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February 11, 2010

Tackling Digital Piracy with the SSP

Copyright violations have been around as long as copyright law (1709, did you know?), but digital piracy is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that is a justifiable concern for publishers. A recent SSP web seminar entitled “How to Combat Digital Piracy on a Budget” demonstrated how to do just that, and provided a very interesting overview of the problem and how it affects scholarly publishers.

At the end of last year an independent study by the internet monitoring and enforcement service Attributor tracked 900 book titles over a three month period and concluded that each of the titles was illegally downloaded 10,000 times, with titles in the categories of Business and Investing, Professional and Technical, and Science topping the list (see the report for details - PDF). Ed McCoyd from the AAP explained that over half of these downloads came from just two sites: rapidshare.com and 4shared.com, both “one-click hosting” sites to which users can upload content and share it by distributing the files’ URLs. 4shared.com and other sites also offer a search function whereby anyone can download from other users’ public folders (I found articles from a number of CrossRef members’ journals with just a few clicks on 4shared).

But it’s not all bad news: when the authors of the study followed up with these sites, 85% of the illegal copies were subsequently removed or blocked. There’s work, however, in contacting these sites, and to this end the Publisher’s Association has launched its Copyright Infringement Portal. Members submit details of a reported infringement to the portal and it identifies the offending site, sends an appropriate takedown notice and tracks progress through to removal. To date, Scribd is the biggest offender but also the most cooperative partner, removing 98% of offending works almost immediately (the overall removal rate is currently 61%). Alicia Wise from the PA demonstrated how the portal is also useful as a discovery resource, allowing publishers to see notices issued by others and thereby identifying the most frequently offending sites.

The seminar finished with Daphne Ireland talking about the ways in which Princeton University Press is attempting to fight piracy. PUP is alerted to much of its pirated content by its authors who come across it on the web, yet they estimate that 50% of these illegal copies are author copies that have been redistributed. Educating authors on copyright is, as you might imagine, high on their agenda. They are also making use of watermarking and tightening their license agreements with all third parties who handle their content. But on a more strategic level, Daphne’s advice to other publishers was to “embrace the digital marketplace”. If your content is available to purchase in many places at a reasonable price then people will have fewer reasons to seek out pirated copies.

October 07, 2009

CrossRef Congratulates Bob Campbell on ALPSP Award

Bob Campbell of Wiley-Blackwell, who serves as the Chair of CrossRef's Board of Directors, recently received the prestigious Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing. ALPSP's Council cited Bob's "fierce and passionate advoca[cy] of the publishing industry and the role and importance of society publishing." Congratulations, Bob!

Visit the ALPSP website for more on this year's awards. ForceDownload.jpg
Robert Parker (ALPSP Chair) and Bob Campbell (Wiley-Blackwell). (Photo courtesy ALPSP)

October 01, 2009

Solving the challenges of journals that change hands

lp.gif CrossRef Executive Director Ed Pentz and Yvonne Campfens of Springer explain the Project Transfer Code of Practice in the October issue of Learned Publshing (http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20090405). A good example of industry collaboration, Project Transfer's Code proves a set of voluntary best practices that help ensure that online publications that change ownership or publishers or both are still accessible to subscribers.

Learned Publishing access is by subscription--ALPSP and SSP provide access as part of membership.

June 19, 2009

CrossRef's Chuck Koscher Chairs NISO

NISO logoChuck Koscher, CrossRef's Director of Technology, begins his term as Chair of the National Information Standards Organization. Here's an exerpt from NISO's press release:

Chuck Koscher, Director of Technology at CrossRef, who was elected last year and has served as Vice Chair during the current term, will become Chair of NISO for the 2009-10 term.
“NISO has a great deal of opportunity before us,” said Koscher, the incoming Chair.

“With recent successes on the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) and Shared Electronic Resources Understanding (SERU), new work on single sign-on authentication and Cost of Resource Exchange (CORE), as well as potential projects on XML structures, physical delivery, and e-resource management, NISO is at the forefront of technology issues facing the information community. Helping to lead the organization in this exciting time will be a great honor.”

Please see the NISO Press release for more information.

May 06, 2009

Come up to speed on Twitter

CrossRef's Kirsty Meddings shows how Twitter worked at the recent UKSG meeting: http://tinyurl.com/UKSGtweets.

A reassuring word that actual face-to-face conversations are not dead from her article published in UKSG Serials e-News: "It was also good to see people seeking each other out in person after having exchanged tweets, to continue conversations in a more traditional manner with people that they probably otherwise would not have met."

April 09, 2009

CCC Webinar: How does the Google Books Settlement affect you?

Copyright symbol

Image via Wikipedia

Lois Wasoff, a well-known attorney specializing in copyright, will present a webinar for the Copyright Clearance Center at noon EST on Wednesday April 14th. CrossRef board and committee members know Lois as CrossRef's counsel.

I had an opportunity to preview this extremely helpful talk last week, and I highly recommend that publishers, authors, and librarians attend to find out how this agreement may affect their rights.

Register at the CCC web site.

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March 13, 2009

Plagiarism in the news

A number of articles and news items have brought the issue of plagiarism into focus recently. Last week, a short paper in Science provided an update on the research by Harold Garner and his colleagues that was previously reported in Nature News, and has since been commented on in a number of places including SSP’s Scholarly Kitchen blog.

Garner’s team has taken abstracts from Medline and used a piece of software called eTBLAST to compare them against each other for similar and overlapping text. To date, with a combination of machine and human analysis, they have identified 9120 articles with "high levels of citation similarity and no overlapping authors", and 212 pairs of articles "with signs of potential plagiarism". They have gone on to contact authors and editors and (under assurances of anonymity) have received a range of responses from outrage to apology to denial. As of February 2009 they are aware of their study having triggering 83 internal investigations leading to 46 retractions.

In The Scientist Garner explains that technology has a role to play in plagiarism detection because "You can't expect all the editors and reviewers to have all 18,000,000 papers in their head from biomedicine”. Technology will never be an adequate substitute for a human domain expert’s knowledge and judgment, but a system such as CrossCheck can scan vast amounts of content and flag up potential issues, saving time and adding a level of reassurance previously unavailable.

The CrossCheck database currently contains almost 11 million content items and is on course to become the most comprehensive resource against which to check scholarly content for plagiarism. Look out for sessions on CrossCheck and plagiarism at the UKSG conference at the end of the month, and also at the Council of Science Editors meeting in May.

September 12, 2008

CrossCheck Wins 2008 ALPSP Award for Publishing Innovation

It was announced last night at the ALPSP International Conference Dinner that CrossCheck was chosen as the recipient of this year's Award for Publishing Innovation. The award recognizes a truly innovative approach to any aspect of publication. Applications are judged on their originality and innovative qualities, together with their utility, benefit to their community and long term prospects.

CrossCheck powered by iThenticate is a new initiative to aid publishers in verifying the originality of scholarly content. CrossRef members who choose to participate can check submissions against a vast database of proprietary as well as open web content.

For more information about ALPSP and their awards program, visit http://www.alpsp.org/.

March 20, 2008

Publication Ethics and CrossCheck

Elsevier recently launched its Publishing Ethics Resource Kit (PERK) - http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/editorshome.editors/Introduction - which mentions the CrossCheck pilot and the important work being done by COPE - the Committee on Publishing Ethics (http://www.publicationethics.org.uk/about).

I'm glad that Elsevier has highlighted its participation in the CrossCheck Pilot which we hope to move into production and role out to all CrossRef members starting in June 2008. The PERK information shows that a technology tool for detecting overlapping text between documents is only one small (but important) part of the larger issue of ethics in publishing. Publishers need to look at a broad range of policies and procedures and need to explain to authors and readers how they go about publishing high-quality, original content - scholarly publishers haven't always been very good at this in the past but publishers do add a lot of value.

March 11, 2008

Acknowledgement of funders in journal articles

The Research Information Network (RIN - http://www.rin.ac.uk/) worked with funders in the UK, Wiley-Blackwell and CrossRef to come up with some very reasonable guidelines on the acknowledgement of research funders in scholarly journal articles. The full document is available on the RIN website - http://www.rin.ac.uk/funders-acknowledgement).

If all the parties work together there will be a virtuous circle - funders instruct grantees on how to cite the funder and grant numbers in publications, authors follow these instructions when submitting papers to journals and publishers pick up the standard funder names and grant numbers, tag them and list the information in a separate section. Publishers add value and the funders can assess the results of funding.

Continue reading "Acknowledgement of funders in journal articles" »

May 09, 2007

Project Transfer Announcement

Please see the important announcement below about Project Transfer which CrossRef has been involved in. Publishers will be asked to sign up to the Code, which includes a requirement to follow the CrossRef DOI Ownership Transfer Policy - http://www.crossref.org/02publishers/61ownership.html

Oxford, UK - 9th May 2007- Project Transfer is inviting publishers to sign up to a Code of Practice which aims to improve the procedures and policies surrounding the transfer of journals between publishers. The Code has been drafted with extensive help from many of the major international publishing houses and has already been applauded as an excellent step forward by the contributing library community.

The Code outlines a set of guidelines for both the Transferring and the Receiving publisher in any journal transfer. Comprehensive in its detail, the Code covers the thorny issues of ongoing access provision to online content, exchange of subscriber lists, DOI and URL transfer as well as the division and definition of born-digital versus newly digitized backfile content.

The Project Transfer Working Group is inviting publishers to sign up to this Code through the Project website: <http://www.projecttransfer.org/> where the Code of Practice can also be found. Full details of the Code were launched at the UKSG Annual Conference in Warwick (16-18 April 2007).

Note: A direct link to the Transfer Code of Practice is <http://www.uksg.org/sites/uksg.org/files/UKSG_TRANSFER_Code_of_Conduct_Phase_1.pdf>