“Z-Library appears to be shrugging off a criminal investigation as if nothing ever happened. The site continues to develop its shadow library and, following a successful fundraiser, now plans to expand its services to the physical book market. Z-Library envisions a book ‘sharing’ market, where its millions of users can pick up paperbacks at dedicated “Z-Points” around the globe….”
“Ever try to read a physical book passed down in your family from 100 years ago? Probably worked well. Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago? Probably a different experience. From the leasing business model of mega publishers to physical device evolution to format obsolescence, digital books are fragile and threatened.
For those of us tending libraries of digitized and born-digital books, we know that they need constant maintenance—reprocessing, reformatting, re-invigorating or they will not be readable or read. Fortunately this is what libraries do (if they are not sued to stop it). Publishers try to introduce new ideas into the public sphere. Libraries acquire these and keep them alive for generations to come.
And, to serve users with print disabilities, we have to keep up with the ever-improving tools they use.
Mega-publishers are saying electronic books do not wear out, but this is not true at all. The Internet Archive processes and reprocesses the books it has digitized as new optical character recognition technologies come around, as new text understanding technologies open new analysis, as formats change from djvu to daisy to epub1 to epub2 to epub3 to pdf-a and on and on. This takes thousands of computer-months and programmer-years to do this work. This is what libraries have signed up for—our long-term custodial roles….”
Abstract: Over the last two decades, reading has shifted from taking place on paper to, increasingly, screens. As digitalisation spreads, there have been growing concerns about unbalanced access to new types of resources between socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged students. PISA 2018 results show that while disadvantaged students are catching up in terms of access to digital resources, their access to cultural capital like paper books at home has diminished, and the socio-economic gap has been persistent over the last two decades. This policy brief draws education stakeholders’ attention to this issue and provides evidence for the discussion of equity in education by examining how access to books at home is related to students’ prevalent mode of reading books, their performance in reading and their enjoyment of reading.
” Passengers at Zagreb Airport now have the opportunity to fulfil their waiting time before boarding the plane, as well as during the trip, with a good book for which they will not need prior registration or membership fees.
ZAG Flybrary is a free library based on the principles of open access and sharing and is now located in the??international departures area of Franjo Tu?man Airport.
A tense thriller, historical or love novel, poetry collection or something similar can be taken off the shelf for free, and if passengers have a book they have already read, they can leave it and give others a chance to enjoy it.
The basic rule is – Do you need one? Take one. Do you have one? Leave one….”
“In India, most scholarly societies only publish their journals in print. If the journals are online, they still use the printer-set portable document formats because they believe that the only trustworthy and legitimate copies are those that are printed. In many cases, the scholarly societies post their entire journals online on their websites. The new publishing technologies do not seem to entice societies to devote much of their time to them. It seems they are content with the status quo. A dedicated staff and funding are needed to design layouts, publish in multiple formats, share meta-data, and generate metrics for articles. Society membership fees are often the main source of funds for these societies, and making their journals freely available online may undermine their sustainability. Since society cannot eliminate printing altogether, they must spend thousands of rupees on the design and layout of the manuscripts, as well as the printing.
Open access is a challenge for scholarly societies! They are still unsure as to the benefits open access can offer when libraries subscribe to their journals and make them available to readers. There are several Indian journals published by international publishers. The societies want to increase the reputation of the journals by utilising the publisher’s technology and reaching a wider audience. …
AmeliCA XML can be used to create digital publishing formats such as epubs, pdfs, HTML, and so on, and the meta-data can be harvested by the interoperable harvesters to develop global repositories online. Since all the works are available online perpetually, authors can showcase their work and invite collaborations from anywhere in the world.
The editors and editorial should be trained on the use of free and open technologies like AmeliCA XML and OJS and the authors and research managers need to be educated about open scholarship and open metrics. Already, the Society of Promotion of Horticulture is experimenting with AmeliCA. Joining AmeliCA infrastructure will definitely help the Indian researchers and the people in having a free-of-cost publication and access as the advisors work on implementing a system which will offer less or no cost for publishing and for accessing the published literature. Major advantages to open scholarship are having access to digital publishing software, indexing in the repository of the global south to increase readership, and working with scholars and publishers who share the same vision of creating the world’s open scholarship ecosystem.”
“With this issue, we implement the new format of the EJPH, improving accessibility to the journal, as well as abandoning the hard print copies of the EJPH.
The change to full Open Access was decided by the European Public Health Association in November 2020. With our switch to full Open Access, not only our members but also all public health professionals have access to the publications of high-quality scientific research. On top of that, we also fully comply with the European Union’s demand for Open Access for all research….”
“In 2020, CDL joined in collaboration with the Center for Research Libraries and HathiTrust (the CCH Collaboration) to play a facilitative leadership role in advancing shared print’s transition to a new phase of integration and interoperability (read more here). In its first year, the Collaboration released a freely available shared print comparison tool for serials and journals. On December 1st & 2nd of 2021, the Collaboration hosted a summit bringing together the shared print community, library technologists, and service providers to map a path forward for embedding shared print in the collections lifecycle. …”
“Kriterium is a portal for review, publication and dissemination of high-quality academic books, in accordance with the principles for open access. Kriterium is a quality label for Swedish academic books.All books with the Kriterium label will be freely available through open access, in print as well as online….”
“In his Medium article “Scholarly publishing is stuck in 1999,”
Springer Nature product manager Stephen Cornelius reproaches the outdated publishing practices many academic journals are using to produce online content. He notes that, despite decades of technological advancement, “research publishing seems stuck with those that were employed when it first went online.” Cornelius points to many areas of digital journal publishing that have been designed to mirror print publishing, such as journals formatting online articles as print-based PDFs, despite there being better ways to produce and present content online….
PDFs are rife with limitations as compared to HTML because, unlike HTML, PDFs:
Cannot support embedded multi-media research files such as videos
Have a poor layout for online reading, generally using columns that require readers to scroll up and down to read content on the same page
Are nearly impossible to read on mobile devices because PDFs are a static page (whereas HTML can be made to have a responsive design)
Do not easily allow for clickable references within the text
Are overwhelmingly not search-optimized for online browsers…
A recent article in The Atlantic titled “The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete“ explores the limitations of PDFs and the need for journals, particularly in STEM fields, to adopt internet-based publishing formats in order to support more dynamic presentations of research as well as to make it easier for readers to find articles online….”
“Nearly four million volumes held by Harvard University have been added into the shared collection of the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP), a partnership between Columbia University, The New York Public Library (NYPL), Princeton University Library, and Harvard. Users of all four libraries can access the shared collection, now numbering nearly 17 million volumes, as though those items were in their own library.
This means that Harvard Library users can now use the institution’s catalog, HOLLIS, to directly request materials in the shared collection at ReCAP contributed by any of the partner libraries, including the NYPL, its Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and its Library for the Performing Arts.
For NYPL, this means researchers now have access to a total of 22 million research volumes: NYPL’s 11 million, plus the materials from Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton available via ReCAP. In other words, the partnership and addition of Harvard’s 3.6 million volumes essentially doubles NYPL’s research holdings, which are available to the public. …”
“College & Research Libraries News (C&RL News), the official newsmagazine and publication of record of ACRL, will adopt an online-only publication model beginning in January 2022. The December 2021 issue will be the final print issue of the magazine. C&RL News is freely available as an open access online publication….”
“Formed in January 2020, the California Digital Library (CDL), the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), & HathiTrust Collaboration is building on a decade of collaboration, innovation, and expertise to define a new phase of shared print built on open and interconnected infrastructure. The collection comparison tool brings together the shared print retention commitments registered in CRL’s Print Archives Preservation Registry (PAPR), HathiTrust digital collection metadata, and the local library serials data submitted by users. Users know instantly which titles in their collection have been retained by shared print collections and which have not. This tool utilizes technology included in WEST’s decision- support system, AGUA, built and supported by CDL….”
“In the beginning of 2020, CDL joined with the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and HathiTrust to form a Collaboration for Shared Print Infrastructure. Working together, the Collaboration seeks to build on a decade of community innovation and expertise to define a new phase of shared print built on open and interconnected infrastructure.
As a first step toward that larger vision, CDL is proud to announce the launch of a new collection comparison tool realized in partnership with the Center for Research Libraries and HathiTrust. This new tool is a completely open means of comparing local serial and journal holdings against shared print commitments across North America and select digital repositories, including hundreds of thousands of HathiTrust digital serial and journal titles.
The tool can be accessed at papr.crl.edu/tools/compare. …”
“BSPS Open is an Open Access book series for cutting edge philosophy of science monographs, which are published Open Access and freely downloadable online at no cost to readers or authors. Here, four philosophers of science discuss BSPS Open: What it is, why publish open access, what are Creative Commons licenses are, and how to submit.”
“Earlier this year in July, we shared news with the WEST membership that California Digital Library (CDL, administrative host for WEST), the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), and HathiTrust released a set of framing documents that would guide their collaborative work to realize open infrastructure to support shared print as an integral part of contemporary collection management and development.
Now we are happy to share that the three organizations have embarked on their first collaborative project: a freely available, web-accessible tool that will enable any library to compare lists of serial holdings with serial retention commitments in PAPR in order to distinguish, in the local list, what has been retained and what has not.
This project embodies the intention of the CDL, CRL & HT collaboration not to rebuild, but to build upon and connect the resources and capabilities that already abound in our community. This project is possible because of the cumulative efforts of many: the original work undertaken by CRL and CDL, funded by the Mellon Foundation, to conceive and develop PAPR; subsequent contributions by WEST in developing the AGUA graphic interface and on-the-fly reporting capability; and, as an added bonus, the collaboration aims to open up a new dataset for comparison: HathiTrust’s digital serials….”