NASIG’s Digital Preservation Committee is pleased to announce publication of the NASIG Model Digital Preservation Policy, an important new tool designed to help you measure, grow, and publicize your organization’s commitment to preserving its scholarship. It includes advice on identifying and taking first steps, more advanced options and activities, and opportunities to share and refine…

OA to backfiles, for the first time

Absolutely gorgeous rhetorical moves here.

Nature - To thwart publishing rackets that undermine scholars and scholarly publishing, legitimate journals should show their workings.

tl;dr: Bad idea.

Patron privacy, as articulated in the American Library Association (ALA) Code of Ethics, is a longstanding concern for librarians. In online environments, the possibility of tracking by third parties, usage of HTTPS/TLS to provide secure connections, and easy disclosure of a site’s privacy policies all have implications for user privacy. This paper presents new empirical evidence about these issues and discusses their ethical implications. Data about the incidence of third-party tracking, usage of HTTPS by default, and easy discoverability of a privacy policy or terms of service (TOS) were collected for public libraries across Canada and the United States. The sample consisted of 178 public libraries; members of the Canadian Urban Libraries Council and Urban Libraries Council. Several common commercial databases (e.g. OverDrive) were also examined using the same criteria. Results show that only 12% of libraries were devoid of third-party tracking, with Google Analytics being the most common third-party tracker. While libraries may support HTTPS under certain circumstances, it was found that a majority of libraries serve neither their websites nor their online catalogs (OPACs) HTTPS by default. Regarding disclosure of possible tracking, it was found that 58% of libraries did not link to a TOS or privacy policy from their homepage. Together with previous research on the usage of privacy-enhancing tools in public libraries, these results suggest that public libraries are accessories to third-party tracking on a large scale. Implications of this fact in light of library professional ethics are discussed.

Corporate publishing wants to turn all readers into renters. We’re trying to stop them.

Anna Abalkina It keeps happening.  There was the case of Talent Development and Excellence, which cloned an existing journal and managed to index hundreds of articles in Scopus, one of the wor…

Context From June 2020 to February 2021, a consortium of 10 organisations undertook a large-scale study on open access journals across the world that are free for readers and authors, usually referred to as “OA diamond journals”. This study was commissioned by cOAlition S in order to gain a better understanding of the OA diamond landscape. Presentation The study undertook a statistical analysis of several bibliographic databases, surveyed 1,619 journals, collected 7,019 free text submissions and other data from 94 questions, and organised three focus groups with 11 journals and 10 interviews with hosting platforms. It collected 163 references in the academic literature, and inventoried 1048 journals not listed in DOAJ. The results of the study are available in the following outputs: Findings Report - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4558704 Recommendations Report- DOI:10.5281/zenodo.4562790 References Library - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4562816 Journals Inventory - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4562828 Dataset - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4553103 Findings: A wide archipelago of relatively small journals serving diverse communities OA diamond journals are on the road to full compliance with Plan S A mix of scientific strengths and operational challenges An economy that largely depends on volunteers, universities and government