Mr. Walton speaks about the importance of digitizing books, and in the second Ms. McDonald “demonstrates step-by-step how to digitize books for online consumption.”

http://www.carleton.ca/Capital_News/07032008/multimedia.shtml

Revenge of the Experts

Tony Dokoupil

Newsweek, March 6, 2008

By any name, the current incarnation of the Internet is known for giving power to the people. Sites like YouTube and Wikipedia collect the creations of unpaid amateurs while kicking pros to the curb—or at least deflating their stature to that of the ordinary Netizen. But now some of the same entrepreneurs that funded the user-generated revolution are paying professionals to edit and produce online content. In short, the expert is back. The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web. "People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information," says Charlotte Beal, a consumer strategist for the Minneapolis-based research firm Iconoculture. Beal adds that choice fatigue and fear of bad advice are creating a "perfect storm of demand for expert information."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/119091

ARTICLES

E-mail is Changing the Way We Communicate and Historians are Worried

Tom Alderman

The Huffington Post, March 5, 2008

There's a treasure-trove of computer-generated communications sitting out there amongst business, government and significant people that is not available to historians and biographers. There is no way to access, manage and use it. A nation without history is like a nation without a memory, says author and historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Which is why historians are so concerned about email communications and the petabytes of digital memory being lost. As a result, there are several experimental projects underway to try and solve the vital information gap that emails present for the future. One of them is an unprecedented affiliation between the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the University of San Diego's Super Computer Center.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-alderman/email-is-changing-the-way_b_90050.html

Information Liberation

Daniel Akst

The Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2008

American institutions of higher education are knowledge machines of unprecedented fecundity, but much of the knowledge they produce is locked up in high-priced scholarly journals that most people can't easily get. Citizens thus find themselves in the position of paying for research and then paying again to buy it back from academic journals whose prices have been spiraling upward. Library Journal says that U.S. journal prices rose 9% last year alone. The average chemistry-journal subscription, to cite a single egregious example, was $3,429 for one year. But change is on the horizon. Congress has mandated that by April 7 papers arising from NIH-sponsored research — roughly 80,000 of them a year — be made freely available in the federal PubMed database, which can be read by anyone with an Internet connection.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120486540450119149.html

The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0

Michael Zimmer

First Monday, Volume 13, Number 3, March 3, 2008

The rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0 infrastructures presents certain cultural claims about media, identity, and technology. It suggests that everyone can and should use new Internet technologies to organize and share information, to interact within communities, and to express oneself. It promises to empower creativity, to democratize media production, and to celebrate the individual while also relishing the power of collaboration and social networks. Web sites such as Flickr, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, MySpace, and YouTube are all part of this second–generation Internet phenomenon, which has spurred a variety of new services and communities – and venture capitalist dollars. But Web 2.0 also embodies a set of unintended consequences emerging from the resultant blurring of the boundaries between Web users and producers, consumption and participation, authority and amateurism, play and work, data and the network, reality and virtuality.

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2136/1944

RESOURCES / RESSOURCES

Nouvel initiative du Programme d’aide à l’édition savante (PAES) : livres en mode libre accès

L’avènement des nouvelles technologies des communications permet désormais aux chercheurs de partager leurs recherches à échelle plus vaste que jamais on aurait pu imaginer auparavant. Mettre les livres savants en ligne en mode libre accès rend leurs trésors accessibles à des millions de personnes, permettant aux utilisateurs de lire des ouvrages entiers en ligne et d’y effectuer des interrogations. Le PAES cherche à faire sa part dans ce mouvement de plus en plus important en matière de diffusion, en vue surtout de ramener vers les feux de la rampe de nombreux ouvrages riches et précieux qu’il a appuyés par le passé et qui sont désormais difficiles à trouver. Une dizaine d’œuvres y compris quatre livres des lauréats antérieurs du Prix du livre savant sont disponibles sur le site web de la Fédération canadienne des sciences humaines (FCSH), et d’autres ouvrages en format libre accès seront ajoutés.

http://www.fedcan.ca/francais/aspp/openaccess/

Archive of ARL-NASULGC Webcast on NIH Public Access Policy Available Online

March 10, 2008

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) are making available an archived version of their March 7, 2008, webcast on "Institutional Compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy: Ensuring Deposit Rights." The webcast explores options for institutional responses to the new Public Access Policy adopted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and focused particularly on the need for institutions to develop strategies for ensuring the retention of deposit rights by investigators. Effective April 7, 2008, the new policy requires investigators to deposit their articles stemming from NIH funding in PubMed Central. Institutions confront a key set of issues raised by the need to ensure that authors maintain the legal rights required to allow compliance with the new policy.
http://www.arl.org/sc/implement/nih/webcast/

Conceiving an International Instrument on Limitations and Exceptions to Copyright

P. Bernt Hugenholtz & Ruth L. Okediji

Open Society Institute (OSI), March 6, 2008

The task of developing a global approach to limitations and exceptions (“L&E’s”) is one of the major challenges facing the international copyright system today. As mechanisms of access, L&E’s contribute to the dissemination of knowledge, which in turn is essential for a variety of human activities and values, including liberty, the exercise of political power, and economic, social and personal advancement. Appropriately designed L&E’s may alleviate the needs of people around the world who still lack access to books and other educational materials, and also open up rapid advances in information and communication technologies that are fundamentally transforming the processes of production, dissemination and storage of information. As new technologies challenge copyright’s internal balance, and as the costs of globalization heighten the vital need for innovation and knowledge dissemination, a multilateral instrument that can effectively harness various national practices with regard to L&E’s, and that can provide a framework for dynamic evaluation of how global copyright norms can be most effectively translated into a credible system that appropriately values author and user rights, is a necessity.
http://www.ivir.nl/publicaties/hugenholtz/finalreport2008.pdf

EVENTS / ÉVÉNEMENTS

ACRL Online Chat to Focus on NIH Public Access Policy

March 27, 2008

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), along with the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) and the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), are co-sponsoring a live chat session on the newly mandatory NIH Public Access Policy. The session is the first in a new chat series, ACRL OnPoint, offered by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). The chat session will be held March 27, 2008, starting at 2:00 p.m. EDT. It will be unmoderated and 30-45 minutes in length. This informal chat session will provide the opportunity to connect with colleagues and experts to discuss how libraries are leveraging the new NIH policy on campus. The chat is free and open to the public.

http://www.arl.org/news/pr/nih-chat-12mar08.shtml

Diego Argáez

Research Officer / Agent de recherche

Canadian Association of Research Libraries / Association des bibliothèques de recherche du Canada

Room / Pièce 238, Pavillon Morisset Hall, 65 University Private

Ottawa, Ontario K1N 9A5

Phone / Téléphone : (613) 562-5800 ext. 2427

Fax / Télécopieur : (613) 562-5195

E-mail / Courriel : ac.awattou|oprlrac#ac.awattou|oprlrac

www.carl-abrc.ca

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