No 4, 1996
 No 3, 1996

Quarterly Newsletter
Vol. 8, No. 4, 1999
ISSN 1389-1804

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Link Managers for Grey Literature
GL'99 Questionnaire Results
SIG Report on Copyright and Grey Literature
Recommended Reading
Your New Website Agenda
First Time GreyNet Membership Offer

Annual Subscription: 20 Euros / 20 USDollars

Editorial Address

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Link Managers for Grey Literature
"Excerpts from a paper presented at GL'99"
by Jens Vigen
co-authored by Martin Vesely, CERN and
Elena Lodi, Dipartimento di Matematica di Siena

In the self service area of the library reading rooms it is necessary to organise the collections in the simplest way possible. This is an important feature for readers making it possible to get direct access to the material without necessarily having to go via the library catalogue to retrieve the call number. A typical example will be that a collection is organised so that a reader can easily get directly from an article reference to the article itself in a library where the journal collection simply is organised alphabetically.

This requirement seems to have been forgotten by many of the most important actors in the digital library, both by the commercial publishers and many of the bodies producing grey literature. How are the users supposed to get directly to report xyz without having to navigate through n different web pages? This is on top happening in "The Library" which is intended to be close to 100% based on self service!

CERN Library has developed a mechanism, "Go direct", which handles the problem. So far it only processes articles published in journals, but due to it's success it will however be extended to also include grey literature issued in series holding a report number. CERN Library catalogue uses "Go direct" to automatically generate links from bibliographic information to the corresponding fulltext of a document. This presentation provides an overview of the present situation concerning link managers and URL architecture in the field of electronic publishing within high energy physics.

Introduction

The CERN Scientific Information Service has for more than forty years been collecting and organising information of interest for the whole high energy physics community. The aim is to have a collection as complete and up to date as possible. With the explosion of the Internet and the introduction of the preprint servers the amount of information has multiplied several times over the last ten years in parallel to the fact that user requirements are much higher today than ever before. The Service is now processing around thirty thousand grey research documents per year in addition to "whitewashing" thousands of other documents collected in earlier years.

With the introduction of the electronic preprints (Dallman et al., 1992) and later the journals (Chaney et al., 1999a), complete new possibilities for weaving the information together have come up and so have new problems. In the pre electronic era it was possible to get directly from a reference to the corresponding document in the library, often without using a catalogue, while now the same operation would require a significant amount of navigation through a number of web pages. The CERN Scientific Information Service's main aim in organising the information has been to avoid unnecessary navigation and the introduction of new identification systems. Related documents are linked together and the system permits the users to get to a given document simply based on the bibliographic reference without having to go via hierarchical trees or any other "clicking exercises".

The very first solution to this problem was solved by a simple form with a script behind, which based on the given information, computed the URL of the corresponding document. The idea was to provide a facilitating tool for the scientists so that it should be easy to retrieve the articles available online. As the form, now called "Go Direct", became so successful, it also became clear that the script which is behind could of course take it's arguments directly from the library catalogue so that links could be created "on the fly".

Future Challenges

The developments which were meant to make the world simpler for the scientists made it in some senses actually more complex. The documents are in principle easier to get access to, but there are more references to a single document and it's published counterpart than there were ever before: author/title, report no., preprint archive no., URL, DOI etc., and finally the traditional bibliographic citation - or at least it is still there for the time being. The goal must be to reduce these different references to a minimum and establish a standard which is as intuitive as possible. Having made the major publishers aware of the power of the link managers and later getting several of them onboard, the situation seems to be turning in the right direction. The work of lobbying the publishers, also the ones issuing grey literature, is however not yet at an end. To augment the pressure the campaign should also be directed to other database providers. The more people applying this simple system, the more likely it will be that it will become a de facto standard. The major challenge for the future will be however to find a better solution for how to associate GL with it's published counterparts. The DOI Foundation, a foundation more and more publishers are joining, is aiming for this. The DOI is meant to be a unique identifier of any piece of intellectual content, together with a system for using that identifier to locate digital services on the Internet associated with that content (Paskin, 1999). In the field of high energy physics there is already a veritable preprint culture which is accordingly well organised. More or less all these preprints have report numbers and it is not difficult to imagine that they accordingly could be assigned DOIs. Exploiting the power of the DOI system, one could then reach a situation where by pointing to the DOI of a preprint, the researcher would automatically be offered the option to follow a link to the published counterpart as soon as this would be available.

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GL'99 Questionnaire Results
The Fourth International Conference on Grey Literature

According to the respondents, the information found in the found in the conference materials (Announcements, Call-for-Papers, Pre-Program, Conference Updates, Newsletters, etc.) was:
Quite Satisfactory (66%) Satisfactory (34%) Unsatisfactory ( 0%) No Response ( 0%)
The administration of GL'99 including the pre-registration, the registration desk, etc. was:
Quite Satisfactory (86%) Satisfactory (14%) Unsatisfactory ( 0%) No Response ( 0%)
The facilities and services at the conference center (e.g. catering, seating arrangements, technical equipment, etc.) were:
Quite Satisfactory (59%) Satisfactory (34%) Unsatisfactory ( 7%) No Response ( 0%)
The content and quality of the Authors' presentations were:
Quite Satisfactory (34%) Satisfactory (63%) Unsatisfactory ( 0%) No Response ( 3%)

Top Five Presentations

Link Managers for Grey Literature - Jens Vigen, CERN, Switzerland

Electronic Theses and Dissertations - Gail McMillan, VT, United States

Preserving the Pyramid of STI Using Buckets - Michael L. Nelson, NASA, United States

The Internet and the Socio-Structural Change of Informal Scientific Communication - Helmut M. Artus, IZ, Germany

Grey Copyrights for Grey Literature: National Assumptions, International Rights - Michael S. Seadle, MSU, United States

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Special Interest Group
Report on Copyright & Grey Literature
Summary by Eamon T. Fennessy - TCG, The Copyright Group

What exactly is copyright? It is a piece of intellectual property which belongs to the creator of the work (movies, software, printed works, CDs, etc) and bestows on the rightsholder the ability to control the use of that work. The period of copyright generally runs for 70 years beyond the life of the author. As a piece of intellectual property the rightsholder establishes the terms under which the work is used by a third party and the distribution of that work.

How can we keep up-to-date on Foreign Copyright Laws? Some of the sources to contact are: the U.S. Copyright Office itself-in the Library of Congress; Department General Counsels in the government agencies where some of us work; the Web, although we didn't spell out which URLs carried such information; and WIPO in Geneva, Switzerland, the agency which oversees global copyright issues.

Are all Government Publications Copyrighted? The answer is No.
Generally government publications are not copyrighted but materials which are given to the government from outsiders, or where the copyright has been transferred to the government are not necessarily in the public domain. Whenever you have a question about this contact the agency which has published the material you are interested in and ask.

What is DOI? DOI stands for Digital Object Identifier, a numbering system that a copyright owner can assign to an article, a book, a paragraph, or even a single sentence in order to identify that piece of content. Rightsholders can request a base number for a specific imprint from the DOI Foundation through the Association of American Publishers in Washington and then can add to the base number identifying individual pieces of content. Once a DOI has been established a price can be assigned to that content and the rightsholder can sell that content to users.

How can we find out about Ownership and terms of usage for specific articles and other literary works? One way is to refer a question like this to information brokers. I happen to run The Copyright Group which acts on behalf of users, arranging permissions for the electronic and print use of copyrighted works for the user community.

What was the Tasini Suit? This was a suit filed by the National Writers Union, of which Mr. Tasini is the president, on behalf of writers who are not employees of major information distributors but who submitted articles to these corporations for the print use of the work, and which eventually turned up in the corporations' electronic networks and were sold. Tasini & Company lost the first suit filed but on appeal the ruling was overturned and the writers' arguments were upheld. The decision was announced only a week or to ago. The importance of this suit conveys the need to have specific terms of usage included in any agreement between publisher and author.

Are Abstracts Copyrighted? There is no simple answer to this. If the abstract is written by the author of the article some publishers feel its use should be paid for. Not all publishers require payment so you should contact the publishers in order to be on safe ground.

For more on Copyright and Grey Literature, see
http://www.mcb.co.uk/services/conferen/webforum/greynet-liblink-forum/

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Recommended Reading
Grey Literature as unconscious : causal subjectivity of the repressed in Lacan's Theory
By William Theaux

In: IJGL, International Journal on Grey Literature,
vol. 1, no. 1, 2000. - Pages 28-34. - ISSN 1466-6189

Abstract:

In this article, grey literature is identified as unregistered textuality (radicalizing its characteristics, such as the difficulty of its identification, access, bibliographic control, and its undervaluation, etc.) It can be deduced that, in this scope, what is called "grey" represents a mode of expressing the unconscious that is described by psychoanalysts. This leads to a Freudian practical observation that no other than grey discourses can accurately talk about grey literature. I shall then suggest how the factor of cybernetics (aka artificial intelligence), according to the theory of Jacques Lacan, modifies this logical condition of "impossibility" to render a grey discourse by the University. This can also be described as the detection of the unregistered.

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Your New Website Agenda 2000
http://www.greynet.org/events/calendar.html

A Selection of S&T Events relevant to Grey Literature

January
15-19	ALA-MidWinter American Library Association Midwinter Meeting San Antonio, Texas, USA http://www.ala.org
March
16-18	Third International Symposium on Electronic Theses & Dissertations St. Petersburg, Florida, USA http://etd.eng.usf.edu/Conference
20-22	Internet Librarian International 2000 London, United Kingdom http://www.internet-librarian.com
April
4-5	Online Conferentie Nederland 2000 De Doelen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands http://www.onlineconferentie.nl
7	Joined-up Publishing : The Significance of Linking 16th International Learned Journals Seminar, ALPSP Royal Institute of British Architects London, United Kingdom http://www.alpsp.org.uk/
14	Literati Club Awards for Excellence "Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Grey Literature 2000" London, United Kingdom http://www.mcb.co.uk/literati
May
15-18	OSS 21, Open Source Solutions Global Information Forum - Virgina, USA http://www.oss.net
16-18	NOM'2000 21st Annual National Online Meeting "Technical Session on Grey Literature" New York Hilton, USA http://www.infotoday.com/nom2000
25-27	CRIS 2000 "Knowledge at Work Research Information for Society" Fifth Conference on Current Research Information Systems in Europe Helsinki, Finland http://www.cordis.lu/cris2000
June
1-3	SSP, Society of Scholarly Publishing Baltimore, Maryland, USA http://www.sspnet.org
10-15	SLA, Special Libraries Association Meeting Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA http://www.sla.org/conf/2000conf
July
3-7	IATUL, International Association of Technological University Libraries Meeting Brisbane, Queensland, Australia http://educate1.lib.chalmers.se/IATUL/qut
6-12	ALA-Annual, American Library Association Annual Meeting - Chicago, Illinois, USA http://www.ala.org
August
13-18	IFLA 2000 International Federation of Library Associations, Annual Meeting Jerusalem, Israel http://www.ifla.org

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First Time Offer : GreyNet Membership 2000

"From a Subscriber Base to Worldwide Membership in 2000"

Goals of GreyNet

The Grey Literature Network Service is established in order to promote and support the work of authors, researchers, librarians, and intermediaries in the field of Grey Literature. This goal is achieved through the enhancement of international co-operation, through training and conference organization, through the publication of research findings, as well as the establishment of a worldwide information referral base. In this capacity, GreyNet actively compiles bibliographic, documentary, and factual information on persons, organizations, and their respective products and services in the area of Grey Literature.

What are the Benefits of Your GreyNet Membership:
	Subscription to IJGL International Journal on Grey Literature, Vol. 1	ISSN 1466-6189
	Subscription to NewsBriefNews GreyNet's Quarterly Newsletter, Vol. 9	ISSN 1389-1804
	Subscription to GL-Compendium A Netbased Directory of Grey Literature Collections (Forthcoming Mid-2000)	ISSN 1469-1027
Also included in your Membership is a 15% Reduction on:
	All conferences and seminars organized by GreyNet
	All information products published by GreyNet: Conference Programs, Proceedings, International Guide, GLOSSARY, Annotated Bibliography, etc.
	All printed advertisements and inserts in GreyNet's serial and non-serial publications
	All inserts in IJGL, the International Journal on Grey Literature
	Advertisements and electronic postings to GreyNet's website
And Furthermore:
	Pre-payment waiver on product deliveries
	Guarantee that all of GreyNet's products and services under development will be offered to members at reduced rates

GreyNet Membership Form

GreyNet Membership: 235 Euros / 235 Dollars per calendar year

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