Information Research Weblog

Microsoft vs. IBM is a feature of some of today's news. ZDNet has an item on the possible purchase of Red Hat's Linux by Microsoft as a strategy in its assumed battle with the Big Blue giant. It's all speculation and based on rather complicated issues (to me) of intellectual property rights in Linux, but, who knows?

The same source tells us that IBM is promoting the use of Firefox to its staff (against MSoft's Internet Explorer), making the software available for downloading from its own servers and providing an internal Help Desk. With a reported 10% of staff already using it (that's about 30,000 people, apparently!), presumably the take-up is likely to be rapid. With IBM pushing Firefox in this way, how long will it take other companies to do the same?

I see that the European Commission is getting its tights in a knot over software patents.

My thanks to Bob Robinson for drawing my attention to a feature in today's Financial Times, which is fortunately openly available on the Website. It's an article by Michael Earl, Professor of information management at the University of Oxford, called Tantalised by the promise of wisdom. In it he notes:

Yet nearly 15 years on, the promise of knowledge management has yet to be realised. There is a dearth of outstanding success stories, where original goals were achieved or sustainable value was created.

It is not unusual to visit companies claiming knowledge management successes only to find some worthy efforts lacking any lasting impact. More often, a company has simply relabelled a new IT application as a knowledge management initiative.

In a 1998 article in the Sloan Management Review, I reported on the work of 20 chief knowledge officers at large corporations. Sceptics may not be surprised to know that most of these CKO positions no longer exist. More than half had gone within two years of our study. In other words, knowledge management is tantalising. It still appeals to many, but success is elusive. Even defining it is not easy. Perhaps this is because knowledge management is concerned with an intangible and, in some ways, invisible asset.

He describes a study of forty companies, through which seven schools of knowledge management were identified: the 'systems' school, the 'cartographic' school, the 'engineering' the 'commercial' school, the 'organisational' school, the 'spatial' school and the 'strategic' school. He also terms the first three, technology oriented and the last three, behavioural. I'll leave it to you to explore the article for the detail.

The article is relatively brief, so one does not expect close analysis of the schools; that may be in whatever paper is published on the research. However, it is notable that the first three are all, in essence, information management schools, involving databases and/or intranets, the 'commercial' school is concerned with intellectual property rights and intangible assets, and the first two 'behavioural' schools are all about sharing information within the organization, while the 'strategic school' is about defining the business as a knowledge business - which is, perhaps, closer to the 'commercial' school than to the other two 'behavioural' schools.

The reasons for the disappearance of the CKOs are interesting:

Our study of CKOs revealed broadly skilled people with loose job descriptions and CVs rich with experience. They were usually appointed by the chief executive but had to define their own role and work out the company's agenda for knowledge management. Their roles combined the skills of an entrepreneur, consultant, technologist and designer. Most did not keep their job for long, often due to a change of CEO, sometimes because an early victory was declared over knowledge management or because they were headhunted by management consultancies.

I wonder when we're going to hear about 'common-sense management'?

Lawrence Lessig is stirring things nicely by suggesting that developing countries should ignore US copyright law, the way that the US ignored foreign copyright until 1891. Now there's an interesting idea!

Funny man Michael Moore - not really funny, but hopping mad - is making quite a hit in the UK newspapers for his savagely satirical take on events in the USA. Readers of Stupid White Men may recall that he became a powerful advocate for libraries and librarians when a library attending one of his talks, in New Jersey, I think, started a national campaign to blitz his publisher Harper Collins about their attempted censorship of his book. (And who is behind Harper Collins? Does the name Rupert Murdoch ring a bell? I wonder how much he gave to the Bush campaign?)

I urge everyone who is interested in civil liberties, including intellectual freedom to read Moore - you can start with his Web site, move on to Stupid White Men, if you haven't read it yet, and get the DVD of Bowling for Columbine

Read the report in the Daily Mirror of Moore's Oscar speech, and an extract from his new book, which appears in today's Guardian

I know that many people in the USA are worried by the so-called Patriot Act and the attempts to extend powers under that act. Well, one thing we can be sure about is that unless everyone is prepared to get up and vote the bastards out of office, it won't be long before there are no such thing as civil liberties. If George Orwell was alive today he'd think that 1984 was a little late in arriving but that it had finally made it. And if anyone thinks that it is only US civil liberties that are risk, think again. There are some tough questions for Tony Blair to answer and what he and other politicians don't seem to understand is that the game has changed - it's no longer enough to have a winning smile (even if it is slipping a little lately), people know they've been conned and they are going to want a truth-teller in 10 Downing Street. Exactly who in the present bunch of politicians would qualify for that title is difficult to figure out!

Get on to it, bloggers - post and re-post these links and get people thinking. It could be the revolution of the nerds!

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The top story in the latest issue of The Onion should amuse. The top line: "An Internet worm that disabled networks across the U.S. Monday and Tuesday temporarily thrust the nation into its most severe maelstrom of productivity since 1992."

The economic impact of libraries

If you've ever wondered about the economic impact of libraries in society - and it must be on your minds more or less continually - then wonder no longer. OCLC has produced a nice .pdf file that tells all called Libraries: how they stack up. Among the interesting snippets:

U.S. libraries purchase an estimated $14 billion in goods and services annually—exceeding U.S. spending on videos and athletic footwear, and approaching the level spent by businesses on magazine advertising. U.S. libraries account for nearly half of the $31 billion spent annually by libraries worldwide.

And George Bush, of course, snipped $39,000,000 from the budget for libraries when he slipped into the White House - shows how much influence his wife, the former children's librarian, must have had. Of course, Tony Bliar and the New Thatcherites don't have to do that in the UK - they just crack down on 'waste' in the public services.

Licences for electronic resources

A useful little article on this subject at Free Pint by Paul Pedley of the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The key point, of course, is:

It is important to point out that a licence does not confer ownership rights. It merely specifies the conditions upon which databases and other copyright works can be used and exploited, and by whom. At the end of the subscription period they may well no longer have access to the materials. Indeed, it may even be a requirement of the contract that anything which has been downloaded from the electronic information product is deleted at the end of the contract term.

In other words, "Oh sure, we'll sell you this stuff - but we're going to take it back when George snips another $39 million."

Both of these items courtesy of Charles Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog

Librarians in court

This from Yahoo News:

In a hotly contested lawsuit before a federal appeals court, two peer-to-peer companies are about to gain a vast army of allies: America's librarians.

The five major US library associations are planning to file a legal brief Friday siding with Streamcast Networks and Grokster in the California suit, brought by the major record labels and Hollywood studios. The development could complicate the Recording Industry Association of America's efforts to portray file-swapping services as rife with spam and illegal pornography.

According to an attorney who has seen the document, the brief argues that Streamcast -distributor of the Morpheus software - and Grokster should not be shut down. It asks the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the April decision by a Los Angeles judge that dismissed much of the entertainment industry's suit against the two peer-to-peer companies.

Read more about it

Euan Semple (who has his own Weblog) has drawn my attention to an interesting site - Open Access Now, which is published by BioMed Central, which is, itself, an open access publisher.

This interests me greatly, of course, since Information Research is an open access journal. Unfortunately, to date, I have been unable to get the kind of support for the journal that BioMed Central seems capable of. However, I am now in contact with SPARC - the open access initiative of the Association of Research Libraries - and hope for better things in the future.

One news item on the site also suggests changes for the better: Oxford University Press is to experiment with open access. It's top-rated Nucleic Acids Research is to become open access under an 'author funded' model. That is, authors will pay to have their papers published. Initially, the experiment will concern only one issue of the journal, its 2004 database issue, but it expects to roll out the system to cover all issues over the next four to five years.

I doubt that the author-funded model would work in our sector. There are too many journals looking for too few quality papers. However, someone pays for open access - in the case of Information Research, server space is paid for by the University of Sheffield, and all other costs, including domain name registration, are met by me.

A couple of publishers have approached me about the journal, but their heads begin to hurt when I talk about alternative models for open access and interest disappears pretty rapidly. However, if anyone out their knows of a sugar daddy who would like to support this enterprise, do let me know!

As a complete aside, I saw that Euan's Weblog has a poem as its most recent entry, so I thought - why not the IRWeblog? After all, poetry is a very concentrated way of transmitting messages about all kinds of things. For something different, however, I thought that a waka competition might be the thing. See the next entry.

From Lawrence Lessig's site, a pointer to his article in the Financial Times. The trigger for Lessig's article is the decision of the BBC to make its Web content freely available for non-commercial purposes. Naturally, the BBC will continue to enjoy its rights to commercial use. Lessig contrasts this with the decision of the US government to oppose a meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization which was to be devoted to 'public goods'. Wonderful guys in the Bush administration, eh? Who says big business doesn't run the USA?

Grahame Gould drew my attention to the fact that the Free-Conversant server has been down and the last lot of 'Odds and ends' was not reachable - so, as compensation, here's another lot. I've no idea why the server was down, not having had any information about it.

Music piracy is hitting the headlines again. Regular aficionados of this site may recall an earlier message on the subject and today the music industry won plaudits for its suing of a 71-year old grandfather and a 12-year old child. That's the way to do it, guys - go for the soft targets. Naturally, it has been picked up by the other Weblogs and The Shifted Librarian raises a point or two.

The whole thing makes another item from Techdirt all the more interesting: apparently the music industry is using file-sharing networks it abhors to collect market research data.

On the search front, there's a rather curious hybrid at Anacubis, described as an integration of :

...the Amazon and Google search APIs with the anacubis^TM Viewer to deliver an innovative and powerful new way to browse the extensive catalogue of books, CD, DVDs and videos for sale at Amazon.com - and then explore related information amongst Google's 3 billion plus web documents

The demo worked fine the first time I used it, but refused to perform again. Try it out, however, you never know your luck. I'm not sure who it is intended for - perhaps simply to show that the Anacuba visualisation software works - but I'm always chary of visualisation of searches, given the way people search and the limited responses they are happy with. Pictures are not always worth a thousand words. Thanks to ResearchBuzz for that one.

An interesting item on The Shifted Librarian caught my eye: "When does 'own' not mean 'own'?" It's a cautionary tale about the US library supplier Baker and Taylor who have plans for the electronic delivery of texts using the .pdf format. No problem you think? Well - read all about it for another example of the desire of business to sell you something and hold on to it at the same time.

The same source has a defense of news aggregators. I never realised that a defense was needed: I can't think how I'd scan as much material as I do without NewzCrawler. However, The Shifted Librarian points to an article by one Steve Bell (presumably not the Guardian satirical cartoonist) on a e-zine called Ex Libris in which, among other things, he notes:

RSS and news aggregator enthusiasts will emphasize that these technologies will save you time as they improve your access to news and information. But does the time required to obtain the necessary skills to use them payoff in the long run? I'm suspicious of anyone who claims something is easy and fast to learn and implement, but tells me I need to first read a four-page article that explains how it works.

Read a four-page article? I've installed Newz Crawler and used it for months now without reading anything at all about how to use it. I also used Amphetadesk for a while and that, too, required no reading - you just get on with using it!

Talking of aggregators, I came across an interesting one - SNARF - which lives on your Internet Explorer 'links' bar and which you can pop up at any time - worth a look.

The Weblogs are buzzing with a report from The Register, which analyses Lawrence Lessig's Weblog and concludes that the legal decisions concentrating digital rights 'in the hands of a few large media companies' will result in the death of the Internet.

Slashdot thinks there's a large element of truth in this. What do you think?

Having a little time to spare on my trip to Loughborough today I spent some of it in the library and found that Communications of the ACM, April 2003 issue, had a number of papers devoted to 'digital rights management'. The drive towards DRM comes, of course, from those with vested commercial interests in intellectual property, especially the (largely US-based) music industry.

In a very interesting paper, Pamela Samuelson (a regular contributor to Comm ACM) notes:

"...even though copyright law confers on copyright owners the right to control only public performances and displays of these works, DRM systems can also be used to control private performances and displays of digital content. DRM systems can thwart the exercise of fair use rights and other copyright privileges. DRM can be used to compel users to view content they would prefer to avoid (such as commercials and FBI warning notices), thus exceeding copyright's bounds."

Now there's a couple of interesting thoughts. I wonder if legislators are aware of these particular consequences of the extension of copyright?

Samuelson adds that DRM technology is misnamed - it is not about "rights" but about '..."permissions" to do X, Y, or Z with digital information.'

If you have access to the ACM's digital library, you'll find this paper here.

You might have heard about Lawrence Lessig's (he of Creative Commons fame) suggestion that a bounty should be placed on spammers - hunt them down and you get a reward.

According to techdirt, the idea has been picked up by a Congresswoman, Zoe Lofgren who plans to introduce a bill into Congress. There's more about this from The Mercury News.

From a personal point of view, I'd be happy to support the idea of bounty hunters - preferably armed! The mailbox I have for my work in Sweden displayed its usual twenty-five messages this morning - twenty-three of them were spam.

Even the musicians are rising up in opposition to piracy prevention! The TechDirt Weblog draws attention to a message from one George Zieman. Zieman also has material quoted elsewhere, which shows that the US music industry cut its production of new releases last year by 25% and then tells us that its drop of 4.1% in sales is the result of 'piracy'. One thing is clear - when companies lobby government in their interests, legislators need to check the facts VERY carefully, these guys will go to any lengths to massage the facts.

For much, much more from Zieman, visit his Website.

Here's an item that chimes in with Terry Brooks's latest column in Information Research, brought to my attention by Current Cites.

It's an article by Clifford Lynch (of the Coalition for Networked Information) on 'institutional repositories', that is, official, mainly university, archives of digital resources:

...a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.

Terry mentioned DSpace as one of the players in this area of activity, and another is ePrints from the University of Southampton in the UK - however, the latter is intended mainly for working papers and similar documents, whereas DSpace is intended for all digital content.

One of Lynch's comments rang bells:

Our institutions of higher education have overlooked an opportunity to support our most innovative and creative faculty for at least a decade now, to the detriment of both the faculty members and the institutions themselves. These faculty have been exploring ways in which works of authorship in the new digital medium can enhance teaching and learning and the communication of scholarship; such innovations are essential to keeping scholarship vital and effective, and they must not only be supported but nurtured. Indeed nurturing these innovations reaches to the core mission of our universities, and to the core values of our universities.

Read the rest - it's well worth the time.

When it was announced in January that Prentice Hall - the technical book publisher owned by Pearson - planned to release a new series of books under the Open Publication Licence (OPL), rather than traditional copyright, other publishers were baffled.

So begins an article in yesterday's Financial Times by Richard Poynder. Prentice Hall's choice of OPL was sensible, given that the book series is about open source software and the publisher is pretty sanguine about the benefits, expecting sales to be maintained because people will want to buy the physical book.

Curiously, I can't find anything about this development on either the Prentice Hall or the parent company (Pearson - publisher of the FT) on either of the Web sites.

Poynder also mentions the Creative Commons development - I use one of their licences in connection with this Weblog. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and hit the Creative Commons button.

Developments such as this give one some hope that scholarly output will become more freely available, but as the copyright legislation in the US shows, the forces of commerce can be relied upon to make it difficult!

Today's Guardian Online supplement includes a report on an interview with Lawrence Lessig - the founder of the 'Creative Commons' movement.

Briefly:

The Creative Commons is devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share.

and there is more about the mission at the Web site.

Creative Commons also has a Weblog - and the latest entry gives information on possible innovations in the nature of the license - specifically relating to educational use. This seems to me to a desirable innovation, but for one fact - that is, that education is increasingly seen as a business and students are paying significant sums of money not only to state-financed educational institutions, but to companies. The borderline between commercial use and educational use, therefore, is disappearing and I doubt if the two can be separated.

What do you think? Post a response to this item by clicking on the 'Reply' button.

The more observant readers of this Weblog will have noticed the Creative Commons badge at the bottom of the main page - to see what it means, click on the badge and a brief statement of the nature of the license will be delivered to your screen.

Google is getting its underwear in a twist about the use of 'google' as a verb and Slashdot reports that its lawyers have called upon Paul McFedries who maintains the 'Wordspy' site to cease and desist from entering the word in his lexicon.

However, another correspondent to the American Dialect Society mailing list has pointed out that, in US copyright law, a verb cannot be protected by copyright, so we can all go on happily googling and the lawyers are just trying it on. Isn't it wonderful when the rug is pulled from under the lawyers? :-)

Last year I received a request from an African aid agency to allow Information Research to be distributed by them on CD-ROM. I had to refuse, since it would have meant contacting all of the authors to seek their approval as copyright holders.

However, it seemed to me that the proposal was a very desirable one, since Web access is by no means universal on the African continent and it occurred to me that the authors would, in all probability, agree.

To overcome the problem of the authors being the copyright holders I am considering putting the following paragraph into the Copyright Policy page:

"2. However, in submitting to Information Research, authors agree to the republication of papers for charitable or other non-profit reasons."

This would allow me to sanction the proposal from Africa, while the authors retain copyright for any for-profit purpose.

I'd welcome feedback, especially from those who have published in the journal.

I'm posting this as a 'Reply' to my earlier message because I am reproducing here a message from Euan Semple to the IR-DISCUSS mailing list. Euan says:

"This group may be interested in the project called Creative Commons run by Porfessor Larry Lessig from Stanford University.

Basically it allows creators of content to explicitly state what for which purposes copying is permitted rather than current copyright law which assumes copyright in all circumstances. They have developed a very user friendly web based process which as Larry says produces Human Readable copyright, machine readable copyright and lawyer reader copyright.

The process is explained at Creative Commons and there is a very good flash movie explaining the context."

I've taken a look and it seems to me that, if Information Research authors were to agree, upon submitting a paper, that a Creative Commons licence would apply to their work, it would nicely establish the appropriate copyright relationships. If you've submitted a paper to IR, please take a look at Creative Commons and let me know what you think. In the meantime, I shall 'talk' with Creative Commons to see how it would work.