Final Session Notes

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Action items that seemed interesting or plausible

1. Privacy Session / Rotenburg

  • Rich tradition of protecting privacy in the library world
    • Some in practice in the information librarians kept, some in laws, some in constiution
  • Also in the new digital world, some new privacy safeguards
  • Considered: in the realm of public domain information (inc 18th century and current stuff generated by gov agencies which helps inform the public)
    • There may be a lot of info that could be made available w/ IDing info
    • Explored some author compensation schemes
  • New approaches trying to map the traditional safeguards into the digital world

2. Non consumptive use session / Zuckerman & Suber

  • Superficially the research corpus allowed by the settlement seems win / win, but the market may be bigger (if could solve probs w/ machine translation, there is a market for it)
  • Google would have a copy of the corpus + up to two research institutions working w/
  • Can't commercialize what you do w/ the corpus.
  • Low hanging fruit w/ better language models / frequency models
  • Big concern: Univ accepting legal and financial liability that terms are enforced.
  • Fear that the two research inst. will turn into provider of text research and only members of that inst. could have access (Could cause a research crisis if not enough people have access).
  • Imp to make sure there is some degree of open access (if at least GOogle provides that to anyone, the other two inst could provide more 'broad' access that's high risk')
  • Michigan - what can they do w/ their copies of the data already, irregardless of the settlement (Harvard did public domain works so they should be able to release nonetheless)
  • Clearly an enormous amnt of discussion around authors/publishers/etc rights. At least as interesting questions around the research corpus, but not as much done around it.
  • Ability to have some ongoing process to figure out what is in fact a non-consumptive use?
  • How can it be communicated to researchers as to what is ok and not?

3. Google / Orwant

  • Loud and clear that we need to figure out a way to give public interest groups and libraries a voice. Google needs to be clearer in how that's going to take shape.
  • Suggestions: Build constraints for inst. pricing.
  • 1- settlement agreement if approved requires to price for broad access (if they don't do that, they can be sued). 2- economically irrational for google to price at too high an amount (competition). 3- Google releasing several products, including indiv consumer sale. Indiv consumer sales set by market, tend to emit downward pressure -- inst. & indiv sales.

4. Libraries & OA / Darnton & Palfrey

  • Most in group concerned with library budgets and suffering from prices charged by journals -- and what to do about it?
  • Possibility of reversing the model for journal pricing (subsidizing processing fees / author's fees). Provide a subsidy to every cap to particular authors intended to go to an OA scholarly periodical. Could be feasible and, we hope, begin to set in motion a general drift towards OA publishing in scholarly journals.
    • Objection: Only wealthy universities could afford to pay. But the plan has a provision to subsidize journal articles from less wealthy inst. and developing world inst.
    • If we can mobilize enough inst. to pay these processing fees, would be tremendous impetus for OA & undercut journal publishers charging exorbitant prices, and perhaps create a shift where costs emerge from production end rather than consumption
  • Libraries facing perfect storm w/ rising prices. The group said working with OA and mandating/implementing are the most imp things to break the chain we're experiencing
  • One problem: of metadata. That comes w/ purchasing data set and also the problem of prestige. The way career patterns exist (esp in hard sciences) almost compel younger researchers to publish in exclusive/expensive periodicals
  • There are more citations to OA journals than there are to high prestige journals
  • Best thing a univ could do to advance OA is require faculty (w/ an opt out) to deposit their peer-reviewed research articles in a OA repository